Pinole Creekside Park Planning
The Friends of Pinole Creek Watershed has been working hard to promote establishment of a new park alongside Pinole Creek. The planned site extends from Pinole Valley Rd to Sarah Court, between the Pinole Valley High School and the Pinole Valley Shopping center. Currently there is a trail that follows the creek and is frequently used by the students. Unfortunately, the trail has not been maintained, is lined with non-native weeds and the creek shores are overgrown and choked with blackberry. FOPCW regularly conducts trash clean-ups along this creek and was successful in getting two new trashcans installed.
The trashcans have helped, but the idea of truly converting this trail and its corridor into a park was conceived to increase its stewardship by the students, local businesses, and the community at Sarah Court. BASE (https://www.baselandscape.com/), a landscape architecture from San Francisco agreed to complete a pro-bono concept design for the creek and the trail. (Click on the image below). These designs were then used by members of Pinole Earth Team to gather input on the concepts from other students and the general public by holding “tabling” events along the trail and at the Shopping Mall.
All the comments have been submitted back to our BASE contact MaFe Gonzales to be incorporated into a final concept for the park. In June, FOPCW was contacted by the San Francisco Bay office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to meet and discuss the Creekside project. The EPA team toured the Creekside trail and checked out the fish passage. They indicated that the Creekside Park project would be eligible for a design and implementation grant for the 2025 cycle of the San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund (SFBWQIF) https://www.epa.gov/sfbay-program/about).
FOPCW then met with the City of Pinole’s Public Works Director Sanjay Mishra who agreed that the City would take the lead on the grant writing and execution. Follow-up meetings onsite with Pinole’s new City Manager, Kelsey Young have also been supportive and positive. Since then, FOPCW has reached out to many other potential partners to learn from their experience on other projects. Contacts include the Resource Conservation District, Contra Costa County Flood Control, The Watershed Project, the John Muir Land Trust, and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. FOPCW will be working with the City of Pinole’s grant writer to make sure we have a highly competitive application this winter.
