It took 50 years of volunteer efforts to create the East Bay Shoreline Park

The creation of the Eastshore State Park has depended on almost 50 years of volunteer efforts. Without them, this park would never have existed. At times volunteers have faced opposition from property owners and indifference from public officials, but park advocates have refused to give up, and in the coming decades, as the park is further developed and expanded, volunteer efforts will be essential for keeping it on course.

The story begins with Berkeley activists in the late 1960s who opposed the efforts of the Santa Fe Railroad to build a shopping center on the Berkeley Meadow (the squarish parcel bounded on the north by the North Basin Cove, on the south by University Avenue, on the east by Frontage Road, and on the west by the Berkeley Marina). The railroad's proposal immediately encountered stiff opposition. Key leaders in opposing Santa Fe included Save San Francisco Bay co-founder Sylvia McLaughlin; Ariel Parkinson; Ed Bennett; and Albert and Roz Lepawsky, who were the backbone of a local organization called Urban Care. Many Berkeley political notables were involved with Urban Care, including Shirley Dean and Frederic Weekes. (Park supporters mentioned in this article include all segments of the Berkeley political spectrum; this breadth of public support has been one of the keys to the park's success.) But the campaign has never consisted just of the few leaders who can be named in a short article like this. At one Planning Commission hearing, for example, Ariel Parkinson recalls that 400 people showed up. The campaigns have required the leaders who followed the issues pertinaciously and went to meetings week after week, but equally essential have been the thousands of folks who come out occasionally to write letters or attend a particular important meeting or help in whatever way is needed at the moment.

Santa Fe pressed forward. The Planning Commission voted against the shopping center (Loni Hancock, later mayor of Berkeley and now in the state Assembly, was among the commissioners voting against the Santa Fe plan), and Santa Fe appealed to the City Council. The Council said no, and in 1972 Santa Fe went to court. Finally in late 1982 the California Supreme Court ruled against Santa Fe.

While the legal proceedings ground on, activists took the first steps towards a shoreline park. Sylvia McLaughlin and Dwight Steele were among those who worked with Assemblymember (now Berkeley Mayor) Tom Bates to get the State Parks Department to start the process. While some park officials supported the idea, others were reluctant for State Parks to get into urban parks. Fortunately, this was the era of environmental leadership by Gov. Jerry Brown (now attorney general).

Santa Fe came back in early 1983 with a new proposal for a large office and hotel center on the Berkeley waterfront, and with proposals for Albany and Emeryville as well. Activists again took up the fight to stop all these. In Berkeley, Sylvia McLaughlin, Dwight Steele, Ariel Parkinson, and Ed Bennett remained in the leadership, and were joined by Norman La Force, who became the Sierra Club's point person on the issue.

Santa Fe pushed strongly, and its proposal became a central issue in the City Council election, where Berkeley Citizens Action candidates who opposed Santa Fe were elected. A key turning point was when the Sierra Club put together our own plan - helped by the volunteer expertise of a fellow who worked for a developer. We showed that with minimal development Santa Fe could get a fair return on its investment while protecting about 70% of the land as open space.

Again defeating Santa Fe took many activists, including Sylvia McLaughlin, Ariel Parkinson, Ed Bennett, Esther Gulik, Kay Kerr, the Lepawskys, Kate Nichol, and Norman La Force. Santa Fe encountered stiff opposition also in Emeryville, where key leaders included Bruce Walker, Melissa Wischusen, Alan and Norma Garrett, and Stu Flashman, and in Albany, where opposition was led by Robert Cheasty, John Shively, and Bob Arnold. The Sierra Club, with leadership from Norman La Force, played an important role in defeating all Santa Fe's proposals, but key roles were also played by the Emeryville Shoreline Committee, Urban Care and Ariel Parkinsons' CAUSE in Berkeley, and the Citizens for the Albany Shoreline.

With so many groups involved, activists felt the need for an umbrella organization and in 1985 created Citizens for the Eastshore State Park (CESP - later Citizens for East Shore Parks). Dwight Steele was its first president, followed after his death by Robert Cheasty.

We needed not just to block development projects, but also to bring the shoreline into public ownership. In 1988 we helped pass two bond measures, the statewide initiative Prop 70 and Measure AA of the East Bay Regional Park District, which together provided $40 million for purchasing lands for the Eastshore State Park. Volunteer leaders played important roles in making sure that these measures contained money for the shoreline, and hundreds of Chapter volunteers participated in the campaigns, including the gathering of signatures for Prop 70.

In 1986, after months of planning, the Berkeley City Council put on the ballot Measure Q, the waterfront plan that came to be known as the "Sierra Club Plan" because it came from the work of the Sierra Club. This got overwhelming support at the ballot box and helped get Loni Hancock elected as mayor. Nancy Skinner, currently the East Bay Regional Park District director for the Berkeley area, was on the Council at the time and voted for the Sierra Club plan.

Ballot measures have continued to play a key role in protecting the shoreline. In 1987, Emeryville activists put on the ballot a non-binding shoreline-protection initiative that passed by an overwhelming 76%. In 1990, Albany activists put on the ballot Measure C, which requires any change to the zoning on the Albany waterfront to go to a popular vote. The City Council opposed that measure, but it won by a 75% vote

Skilled and committed work by then-Assemblymember Tom Bates got the final legislation passed for creating the state park, but even he could not have done this without the ongoing and visible support of all the volunteers who worked for the park. There was a real synergy at work with Tom Bates in the Assembly working the legislative and State Parks arena while activists provided the essential popular support.

Now in Richmond, the Richmond Shoreline Open Space Shoreline Alliance, under the leadership of Whitney Dotson, is spearheading a similar effort to save the Richmond shoreline.

In Albany just last year, through a huge outpouring of volunteer support, Citizens for the Albany Shoreline under Bill Dann and Marge Atkinson helped defeat plans for a mall on the shoreline. This volunteer effort was absolutely essential because the developers spent a lot of money on the proposal. The momentum of the efforts to stop the mall propelled the election of Marge Atkinson and Joanne Wile to the City Council that November to give us a solid three-vote majority for protecting the waterfront.

The Sierra Club Bay Chapter has been in the thick of all these efforts, first through the East Bay Shoreline Park Task Force and now with the East Bay Public Lands Committee, which Norman La Force chairs.

Norman La Force has written a detailed history of the activists' success called, "Creating the Eastshore State Park, An Activist History". For a free download, contact him at n.laforce -at- comcast.net

To purchase a paper copy at the cost of printing, call Norman at (510) 526-4362. Copies are in the Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, and Oakland libraries. Copies are also at UC Berkeley's Regional History Library.

Readers can also go to the web site.

Norman La Force