Overdose Centers

Most are illegal. One was built in Skid Row

By Annakai Geshlider | Capital & Main

Published December 26, 2023 5:00 AM

Quincy "Pastor Blue" Brown, co-founder of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, a half-block long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles' Skid Row, speaks to a video blogger as he gets ready for his monthly birthday celebration for his community.

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Barbara Davidson

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Capital & Main

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Topline:

Health experts say overdose prevention centers can save lives, but are illegal in most of the U.S. On Los Angeles’ Skid Row, those in need have built their own.

The backstory: A sidewalk sanctuary in Skid Row meets a need served elsewhere by overdose prevention centers, which are common in European cities but rare in the United States. With overdose deaths rocketing upward, public health officials in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities have called for legalizing such centers, saying there’s now an abundance of evidence that they save lives. But the political will to heed that advice has not materialized.

Read on ... for the perspective of "Pastor Blue" of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary. half-block-long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where more than 4,400 unhoused people live.

“Come on, kick back,” invites Quincy Brown, co-founder of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, a half-block-long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where more than 4,400 unhoused people live.

Four years ago, Brown began serving barbecue here out of the back of his van. He propped up a handful of tents and canopies to shade visitors from the intense sun. Now there are folding chairs and tables where men and women play dominoes, chess and checkers, and enjoy snacks and bottled water donated by local organizations and community members who pass by.

Amid the visitors hanging out and catching up, some smoke crack cocaine, meth or marijuana, sitting on chairs in the sanctuary’s central area. The nonjudgmental environment for drug consumption is on-mission for the sanctuary. Brown, 50, was ordained as a pastor in 2005 and is known by most as Pastor Blue. He started the community space to save lives: whether through food, prayer or prevention of overdose deaths. Here, anyone can obtain free clean pipes and Naloxone (commonly known by its brand name, Narcan), a nasal spray medication with the ability to reverse overdoses. While injection drugs are less commonly used at the sanctuary, free clean needles are available.

“First and foremost, I want people to live,” says Pastor Blue. By creating a hygienic environment with lifesaving medicine at hand, he hopes to prevent overdose deaths, which over the last few years have risen sharply in Skid Row and across the country.

Pastor Blue’s sidewalk sanctuary meets a need served elsewhere by overdose prevention centers, which are common in European cities but rare in the United States. With overdose deaths rocketing upward, public health officials in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities have called for legalizing such centers, saying there’s now an abundance of evidence that they save lives. But the political will to heed that advice has not materialized.

A top-down shot of a bin full of plastic-packaged naloxone (Narcan) spray medication.

Darren Willett, director of Skid Row’s Center for Harm Reduction, operated by the nonprofit Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, said the lack of overdose prevention centers in Los Angeles is “infuriating.” If officials approved them, “we could do it tomorrow. And yet, here we are watching people die,” said Willett.

Pastor Blue estimates there have been 20 overdoses at Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary over the last two years — yet not one fatality.

To achieve this, monitoring is crucial. The sanctuary operates with an “I’m gonna watch over you while you use, you watch over me” approach, Pastor Blue says. “I’m constantly walking through, so if somebody sleeps too long, we’re gonna get you up.”

Illicit fentanyl has been the greatest cause of overdose. By weight, the synthetic opioid is about 50 times stronger than heroin. Even small amounts can cause respiratory difficulty, and in some cases death. Fentanyl’s potency and low production cost have led to its increasing use as an additive to other drugs.

In 2021, 2,741 people in Los Angeles County died from an accidental drug overdose, according to the Department of Public Health — more than double the number of lives lost to overdose in 2016. Fentanyl was involved in 109 deaths in 2016 and 1,504 deaths in 2021.

As fentanyl-related deaths in Skid Row began to soar, the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and other health officials called for the establishment of official consumption centers to prevent overdoses.

The L.A. County Department of Public Health released a report late last year on fentanyl overdoses that included a call for official prevention centers and other harm reduction measures, such as access to Naloxone and fentanyl test strips. At the same time, Barbara Ferrer and Gary Tsai, director of L.A. County Department of Public Health and director of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control, respectively, endorsed the centers, saying it was time for “bold action.”

