Seal Beach has 3.12 acres of parkland for every 1,000 individuals, according to the city’s Parks and Community Service Master Plan, which the City Council adopted on July 22.
According to the plan, state law and the Seal Beach Municipal Code both call for 5 acres of parkland per person. (Does anyone research these ideas before passing laws mandating them?)
That’s not going to change unless the Naval Weapons Station is closed and that is highly unlikely to happen. (Frankly, we’re better off with the Navy base.)
So how does Seal Beach increase park space and how does Seal Beach improve the recreation facilities it has?
The following is my own brief look at the plan and my thoughts on the subject, for what little they might be worth. This is not a complete review of the Master Plan by any means. The document is nearly 200 pages long.
The Master Plan proposed making the most of the recreation facilities Seal Beach has and acquiring more parkland if there are any new development projects in the city.
Ahem.
The report here overlooks a critical reality: there is a politically active segment of the Seal Beach community that considers any and all development a dirty word. The NIMBY element is passionate—but is only good for stopping things. Creativity belongs to other elements in Seal Beach. Linking the city’s future parkland, if there is any, to development projects is a recipe for universal aggravation, not universal success.
One partial solution I’d like to suggest to the parkland shortage problem is to address Seal Beach’s relatively few empty lots.
The property owners can’t do much with those lots until they sell the lots or get permission from various government agencies to build something there.
As I mentioned recently in my blog, unsecured lots become dumps and fenced in lots are unappealing to the eye. The solution? Some cities that also have limited space for parks have devised a clever concept called “pocket parks.” (It isn’t my idea. I just stumbled across it in the course of my work.)
The city in question agrees to take over the responsibility for maintaining the empty lot in question—including liability—in exchange for being allowed to create temporary park space on the empty lot. The agreement would protect the owner’s right to sell the land. (I’d go a step further and allow the owner to regain control of the property once they received the legal OK to develop the site.) That’s a win-win, if only a temporary one. The down side is that the public might become emotionally attached to a park they might not be allowed to keep forever. I know of a Los Angeles County city that recently built an 11.5 acre park on Southern California Edison property using state grant money—a supersized variation on the pocket park model I’m sharing.
Money, of course, is another issue, and here the park Master Plan offers a reasonable suggestion: hire a grant consultant. Personally, I’d rather have an existing city employee get specialized training in grant writing—but that might just be my particular bias against “consultant fever,” that tendency of government agencies to hire consultants for just about everything. The parks Master Plan argued in favor of the consultant.
“This person would most likely pay for themselves if they were able to help the City acquire two or three grants to provide additional programs and park improvements,” the plan said.
That would certainly be true of anyone who found the grant money to develop a large park or build a new city swimming pool.
I’ll be discussing the Master Plan in further detail in my blog at sunnews.org on Friday, Aug. 2.
Charles M. Kelly is assistant editor of the Sun Newspapers.
