Quick Take
Santa Cruz public works projects haven’t been affected so far by FEMA’s temporary pause on nonemergency disaster relief funding. However, some of the projects dealing with damage leftover from the 2023 winter storms are in limbo — including coastal armoring and a short segment of the Coastal Rail Trail.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) temporary pause on disaster relief might be concerning for 2025 projects, but Santa Cruz city officials say it won’t affect public works projects currently in progress.
FEMA’s projected budget deficit of more than $6 billion has prompted the agency to shift priorities, and deal only with work addressing immediate life and safety needs rather than repairing damages from previous disasters.
City of Santa Cruz emergency operations center manager Meredith Albert said the city is currently going through the recovery process for five federally declared disasters and one state-designated disaster, and that none of the projects associated with them have stopped due to the FEMA disaster relief pause.
Even so, the process to secure federal funding for these types of projects is arduous and often frustrating, said Kevin Crossley, assistant director of public works for the City of Santa Cruz. He said the city has more than 30 different requests in to FEMA, and some of the bigger asks are “still in limbo.” In total, the public works department is seeking about $3 million from the federal agency. Crossley said the biggest local effect of FEMA’s disaster relief pause will be slower access to the funds if and when the outstanding projects are approved.
“We’re not getting ‘no’ across the board to the requests, but some of the bigger-ticket ones have been in review for a long time,” he said, adding that, most recently, the city’s projects were in a stage titled “pending ineligibility.”
“That’s a negative way of saying, ‘Are you eligible or not?’ So that got us concerned,” said Crossley.
The two biggest projects for which the city hopes to secure FEMA funding are the restoration of coastal armoring along West Cliff Drive and Segment 7, Phase 2, of the Coastal Rail Trail that will run from the intersection of California Street and Bay Avenue to the Santa Cruz Wharf. These sites saw notable damage following the 2023 storms.
Crossley said that the rail trail segment doesn’t require FEMA money for completion, but if the city cannot secure the federal funding, it could mean that the city has to shell out about $1 million for the project’s final costs. He added that the city is continuing to push on getting the funding, though “it’s not something that we’re going to give up on.”
Although these projects have been frozen in the funding process for some time now, there is a silver lining, said Crossley. The city has begun communicating with the agency on a “human-to-human” basis, rather than through its online portal. He hopes that this will improve communication and ideally expedite the process.
“That’s very impersonal and you don’t really know who’s looking at your stuff on their side,” he said of having to deal with the online process. “For better or worse, so much time has gone by now that it’s turned into more of a special case, and in a way, that might actually be a good thing.”
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Check out our Carmageddon road delay list here. This week, pay particular attention to:
- Work on the “Whale Bridge” will shut down northbound lanes of Highway 1 overnight on Monday and southbound lanes overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday. The northbound closure will last from 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m., and the southbound closure will last from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Travelers will detour at Soquel Drive and rejoin Highway 1 at the 41st Avenue on-ramp.
- Guardrail and utility work will shut down alternating lanes at various sections of Highway 9 between 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Monday through Friday. Those sections are between San Lorenzo Way and Coon Heights Road, lower Glen Arbor Road and Arboleda Way/Highland, Arboleda Way/Highland and Scenic Drive, and Menker Street and First Street/Grove Street.
- Repaving of a 4-mile stretch of Highway 1 between the Buena Vista Drive bridge in Watsonville and the Rio Del Mar Boulevard bridge in Aptos began July 28. It will cause intermittent overnight single-lane closures of northbound Highway 1 on Sundays from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. and Mondays through Thursdays from 7:30 p.m. to 5 a.m. Overnight single-lane southbound closures will be from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Sundays and 8:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Mondays through Thursdays.
- Through the end of 2024, various sections of Soquel Drive between State Park Drive and Paul Sweet Road could be reduced to one lane of traffic as the Soquel Drive Buffered Bike Lane and Congestion Mitigation Project moves forward — which includes new bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, adaptive traffic signals, and updated sidewalks and curbs. The sections of road will be intermittently closed as work continues at multiple sites. Specifically, look out for intermittent single lane closures between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
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