Will new parking limits help solve issues in Sacramento’s William Land Park?
Kristina Rogers ran through a list of things that she said people had been finding in William Land Park.
Rogers is president of the Land Park Community Association and has lived in the neighborhood, one of Sacramento’s oldest outside the central city, for more than 20 years. The 230-acre park is used by day for picnics, jogs, zoo visits and more.
After hours is a different story, though.
“All over the park and at night when it is closed, people are driving into the park,” Rogers said. “And in the morning, what the park meetings people find, what people who are jogging and walking through the park find are condoms, needles, liquor bottles and tons of trash all over the place.”
“So the park is being used at night for all kinds of behaviors that it should not be used for,” she added.
William Land Park is open from sunrise to sunset. The city recently posted signs in the park that prohibit parking from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. The move came after Sacramento City Council voted in April to disallow nighttime parking.
Trash and other activity reported at rock garden
Jeff Massa is a city park worker who arrives at 5 a.m. to get ready for shifts that begin an hour later. Massa said that when he arrives, six or seven cars can be parked near the Works Progress Administration rock garden in the park.
“When I come by and I see these people milling around, they’re not teenagers,” Massa said. “Sometimes I’ll hit the high beams and they’ll start running.”
Beer cans and cigarette butts get left in the park, Massa said. He said he finds discarded condoms “on a daily basis” and the occasional syringe.
“There’s a lot of characters in this park,” Massa said. “It’s getting bad.”
Other people familiar with park haven’t noticed a recent change.
Dale Claypoole is a member of the Land Park Volunteer Corps and participates in cleanup days at the park, helping with gardens that are adjacent to Sutterville Road. Claypoole said he hadn’t noticed more trash than usual in recent months. Nor has he heard safety concerns.
“In the many, many years I’ve worked there, I haven’t heard anyone come back and comment on their feeling that … they were unsafe,” Claypoole said. “Doesn’t mean they haven’t been, but I haven’t heard it.”
Jeff Strenk, who has lived opposite the park on 13th Avenue for more than 20 years, said that to his knowledge, crime and after hours activities hadn’t gotten worse in the park. That’s not to say the park doesn’t sometimes bring him other inconveniences.
“My biggest concern with the park is that on busy weekend days, the music can get really loud and the car noise can get really loud,” Strenk said. “My windows rattle and it’s miserable.”
But the rock garden might not be the only problem area for the park at the moment. Massa said that a restroom near Freeport Boulevard has its own issues and that bikes and garbage can be found near it.
“That’s like ground zero,” Massa said.
What’s being done to address Land Park’s issues
Aside from barring nighttime parking in the park, the city has also discussed closing some streets in the park to vehicular traffic as part of a two-year pilot program.
“We already started moving because we think this is the right thing to do for this community,” Sacramento City Councilmember Rick Jennings said at a Land Park Community Association meeting earlier this year.
Jennings was unavailable for an interview for this story, but Rogers said that he was working on broader plan for the park.
“Part of that plan is to close the gates at night when the park is closed, so people cannot drive in and then have the gates open in the morning when the park is open,” Rogers said. “There are certain parts of the park where that will make a big difference.”
Massa wonders about the new signs prohibiting nighttime parking. “I think the big thing now is, are they going to come in and enforce it?” Massa said.
Rogers, meanwhile, wonders what will happen if the current state of affairs goes unchecked.
“A lot of people have said to me, mothers and other folks have said, ‘We bring our kids to Land Park because we don’t feel safe in other parks,’” Rogers said. “So they bring their kids here. So if this continues, and it continues to escalate, where do those kids have to go?”
