A decision to rebuild the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf is not expected for months, after detailed engineering work is done. (Tom Gigliotti)
Key takeaways
- Despite constant wharf maintenance and a city-approved plan to revamp the wharf in 2024, decades of maintenance backlog and insufficient money for repairs contributed to the end of the wharf’s collapse in December, current and former city workers said.
- Potential state and federal grants to fund a wharf overhaul were held up for years by a lawsuit. A former wharf manager said the city should have considered raising more repair money through a bond, foundation or sponsorship.
- City leaders won’t make a decision about rebuilding until more detailed engineering assessments are done in the next several months, said Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker.
SANTA CRUZ >> In 2020, Santa Cruz city employee David McCormic wrote a report that would prove prophetic.
He noted that a 2014 engineering document showed significant corrosion of metal fasteners that hold the pilings together on the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. When the fasteners are weak, “large sections of the Wharf can move independently and a great deal of damage can quickly occur in a single event,” McComic wrote. “Without significant reinvestment soon, parts of the Wharf may reach a tipping point and begin to fail.”
On Dec. 23, the prediction of major damage came to pass when a large swell uprooted the end of the wharf, cracking off a house-sized wooden platform and sending debris floating toward shore. The end was under repair from 2023 storm damage and partly disassembled, which left it vulnerable to collapse, said Santa Cruz Parks and Recreation Director Tony Elliot. City leaders have said the pace of repairs was hampered by California Coastal Commission environmental restrictions.
A 2016 plan to reinforce the wharf and forestall damage was held up for years in legal challenges. The plan didn’t legally prevent the city from much of the repair needed to strengthen the wharf, but it held up state and federal funding to pay for repairs the city couldn’t finance on its own.
Jon Bombaci, a former wharf supervisor who retired in 2021, said that the city should have considered other ways to fund large-scale wharf repair. But Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley said focusing on “woulda, coulda, shoulda” is shortsighted.
“I happen to think that the city did what it could, when it could, with the money it could, under the conditions that were in place,” he said. “And then we had two enormous winter storms that broke our wharf.”
People dine on the Santa Cruz wharf hours after it reopened on Jan. 4. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local)
Decades of backlog
Even prior to recent major storms, the wharf has been constantly maintained — it has a 12-person, full-time crew, and the city spends millions annually to conduct repairs and replace lost pilings.
“The wharf is always, in some way, an active work site,” Elliot said, at a Jan. 4 news conference.
But some needed repairs have been too costly to pursue, according to city records and current and former staff.
In 2014, an engineering report found $12 million in deferred maintenance. In 2023, McCormic, the asset and development manager for the City of Santa Cruz Economic Development Office, estimated the updated figure was north of $14 million. Bombaci said the problems date even earlier, to before he was hired in 1982.
“It was tough through all of those years, through those decades, coming up with sufficient funding to take care of all the maintenance,” said Bombaci. “I think the desire was there — the money wasn’t.”
Wharf operations and maintenance are primarily funded by parking fees and rents from wharf businesses. But since at least 2015, the wharf has mostly operated in the red. It has been subsidized by the city’s General Fund by about $1.5 million each year, McCormic said. That means the city hasn’t been able to self-fund major renovations, he said.
Even smaller-scale maintenance efforts the city could afford were hampered by California Coastal Commission rules, Elliot and other city officials have said. A 2021 permit from the commission prevented the maintenance crew from heavy equipment work within 300 feet of active seabird nests during the nesting season, slowing the pace of up badly-needed repairs to pilings.
Money problems and legal challenges
In the early 2010s, city staff started working on a new master plan for the wharf that aimed in part to solve the maintenance problem from three angles: making it stronger and reducing repair costs, gaining state and federal grants to fund major upgrades, and enticing tourists to visit year round to raise revenues.
The Wharf Master Plan, publicly unveiled in 2016, included widened sections of the wharf, a new large building at the end, and a walkway on the west side to help buffer swells and serve as a fender for the pilings.
Some community members, including Santa Cruz resident Gillian Greensite, pushed back and cited potential environmental impacts. In response, the city completed a full environmental review for the plan. The city council approved the plan and the environmental review in November 2020.
A subsequent legal challenge from Greensite and a group called Don’t Morph the Wharf held up the plan — and potential grant money. Don’t Morph the Wharf sued the city with objections to two elements of the plan: a walkway on the west side of the wharf and a “landmark building” at the end up to 40 feet tall. The suit also argued that the plan would block access to sea-lion viewing holes.
A Wharf Master Plan approved in January 2024 excluded a ‘westside walkway’ and a ‘landmark building’ proposed near the end of the wharf. (Roma Design Group)
A ‘landmark building’ in early wharf plans was excluded from a plan approved by the Santa Cruz Council in January 2024. (Roma Design Group)
In December 2023, a judge ruled that city leaders didn’t sufficiently show that the plan would not curtail public recreation.
