South City Park Redevelopment Plan: Boon or Bust?

On Tuesday, December 6, the Redding City Council will take a second look at whether to approve a conceptual plan for redeveloping South City Park. The park, which is located off Cypress Street, close to City Hall, the Redding Police Department and the Redding library, was fenced off from public use in 2018 in response to crime and garbage at the site.

The newly reimagined South City Park would include a central children’s playground area, indoor pavilion building, basketball and ping pong areas for youth, 8 pickle ball courts, and a perimeter walkway. The estimated cost for the project is $8-10 million.

At it’s November 15 meeting, the council was divided on whether to approve the plan in concept with Council members Kristin Schreder and Julie Winter supporting the plan and Mark Mezzanno and Michael Dacquisto firmly opposing it. Conflict over whether to pursue the park revitalization plan related largely to Daquisto’s concern about the cost of ongoing maintenance of the new park facility and Mezzano’s concern about how the city’s current homeless shelter crisis will affect the use of the park.

South City Park is located just down the street from the Good News Rescue Mission in an area of the city where unhoused people frequently congregate to use free library facilities and enjoy public open space.

After spirited discussion, the council agreed to bring the issue back to the December 6 council meeting when newly-elected council members Tenessa Audette and Jack Munns will take their seats, replacing outgoing members Kristin Schreder and Erin Resner and providing a significant opportunity for new perspectives that could move the South City Park project forward. 

Kim Niemer, Redding’s Community Services Director, presented the plan, which has already been approved by the City’s Community Services Advisory Commission. She has championed the South City revitalization project for more than a year, utilizing the consulting services of Projects for Public Spaces to facilitate significant community engagement in the conceptual planning process for the park.

That engagement process has facilitated 1300 survey responses, two community zoom meetings, an on-site open house engagement meeting and a series of smaller stakeholder meetings involving community members from the nearby neighborhoods of Parkview, Garden Tract and Wildwood as well as meetings with potential collaborators and funders like McConnell, Viva Downtown, and Shasta Living Streets.

According to the city staff report responses from that engagement process indicated that perceptions of a lack of safety at the park and difficulty in accessing the park by bike or on foot are the public’s two primary concerns in moving forward with the plan. Community concerns about safety are key to the redesign process, Niemer said on November 15, explaining that the park plan is specifically designed to address those concerns by including a variety of activities that could keep the park in use by local residents every day of every week, all year long. The city will also continue to fence the park and limit users to a single entrance. Police holding the title of park rangers will patrol the area in and around the park which would open at dawn and close at dusk, Niemer said. 

Redding recently used a similar strategy of park hours, fencing, and police patrols to “reclaim” the Nur Pon Open Space Area off Cypress Street not far from South City Park which had previously been home to several large camps of unhoused community members. 

But multiple members of the local homeless community told Shasta Scout last week that the changes at Nur Pon have only served to move members of their community into different parts of the nearby city including areas near South City Park. Last Tuesday when Shasta Scout visited the South City Park area approximately 30-40 members of the unhoused community were congregated outside the library or on the street by South City Park. Redding currently has no low-barrier emergency shelter facility and does not provide community spaces where the unhoused can keep warm or cool, charge phones, go to the bathroom, or otherwise find facilities, safety and community during the day. 

Mezzano emphasized that point at the last Council discussion on the topic. “The unhoused aren’t going to go anywhere and we haven’t dealt with that problem to my satisfaction at this point,” Mezzano said, explaining that he meets with the unhoused at a local park every week and understands that the homeless community finds the area surrounding the library important. But council member Winter disagreed saying, “If we are going to wait to solve homelessness before we move forward with our parks we aren’t going to move forward at all.” 

The council’s approval for the South City Park conceptual plan would need to occur at Tuesday’s council meeting in order for the city to move forward with the grant application for $3.5 million in federal parks funding by the deadline of December 15. The city’s current funding plan is to match those federal grant funds with $2.5 million in already approved Section 8 Housing and Urban Development (HUD) loans another $1 million in park development funding. That would leave the city $1-3 million short of the money needed to complete the project, but Niemer said she’s not concerned about finding that money when the time comes, citing strong support for the project from various community collaborators.

At the last Council meeting, individual representatives from both the Wildwood and Parkview neighborhoods spoke strongly in support of the South City Park revitalization plan, saying it’s what their communities have wanted and needed. Niemer reinforced those comments, saying that as Redding continues to build parks for new housing developments across the city it would be it would be “troubling” if the city was not willing to provide similar facilities for established neighborhoods downtown. 

---

You can make your voice heard by submitting a comment to the council by email (citycouncil@cityofredding.org) or showing up in person to speak on Tuesday, December 6, at 6 pm at Redding City Hall. Find the city’s staff report including the South City Park conceptual plan here. Read more on the city’s website, and view survey results here.

---

Do you have a correction to this story? Submit it here.