Twin Lakes State Beach $7 million beachfront project officially complete

The long awaited Twin Lakes State Beach project is officially complete.

Ten years of planning and two years of construction are now in the past.

Neal Coonerty, former Santa Cruz County Supervisor was there from the beginning, he says “it’s been lots of ups and downs, but it’s really tremendous and it’s going to benefit people form years and years and years to come.”

If you went to Twin Lakes prior to construction, you might remember “it was very disorganized, it was unsafe, it didn’t have organized parking or a pathway for the kids to walk or bicycles,” says Richard Rivoir, who has a home near by.

Now he says with the crosswalks and bike lanes it feels much safer.

The director of Capital projects for the County, Betsey Lynberg, says “the goal of the project was to improve coastal access, that was adding pedestrian pathways and bike lanes, but the real challenge was creating the space from that and then protecting these improvements from coastal erosion.”

To protect the improvements, the county put in a “coastal protection structure.” It is the seawall that now lines the beach, but officials say it brought some challenges with it.

“The coastal protection structure is founded in the bedrock, so there was a lot of sand excavation to reach the bedrock. It’s not a vertical wall, it’s sloping. We covered it with colored and textured concrete to look like the terrace deposits. That was a pretty challenging undertaking for granite rock the contractor,” says Lynberg.

Business owner in the area say now that construction is done they are already seeing an improvement in the flow of customers coming through.

Java Junction owner, Michael Spadafora says, “It’s less stressful coming down here to work. Seeing that everything is done and there’s not daily delays and setbacks and things like that. So now that it’s done they all did a great job and i’m just glad that it’s done.”