MEETING REPORT: OC PARKS WORKSHOP #3

OC Parks reviewed highlights from the data they've collected, and here are some of their key points:

1. A lot of people have apparently questioned why we need a "development" plan for the Park. They explained that this is County-speak, and all the departments must produce General Development Plans for any major project -- even if it's purpose is conservation.

2. They talked about overall visitor levels for the Park, and while we didn't get answers to all of our questions, we did learn that they measured 800 visitors at peak periods on Saturdays and Sundays, and they acknowledged that the park is "maxed out".

3. The only parking lot for the park has 130 slots, and this lot overflows just about every weekend. The park rangers plead for help with managing the overflow traffic. (There is obviously a great disparity between slots in the lot and Park weekend traffic, even allowing for some carpooling.)

Parks' staff went on to explain that they had received a great deal of input from people who attended their Workshop #1, from the in-park surveys they did next, and from on-line surveys they did subsequently. The input clusters into two distinct groups, those who are primarily concerned about over-use/preservation/conservation, for whom more parking is anathema, and those who want to see more active development, a paved bike trail, and expanded park facilities overall.

The Parks Department responded to this by developing two high-level alternative plans, one trying to follow the precepts of the conserve/preserve group, and the other following more of the development ideas. The Workshop attendees then split into four groups, named for the suits in a deck of cards, and each group got to view both alternative diagrams with a senior Parks staff representative and an aide to capture feedback from the hot and heavy discussions.

The two alternatives focused on different approaches to the Big Four issues: parking, trails, amenities, and restoration. In each of these categories, participants talked about what they liked and didn't like in each of the Plans, and were free to mix and match elements from both alternatives.

1. Parking In the conservation/preservation plan no new parking would be built, and there would be no change, good or bad, to parking at the Southern entrance.. The existing Northern entrance lot can be re-configured to add more spaces (I believe this is about 30; the current lot is poorly designed), and it's planned that that will happen in both alternatives.

In the development plan, a new lot was proposed near the North entrance, on what is currently a vacant, kind of junky field, with an entrance off of Skylark. Staff estimated this would hold about 50 cars.

In my group, spades, there still seemed to be a preference for no expansion of the current formal parking, e.g. no new lot in the North, and I think the primary fear is that “if you build it, they will come”. The new lot wasn’t seen so much as a reasonable way to handle peak overflow, but rather an invitation for additional visitors.

In addition to the new lot in the North, some additional parking was apparently penciled in at the last minute on the development plan near the ‘Southern entrance. Bill and Barbara Annan and Bill Ahern report that there isn’t room for any meaningful number of parking spaces at the place that was marked in on the diagram, without impacting current roads, and therefore we’re opposed to this.

Observation: OC Parks addresses this as a parking issue, but it’s really a capacity control issue. A couple of people in the audience initially tried to get the staff to address what the “right” usage level of the park should be, in their opinion, to keep it healthy and sustainable, but they wouldn’t bite. They would only reference the actual usage they’ve measured and note that the Park is “maxed out”. It would seem to me that if you have no clear target to manage to – and no way to control visitors to get to that target – you could build many additional parking lots and still not have enough parking space. If the current visitor level is 800 at peak periods, and that’s a max . . . what do we do if it’s 1,000 people three months from now? If there were a sustainable target, and a credible approach to capacity control, I would tend to support the new North-end lot as a reasonable thing to do, since the existing lot, even re-configured, is shy of a reasonable amount of parking slots for the Park. But if there isn’t any serious effort at capacity control, I would tend to resist any new parking as it would simply relieve a small amount of pressure and kick the real problem down the road, when it will only be harder to solve.

2. Trails

As Park users know, there is currently a network of natural (unpaved) multi-use trails in the Park, intended to be used by hikers/walkers/runners, as well as horses, and mountain bikers. In reality, there are few horses on the trails any more. As a horse person, I believe this is because there are so many people on the trails. Controlling a horse with a lot of strange people around, and mountain bikers popping up sporadically can be a challenging business. Nonetheless, the horse riders are supposed to be welcome, and the Park used to have more equestrian traffic.

