Monterey-Salinas Transit hopes to change the Coastal Commission staff’s view on a proposed busway.

For those who’ve read the California Coastal Commission’s July 26 report about Monterey-Salinas Transit’s proposed SURF! project, which seeks to build an off-highway busway between Marina and Sand City, one might get the impression they’re reading an obituary for a proposal about to be put in its grave. 

Yet if one speaks with Carl Sedoryk, MST’s general manager, one might come away thinking it’s one big series of misunderstandings, and that reports of the project’s potential death have been greatly exaggerated—Sedoryk remains a true believer the project will get done.

Ultimately, the Coastal Commission is a political body—its staff just make recommendations based on enforcing the state’s Coastal Act—and I could see the vote about whether to grant the project coastal development permits go either way.

That vote was slated to take place tomorrow, Aug. 7, at the agency’s monthly three-day meeting (this one in Calabasas), but MST requested to postpone it until September, when the commissioners will meet in Monterey. And the request has nothing to do with location—Sedoryk says he and his staff have been in ongoing meetings with commission staff since the report came out to iron out what he characterizes as “corrections” to the agency’s 68-page assessment of the project, in which Coastal Commission staff recommend denying giving the project permits, mostly on account of its impact to environmentally sensitive dune habitat, the second largest in the state (after the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Complex in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, which is the largest coastal dune habitat in the world). 

And while I’ve read a lot of government reports about proposed land use projects locally, I don’t think I’ve read one that more unequivocally calls on those voting to deny a project. 

The recommendation summary at the top of the report includes this plain language near the top: “This particular project is not approvable…under the law.”

Oof. 

The report goes on to say the project, which is fully funded to the tune of more than $92 million, would result in the “direct” loss of 25 acres of dune habitat and impact more than 100 acres of that habitat, and would put a busway within 10 feet, and as close to five feet in one place, from the eastern bike and pedestrian California Coastal Trail parallel to Highway 1. 

“The CCT here is a non-vehicular meandering trail that provides for a relatively quiet, and even contemplative, access experience that takes in all of the splendor of the essentially undeveloped dunes and the Monterey Bay lying seaward, and provides a welcome respite from the hustle and bustle of developed areas lying Inland,” the report reads. “The proposed bus road would change all of that, and would change these important public recreational access facilities for the worse, with buses driving by for up to 16 hours of the day significantly reducing CCT public access and public view value and utility, including significantly altering the sense and perception of serenity that make these CCT segments so valuable in the first place.”

But Sedoryk maintains that habitat is already highly disturbed due to its proximity to the tracks, and that MST is finally bringing a beneficial use to the rail corridor, which the Transportation Agency for Monterey County acquired in the aughts with funds from Prop. 116, passed by California voters in 1990 to fund rail and other clean air transportation projects. 

And speaking on the phone this morning, Sedoryk sounds confident the differences between commission and MST staff will be ironed out in the next two weeks, and that he hopes and believes that when the agenda for the commission’s September meeting is released toward the end of August, it will include a recommendation to approve the SURF! project. 

The Coastal Commission is a hard agency to predict with respect to the commissioners’ votes and I have no sense for how the SURF! drama will play out. Ultimately, the opinions of Coastal Commission staff, who have been raising concerns about the project since it was first proposed five years ago, may well be ignored by commissioners, or Sedoryk can perhaps convince staff to change their minds. 

I just wish we were debating a rail project, and that the vision of re-establishing rail service between Monterey and San Francisco was brought back to life since the Monterey Branch Line fell out of use in the early 1970s. 

I think about the number of tourists who would ride it from Friday evening to Sunday evening, which could in turn help subsidize light rail service from Marina to Sand City during commuting hours on weekdays, in theory at least. 

Because as a region, we have to accept that grinding southbound traffic on Highway 1 on weekends heading into the county, and northbound traffic leaving it, is the new normal. Let’s put some of those people on trains. 

Maybe I’m just a dreamer, but one has to be for them to come true. 

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Marina-to-Sand City busway decision postponed. Dad of the decades.