LOOKING AHEAD: 50th anniversary covereage

All month KION has been celebrating its 50th anniversary, looking back on the special people and events we brought to viewers on the Central Coast.

So many things have changed since KION signed on the air in 1969. In this report, we decided to focus on three things – our climate, our roads and our housing market.

In 1969, the median income for housing in Monterey County was $25,000. Now in parts of the Central Coast, it’s as much as $564,000.

Realtor Ashley Wayland sees more houses up for sale, but prices holding steady.

“This year, I don’t know that we’re going to see a huge dip in housing prices, I feel like people are a bit uneasy with what’s happening in the economy,” Wayland said.

What may change though is who will be buying houses here on the Central Coast.

“A lot of people are coming down from the Bay Area and are looking to retire in the next two to five years so I feel like that is definitely going to have a drastic change on the Peninsula,” she said.

Few things have or will continue to change as much as traffic.

Just three years ago, there was heated debate over the planned Holman Highway roundabout.

“I think the little old ladies are going to kill themselves,” said one resident back in May of 2016.

Since the roundabout has been in place, the Transportation Agency for Monterey County says it’s actually reduced crashes, pollution and traffic. They say there are even many more projects in the works to make our commutes easier, one of the biggest ones, borrowing elements from our past.

Commuter rail service once connected Salinas to the Bay Area and beyond. Now plans are underway for it to make a comeback as soon as 2022.

“It is kind of a throwback to when people used to be able to take these trains all the way to the Bay Area for all kinds of activities,” said Debbie Hale, executive director with TAMC, “Now we have one train in the morning and one train at night, pretty soon we’ll have two trains in the morning and two trains at night and working towards bringing in even more.”

The train would run from Salinas in the morning up to Gilroy, Morgan Hill and San Jose. It would connect to Bay Area transit and take commuters to Sacramento, reducing traffic on the roads and pollution.

And on the topic of pollution, on to the third and final topic – our climate.

“I would expect longer droughts and punctuated by potentially even heavier rain years,”

No one at KION has been keeping a closer eye on climate changes than our own National Weather Association certified chief meteorologist Dann Cianca.

“There’s more heat in the climate, you can hold more moisture in the atmosphere so rainfall can get heavier, downpours can get heavier, so the potential for heavier rain is there as well,” he said.

Dann and the Weather Authority team will be tracking those changes. And the rest of the KION news team will continue to inform you of every major development impacting the Central Coast.

KION thanks you for allowing us into your living rooms and now on to your computers and phones for 50 years, we hope you continue to do so for at least 50 more.