Ride the Monterey Bay Coastal Recreation Trail north from Cannery Row and the pavement carries you, car-free, along the water past Del Monte Beach and under Highway 1 toward Seaside. Then, at the Sand City line, the trail quits. It jogs west behind the shopping centers, dumps you onto Sand Dunes Drive along a path that is usually half buried in sand, and leaves you to find your own way for about two miles of city streets before the Class 1 path picks up again. Eighteen miles of trail between Castroville and Pacific Grove, and one mile of it, through a city of half a square mile, has never been built.
That mile has been on Sand City's books since its Local Coastal Program in 1982. This summer it got closer to real than it has ever been, and then ran into a rent bill.
What Is Actually Designed
The route runs along a 100-foot-wide corridor that used to carry the Union Pacific Monterey Branch Line. The Transportation Agency for Monterey County bought that right of way years ago to preserve it for a possible future transit use, and it now runs parallel to Del Monte Boulevard through the heart of Sand City, past the Edgewater and Sand Dollar shopping centers, from Canyon Del Rey Boulevard at the Monterey border to Playa Avenue at the Seaside line.
Sand City's plan, per the June 2026 project maps and the presentation its staff gave to the TAMC board on August 31, is a paved, dual-path trail for cyclists and pedestrians on that corridor, with landscaping, benches, bike repair stations, gathering areas, and five small trailside parking lots totaling 110 spaces. Northbound, the trail leaves the rail corridor at Holly Street for a bike lane, turns onto California Avenue, and rejoins the corridor south of Tioga Avenue, a detour around a section Graniterock leases. At Playa Avenue it meets the northern end of MST's SURF! busway, which is under construction now and will carry the trail north from there.
The city council approved the 30 percent design and CEQA clearance in June 2025. A request for proposals to take the drawings to 100 percent went out in May 2026. The city's estimate is $12 million to build. Roughly $2.2 million is in hand: a $1.9 million AMBAG Carbon Reduction Program grant awarded in April 2024 and two Monterey Bay Air Resources District grants of $100,000 and $205,000. An Active Transportation Program application went in jointly with TAMC, Seaside and Caltrans in June 2026, and a State Parks grant application that the city says would close the gap is due in December. The city's own project page says it is "on track to initiate construction in 2027."
The car dealerships that park inventory on TAMC's corridor have already settled. Three of them agreed in May to move their vehicles to the edges of the right of way, pay a one-time $43,800 landscaping fee, and contribute $14,833 a year toward maintenance, about 5 percent of the annual cost. Seaside, which the path crosses briefly, has a settlement too. Sand City is budgeting about $250,000 a year for an added public works employee and a police officer to keep the trail maintained and patrolled.
So the design is done to 30 percent, the money is partly in hand, the neighbors have signed, and the city is ready to go. The thing that is not signed is the lease.
The Rent Question
TAMC's policy is not to charge rent when its property is used for transportation. The trail itself, under that policy, would be free. The draft agreement TAMC put in front of Sand City says the parts of the project that are not technically transportation, the 154,052 square feet of landscaping and the 67,908 square feet of parking, should pay fair market value.
Sand City's staff put a number on that at the August 31 special meeting: $184,862 to $277,294 a year for the landscaped areas and $81,490 to $122,234 a year for the parking, a combined $266,352 to $399,528 annually. An earlier city estimate, before the parcels were refined, was closer to $624,000. TAMC has done its own appraisal, and as of Executive Director Todd Muck's comments to Monterey County Now in July, that number was not public.
City Manager Vibeke Norgaard's position to the TAMC board, as reported by Sara Rubin on September 3, was direct: "We are offering to build the project, clean up the blight, put in trees and bushes, make it pretty, and maintain that. We are asking that Sand City not be charged for its efforts to beautify the corridor. If you charge us for the landscaped areas, it would make the project infeasible."
The comparison that kept coming up in the room was MST. The transit agency does not pay TAMC for its use of the same corridor for the SURF! busway. TAMC Chair Chaps Poduri, a Pacific Grove councilmember, said what several members seemed to be thinking: "Nobody is saying we don't love the trail. The point is, why is this board at odds with Sand City on this, when we have a precedent with MST doing the same thing?"
