Update on Village Pond Park

The upgrades to Village Pond Park were supposed to have already started, but those of you looking for bulldozers will have to push past the geese and the ducks to see that nothing has started.

Village Pond Park seems to be the poor step child of the City’s park system. Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on the rest of our parks, but VPP remains unchanged.

The City spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to talk to the citizens and create designs. (Click Here) They took more than 2 years to finally give us an ordinance (March 17, 2015) to prohibit feeding the wildlife (mostly the geese), then before it was even enacted into law, the City weakened it by cutting the fine in half, from $100 to $50.

The City was supposed to aggressively enforce the ordinance and to conduct a “quantitative” study of the impact the ordinance had on the Park, more specifically, the numbers of birds and the spread of bird poop. The City did neither of these things (Click Here), although they did put up some signs and hand out some postcards. (Click Here).

On September 23 and 24 2015 I wrote about the failure of the City to report back to the Council, and I even suggested a format for the City to use in their evaluation. Nothing happened. On October 23 I brought the topic up at a City Council meeting and was informed by the City Manager that he believed the report wasn’t due until after the park had been re-modeled. I disagreed with him, checked the video tape of the March meeting when it was discussed, and reported back to him that indeed the report was due before the plans were examined, not after the park was re-modeled.

• · Between then and now, to my knowledge, still nothing has been said or done.
• · No quantitative report on the effectiveness of the ordinance has appeared.
• · No report on the number of citations issued from July to October has been seen.
• · No plans on the re-model have appeared.

So we are way behind if we plan to start the VPP re-model this year.

Meanwhile, people continue to feed the wildlife at VPP, the geese and ducks continue to use the park as their toilet bowl (when they’re not using Olivewood sport fields), and the park remains unpleasant. Even worse, since there are plans to re-model the park, very little is being done to keep up appearances, so the park looks as bad as it ever has. Not only is this an eye sore and a potential health hazard, it isn’t doing anything positive for home values in the area.

The City should

1. 1. Issue the report on the effectiveness of the ordinance so that we can see what’s working and why (and even more importantly, why not).
2. 2. Get the plans to the Parks Commission so that there can be a public review.
3. 3. Get the (revised) plans to the Council so we can approve.
4. 4. Notify the neighborhood
5. 5. Start construction.

No one has offered a legitimate explanation as to why we are so far behind on this schedule. Of course, given the botched job at Saddleback Ranch Road and the tremendous loss of taxpayer money, perhaps it’s a good thing.

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 4 pm to 6 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.