“We do not tell people with diabetes that they can’t be eligible for treatment unless they comply with diet restrictions 100% of the time, or that people with heart disease can’t receive care unless they exercise,” Ferrer and Tsai wrote in a Daily News op-ed. “Overdose prevention centers … send a subtle but important message that we want to bring people who use drugs out from the corners of our communities and that they deserve unconditional and nonjudgmental services.”

Despite support from health experts and local officials, federal law bans overdose prevention centers due to the “crack house statute” — a 1986 law that prevents individuals and organizations from maintaining or opening places for the purpose of using a controlled substance. Only New York City, which has two prevention centers, has bucked that law so far, though Rhode Island, Colorado and New Mexico are taking steps to open them.

A nonprofit center operated in San Francisco for one year in 2022 as part of the mayor’s emergency plan to address the overdose crisis, though it has since closed. In recent months, other unsanctioned sites have popped up in the city to address the urgent issue of drug overdose. Like in Los Angeles, the future of prevention centers in San Francisco is uncertain.

Last summer, Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) authored a bill to open pilot overdose prevention centers in L.A., Oakland and San Francisco. But Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying that more planning was needed. He expressed concern the centers could open “a world of unintended consequences.”

Newsom was likely hoping to stave off “the largely GOP-driven narrative of California as a needle-infested, drug-overrun dystopia,” CalMatters stated on its website.

Under a white-roofed canopy, a group of people with brown skin tone are gathered at a table to play dominoes. Adorning the canopies are a variety of national flags.

While Los Angeles has seen a groundswell of support for overdose prevention centers, with local leaders and community nonprofits calling for them to be legalized, none have opened.

So Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary operates as a real-world example of the paradoxes brought about by the nation’s 52-year war on drugs. Worldwide, 16 countries have established more than 120 official overdose prevention centers where people can use drugs in a supervised environment, with staff ready to respond if they overdose. While such official centers are illegal in the U.S., Pastor Blue’s sidewalk setup serves as a one-man version of such a space.

On one summer evening, while people at Blue Hollywood were playing dominoes and hanging out, a resident who frequents the sanctuary accidentally overdosed. After smoking crack in a pipe, he began to have trouble breathing.

Pastor Blue called an ambulance, administered four doses of Narcan and performed CPR. Moments before paramedics arrived, “we revived him,” Pastor Blue said. “We had Narcan, thank god.”

Pastor Blue is fighting a problem that “does not seem to be going anywhere in the near future,” he said. “We have loved ones, we have friends, we have people that are suffering with different addictions. I’m here to meet people right where they are.”

Here on Skid Row, Blue Hollywood is an example of a community-created oasis, said Soma Snakeoil, director and co-founder of the Sidewalk Project, a harm reduction nonprofit in the neighborhood.

The sanctuary receives supplies such as clean needles, pipes and Narcan from local nonprofits like the Sidewalk Project, as well as chairs, tents, food and water from Los Angeles Mission and donors who drop by.

“For the most part, it’s a community,” says Pastor Blue, who resides near Skid Row. “I really want to preserve community, because there’s so many people who have been detached from their biological community.”

The sanctuary offers immediate support, whether it’s a tent for shelter or a freshly cooked lunch.

“By him putting this here, I think he saved a lot of people,” said Rico Solomon, a longtime sanctuary member. Born and raised in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood, Solomon lived in a tent on Skid Row for four years before moving to an apartment in La Puente, 20 miles east of downtown. Even though it can mean three bus rides for more than an hour and a half, he returns to Blue Hollywood regularly.

Three people with brown skin tone are sitting during the evening, facing toward the camera. One of them, a man, is in the middle using a light to read aloud from a book.

Solomon says the community keeps him coming back. “It’s a bit of a commute, especially when I’m catching the bus. But I have my habits, you know. So I don’t take this stuff home with me,” he said of the drugs he consumes and the pipe he uses to smoke. “I come out here and do it. Then, when I get ready to go home, I leave it all here.”

Solomon said he’s seen four overdoses at the sanctuary and has called 911 himself to assist people experiencing an overdose, so they are able “to live to see another day.”

“People are dropping like flies around here,” said Anthony Willis, 60, who lives in an apartment in Skid Row. Born and raised in L.A., he is a father and grandfather.

Nearly a year ago, Willis accidentally overdosed. While looking to smoke crack cocaine, he borrowed a pipe. Before smoking the pipe, he asked if it contained fentanyl and was told no.

