Wish Comes True: El Cerrito Gets New Park
By Violet Feng, September 15, 2002 11:05 AMEL CERRITO, Sept. 15 -- El Cerrito citizens dying for more green in their landscape now have good reason to celebrate. The city will soon complete a purchase of a small piece of wetland and restore it into a greenway park complete with water, plants and trails, assistant city planner Carili Paine said last night.
EL CERRITO, Sept. 15 -- El Cerrito citizens dying for more green in their landscape now have good reason to celebrate. The city will soon complete a purchase of a small piece of wetland and restore it into a greenway park complete with water, plants and trails, assistant city planner Carili Paine said last night.
The announcement also marks the victory of 7-year-long fight by Friends of Baxter Creek, a neighborhood environmental group, to save the strip of watershed from being buried under a parking lot of the neighboring Albertson's supermarket.
"The city council will approve the purchase in its October 7 meeting and we expect to complete the transaction by November," Paine told a meeting of the neighborhood group last night. The purchase price is $400,000, with $350,000 coming from a grant by the California Coastal Conservancy and the rest from the city's 2002 budget, she said.
The property, located south of the Alberston's market on San Pablo and MacDonald Avenues, is now a rather unsightly vision with worn, dusty grassland and a shallow, trash-strewn ditch. The strip meanders down the Richmond and El Cerrito Hills and flows east-west into several streams into the San Francisco Bay.
Negotiators from the city and the owner of the land, Burlington Northern Railroad Sante Fe, will work out the details of the purchase agreement within a few weeks, Paine said. "Right now we are looking at other ways of renovating the store on other sites in the community," Stacia Levenfeld, public affairs director at the Albertson's, said yesterday during a telephone interview. She said cookies and M&M's on the meeting room table last night bespoke the delight of the Baxter Creek friends members at the hard-won victory.
"I walk my dogs along the creek every night," said El Cerrito resident Peter Loubal. Public opinions are welcome as the city starts to hammer out a detailed designing plan for the park, Paine said.