Marina Mayor Bruce Delgado, also on the board, split the difference: "I don't think Sand City should pay for landscaped areas. That's good for everybody. The parking, I'm on the fence about."
"This project provides a public benefit for residents of the region, and should not be used to provide a windfall financial transaction to TAMC from a fellow public agency."
That line is from Norgaard's June 30 letter to Muck. The board took the matter into closed session after her presentation and reported no action. The parking is the genuine sticking point. Muck's own words on it in July: "We don't normally put parking in with bicycle facilities."
Why a Small City Cannot Just Pay
Sand City is half a square mile including the coastal zone and about a sixth of a square mile without it, by the city's own General Plan figures. A rent line of $266,000 to $400,000 a year, on top of the $250,000 the city already plans to spend on upkeep, is not a rounding error for a budget that size. Planning Manager Nick McIlroy said as much in July: "It's more than we can afford as a small city. We are hoping to find a middle ground and a way to make this work."
The timing pressure is the State Parks grant. It is due in December 2026 and requires 30-year site control. Sand City has asked for a 20-year term with two five-year extensions, matching what MST got. Without a signed use agreement, the application that is supposed to close the funding gap cannot demonstrate site control, and the 2027 construction start slips.
What This Means If You Are Looking on the Del Monte Corridor
For a buyer in Sand City's small West End, in Seaside's Edgewater-side neighborhoods, or in the Monterey blocks south of Canyon Del Rey, the practical question is whether the trail connection changes daily life or only changes the map. The honest answer is that it changes both, and here is how to think about it:
- The missing mile is the difference between a car-free ride from Seaside to Cannery Row and a ride that ends at Sand Dunes Drive. Once built, an address near Playa Avenue or California Avenue is a direct trail connection to Monterey. Today it is not.
- The parking lots are the contested piece. If TAMC prevails on charging for them, the city has floated paid parking as a fallback. If the lots are dropped to save the deal, trail access from the neighborhoods stays as it is, on foot and by bike, which for most nearby residents is the point anyway.
- SURF! is the other half of the connection. MST is building from Playa Avenue north, with retaining wall work running through January 2027 and traffic signal installation at Playa and California this month. The busway and the trail arrive together or not at all.
- Sand City's General Plan update is running on a parallel clock, with a public review draft due in May 2027 and a West End theme built around walkability and mixed use. The trail is the spine of that plan.
The market on this corridor is not pricing the trail in yet, because nobody can promise it. Zip code 93955, which Sand City shares with Seaside, posted a median sale price of $805,818 on 33 sales for the three months ending June 2026, up less than 1 percent year over year, with homes going pending in about 20 days. Sand City on its own has so few residential sales that Redfin's most recent city figure is a $1.2 million median on two sales from the end of 2024, which is not a number anyone should use. The City of Monterey ran a $1,154,236 median on 82 sales for the three months ending August 2026, up 1.2 percent.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
When would the trail actually open? The city says construction is on track to begin in 2027, with the 100 percent design contract out for proposals since May 2026. That date depends on the December State Parks grant, which in turn depends on a signed TAMC use agreement. No agreement, no site control, no grant, no 2027.
What is the dispute really about, the trail or the extras? The extras. The trail itself would be rent-free under TAMC's policy for transportation uses. The disagreement is over the landscaped strips and the five parking lots, which TAMC's draft agreement treats as non-transportation uses subject to fair market rent.
Where does the trail go relative to the shopping centers? It runs on the old rail corridor between Del Monte Boulevard and the Edgewater and Sand Dollar centers, from Canyon Del Rey at the Monterey line to Playa Avenue at the Seaside line, with a short on-street detour along Holly Street and California Avenue.
Will the dealership cars still be parked along it? Yes, but moved to the edges of the corridor under the May 2026 agreement, with the dealers contributing to landscaping and maintenance costs.
Carmel Luxury Group follows the agenda packets on this side of the bay because the connection between a bike path and a lease negotiation is exactly the kind of thing that decides whether an address is convenient or merely close. If you are weighing a property along Del Monte Boulevard, in Sand City or the Seaside blocks next to it, start a confidential consultation and we will walk through what the corridor is likely to look like from your front door.
