The Little Park That Could Do More
By: Joel Engardio
Tags: Social Distance, Parks, San Francisco, Coronavirus, Government

Roberta Bechtel at Triangle Park on San Francisco’s westside.

By Joel P. Engardio

As City Hall grapples with coronavirus pandemic recovery, the threat of resurgence without a vaccine and a looming $2.5 billion deficit, it’s hard to know where to find solutions when the problems seem so big and insurmountable.

A small neighborhood park could be a good place to start.

Now that social distancing is the norm, open space is in high demand. Residents need it to safely walk dogs, exercise, play with kids or just sit in fresh air outside their homes.

An all-volunteer neighborhood team has spent countless hours trying to renovate Triangle Park, a little respite nestled among the homes between West Portal and Forest Hill that has been long-neglected. But a slow and impenetrable City Hall bureaucracy continues to thwart them at every turn.

Triangle Park and many more forgotten mini-parks like it throughout our city have a new relevance in the pandemic era. That’s why now is the time to get the Triangle Parks of San Francisco into shape.

Wasted space

Triangle Park has been neglected for decades. It is overrun with weeds and gopher holes. An 80-year-old stone water fountain is broken and crumbling. A rusted World War II-era flag pole no longer stands and lays discarded on the ground. The bumpy and uneven land needs leveling.

When San Franciscans were sheltering in place this spring, places like Triangle Park were rendered unusable with waist-high weeds, trash and hazardous conditions. It was wasted space that we can no longer afford to ignore.

If coronavirus resurges in the fall or winter, there could be more shelter orders until a vaccine is available. City Hall can’t ask nearly 900,000 residents living in a 49-square-mile peninsula to stay at home without maintaining and activating open spaces in the neighborhoods.

Getting back to basics

City Hall is facing massive deficits that will require cuts to jobs and services. Yet City Hall can still cut the weeds even if it must cut the budget.

Maintaining our current open space is much cheaper and easier than creating new spaces. It also saves money when the alternative is dealing with the public health costs of people getting infected because they didn’t have enough accessible areas for social distancing.

Besides filling potholes, there’s no city service more basic than cutting weeds. Now is the time to focus on the basics. It’s been too long since City Hall got those right.

Near Triangle Park, a median on Portola Drive sat untended until 76-year-old resident Carol Dimmick began weeding it herself. The tall weeds were an eyesore for residents walking and exercising along the route.

“It was depressing to look at every day,” Dimmick said. “The city put wood chips down but the weeds and trash soon took over. We need a realistic, well-funded plan to keep our city livable. Calling 311 is not a plan!”

City Hall certainly needs to step up and not solely rely on the volunteer labor of senior citizens.

Community builders

I’ve written about Carol Dimmick’s impressive neighborhood beautification efforts, which include renovating the Dewey traffic circle, the Dorchester median, and the West Portal walkway. She is a retired investigative journalist who volunteers her time working in partnership with city agencies and neighborhood associations to improve small open spaces. Her goal is to bring people together and foster a sense of community.

Dimmick also recruits younger neighbors to carry the baton because she wants to scale the movement beyond herself.

When she heard that Roberta Bechtel wanted to fix Triangle Park, Dimmick came knocking.

“She showed up at my front door. I had to figure out, ‘Who is this lady and do I let her in?’ My house was a mess,” Bechtel said. “Then I watched her work and thought, ‘Wow I need her.’ I learned from Carol how things really work at City Hall.”

City Hall bottleneck

Bechtel and the neighbors on her team won a $25,000 grant from City Hall in 2018 to start renovations on the park. Two years later it was still overrun by weeds and a watering system that was repaired last year is broken again.

“City workers dug the new pipes out of ground while pulling the roots of a large bush,” Bechtel said. “But no one at City Hall will admit the water system was working before it wasn’t working. I don’t even know who to contact anymore. There are so many different departments with a say on things and the people who work there keep changing. So our project just keeps going off the rails.”

The Department of Public Works owns the park. Bechtel had finally scheduled a meeting with its director, Mohammed Nuru, to get some answers. But before they could meet, Nuru was arrested by the FBI on public corruption charges.

“I feel like we’re always getting knocked down,” Bechtel said. “Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and everyone at City Hall disappeared.”

Bechtel’s dream park — with plans drawn by an architect on her all-volunteer neighborhood team — features separate botanical, kids play and dog run areas. Accessible pathways lead to seating and a central fountain. There is also a pared down version with a renovated fountain, seating and open space with some newly planted trees.

Bechtel is willing to raise private funds through donations and named tiles on the fountain. She knows independent contractors charge a lot less than city workers. But if she must use DPW employees, their exact cost is a mystery — and she isn’t able to determine how much she needs to raise.

“City Hall is the bottleneck. No one will tell me what things will cost or who will do the work,” Bechtel said. “It’s stressful because I’m worried neighbors will be upset that I promised an improved park and I’m not delivering.”

Overhauling the system

Bechtel said she was fortunate to meet a mentor like Carol Dimmick who has battled the bureaucracy before. After three years of navigating City Hall politics and agency structures, Dimmick said an overhaul is needed.

“There are competent people, caring people at the Department of Public Works and City Hall that I know and admire. They are, for the most part, hard-working people who are underpaid and have a lot of responsibility,” Dimmick said. “The system, however, needs reimagining. And that’s a very complicated and difficult challenge.”

Bechtel wonders how many others like her in other neighborhoods are trying to make improvements and facing the same roadblocks.

For example, a group of volunteers a few miles away have been working the past year to renovate the Detroit stairs at Monterey Boulevard, which connect lower Miraloma Park and upper Sunnyside neighborhoods.

The Triangle Park and Detroit stairs volunteers don’t know about each other. But they should, because they live in the same supervisorial district and could benefit from each other’s neighborhood improvement.

What is the best way to connect everyone? The supervisor that represents a district should be the point person.

Rather than multiple residents calling the same city departments on their own, it would be more efficient for the supervisor to interact with the necessary departments with one voice. A schedule could be created that prioritizes each effort based on set criteria.

Volunteers on projects like Triangle Park and Detroit stairs can share best practices offered by the supervisor’s office and help each other when it’s their turn in the schedule to move forward.

By coordinating the completion of every volunteer-run neighborhood project, the supervisor can be held accountable for results.

“Right now, I feel like I’m on an island navigating on my own,” Bechtel said. “It would be super helpful to have more direction and help. We’d also get to make new friends in other neighborhoods and increase our sense of community.”

The importance of open space

The course of the coronavirus pandemic will remain uncertain until there is a vaccine. San Francisco will continue to have new problems to go with what we already had. That’s why we can’t ignore the doable tasks that will highly impact our quality of life. City Hall must listen to the cost-benefit analysis of cleaning up open space that already exists.

“I have been struggling with whether this space is a trivial issue with the health and economic situations we are dealing with as a city and country,” Bechtel said. “The more I think about it and the longer we will deal with the virus and a changing way of life, I think that this open space is more important than ever.

Dimmick agrees.

“It is my concern that if small necessary open spaces are not renovated and ready for the next emergency the whole city structure will be compromised,” she said. “I just hope that those in positions of power realize how a little smart funding will go a long way.”

Joel Engardio is a candidate for supervisor on San Francisco’s westside in District 7. Learn more about his views on local issues at engardio.com/issues