Village Pond Park - The Workshop That Wasn't

For weeks the Community Services Department has been advertising the third “workshop” in a series of problem solving approaches to dealing with the challenges at Village Pond Park. As it turns out, there was no workshop, a fact apparently known to everyone except the people who showed up to attend the “workshop”. Instead it was a presentation to the Parks and Recreation Commission of a report from the Consultants, a report that wasn’t circulated to the public prior to the meeting, nor was it placed on the city’s website under the agenda item, a practice which the City has followed scrupulously in other cases.

Laying aside the lack of proper notice and the fact that advance copies of the report were not in general circulation to the public, a group of less than 30 people showed. Although this is a full house for the usual attendance at PRC meetings, this was less than half of the numbers who attended previous meetings on this subject. Fearing the time and place would lead to this result, Lake Forest HOA had offered its location as an alternative, but the Community Services declined, apparently because they knew in advance this wasn’t going to be a workshop and therefore holding it at the HOA made no sense.

Community Services has promised to put the report online, but in the meantime, you can refer to my recent report in which I summarized what I thought were going to be the contents of the report.

There are three major items being discussed – (1) the pond area, (2) the surrounding area, and (3) methods to make the pond and the surrounding area less hospitable for the waterfowl. Everyone agreed that having waterfowl was desirable, but not in the numbers we currently have.

The approach adopted by the consultants is basically a shotgun approach or what they call in advertising the “spaghetti approach”. This involves listing everything you can possibly think of, hoping that some of the changes will work. For example, in order to make the area less hospitable for the waterfowl, the report lists 12 different methods that might be tried. I already listed many of these in my previous report. Unfortunately, the report lacks any data on which to make judgments. For example, the report suggests “Grease or puncture eggs” but it isn’t clear if there are any eggs being laid by ducks and/or geese in the park area. Surely the recommendation that we adopt egg greasing should include how many eggs of all kinds are currently in the park area, how this would be accomplished, what the costs of doing this are, what are some of the legal challenges the City would face, etc. Then we could do a cost/benefit analysis to determine whether this method is workable.

The same lack of data permeates the entire report.

The report on the pond itself contains a lot of very interesting graphs about water quality issues, but there is no real substance and no application to our Pond and our issues. During discussions, the consultants suggested (1) draining the pond, (2) using bio-filters, (3) using chemicals, (4) creating a water filtration system that uses the dirty pond water to irrigate the lawns and replenishing the pond water with new water, (5) installing a floating island, and (6) installing two water fountains. These are all interesting ideas, but again, there is no data. What are the costs of each of these “improvements”? What is the current health of the pond and how will each of these approaches impact the current health of the pond, and even more importantly, what are the cost/benefits of each approach. In addition, what are the potential side effects of these improvements? Will installing a floating island to improve the water quality provide a safe haven for geese and thus make the area more hospitable for them? Will irrigating the lawn with dirty pond water create an undesirable condition for people visiting the pond? These are all legitimate questions, for which the consultants had no data.

When they looked at the surrounding area, the consultants propose planting tall trees around the pond to discourage waterfowl from flying in. But there is no data on the direction from which the waterfowl come, so why would we surround the entire pond with tall tress if the waterfowl come from only one or two directions. Indeed, a homeowner whose backyard overlooks the pond is worried that the tall trees will spoil her view of the pond, and achieve nothing since the waterfowl do not fly into the pond from that direction. Once more, it’s obvious that there is a substantial lack of data.

Apparently this report, without any data, is going to be forwarded to the City Council, but how can you expect the Council to act on any of these recommendations without more data.

Despite the lack of a workable plan and the lack of any data, several people from the surrounding area praised the report. By my count, 10 people commented and 6 of them commented favorably about the report, although one of them added “What happens if it doesn’t work?” Indeed.

What we have here is a good beginning and from this report we need to take the next step and provide data, do some preliminary cost estimates, and begin talking about cost/benefit of each suggestion. Moreover we need to come up with the best alternatives based on this and then talk about the process by which these steps can be implemented. With that in hand, it would be appropriate to take the report to the City Council. At this stage, there is nothing there for the City Council to respond to.