Construction on Pajaro River levee anticipated to begin in early 2026; funding for Phase 2 still in limbo

Work to create new flood walls along the Pajaro River levee is expected to start in early 2026, according to the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency. 

The long-overdue project is intended to rebuild the river levee needed to protect the surrounding farmworker community and agricultural land along the border between Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. It will have five phases. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin work on the river’s first reach, from Corralitos Creek through Green Valley Road in Watsonville, shortly after the new year, said PRFMA executive director Mark Strudley. He did not have an exact date for when work will begin. 

Construction crews will create new levees where they currently do not exist, such as in the first stretch of the river, said Strudley. The new levee walls will not be very large, he said, but residents will be able to see that there is something new on the floodplain. 

Strudley said work on the levee’s first reach is expected to go through summer or fall of 2026, but might extend further depending on how much work is completed this winter season. 

While work on the first stretch of the Pajaro River levee is set to begin next year, Strudley added that Army Corps engineers are well into designing the next phase of the project. Plans for Reach 5 are about 60% finished, he said, and engineers are already looking towards mapping out the next three phases. 

However, it’s not typical for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to overlap its design process with construction on most of its projects, said Strudley: “What the Army Corps does is they step sequentially through the reaches, and they don’t overlap the design there.”

The Army Corps is overlapping the design process to speed up the project, Strudley added. Repairs on the river levee should have happened decades ago, which has become the overarching philosophy of this project, he said, and the Army Corps agrees.  

What also helps is that the federal agency has secured $156 million in funding needed for the construction of the first reach and the design of the remaining reaches, Strudley said. The Army Corps is already issuing all the design contracts for the remaining reaches. 

Money for the rest of the project’s construction is still being sought, and it’s been difficult to get new funding, he said. There were two requests for funding this year, which were both denied, Strudley said. The flood agency has a new request for $54 million going through the Army Corps budget right now, but there is no way of telling whether the request will be approved. 

“Obviously, we hope it is, but we don’t know so it is a little more challenging to get federal funding,” Strudley said. “But we’re not out of the running.” 

Existing federal funds haven’t been retracted from the project, Strudley said, but if no additional money comes in over the next few years, the time will be used to design the rest of the levee reconstruction. He added that funds from the state, which are used to pay for utility relocation and real estate, are still trickling in. 

“By the time new federal funds trickle in over the next couple of years,” he said, “we’ll be ready to build all of it, essentially.”

In 2023, PRFMA and the Army Corps of Engineers greenlit the construction of a new Pajaro River levee, which marked the culmination of a nearly 70-year struggle to replace an inadequate levee system. That same year, hundreds of community members in the Pajaro Valley were displaced after the river breached the levee. 

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