The pipe turned out to be laced with it. “I panicked,” Willis said. “I couldn’t breathe.” Emergency services arrived, though he was able to regain his breathing on his own.

Consuming drugs less frequently is one of Willis’ goals. In the meantime, treating those who consume with dignity is imperative. “We’re all human,” he said. “Don’t judge people.”

According to Willett, the Center for Harm Reduction director, a nonjudgmental approach is key.

“There’s a lot of things you can do to help people improve [their] health without stopping using drugs,” he said. Too often, he said, organizations approach the problem by focusing on abstinence. “For many people, that’s a deal breaker,” he added.

Using a harm reduction — as opposed to an abstinence — approach allows the center to engage with 95% of clients who use drugs, Willett said.

While the U.S. is now five decades deep into the war on drugs, the stigma and criminalization of drug use is a relatively new phenomenon. “In the late 1800s, you could buy cocaine and a syringe for $1.50 in the Sears catalog,” Willett said.

“There’s a direct lineage straight from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and the war on drugs,” said Willett, adding that all were tools used by the system of white supremacy to maintain control over Black people. He points out that the supposed end of Jim Crow laws in the late 1960s coincided neatly with the start of the war on drugs in 1971, which resulted in a dramatic increase in prison populations. It has cost the U.S. roughly $1 trillion to police, arrest and incarcerate people for drug-related charges, and spiked rates of overdose and death.

A man with dark brown skin tone and another man with light skin tone and long hair sweep streets during the daytime.

If you ask Willett, the war on drugs has neither met its stated goals nor alleviated the most pressing health issues: It hasn’t reduced overdose rates, soft tissue infection, infectious disease or violence related to drug trafficking. Instead, it has “devastated communities of color through reincarceration, ripping families apart for minor drug offenses and confiscating people’s homes for being associated with illicit drug trade.”

The problem isn’t drug use itself, Willett believes. It’s the way society punishes people for using drugs — targeting Black people, communities of color and low-income people in particular, despite similar rates of drug consumption and sales across racial and economic lines.

“We cannot continue doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result,” L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in an email, speaking to the history of criminalizing drug use and the rise in overdose deaths.

“It’s a reality that people are gonna use,” said Pastor Blue. “So on behalf of trying to keep an atmosphere where they’re at peace … safe consumption sites are very important.”

Countries with overdose prevention centers (the first opened in Switzerland in 1986) show significantly lower rates of overdose than those without. In 2020, 91,799 people died from overdose in the United States — about 58 times more than in Germany, where 1,581 people died from overdose (the U.S. population is only four times larger than Germany’s).

Jeannette Zanipatin, California director for the national advocacy group the Drug Policy Alliance, says these overdose prevention centers are not a substitute for treatment. The centers, which commonly connect clients to other services such as mental and physical health care, “keep individuals alive so that when they are ready to access treatment those linkages can be made for the individual,” Zanipatin said in an email.

In the U.S., critics from both parties have questioned their success. “Enabling those suffering from addiction to go to the brink of death is a dubious treatment,” wrote U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, a President Trump appointee, in a 2020 opinion in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a state measure to open a pilot prevention center in San Francisco, saying, “Fundamentally I do not believe that enabling illegal drug use in government sponsored injection centers — with no corresponding requirement that the user undergo treatment — will reduce drug addiction.” Such sentiments linger today.

In 2022, the American Medical Association called for more funding for pilot prevention centers. And recently the National Institutes of Health announced it will fund a four-year study to investigate the impact of prevention centers on both individual clients and neighborhoods — as well as estimate potential costs and savings for local medical and criminal justice systems.

NIMBYism is also an obstacle to opening prevention centers, said Zanipatin, with some fearing a center would negatively impact their community. Yet “crime rates have been reduced, syringe litter is reduced, and open drug use is reduced in places where centers are co-located in communities,” she wrote in an email.

A study of one unofficial overdose prevention center in the U.S. found that in the five years since its opening, crime decreased in the surrounding area. A review of government-sponsored prevention centers in Vancouver, Canada, found no increases in drug-related crimes or public nuisance.

As part of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles in Skid Row, a trained overdose response team of staff and clients canvasses the neighborhood in golf carts seven days a week. They are armed with a broad range of tools, including Naloxone injections, concentrated oxygen, artificial breathing masks, pulse oximeters and automated external defibrillators.

