Santa Maria’s Parks Commission finalized renovation plans for Buena Vista Park more than a month ago—but that hasn’t stopped the Buena Vista Beautifiers from publicly protesting the city’s park design.
The Parks Commission’s renovation of Buena Vista will remove most of the 4-acre park’s existing features, replacing them with tetherball poles, a new children’s playground, three basketball courts (there are currently four), and a large open lawn area.
But the Beautifiers take issue with the new plan, which doesn’t yet account for picnic tables and will remove the bell-shaped walkway as well as mature trees. Though the city is set in its design, Beautifiers member Jeanne Sparks is still writing editorial pieces, making calls, and demanding that the city not “just wipe out everything that’s there.”
Sparks acknowledged that the park needs a makeover, but said the city’s design is too much: “I don’t think that their solutions need to take the drastic measures that they are, eliminating the good that’s there,” she told the Sun.
Sparks was one of nearly 20 public commenters at the Parks Commission’s May 10 meeting who spoke about Buena Vista’s renovation plan. Many expressed concerns for preserving the park’s historic elements, such as the walkway, which Sparks claimed in her May 6 Santa Maria Times editorial “portrays the El Camino Real bell.”
But Alex Posada, director of the Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department, said, “there are no historical aspects at the park”—and that includes the walkway. Posada provided the Sun with an email from landscape architect Kevin Small, who designed the bell-shaped sidewalk for Buena Vista Park in 1994.
“There is NO historical significance to the bell shaped walk,” Small wrote in the email.
He said the idea for the walkway came from wanting to create a modern-day park, where the focus was giving neighborhood kids a place to play.
“The walkway simply became a path to that point and the layout of it was to be reflective of what you would have found in a park of that era,” Small wrote.
Posada added that the renovated park would actually pay more tribute to Buena Vista Park’s history than its current design does: The plans include a series of artistic tiles featuring Santa Maria life and the park’s history.
The new design will remove existing mature trees, but it also includes plans to add new trees. It doesn’t plan out spaces for picnic tables, but Posada said the tables would be factored in once the park is rebuilt. It preserves the existing bathroom structure (which Sparks called “ugly”), but plans to repurpose it and build new restrooms. And though the renovated park will move and replace its current basketball half-courts, Posada said the Recreation and Parks Department has a specific reason for doing that.
“One of the complaints we got originally was too many single males were playing basketball too close to the playground,” he said. In response to that complaint, the basketball courts and children’s playground will sit on opposite ends of the renovated park.
Of course, the Beautifiers don’t entirely oppose the renovation plans, Sparks said.
“There are some aspects of it that are generally good,” she said. “They’re going to add a lot of trees and they’re going to add landscaping.”
Her primary complaint is that the community didn’t have enough of a say in the city’s plan for Buena Vista Park: “Part of rejuvenating parks is getting the people who live in the neighborhood involved,” Sparks said.
“The parks department is doing the minimal,” she said. “They’re probably trying to be really efficient and move this along quickly, but they’re not really engaging in a way that is meaningful for us.”
Posada disagrees. He said the city has been collecting input from the community—including the Beautifiers—for more than a year. Parts of the city’s plan for Buena Vista, such as the tetherball poles, actually originated from the Beautifiers’ ideas.
“It’s been really difficult to work with them as a group,” Posada said, “but what we have done is take the input we got from them that was workable and try to incorporate it.”
He said it may not be the plan that the Beautifiers want, but “it’s the plan.”
“We’ve come up with what I think and what our architect thinks and what our Parks Commission and City Council think is a workable plan that gives our community what it’s looking for,” he said.
The park will close for renovations for about eight months, with a projected start date of June 2017, and the city will fund the $1.4 million project using Federal Community Development Block Grant Funds, city park development funds, and a pending Federal Land and Water Conservation grant.
Posada added that despite butting heads with the Beautifiers, the Recreation and Parks Department is grateful for the organization’s efforts.
“They’re a really well-intentioned group,” he said. “I don’t think this project would have moved forward as quickly through the typical city bureaucracy had they not gotten involved, so we’re glad they did.”
This article appears in Jun 23-30, 2016.
