Bombay Beach Clean Mobility & Community Action Plan
Organization: United for Justice, Inc.
Funding Request: $399,529.50
Project Summary
The Bombay Beach Clean Mobility & Community Action Plan is a resident-driven planning project led by United for Justice, Inc., designed to create Bombay Beach’s first comprehensive mobility framework. The vision is to identify transportation needs, advance transportation equity, and build long-term organizational and community capacity in a community that has historically been excluded from clean mobility investment. As both an SB 535 Disadvantaged Community and an AB 1550 low-income community on the Salton Sea shoreline, Bombay Beach is eligible for state mobility funding but has never received it, and this project addresses that gap directly by creating the foundational planning document required to access future CARB funding.
The work is guided by a 10-member Community Advisory Group composed entirely of Bombay Beach residents, ensuring planning reflects lived experience and community-identified priorities. The project will conduct surveys, community meetings, and targeted outreach to document mobility gaps, safety concerns, and clean transportation opportunities, then evaluate options for the community’s first designated mobility pathway, including walking routes, bicycle lanes, and a legal golf cart route to reduce enforcement interactions and improve safety. It will also assess needs for EV chargers, electric bicycles, and income-based EV incentive programs that have never reached Bombay Beach. The effort culminates in a Mobility Needs Assessment, Existing Conditions Summary, Clean Mobility Options Analysis, and a Draft and Final Action Plan, positioning the community to pursue implementation funding.
Project Descriptions and Transportation Equity
Bombay Beach faces severe and compounding transportation, access, and environmental burdens. Residents have no emergency services, hospital, school, grocery store, pharmacy, or employment center within the community, so every essential need requires long-distance travel; the lack of any public transit, transportation plan, or safe mobility routes turns daily life into a series of barriers. Low-income households, seniors, people with disabilities, and families without reliable vehicles are disproportionately impacted. Residents rely heavily on walking, bicycles, and golf carts, yet there are no sidewalks, bike lanes, shade structures, or designated golf cart routes, producing unsafe travel conditions and frequent enforcement interactions with CHP and the Sheriff’s Department. Environmental burdens intensify these inequities: the community experiences extreme heat, high cumulative pollution, and limited shade, with elevated PM10 and ozone levels, making active transportation unsafe for much of the year.
The project advances equity by reversing traditional planning hierarchies and placing the residents most affected at the center of decision-making. Recognizing that many residents have never been asked for input on transportation despite carrying the greatest burdens of isolation and poverty, the project uses flexible, informal, culturally respectful engagement, meeting people at their homes, community spaces, and local gatherings. The planning will evaluate the community’s first safe mobility pathway and assess the clean transportation options (EV chargers, e-bikes, income-based incentives) that statutory eligibility under SB 535 and AB 1550 should have made available, but never did. Notably, the community recently completed its first tree canopy along the Salton Sea shoreline, improving shade and environmental resilience, but it still lacks a safe mobility pathway, which this plan begins to address.
Community Benefit
The project brings meaningful benefits to the Bombay Beach residents who feel the weight of transportation inequities daily, especially low-income families, elderly people with disabilities, and residents without reliable vehicles, for whom getting groceries, reaching a doctor, or checking on a loved one currently requires long travel, careful planning, and often a neighbor’s help. By creating the first community-driven Clean Mobility & Community Action Plan, residents will finally have a voice in shaping solutions that reflect their lived reality. Engagement is deliberately designed to reach those most often left out, through door-to-door conversations, community meetings, and one-on-one outreach, with participation incentives, translation, and accessible formats ensuring every resident can contribute regardless of income, age, or ability.
The project also builds durable local capacity. Residents will gain a clearer understanding of clean transportation options, including electric bicycles, EV chargers, and income-based EV programs that have never reached the community, and community members will serve as staff, advisors, and leaders, gaining skills and confidence that carry beyond the grant. Because all project staff are drawn from the community and advisory members, survey participants, and outreach attendees are compensated, the project creates new paid roles and prepares residents for future workforce opportunities in planning, outreach, and implementation. Above all, it offers hope for safer travel, easier access to essential services, and a future in which Bombay Beach is no longer isolated or overlooked.
Partnerships and Structure
The partnership is structured to ensure clarity, accountability, and genuine community leadership, intentionally reversing traditional planning hierarchies so that facilitators support rather than direct community decision-making. The roles are organized as follows:
United for Justice, Inc. (Lead Applicant): Manages grant administration, reporting, compliance, and coordination, drawing on long-standing relationships across Salton Sea shoreline communities and a proven record of community-centered planning, including prior grants involving environmental data translation and cross-agency coordination. Its role is explicitly to support, not direct, community decision-making.
Bombay Beach Community Services District (BBCSD) (Sub-Applicant): As the local governing body closest to residents, BBCSD provides local governance insight, community access, institutional knowledge, and logistical support, ensuring planning reflects daily realities.
Calipatria Latin American Club (Community Partner): Deeply trusted among Spanish-speaking families, the Club assists with Advisory Committee meetings, survey development, outreach, meeting logistics, and drafting components of the Action Plan, ensuring language access, cultural competence, and meaningful participation from often-excluded residents.
Decision-making authority rests with the 10-member Community Advisory Group, which must review and approve all major project directions, priorities, and recommendations, while the three partner organizations serve as facilitators and implementers rather than gatekeepers. Community validation checkpoints ensure that findings, strategies, and the final Action Plan reflect resident-defined priorities, and transparent communication, shared review processes, and community-approved decision protocols prevent any single partner from dominating. The Advisory Group is designed to transition into an ongoing leadership body that guides future planning and implementation beyond the grant period.