Still, one crucial service is missing: providing a safe environment for clients to consume drugs on-site.

In 2016, Homeless Health Care Los Angeles formed a partnership with The Men’s Home in Copenhagen, which operates two overdose prevention centers, and has been sending staff to Denmark to learn from these centers ever since.

Yet no such center has arrived in Los Angeles.

Climate & Environment

Turtle rescue

A native turtle gets a boost.

Erin Stone covers climate and environmental issues in Southern California.

Published May 22, 2026 4:21 PM

A small brown and greenish turtle swims in water.

A recently released juvenile southwestern pond turtle swims in the San Gabriel River in the Angeles National Forest.

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Ken Bohn

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Courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

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Topline:

There’s a day for everything, and Saturday is World Turtle Day. This is the story of how humans helped a vulnerable native California turtle.

The backstory: Southwestern pond turtles in the San Gabriel mountains were almost wiped out by the Bobcat Fire in 2020. But biologists rescued 11 adults that were held at the San Diego Zoo until 2024, when they were released.

The baby boom: But then something happened that scientists didn't expect: "One baby, two baby, three baby, four baby. Fifteen babies later," is how a wildlife care manager at the zoo described it. Yes, the rescued turtles had laid eggs in their temporary home, and the hatchlings were emerging.

A new generation: Once they'd grown a bit, the zoo released the young turtles into San Gabriel River where they belong in April.

Read on ... for more about this conservation success story.

After fires and floods, Southern California’s only remaining native freshwater turtle recently got a boost.

Just last month, 15 southwestern pond turtle hatchlings were released into the San Gabriel River — a major milestone in an effort to restore the vulnerable turtle population.

But this wasn’t a typical raise-and-release scenario.

These turtles’ parents went on a harrowing journey before they were born.

A daring rescue

In early September 2020, amid a heat wave and dry weather, a tree branch hit a Southern California Edison power line, igniting the Bobcat Fire.

The fire eventually scorched more than 180 square miles — mostly forest in the San Gabriel Mountains. For comparison, the 2025 Eaton Fire burned about 22 square miles.

A firefighter directs his hose toward flames amid smoke and trees.

As the Bobcat Fire spread, biologists grew worried. The fire was burning in the West Fork of the San Gabriel River, a biodiversity hotspot and refuge for bears and mountain lions, the federally protected Santa Ana sucker fish and the mountain yellow-legged frog.

It’s also home to the largest remaining — and possibly only — population of southwestern pond turtles in the entire watershed. Their exact numbers aren’t known, but it’s likely less than 200.

What is a southwestern pond turtle?

The small, shy turtles grow to about 8 inches and range from Baja California to just south of the San Francisco Bay. They spend most of their lives in streams, rivers, lakes and other watery environments. They primarily eat small insects and plant matter.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife lists them as a Species of Special Concern, and they're being considered for federal protections under the Endangered Species Act.

“Because this hadn’t burned in decades and decades and decades, there was big concern about debris flows,” said Robert Fisher, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Scientists hoped the turtles would be able to ride out the fire itself by staying in the water, but any rain after would likely lead to a deluge of mud, trees and other burned materials. That would be akin to an avalanche for the turtles in the river, and it had the potential to wipe out the entire population.

Once the flames died down, Fisher and a team of biologists, in partnership with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Forest Service, trekked to the home of the pond turtles.

“It was a moonscape,” Fisher said.

They waded through ashy, murky waters, eventually collecting 11 adult turtles.

World Turtle Day’s SoCal cred

There’s a day for everything these days, but World Turtle Day (May 23) has surprisingly local roots.

Susan Tellem and her late husband, Marshall Thompson, coined the day in 2000 after founding a turtle and tortoise rescue 10 years earlier at their home in Malibu.

“When I first started helping turtles, there were hardly people helping the needs of turtles,” Tellem told LAist. “We decided to help educate people internationally so that turtles can live a longer and happier life.”

A temporary home and 15 surprises

The turtles were taken to the San Diego Zoo, where the plan was to hold them until their mountain habitat recovered enough for them to return.

By 2024, the San Gabriel Mountains were looking far better — biologists even found some pond turtles that survived major debris flows.

