22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY NOVEMBER 20-26, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com floodplain leaves earth alongside the banks. It looks like a creek. Just downriver on the Salinas side, what is now named Santa Rita Creek is a canal lined with concrete and rocks and little greenery; it has clear culverts. It resembles a manmade ditch more than a river. The difference is apparent to residents whose homes back up to the creek. “If you look on the Santa Rita side, you’ll see that the creek is pretty large and deep and wide. If you look on the Bolsa Knolls side, it’s never cleaned out or widened or anything. So any excess water that’s coming down the creek gets out of the banks really quickly, because the creek bed is so much smaller,” says Thomas Spencer, a Santa Rita resident since 1958. Residents report that Santa Rita usually floods once or twice per year, while flooding in Bolsa Knolls is at least two or three times more frequent, and has gotten worse in the past few years. Even when it isn’t running, Little Bear Creek looks messy. Some sections have dense vegetation, including trees. The depth varies and the width varies. It’s a normal state for a natural stream, but a concern for residents who live in an area prone to flooding. “The darn creek is almost filled up with silt. If you wait for years, people are going to start losing their homes,” says Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church, who represents North County’s District 2, which includes Bolsa Knolls. Residents are frustrated with what they view as lack of action and blame the current level of creek maintenance as one of the contributing factors to the ongoing problem. “I don’t want to flood every year. I don’t want to flood five times a year,” Wise says. Maciel sounds defeated: “It just happens four to five times a year so they forget about us. They don’t care,” he says. Church says part of the issue is not every property owner is maintaining their part of the creek. “I’m doing everything I can to get the County involved in finding a way to address it, because we have a public concern here that is not just a private property issue,” Church adds. Maciel and Wise say creek maintenance before 2018 was more extensive. It included cleaning the culverts and digging the creek six feet deep and removing sediment, debris and trees. “There shouldn’t be any trees in that place. It’s just ridiculous; it’s literally like a jungle in there,” Wise says. “If it were our property and we could do something with it, we wouldn’t be having this issue.” That jungle-like setting means habitat, and habitat means restrictions on clearing vegetation. Some residents have thought about doing the work themselves but penalties—up to $50,000 in fines and one year in jail— are deterrents. Each year, Bolsa Knolls property owners collectively pay $57,500 the County of Monterey for services as part of County Service Area 9, one of 37 CSAs the county oversees for services like culvert clearning, sewer maintenance and trash disposal. CSA 9 is a non-contiguous CSA that includes some areas outside of North Salinas such as Bolsa Knolls and Rogge Commons, as well as streetlights along San Juan Grade and Rogge Road. Randall Ishii, director of the Monterey County Department of Public Works, reviewed previous maintenance records but says there isn’t a paper trail showing the level of maintenance residents talk about. “The Special Districts Division has no record of staff working in the creek to remove vegetation or silt,” Ishii says. Every fall County Public Works flushes the culverts and clears ditches in the area, including on Rogge Road, Cornwall Street and Paul Avenue, and again before forecasts of significant rainfall. “We try to be proactive as much as we can,” Public Works Chief Enrique Saavedra said during a media briefing in October. “Every year we put close attention to [Bolsa Knolls] because it’s a sensitive area and because a lot of homes are adjacent to Little Bear Creek,” Saavedra said. “There’s quite a bit of ag upstream of this community. Historically, they’ve had sedimentation issues.” The annual cleaning in Bolsa Knolls happened a little earlier this year, with rain in the forecast for Oct. 13. “It’s one community we have to be very proactive in making sure our culverts are cleared,” Saavedra added, noting there weren’t any issues reported during or after the rain. Property owners are responsible to clean the part of the creek that is on their parcels and every year the department of emergency management sends information about storm preparedness. These mailers are sent to all the properties near the creek and those who are in the 100-year flood plain. Church has hosted community meetings for Bolsa Knolls residents at John Gutierrez Middle School and Rancho Cielo. Wise says they listen to similar information every time, and some have lost interest in participating. Even with preparation and clearing, there are factors outside of the immediate area that affect conditions in Bolsa Knolls. Those factors include the active agricultural fields in the area, including strawberry fields covered with plastic, preventing rain from penetrating the soil and instead running off into the nearest body of water, according to Paul Robins, executive director of the Resource Conservation District of Monterey County. In the past two or three decades, active agriculture in the area has expanded. “It used to be much more gradual runoff, when it was more rangeland,” Robins says. Every year, the County Agricultural Commissioner sends letters prior to the rainy season to property owners urging them to prepare for the winter storms and prevent erosion and runoff from their properties. “The risk is much higher in sloping fields and those planted with strawberries,” Ag Commissioner Juan Hidalgo wrote on Sept. 22. “The plastic mulch that covers strawberry beds reduces rainwater infiltration, and increases runoff.” Residents who live in the lower areas in Bolsa Knolls near Little Bear Creek experience flooding events almost every year. Ramon and Francisco Maciel prepare for the rainy season. This year they are hoping for extra protection from a new concrete wall. DANIEL DREIFUSS CELIA JIMÉNEZ “I don’t want to flood every year. I don’t want to flood five times a year.”
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