Public Comment

Commentary: The Lessons of Blackberry Creek By ZELDA BRONSTEIN and CHRISTINE SWETT

Tuesday March 21, 2006

A decade ago we led the successful community effort to rebuild the tot-lot at Thousand Oaks School Park in conjunction with the daylighting of Blackberry Creek. As Glen Kohler has stated (letter to the editor, Feb. 21), the daylighting project was a wrenching experience for our neighborhood. Replying to Kohler, Urban Creeks Council leader Carol Schemmerling (Feb. 28) wrote: “There were indeed, advocates and critics (after all this is Berkeley)…”  

In fact, the major source of acrimony was not some local penchant for contentiousness. Rather, it was poor planning by the Urban Creeks Council, which oversaw the daylighting of the creek. Above all, the UCC disregarded the social aspects of the park. Daylighting the creek meant removing the park’s tot-lot, which was located above the culverted stream. The tot-lot at Thousand Oaks School Park was (and is) the heart of our neighborhood, a center of convivial activity that brings together several generations in convivial activity. The prospect of losing it was extremely dismaying.  

It’s true, as Schemmerling wrote, that the equipment at the old tot-lot needed to be replaced. But it’s not true, as she also wrote, that when the creek daylighting was proposed, the city was “partnering with citizens who could raise funds privately for new equipment that was up to code.” (Situated on land owned by the Berkeley Unified School District, the park was built with City of Berkeley Measure Y funds.) Such a partnership did occur, but only after Thousand Oaks neighbors realized that, despite our appeals, the Urban Creeks Council hadn’t the slightest interest in replacing the tot-lot, either with a portion of the grant from the California Department of Water Resources or with other funds.  

Only after Zelda Bronstein stood up at a BUSD school board meeting just as the daylighting project was about to get final approval and called out (totally out of order), “What about the tot-lot?” did the board direct the UCC to dedicate $25,000 of its grant monies toward a new tot-lot. We went on to raise the additional $40,000 or so that it took to build the new tot-lot, gratefully accepting donations in cash and in kind from the BUSD, the city of Berkeley, local businesses and Thousand Oaks neighbors. With the help of Partners for Parks, Berkeley’s volunteer parks support organization, we formed the Thousand Oaks Parks Society and were able to receive donations. Landscape architect Walter Hood generously shared his talent in the form of a pro bono design that became the basis of the new tot-lot and the reconfigured park. We also benefited from the guidance of Lisa Caronna and Brad Ricard of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, who helped us to determine the site’s final specifications.  

Creek daylighting can be a fine thing. Indeed, we were early supporters of daylighting Blackberry Creek. One of us carried a letter from the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association to the Sierra Club’s Northern Alameda Group asking NAG to endorse the project for the grant application to the state (which it did). Since the creek was opened up, the bird life in our neighborhood has greatly multiplied, much to our delight.  

But the scars from the decade-old history remain. Much of the acrimony could have been avoided if the planning had been truly inclusive, involving all the key stakeholders from the start. (Until the last minute, the park’s tai chi users were also sidelined. They learned that their meditation tree was about to be cut down, not through some community planning process, but quite by happenstance, when they stumbled over the contractor who was preparing to remove it.) Everyone also would have benefited from greater fiscal realism on the part of the Urban Creeks Council, which received only a fraction of the money requested in the grant application to the state but still proceeded with the daylighting project.  

Berkeley’s creeks flow through a dense urban setting, not a wilderness. When we open up our local watercourses on public land—as we should, where it’s appropriate—we need to take into consideration the real, social uses that have grown up around them. Otherwise, we’re going to invite more “strident neighborhood disharmony” of the sort that roiled Thousand Oaks over the daylighting of Blackberry Creek.  

 

Zelda Bronstein and Christine Swett are neighbors of Thousand Oaks School Park.