But right before the turtles were set to go back home, scientists got a surprise.

“Just before we were getting to release, we found a baby turtle, which is amazing,” said Brandon Scott, wildlife care manager of herpetology and ichthyology at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. “You don't know how long it's going to take to restart that process of them actually being able to breed, with the stress and it's a new habitat.”

A hand in a blue glove places a small turtle on a scale to be weighed.

The turtles and the new baby were all returned to their home in the San Gabriels. But then came another surprise. And another.

“We just continually, every day, started finding a baby in that habitat,” said Scott.

Female southwestern pond turtles lay and bury their eggs in late spring or early summer. Juveniles emerge months later, only about the size of a quarter.

Fifteen babies later, conservation staff were shocked and pleased.

Their goal for the 11 rescued turtles was to make sure they could thrive before being released back into their habitat. “But in the process,” Scott said, “yes, we made it comfortable enough for them to breed.”

A hopeful release

The new generation of southwestern pond turtles was released in April near the spot their parents were rescued from in the San Gabriel River.

Such rescues of vulnerable wildlife are becoming increasingly common in the face of more catastrophic fires. All but two of the biggest fires in recorded history have been in the last 20 years.

Fisher said a similar rescue of pond turtles had occurred only once before, after the 2009 Station Fire in the San Gabriels. That time, the turtles were quickly returned to their habitat.

A man wearing a brown baseball cap and khaki long sleeved shirt holds a small turtle at the edge of a pond.

That rescue, in part, inspired the U.S. Geological Survey to work with the San Diego Zoo to build a conservation habitat for southwestern pond turtles nearly two decades ago. And the Bobcat Fire became the first time it was used for wild rescues, Fisher said.

Ironically, the Bobcat Fire could eventually help the local population, Fisher said.

“We’ve known about [the population] for decades, but it’s not really thriving,” he said. “So this helped give it a head start. And because the fire was so intense, it opened up a lot of habitat.”

With less tree canopy and more sunlight, the cold-blooded reptiles could thrive in warmer waters and on sunnier rocks.

Threats to southwestern pond turtles

Southwestern pond turtles have lived here for millennia, but invasive species and habitat destruction have nearly wiped them out. They’re currently being considered for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Nonnative turtles — such as red-eared sliders, many of which are abandoned pets — are outcompeting them in their habitats. And native pond turtle hatchlings are easy prey for invasive animals such as bullfrogs and crayfish.

On top of that, pollution in our atmosphere is driving longer, hotter droughts, which dries out the streams and rivers where they live. Worsening “weather whiplash” means more dangerous mudflows after fires, which can wipe out entire aquatic animal populations.

But the new generation is key.

“Because the site was so forested and hadn’t burned in so long, we don’t think they were having good success at breeding,” Fisher said. “Now we think we’ve really enhanced the population by putting more animals out there, especially young animals.”

Scott and Fisher said the saga has inspired preliminary conversations about formalizing breeding efforts to support the population. The little turtles' myriad threats have yet to let up, so they’ll likely need more help in the future.

But at the moment, there’s a little more hope — at least 16 hatchlings and 11 adults' worth of hope, to be exact — for California’s only native freshwater turtle.

About the owner

Owner-operator Peggy Simonian was working for the British Tourist Authority when they decided to bring a pub to Pasadena. Three years after opening, they got their following after hosting their first Belgian Beer Festival.

Listen 13:39

World Cup pub crawl: Lucky Baldwins Pub

What sets their food apart? The beer batter

"I think there's this stigma around British food that it's a little bland," said general manager Patsy Sutton.

She says the fish and chips knock people's socks off — and it all comes down to the beer batter.

They use locally sourced Pacific cod instead of its Atlantic relative and an undisclosed pale ale. This combo drives the taste.

In the forefront, sits a basket holding steak fries, a lemon, fried fish, and tartar sauce. In the background, there are other food items, as well as a cup.

The ultimate experience in the eyes of the owner

"I like it when it's a nice sunny day outside our patio in Old Towne ... enjoy a nice Belgian beer ... listen to the music and enjoy the California weather," Simonian said.

She added that her go-to beers currently include a Belgian lager, blonde or tripel. It's all about the mood.

