Berkeley Partners for Parks

From the SF Neighborhood Parks Council

Dear Park Advocates,

The City of San Francisco has supplemental funding available (more than $100 million); two very important hearings will take place to decide how the money is allocated.

City Hall in the Board Chambers, Room 250.
Wednesday (3-15 at 5pm)
Wednesday (3-22 at 1pm)

SIGN our PETITION & ATTEND a MEETING
We urge you to attend one of these important meetings and
to get your friends and colleagues to sign the > Pro-PARKS PETITION by March 22nd when NPC will present it to the Board of Supervisors.

Board President Aaron Peskin has proposed that $35 million be spent on Recreation and Parks Capital Projects — allowing all of the Phase 1 projects for the Capital Program to be completed!
> Full Supplemental Spending Proposal

This includes projects for:

• Lincoln Park Master Plan, $600,000
• Lincoln Playground, $1,092,722
• Hamilton Playground, Rec Center and Pool, $14,300,956
• Junipera Serra Playground and Clubhouse, $840,000
• Lake Merced Master Plan, $875,000
• Lake Merced Overlook and Trail, $145,860
• Midtown Terrace Reservoir Top, $1,510,927
• Buena Vista Park Landscape Improvement, $2,536,275
• Sunnyside Conservatory, $3,039,468
• Rolph Playground & Clubhouse, $817,712
• St. Mary’s Playground, $1,680,000
• Kelloch Velasco Park, $1,639,627
• Potrero Hill Playground, $1,382,000
• Visitacion Valley Greenway Tioga Lot, $1,246,463,
• Joseph Lee Recreation Center, $701,000
• Sava Pool, $3,007,672

Our beautiful city needs it’s wonderful city parks to promote good mental and physical health! What a great opportunity to restore these vital neighborhood assets that serve everyone in our city!!

IMPORTANT
Parks lose out to other social services every year — despite their critical value to our health, our environment and our economy.

We would love to turn in thousands of signatures to help our Board to justify the expenditure of some of the supplemental funding on the most important physical assets of our neighborhoods — in the face of many other claims for the funding.

NPC strongly supports the use of extra funding available to the city for one-time expenses only. IMPORTANT: Because the surplus will be divided to fund multiple causes, the measure for parks is NOT in competition with health
and safety initiatives, etc.

Please let us know if you can attend either hearing; NPC staff will be saving a place in the line for those who can come so that ideally you don’t have to wait too long (just look for the NPC sign and “Love your Park” stickers). We expect to be able to comment at this Wednesday’s hearing by 5:30 p.m.

If you use mulch around your house be very careful about buying mulch this year. After the Hurricane in New Orleans many trees were blown over. These trees were then turned into mulch and the state is trying to get rid of tons and tons of this mulch to any stat e or company who will come and haul it away.

So it will be showing up in Home Depot and Lowes at dirt cheap prices with one huge problem; Formosan Termites will be the bonus in many of those bags.

New Orleans is one of the few areas in the country where the Formosan Termites has gotten a strong hold. Many of the trees blown down were already badly infested with those termites, but the much may also contain wood from houses that were infested as well.

Now we may have the worst case of these stores transporting a problem to all parts of the country that have not previously been infested. These termites can eat a house in no time at all and we have no good control against them, so warn your friends to avoid cheap mulch — better to buy locally-composted mulch from a source you know. Don’t be afraid to ask the source.

— Alice

Alice La Pierre
Energy Analyst
City of Berkeley
Energy and Sustainable Development Office
2180 Milvia St., 2nd fl.
Berkeley, CA 94704

www.CityofBerkeley.Info/ENERGY
Tel: 510-981-5435
FAX: 510-981-5450

We like the photo at the top of this page, but it’s just the default photo that comes with the template.

Enter your favorite Berkeley parks photo in a contest to select a new heading for these pages. The BPFP Board will select one at their April meeting. Please submit photos by April 10th.

Specifications for photo entries:

1. Photos should be of parks or recreation in Berkeley.
2. Photos must be able to be cropped to the proportions no wider than 3 tall by 7 wide (our template is 300×700 pixels). If it is 7 wide, it can be less than 3 tall, but no more.
3. Photos must be able to be compressed to less than 200 kb without loosing resolution.
4. The theme is Spring, so think spring.
5. Ideally, the upper right corner should have a clear area for our heading text to be read over (the text “Berkeley Partners for Parks News/News and events of Berkeley Partners for Parks” you see now).

Email your photos to leeNOSPAM@shopinberkeley.com (remove NOSPAM from email address before sending). If you don’t have email access, call Lee Amosslee at 510-495-7035 so we can coordinate getting your photo submitted.

We’ll have another contest in May for a summer theme photo; if you’d like to submit photos for this now, just be clear with your submission which is for spring and which for summer. If this is successful, we’ll continue the contest each season.

We can watermark your name and copyright into the photo if you’d like.