22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JUNE 18-24, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com in funding for various road improvements to repaving Abbott Street. That road, he said, is heavily trafficked by agricultural trucks, and once Amazon goes operational, it will only get busier. He suggested the city instead tax the ag industry and Amazon for road improvements. “We shouldn’t be in a position where we’re picking and choosing between certain improvements in our community,” Sandoval said. “If we reallocate those funds to specifically Abbott Street, I’m concerned the promises that we made to residents to fix those [other] streets are not going to be able to be honored.” Amazon paid $10 million in traffic impact fees to the city, Sandoval said, but both he and Councilmember Margaret D’Arrigo questioned why those funds were not showing up in the budget report. City Manager René Mendez confirmed the city did receive the money, which was placed in an impact fund that cannot be used for general purposes. That fund has a list of projects that are under development, which will be presented to the council in about a year, according to Mendez, adding that a more detailed budget report with those numbers will be available soon. New development pays impact fees, which are used to fund various projects in the city, but such fees have been lacking recently, Mendez noted. “There just has not been a lot of development and growth in Salinas over the last several years,” Mendez told the council. “When development occurs, they pay their share.” That share can be seen in documents obtained by the Weekly through a California Public Records Act request. Scannell Properties has been dishing out impact fees to various entities, including $420,831.71 to Spreckels Union School District and $597,656 to Monterey One Water. The arrival of Amazon could be the catalyst for future development in Salinas, Donohue noted in his State of the City speech. “This is more than a company,” he said. “It is a signal that Salinas is on the map for major investment. It means jobs, economic activity and new possibilities for our residents.” In the 2020s, Amazon has been making headway into the region. In 2021, it opened a nearly 130,000-square-foot delivery hub near the Hollister Municipal Airport in San Benito County. Four years later, a more than 1-millionsquare-foot facility was completed a few miles north. Amazon recently broke ground on a 438,000-square-foot data center and energy storage facility in Gilroy, at the southern edge of Santa Clara County. Similar to the Salinas project, all of these facilities have taken over former agricultural land. Despite their massive size, these facilities are on the relatively smaller side in Amazon’s portfolio. The company’s largest in the world is located in Ontario, California, a 4.5-millionsquare-foot warehouse that extends up to six stories. Six other facilities range from 3.6 million square feet to 3.8 million square feet, in states such as Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and others, according to Damotech, a company that focuses on warehouse safety. So at 3.2 million square feet, Salinas’ Amazon facility puts it in the company’s top 10 largest in the world. According to a development application filed with the city, plans call for 60 loading docks, 318 trailer parking stalls and 1,103 parking spaces, with 258 delivery trucks expected to go in and out daily. An environmental review of the Salinas Ag-Industrial Center was conducted in 2009. It examined the impacts of a fully built-out center, and under the California Environmental Quality Act, individual projects in the center, such as Amazon, do not require a separate review, so no analysis of the specific figures above was conducted. Roughly 1,600 employees are expected to be hired. Amazon spokesperson Natalie Banke says the facility is considered a “robotics fulfillment center,” where employees pick, pack and ship customer orders. “Employees often work alongside robots, helping keep employees safe by doing the heavy lifting and enabling them to learn new, more technical skills,” she says. In a 2025 radio interview, Luis Alvarez of Salinas-based Alvarez Technology Group described Amazon’s new Vulcan robot that will be operational in the facility. The robot is able to “feel” items, determining how much pressure it needs to exert in order to grab them without crushing them. “They’ve got a new robot that may actually replace humans,” Alvarez said. “Amazon does say this is not going to eliminate any jobs.” He added that with each new facility it builds, Amazon learns how to incorporate technology to make its processes more efficient. “This [Salinas facility] is going to be the most high-tech one in the entire Amazon ecosystem when it’s built,” Alvarez said. When the facility will go live is still in the works, according to Banke. Internal documents within the city show Amazon is projecting it will open later in 2026. Robots may not need vehicles to get to their job—they’ll be living where they work—but the humans working with them do. Abbott Street is a four-lane road that runs parallel to Highway 101. It’s a busy stretch of road, with farmworkers tending the fields and workers commuting into the Firestone Business Park. Follow Abbott Street south, and it merges onto the fast lane of southbound Highway 101 toward South Monterey County. Heading onto northbound Highway 101 from Abbott Street is a different story. It’s a maze of intersections, narrow roads and crumbling pavement through various industrial areas before hitting Airport Boulevard, crossing over an interchange that frequently Electric Amazon delivery vehicles manufactured by Rivian are a common sight in Monterey County. As the first to build in the Salinas Ag-Industrial Center, Amazon is required to construct new roads and other infrastructure in the area.
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