6 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MAY 28-JUNE 3, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com NEWS An intake at Monterey County Jail can take anywhere from an hour to eight hours, according to a report by the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury released on May 7. On busy days, the queue of vehicles holding inmates waiting to be booked can be down the street, according to the report. Booking is a multi-step process, including photographing and fingerprinting the individual and conducting a medical screening. In addition, inmates must be processed twice, first by the police agency then at the jail, since data entry systems don’t communicate with each other, according to the report. “We all really have to make sure we’re doing everything absolutely correctly, otherwise we know we’re going to get sued, so it tends to slow the whole process down,” King City Police Chief Robert Masterson says. Doing it slowly also has impacts, the grand jury found. “This can affect emergency response and routine public safety coverage, as well as increase overtime costs. Extended wait times also affect arrestees, who remain in vehicles or holding areas until booking is completed,” the report states. Long waits reduce officer availability for patrolling the streets while they wait in line. Police chiefs in South County cities say booking can keep an officer away for hours at a time. To make the process faster, King City and Greenfield police regularly take arrestees to Mee Memorial Hospital for medical screening and clearance. In Greenfield, 5 to 10 percent of the police department’s overtime budget is spent on booking arrestees. “I’ve had reports from my officers that say they Jail Time Monterey County Jail delays in booking inmates are impacting local police agencies. By Celia Jiménez After 15 years of working toward alternative locations for a trash dump site, Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority closed its former transfer center at 139 Sun St. in Salinas in 2022, transitioning trash disposal services to Madison Lane. But the property, long envisioned as a key component of the City of Salinas’ Alisal Vibrancy Plan, approved in 2020, remains vacant. As of May 12, the former Sun Street Transfer Station has a new owner. Monterey-Salinas Transit acquired the property from SVSWA, also known as Salinas Valley Recycles, for $6 million. “It was very serendipitous. We had been looking to get a property for over a decade since our Salinas property is so old,” MST CEO Carl Sedoryk says. “We have absolutely no room, yet our ridership in Salinas is 110 percent of pre-Covid levels and Salinas is growing. We don’t have the infrastructure to grow with it.” (The existing Salinas Transit Center, located at 110 Salinas St., is more than 45 years old. Originally designed for 33 buses, 50 buses now operate out of the transit center.) MST is planning a facility on Sun Street that includes maintenance shops, a fuel yard and wash lanes where buses will enter from Sun Street. It would also have an employee patio plus a community garden and gathering space with visitor parking at its Griffin Street entrance. Speaking at an MST board meeting on May 11, Salinas City Councilmember and MST board member Tony Barrera recommended extensive community engagement. “This is fantastic, but I am concerned about making sure that happens.” MST officials plan to conduct outreach in the coming months. Sedoryk envisions not just a bus operations center but also a training facility that could advance the economic development vision laid out in the Alisal Vibrancy Plan. He recently traveled to Sacramento to ask lawmakers to help fund what he says could be a $150 million project if it becomes a training center for students on technologies like batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. “We are hoping to be a catalyst for economic development,” Sedoryk says. The former dump site occupies seven acres in the middle of what city planners call the Alisal Marketplace, envisioned as a mixed-used commercial and residential area. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue, who serves on the SVSWA board, says he was initially skeptical about a bus facility there. “At first I wen, ‘hmm,’” he says. “But you are talking about several hundred employees going there, and you begin to get kind of a circular economy…Salinas is scheduled to continue growing.” Population growth also means more garbage, something SVSWA is gearing up for. “Garbage touches all of us and with more growth in the community comes people with more garbage,” SVSWA Assistant General Manager Mandy Brooks says. SVSWA staff propose using $2 million of the sale price toward a future project at the closed Crazy Horse Landfill, where a facility would accept and transfer up to 400 tons of municipal solid waste per day, recyclables and organics. That material will be shipped offsite to recycling markets or to the Johnson Canyon Landfill in Gonzales. Brooks says it could start operating in summer 2027. A rendering shows a potential design concept for MST’s proposed operations and maintenance facility in Salinas that was presented to the board on May 11. Dump Bump MST acquires former dump from Salinas Valley Recycles, envisioning a central transit hub. By Royvi Hernandez Officials at the Monterey County Jail in Salinas have worked to improve booking procedures to account for inmate safety and welfare, but the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury found long wait times. “It was very serendipitous.” COURTESY MST DANIEL DREIFUSS JAIL continued on page 8
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