Good News, Bad News - Village Pond Park

This week we started a mini-series called “Good News, Bad News” and we looked at senior services and affordable housing. Today we look at Village Pond Park, which due to its complexity, will require 2 articles.

The good news is that the long awaited plans for the remodeling of the Park are likely to surface in the next few weeks. The bad news is that there was some important work that should have been done that wasn’t done.

The history of Village Pond Park is indeed a sad one. For years the City neglected the Pond and their contract agent swept the filth from the wildlife into the Pond, so that not only were the Park walkways filled with feces but even the Pond water was nasty. Lake Forest Community Association was responsible for maintaining the water quality, which they attempted to do even despite the problems caused by the City.

Meanwhile the City refused to enact an ordinance to prohibit feeding the wildlife, yet they proceeded to plan for a remodel of the park. In the process, the City, in my opinion, violated the Brown Act by falsely labeling a workshop that wasn’t a workshop and also allowed the contract company to vary significantly from the terms of the contract.

The City’s approach made no sense. How could we re-design a park because of the filth created by the over-population of the wildlife, due to the excessive feeding by people, without first trying to stop the excessive feeding? Without stopping the excessive feeding, no re-model would be successful, and if we stopped the excessive feeding, how much of a re-model would we really need if the over-population problem was controlled? This simple logic escaped the previous Council, who were prepared to spend $1.5 million to remodel the park without doing anything about the excessive feeding of the wildlife.

After much persistence and effort on my part and a few dedicated community activists, in March 2015 we finally got the ordinance, and as a precursor to the ordinance, the Council adopted an education program. The education program and the enforcement mandated by the ordinance were designed to be implemented asap so that their effects could be seen before the plans to remodel the Pond were reviewed by the Council. As was clearly stated at the March 3 meeting, this was designed to evaluate the extent to which costly structural changes to the Pond were necessary. It was obvious to many of us that if the education program were put in place, sufficient signs placed, and an enforcement policy actually implemented, the feeding of the wildlife would decrease, and many of the wildlife would go elsewhere. Without the over-population of wildlife supported by the excessive feeding, the problems of feces on the walkways and in the pond would be greatly diminished, and many of the costly structural changes that were going to be proposed could be eliminated saving taxpayers a lot of money.

This was such an important issue that Mayor Pro Tem Hamilton added to the original motion the specific requirement that a quantitative evaluation be conducted in the time between the beginning of the education program and the review by the Council. Here in fact is the exact language as it appeared in the minutes of the meeting -

“MOTION: On motion by Council Member Gardner, second by Council Member Robinson the City Council introduced an Ordinance entitled: AN ORDINANCE OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF LAKE FOREST, CALIFORNIA, ADDING PROVISIONS RELATED TO THE FEEDING OF WILDLIFE IN PUBLIC PLACES. MOTION UNANIMOUSLY CARRIED, with staff directed to return the ordinance to the City Council for review after the re-opening of Village Pond Park, and further directed staff add qualitative measurements to be used during the evaluation process after the ordinance is implemented.”

Since that time I mentioned the evaluation process several times, not only in conversations with the City manager and the Director of Community Services, but also in my many publications. Tomorrow we’ll see what the City has done.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 3 pm to 5 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be on Dec 12 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.

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