A lot of people have commented on the difficulties of mixing even walkers and runners on such heavily-used trails, and many people have reported near misses between walkers and mountain bikes. A couple of people in our break-out group said they had given up trying to ride their mountain bikes in the park during peak hours because there were just too many people on the trails for it to be possible.

The one community left out of the multi-use trail discussion is street bikers – often long-distance bikers who ride street bikes with very narrow tires, unsuitable for the dirt trails. A street bike needs a paved surface. And somewhere along the way, the street bike community was promised exactly that: a paved path through every regional park that would provide mountains-to-the-sea connectivity. This promise was actually included in Orange County’s general plan according to the street-biking enthusiasts, and OC Parks backed them up on their statement. I’m told that paved path has been delivered in the other parks but has never become a reality in Peters Canyon, and the street bike people feel they have waited too long already. So – both alternative diagrams contain a paved bike path. This is a pretty big deal, as it must be at least 8’ wide, to provide for traffic in both directions, for safety, and park staff would actually like to see it be more like 15’ wide.

On the one hand, the street bikers really have been promised this, and it would take no doubt a very significant effort to get it pulled out of the County’s general plan, with no guarantee of success. On the other hand, that paved mini-road will take up a lot of Park space, and involve some habitat destruction, and some people were concerned about the speed the bikes would attain, particularly on the downgrades in the Park. (There’s supposed to be a 10 mph limit inside the Park, but would that be enforced?) A couple of people in our group, including one biker, proposed that the trail be completed but outside the boundaries of the park, using space along Jamboree. OC Parks dutifully wrote down the feedback, but my own sense is that a paved bike path will become a reality unless we mount a high-octane effort to stop it. (One thing we just need to be aware of is that Parks, like any other organization, is going to gravitate toward doing things that are within their purview, that they can control. That’s understandable, but it means that stuff like trying to re-route the bike trail – or trying to get a semi-formal understanding with the school district that it’s accepted and okay that Park visitors can park in school lots on the weekends – are going to be up to us to negotiate and accomplish, perhaps with Chairman Spitzer’s help, because OC Parks isn’t able to do it on their own, even if they agree with us.)

Several new multi-use (dirt) trails, or trail segments, were proposed in both alternatives. In the conservation-oriented plan, the multi-use trail was routed away from the paved bike trail in several areas, to create less environmental damage, and to, perhaps, give walkers a little more natural experience, so you wouldn’t feel you were taking your walk along side a freeway. That approach seemed to be favored by most people.

Ken noted one trail marked as “new” on a diagram, apparently an entrance coming in from Overhill, and questioned why we would add new entry points. Parks responded that the trail already exists, though it was never officially put in place, and we suggested that it be closed off as part of the Restoration effort; see below.

Two trail proposals from the Parks staff met with great enthusiasm, one to run a trail segment along the top of the dam at one end of the reservoir and one to create a boardwalk across the other end of the reservoir, to give walkers a “water experience”, which a lot of survey respondents had requested.

3. Amenities These were mostly adding flush toilets, together with water fountains, and adding trash cans, and educational signage. I didn’t hear any really contentious issues related to these. A couple of suggestions re the siting of the restroom facilities.

4. Restoration Parks is going to focus on some of the most worn-out areas of the Park and re-plant them with native plants, which should establish themselves and thrive more easily than the plants they are replacing, and require less water. Ken proposed a restoration zone in a key area in the South – where he volunteered our help to reestablish plantings for the Gnatcatcher. I didn’t hear any real disagreements – or much discussion – relative to these areas. It should be noted that Staff told us that everyone’s stated top priority in responding to park surveys/questionnaires, etc. was restoring and preserving the Park. That really encouraged me. Cal Poly has been heavily involved in the Parks’ project by the way, and they know their stuff re the vegetation, and I found that a very positive thing too.