Restaurant details

Lucky Baldwins Pub first opened in 1996 and now has two Pasadena locations and one in Sierra Madre.
They're an official bar partner with LAFC.
They host: Pasadena Reds, a local Liverpool FC support group; Los Angeles Hammers, a West Ham FC support group; and Eastside Gooners, a local support group for Arsenal FC.
They also have special events tied to the Belgian Beer Festival and Oktoberfest.

Menu items we tried

Fish 'n' Chips — cod dipped in ale batter with a side of steak fries and tartar sauce
Bangers and Mash — two pork sausages with peas and mashed potatoes (also available with fries).
Cornish Pastie — a handheld pie with minced meat
Chicken Curry Pastie — a handheld pie with traditional British chicken curry

How to visit

Address (Old Town Pasadena): 17 S. Raymond Ave, Pasadena
Hours: Monday–Sunday: 9 a.m.-1:30 a.m.
Cost: Fish 'n' chips cost $18; bangers and mash cost $19; and the pasties (with a choice of crisps or fries) cost $14.

You can find the times for their Delirium Pub by clicking here, and their Trappiste Pub by clicking here.

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Climate & Environment

Long Beach parkland

A 2-acre slice of parkland to get facelift

By John Donegan | Long Beach Post

Published May 22, 2026 2:00 PM

A digital rendering of people sitting in an area near various trees and plants with benches on gravel.

The city of Long Beach provided this rendering of plans for the revamped 10th Street Greenbelt.

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Courtesy the city of Long Beach

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Topline:

A two-acre slice of parkland that runs diagonally between 8th Street and 10th Street near Wilson High School is slated to get new trees, landscaping and seating — a project that will complete its transformation from an old railway right-of-way into a welcoming greenspace.

The backstory: The land was once used by Pacific Electric, whose Red Car trains used to slash diagonally across the area from Wrigley to the Colorado Lagoon. For years, Long Beach has been slowly converting a 9.2-acre stretch of the former railway into parkland between 4th Street and Park Avenue to 11th Street and Loma.

What's next: This portion, called the 10th Street Greenbelt, runs between Termino and Grand avenues. It was outfitted with a 900-foot concrete path in 2022. This next phase will add 48 Redbud, Oak, and Sycamore trees, native shrubs, solar lighting, boulder and bench seating, and several granite auxiliary trails that connect the surrounding neighborhoods to the path. There are no plans for restrooms or tables, officials said.

Read on... for more on the changes to the parkland.

A 2-acre slice of parkland that runs diagonally between 8th Street and 10th Street near Wilson High School is slated to get new trees, landscaping and seating — a project that will complete its transformation from an old railway right-of-way into a welcoming greenspace.

The land was once used by Pacific Electric, whose Red Car trains used to slash diagonally across the area from Wrigley to the Colorado Lagoon. For years, Long Beach has been slowly converting a 9.2-acre stretch of the former railway into parkland between 4th Street and Park Avenue to 11th Street and Loma.

This portion, called the 10th Street Greenbelt, runs between Termino and Grand avenues. It was outfitted with a 900-foot concrete path in 2022. This next phase will add 48 Redbud, Oak, and Sycamore trees, native shrubs, solar lighting, boulder and bench seating, and several granite auxiliary trails that connect the surrounding neighborhoods to the path. There are no plans for restrooms or tables, officials said.

A digital rendering showing a park with various trees and plants from an arial view. People walk along a path that crosses down the park. White blocks representing buildings surround the park.

Plans were informed largely by a survey and feedback gathered over the last four years by the Greenbelt Heights Neighborhood Association. Officials say surveys consistently pointed out a need for more seating, native plants and improved drainage in the nearby neighborhoods.

Sharon Turner, the association’s president, said it’s been a 15-year effort that originally inspired the creation of the neighborhood group. For years, the path was “a dumping area of tall grass,” she said. Now, the association is planning to hold meetings at the park.

“It’s been a long haul,” Turner said. “We’ve been really happy with the support, but it definitely started as a local resident push, and we got some support once it got legs.”

Planned for construction in early 2027, it is hoped to be finished by that fall. The project has a $2.58 million budget, mostly funded by a $1.5 million county grant.

Public Works staff are planning to unveil detailed plans at a meeting on May 28, starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Recreation Park Community Center (4900 E. 7th St.) Members of the public are encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts. Interpretation services in Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog are available upon prior request.

Click here for more updates on the project.

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