Quick Take
The City of Santa Cruz is working to wrap up permitting and land acquisition processes for a project that involves relocating a section of West Cliff Drive farther inland to improve public safety and coastal access well into the future as coastal erosion remains a chief concern.
More than two years after a torrent of atmospheric rivers hammered West Cliff Drive, limiting access for everyone regardless of their mode of transportation, the repairs finally wrapped up in 2025, with the road reopening to two-way traffic once again last June.
Now, the City of Santa Cruz is embarking on its long-term plans for the iconic coastal road — specifically, a roadway relocation poised for construction in 2027.
Following those destructive 2023 storms, the city began forming plans for the future of West Cliff Drive, knowing that it needed to work proactively to mitigate future damage from both storms and the ever-looming threat of coastal erosion. The roadway relocation is one of the first major projects on the docket, and a form of managed retreat, which involves moving infrastructure away from environmentally sensitive areas.
“Generally speaking, we’re pushing everything as far back as we can within reason from the coastline,” said Kevin Crossley, assistant director of the city’s public works department.
In total, the roughly $1.8 million endeavor involves about 600 feet of West Cliff Drive that stretches east from Columbia Street past a parking area across from Lighthouse Field State Beach, as well as a part of the pedestrian path. That section of road will be shifted about 60 feet inland, and the pedestrian path about 30 feet inland, to move them away from the gradually shrinking coastline. A section of the pedestrian path has already crumbled and has been surrounded by temporary orange barriers for months.
“We’re at 60% of the design, over halfway. That’s enabled us to start all of the property appraisal and right-of-way purchase process,” said Crossley. He added that the city is also zoning in on the area that needs to be studied in the project’s environmental impact report, which will make clearer the possible construction effects and what the restoration areas will look like. “We’re going to focus on doing some native plant installation where there’s currently invasive ice plant.”
The project is a multi-agency effort. The city is working with California State Parks in order to acquire the Lighthouse Field State Beach land necessary to shift the infrastructure away from the coastline. The California Coastal Commission needs to approve the city’s development permit, which also includes much of the work that’s taken place over the past several years. The city expects that the Coastal Commission approval will come in October.
“We’re taking the emergency work that was completed in 2024 and 2025 and doing one consolidated permit for all of that coastal work and what is planned for 2027,” said Crossley. “That’s the slowest task left to complete but we’re pushing hard to get everything buttoned up so that we’re ready to bid the project in the winter and start construction next spring.”
Crossley said that the funding for this project is “a slightly different flavor” of disaster money, through a Caltrans program called the permanent repair program, which allows a bit more flexibility with design and scope of the desired work.
“Most of the money we tapped into for other parts of West Cliff allows you to put back what was there, or substantially the same as what was there before,” he said. “The permanent repair program means you’re doing a more thoughtful design process for something believed to be the permanent solution.”
The plans are currently available to the public on the city’s public works project website, but there will be more outreach and community engagement in the lead-up to the city council’s approval for bidding.
“We’ll probably do something more on the neighborhood scale once we have a contractor on board and we can talk about some of the detours and more specificity as far as the ‘what’ and ‘when,’” said Crossley. Although the city is still working through details, he said that there will not be a full closure of the road during the project.
The roadway relocation strongly relates to future management of West Cliff Drive, and can be seen as a case study for what protecting infrastructure might look like without having to construct a seawall or otherwise drastically alter the natural coastline — and the sacrifices that come with responding to a changing environment.
“I think it does a good job of highlighting what the trade-offs are. We’re having to encroach in open space that’s currently a park,” said Crossley. “As the coastline continues to erode, we’ll have to wrestle with those trade-offs, whether they’re at this scale or something smaller.”
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