Don’t Morph the Wharf leaders agreed not to pursue further legal challenges if the city council removed the building and the walkway from the plan, Greensite said during a January 2024 city council meeting. The city council relented and approved a revised wharf master plan without the building and walkway.
While the legal action was underway, the city could have still legally undertaken some of the wharf strengthening that didn’t involve the proposed additions, McCormic said. But without an approved environmental review, the city was ineligible for many grant programs, he said.
“State and federal agencies, they don’t generally provide grants for maintenance work,” he said. “Attracting the sort of funding that’s needed to do the improvements and the repairs that are needed typically only comes with new projects.”
Greensite said the city’s contention that the lawsuit is to blame for the damage is “unwarranted, unfair and inaccurate.” She pointed to a 2021 grant the city received to replace pilings underneath the then-demolished Miramar restaurant as evidence that the city would have been able to get more grants for maintenance work.
Greensite said the city should wait for a thorough engineering assessment to point fingers. “They should be looking at the end of the wharf, their failure to maintain it, and assessing the competency of the engineering consultants who were doing the work,” she said.
After the city cited the lawsuit as a reason the wharf was vulnerable to damage, Greensite said she’s received vitriol on social media. “Everybody is pointing the finger at the lawsuit like it’s inherently a bad thing,” she said.
Instead, critics should ask, “‘Was the city doing anything wrong?’” she said. “The court determined that they were.”
The Wharf Master Plan includes two new boat landings, a promenade for pedestrians and cyclists, an expanded lifeguard headquarters and more shops. The plan approved by the Santa Cruz City Council in 2024 does not include the landmark building or the westside walkway. (Roma Design Group)
Bombaci said that he has long thought the city should float a bond dedicated to the wharf and mount an investment campaign from private and public sources to raise funds for repairs.
“We’re just 30 miles away from the biggest economic engine in the world. Wouldn’t we be able to tap into some of that?” he asked.
Keeley, who took office in 2023, strongly rejected the idea that the city should have secured local funding for the wharf earlier.
Like many cities, Santa Cruz has long had “tens of millions of dollars” of unfunded need for projects and repairs, he said. With competing needs across the city and limited public appetite for additional taxes, Keeley said he doesn’t blame past city leaders for not putting up more money for repairs.
“I think that’s pretty serious Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said. “The narrative that is developing seems to be something like, ‘well, they could have prevented it, but they didn’t.’ And I’m willing to debate people in public on that question.”
The path forward
Now, locals and electeds will have to decide whether to rebuild the end of the wharf. Doing so could cost more than $20 million, Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker said this week.
City leaders won’t make a decision about rebuilding until more detailed engineering assessments are completed, which could take months, Huffaker said.
Bombaci said he still thinks the city should pursue a bond measure and court private investment, and that the end of the wharf should be rebuilt. “There’s a lot of pride and a lot of draw in being the longest wooden wharf in the Western Hemisphere,” he said. “To let that go, I don’t think it says good things about the city.”
The end of the Santa Cruz wharf remained closed to visitors on Jan. 4. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local)
He said while he’s unsure there is “the political will” from city council members to put a wharf bond on the ballot, he thinks the public would support it.
Keeley said he’s waiting on more information to make a decision about the end of the wharf, but that he’s skeptical about rebuilding.
“My view is, take a contemporary view of what this wharf should be for the next 100 plus years,” Keeley said. “My guess, the answer to that question is not, ‘let’s have the longest wooden wharf in the Western Hemisphere subject to the vagaries of climate change in the ocean.’”
Keeley said he also wants to take another look at the Wharf Master Plan to determine if it should be changed to further prioritize climate adaptation.
McCormic said that whether or not the end will be rebuilt, the city is in a good position to move forward with the master plan to create a wharf that can better withstand future climate and economic conditions.
But the Don’t Morph the Wharf lawsuit caused the city to miss out on state and federal grants for the wharf when there was “an abundance of funding available,” whereas “we’re going to be on very uncertain terms with the new administration coming in,” McCormic said.
The master plan accounts for up to 68 inches of sea level rise, and would enable the wharf to withstand more and larger swells, he said. “It’s not that we haven’t done that study or we’re not prepared — we are,” McCormic said. “We just have to move forward.”
Santa Cruz Local’s Nik Altenberg contributed to this report.
What do you think?
Read more
- State money sought for $45 million in damage to Santa Cruz wharf, harbor – Jan. 9, 2025
- Santa Cruz wharf renovation plan approved – Jan. 10, 2024
- Legal threat delays wharf plan in Santa Cruz – Nov. 17, 2020
- Could a tsunami in Santa Cruz County reach your home? – Dec. 6. 2024
- 5-year West Cliff plan takes shape with road shift at Lighthouse Field – Nov. 20, 2024
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Jesse Kathan is a staff reporter for Santa Cruz Local through the California Local News Fellowship. They hold a master's degree in science communications from UC Santa Cruz.
