By Rupert Clayton, HANC Land Use Chair
HANC's monthly (except August) general membership meeting is usually held downstairs at the Park Branch Library, 1833 Page Street (between Cole and Shrader) on the second Thursday of the month, beginning at 7 pm. Our meetinngs are open to the public and free to attend.
As the oldest official park in San Francisco, Buena Vista Park has seen a lot of use and in many ways is showing its age. While the City has used bond money to build new facilities and renovate old ones across many parks over the past decade, work on Buena Vista Park has been limited to maintenance and the occasional emergency project to address dangerous trees or badly broken infrastructure.
That lack of investment has been apparent to many park users, and the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association has long been pressing the Recreation and Parks Department to develop a more ambitious renovation plan for the park. In preparation for a future bond request, RPD has hired a landscape architecture firm, Miller Company, to carry out a “Parkwide Needs Assessment and Cost Analysis” over the next six months.
At HANC’s July 11 member meeting, you can find out what RPD is looking to learn from the Needs Assessment and how you’ll be able to have input on that process. We’ll be joined by Carol Sionkowski, the RPD Manager for Park Service Area 5, which stretches from Buena Vista Park to Glen Park, and by RPD Project Manager Brett Desmarais, who is supervising the Needs Assessment project. (Desmarais is also the Project Manager for the ongoing Panhandle Playground Renovation, and we’ll hear about that project, too.)
Some of the more prominent issues that RPD believes need to be addressed in Buena Vista Park are:
- Ageing and dangerous trees dating from the original plantings
- Excessive erosion of the steep sandy surfaces
- Little control of runoff during winter storms
- Old and damaged paths and other “hardscape”
Much of the reason to do the “pre-work” of a Needs Assessment project appears to be that RPD has not seen much success with previous attempts to renovate the park. While a 25-page report resulted from the 2015 Capital Improvement Planning work this still awaits implementation. Little remains from a couple of smaller-scale efforts to replant trees and shrubs; some plantings proved a poor fit for the park’s soils and climate, while others failed to establish because new gardeners assigned by RPD were unaware that they needed extra care.
Earlier this year, RPD came close to winning $550,000 funding from CalFire for an “Urban Forest Expansion and Improvement” project. The City hoped to tap into state funding for wildfire and climate-change mitigation projects. CalFire liked RPD’s proposal to begin with two pilot areas and use the lessons learned from those to move on to additional areas of the park, but was less happy about the overall cost/benefit ratio. The state also preferred to favor projects in more disadvantaged areas.
Hope For New Funding
So, RPD’s next big hope for renovation work at Buena Vista Park is to include funding in a future parks bond, and to do that it helps to know your needs in some detail and have the costs already worked out.
If you’re interested in the future of Buena Vista Park or the ongoing work at the Panhandle Playground, please come along to HANC’s member meeting at 7pm Thursday July 11 at Park Branch Library, 1833 Page Street.