Six months after a flood, real recovery is just beginning for Pajaro.

In the hours and days after the Pajaro River levee breached in March, it was all hands on deck in Pajaro. Rescuers were on the ground and out in boats to get people out of the path of flooding. Politicians visited the town. National news outlets reported on the devastation. Nonprofits and ad hoc groups of residents and neighbors organized to distribute aid.

Now it’s six months later, and the urgency has faded. But in many ways, the recovery for Pajaro is just getting started. Only last week, as staff writer Celia Jiménez reported, 62 people who have been unable to return to their homes in Pajaro and were living in a hotel in Watsonville received a notice from the County of Monterey to relocate to a hotel in Marina.

And that represents just a fraction of the people who are still displaced, or dealing with the fallout of flooding either through overcrowding, living in unsafe (moldy) conditions or with jerry-rigged solutions, like fans under their floors. Patty Sosa, who was born and raised in Pajaro, moved away because of flood damage and says her parents are still battling insurance carve-outs. “It’s ridiculous,” she says.

Irma Carrillo, a 30-year Pajaro resident, put it plainly: “I am here because there are still people suffering. They don’t have a living room yet, they don’t have furniture.”

She was speaking on Aug. 30 to some 200 people gathered in Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Pajaro for the first of what will be a series of meetings in crafting a plan for Pajaro’s long-term recovery, and specifically how to use $20 million allocated for that purpose in the state budget.

The meeting drew heavy hitters from county government: County Administrative Officer Sonia De La Rosa, Assistant CAO Nick Chiulos, Undersheriff Keith Boyd, County Supervisor Glenn Church, director of the county Department of Emergency Management Kelsey Scanlon, and so on.

Residents from Pajaro were there to brainstorm, and also to give county officials a piece of their mind. “There is going to be some frustration in the room,” said Ramiro Medrano, who was raised in Pajaro and moved to Salinas in 2018. “The help has not been up to par. As county folks, if you hear frustrations being expressed – that’s something you have to sit with and understand.”

But besides a postmortem on what went wrong, the idea of making a recovery plan is ultimately about looking forward. Daniel González of DEM ran the meeting in English and Spanish, and he encouraged people to think big as they talked through problems at their topic tables, exploring issues like public safety, infrastructure, economy and housing. What can you do with $20 million that would make Pajaro resilient?

Many of the needs discussed were immediate, but many were not. Better cell coverage, a homeowners’ beautification program for improvements like painting or fencing, enforcement of illegal parking, security cameras, better streetlights and safer pedestrian street crossings all came up.

These are the kinds of things that are not a response to catastrophic flooding. They are the kinds of things that are needed by a community that has for too long been neglected. It’s that pattern of neglect that led to the flooding in the first place, and residents are cautiously optimistic about using this opportunity to change that story and help Pajaro thrive.

“If we utilize this in a smart manner, as a pilot program, it is exciting,” says lifelong Pajaro resident Christine Shaw (also a Monterey County planning commissioner). “We are in the middle of two economic powerhouses – why are we not bigger and better?

“This is what I dreamt about. A horrible thing happened. Now this is the silver lining.”

Of course, the devil is in the details. The funds cannot duplicate other benefits – for example, FEMA covers some home elevation, and Caltrans covers certain road signs, so those might not be allowable expenditures. And then there’s the pool of money. “There are amazing ideas and they’re all feasible,” Scanlon says. “But $20 million is never enough.”

The brainstorming process is a chance to dream. Then comes the harder work of writing and implementing a plan – and then the harder work still of rebuilding a community that has good reason not to trust its leaders.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com.