Newsmakers 2025: West Cliff storm damage work finally wrapped up as city looks toward long-term plans

This midwinter season, Lookout Santa Cruz is checking in with some of the people and topics we’ve covered over the past year.

It took over two years, but West Cliff Drive finally reopened to two-way traffic in its entirety at the end of June as extensive repairs from the 2023 storms wrapped up at long last. The City of Santa Cruz will continue making long-term plans in 2026, including studying environmentally sensitive areas and taking early steps to partially relocate the roadway, as well as pushing the federal government to reimburse the city for emergency repairs.

The scenic cliffside road has been under construction in a number of locations since it was severely damaged by the torrent of atmospheric rivers in early 2023. Traffic was shut down in at least one direction for about 30 months. Over the course of 2025, crews were able to finish projects ranging from repairing sinkholes and slowing erosion to rehabilitating pedestrian paths and damaged culverts, said Kevin Crossley, assistant director in the city’s public works department.

The last section of the coastal road to reopen stretched from Woodrow Avenue to Almar Avenue and had several issues, including major repairs on the Bethany Curve culvert and the roadway over it. A bit farther west, a sea cave began extending farther beneath the roadway, which required crews to fill the cave and reconstruct the road and path on top of it. 

Now that West Cliff is mostly back to how it used to be, with some new railings, pavement and landscaping, the public works department is hoping that the Federal Highway Administration will finally reimburse the city for emergency repairs, a process that was slowed down by the lengthy government shutdown this fall. Crossley estimates that the feds owe the city around $10 million.

“It’s messy, to say the least, but we’ll be working through it for at least the next six months,” he said. “Two separate disaster declarations were merged into one set of projects, which is one of the reasons it’s taking as long as it is.”

This coming year, the city is studying the road and making long term plans to make it more resilient and adapt to an ever-changing coastline.

Crossley said the city is hoping to move a study of the Lighthouse Point area forward, and he’s aiming to have the scope of the study solidified and in front of the Santa Cruz City Council sometime in early 2026. Lighthouse Point has a sea cave underneath its west side, and the study will consider options for managing coastal erosion there.

Public works staff will use a study from the 1980s as a model and update it with experts’ current understanding of the threat of coastal erosion combined with the threat of climate change. “Coastal armoring isn’t in vogue anymore, and that’s the reality that needs to be acknowledged in this analysis,” Crossley said.

When planners talk about West Cliff Drive, they often discuss “managed retreat,” a strategy to relocate community infrastructure away from coastlines and other environmentally sensitive areas. In fact, the city has been planning to do just that by relocating a 400-foot section of West Cliff Drive and its pedestrian path about 50 feet inland into a portion of Lighthouse Field State Beach. 

The project requires collaborating with both the California Coastal Commission and California State Parks, as Lighthouse Field is a State Parks property. Crossley said his department is aiming to present a design for the project to the city’s Transportation and Public Works Commission sometime this spring. 

“The coastal permitting, analysis and acquiring of the property will take the rest of 2026 to get buttoned up, and we’re targeting a 2027 construction,” Crossley said.

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