Quick Take
Early February’s intense windstorm luckily did not affect the parts of West Cliff Drive under construction, but one site that Santa Cruz's public works department has been monitoring continues to erode — and its placement poses a unique challenge for repairs.
West Cliff Drive can’t seem to catch a break.
After the scenic road got battered by storm after storm last winter, Santa Cruzans saw the street change dramatically. The city installed a temporary one-way between Columbia Street and Woodrow Avenue due to eroding cliffs crumbling into the pedestrian path. Just west of Woodrow Avenue, a culvert failure has rendered the stretch between Woodrow Avenue and Almar Avenue inaccessible for cars. It will likely remain that way until sometime in the fall.
Farther west, a section of the pedestrian path between Sacramento Avenue and Auburn Avenue is closed off due to storm drain damage and more cliff erosion from late December’s swell event. Early February’s storm thankfully did not affect the current work sites much, but it did exacerbate concerns about another site that city has been monitoring for over a year.
Kevin Crossley, assistant director of the City of Santa Cruz Public Works department, said that the storm essentially damaged only some of the plastic protection along the work sites, which is a fairly minor problem. He said public works is still shooting to reopen the stretch between Columbia Street and Woodrow Avenue by late February, allowing automobile traffic to travel west and pedestrians and bikers to exclusively use the east lane.
However, Crossley said crews saw more erosion along the cliff and pedestrian path directly across the street from Lighthouse Field State Beach, next to the 20-minute parking lot. He said that’s a “tricky spot” because the city does not actually own the property.
“It has the appearance of looking like the rest of West Cliff, but that’s technically a State Parks property,” he said. “Who is going to ultimately respond and what the eventual repair will be is still being discussed with State Parks.”
Crossley said a design team went to the site at the end of last week to begin working on a temporary fix as soon as possible because “it’s failing quite rapidly.”
The continuous erosion Crossley has seen on West Cliff Drive in just one calendar year has him thinking toward the future even more — and he sees this site in particular as a great case study for what managed retreat could look like.
He knows that route could include some “undesirable options,” and the site opposite Lighthouse Field encapsulates the entire debate. As erosion continues and potentially worsens in that spot, trade-offs will become necessary. Hypothetically, he said, if the community wanted to keep both two-way vehicle traffic and the pedestrian path, that could mean reconfiguring the area to remove some of Lighthouse Field.
“What would moving the road look like? Probably taking part of Lighthouse Field to relocate the two-lane road, and then you get into the issue of making the road one-way which is super controversial in the community,” he said. “It’s an interesting spot because it highlights all the tensions around how we proceed.”
Crossley said he’s looking forward to the city finishing up its 50-year vision for West Cliff Drive in the coming weeks so that everyone can have a little more detail on what’s to come, but what’s certain is that there won’t be a simple solution.
“Is it important enough to have a road and a path, but have to take some of Lighthouse Field? These are the sort of policy debates that are hard to resolve,” he said.
Latest news
Check out our Carmageddon road delay list here. This week, pay particular attention to:
The Pure Water Soquel water purification project continues to move forward, and its current work will affect parts of Laurel Street in Santa Cruz. The installation of an architectural cover for the piping along the Laurel Street bridge will continue this week between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., shutting down one lane of westbound Laurel Street.
The Pure Water Soquel project will also begin valve work on Main Street in Soquel on Monday, and will continue for the foreseeable future every week from Monday through Friday, between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.
The Highway 1 expansion project will cause a full closure of northbound Highway 1 between 41st Avenue and Soquel Drive between 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on Monday. On Tuesday, the same stretch of road will be closed in the southbound direction between 10 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. Both closures are related to the construction of the bicycle and pedestrian overcrossing.
The PV Water College Lake Project will shut down one eastbound lane on Highway 129 between Sakata Lane and Rodriguez Street in South County. Crews are installing a 6-mile water supply pipeline along the road.
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