Northeast Fresno has Woodward. Central Fresno has Roeding. At the edge of southwest Fresno, Kearney Park. And now, after a nearly 15-year long effort, southeast Fresno has broken ground on its own regional park.
Northeast Fresno has Woodward. Central Fresno has Roeding. At the edge of southwest Fresno, Kearney Park. And now, after a nearly 15-year long effort, southeast Fresno has broken ground on its own regional park.
Like a lot of community successes, this one took blood, sweat and tears – in the form of community marches, pressure campaigns on multiple government agencies, failed grant applications, and effective public servants willing to push through hurdles.
Instigated by youth soccer clubs in search of better fields and a place they’d be proud to host tournaments, the first phase of the city’s newest park on an old agricultural research site on Peach Avenue, just north of Church, will have two new massive fields, one with synthetic turf.
“Soccer is the most beloved sport in our city,” said Pedro Navarro Cruz, a soccer coach who got his start in community organizing working on efforts to get the park built. He now runs Love, Peace, Fútbol, a community for soccer and futsal enthusiasts. “But the truth is, the city hasn’t satisfied the demand and potential that soccer has.”
Cruz’ involvement began in 2015 after he saw a flyer for a community meeting at Grace Methodist Church near Huntington Boulevard to discuss the need for more soccer fields.
The meeting’s host, Jose Leon Barraza, head of the Southeast Fresno Community and Economic Development Association, or SEFCEDA, was trying to rile the community up to help increase pressure on City Hall for a new soccer park.
Barraza, once a bureaucrat himself as Fresno County’s former head of economic development, found himself as an unlikely leader to challenge the city to build soccer fields and a regional park where an old USDA agricultural station once stood.
He credits a group of parents from the Roosevelt Youth Soccer League (now Southeast Youth Soccer League) for getting this started. They approached the board of directors of Barraza’s organization, asking whether the association could do anything about the lack of dedicated soccer fields in that part of the city.
“It was kind of interesting, because our board was mostly retired and conservative folks, and here we were stepping into more of a stronger advocacy role for parks in the community,” Barraza told Fresnoland in October.
Barraza set out to the city clerk’s office to see if he could find any land. After a bit of research, he saw an item on an old city council agenda that caught his eye: a donation of 49 acres of former farm research land, a USDA agricultural center, to the city in 2006.
As that corner of the city, on the edge of Sunnyside, started sprouting tract homes in the housing boom of the early 2000s, it became apparent that the dust and chemicals inherent in experimenting with crops weren’t necessarily compatible neighbors in suburbia, Barraza said.
A Fresno representative with GSA, the real estate arm of the federal government, reached out to Georgeanne White, the city manager, and chief-of-staff to then-Mayor Alan Autry: Would the city want to take ownership of the land? Otherwise, it had to be used for activities supporting the homeless, White recalled. They jumped on the opportunity.
Initially, Autry had his sights set on building a military academy on the site, not unlike Jerry Brown’s Oakland Military Institute that he established during his tenure as mayor, according to White.
But the idea never got traction. In 2007, Autry was announcing plans for an ‘exploratorium park’ and a move of the parks department headquarters to the site, financed with bond proceeds. Signs of a housing bust in 2008 tempered Autry’s grand ambitions, and the exploratorium idea wasn’t included in the final bond package approved by the council in April of 2008.
Then the Great Recession forced the city to make hard cuts to the parks budget. Even before the city’s dangerous near miss with bankruptcy in 2011, the most audacious park investment of the last decade was $7.1 million for a new 5 acre community park in the Figarden Loop — funded by a parks bond that Autry promised could help heal the city’s north-south divide.
A 49-acre regional park would easily cost tens of millions to build, even in the 2010s. Even if they were able to secure grants to help build the park, the ongoing maintenance costs were beyond what the city felt they could handle.
City leaders considered it a pipe dream. A 2016 memo to the City Council from then city manager Bruce Rudd laid out the clear challenges the city had in completing the project. After cleaning up the city’s financial messes from the boom days of the early 2000s, he had little appetite for ambitious projects.
But Barraza wasn’t deterred. After he says the city brushed him off, he went back to the drawing board.
At around the same time, in 2014, community organizers with Fresno Building Healthy Communities, another nonprofit based in southeast Fresno, were starting to make noise about the city’s major disparity in parks and open space between north and south Fresno.
For the second year in a row, Fresno ranked dead last of major American cities for parks, ranked by the Trust for Public Land’s Park Score.
For the past few years, they, along with several south Fresno community organizations, had been organizing young people and residents in the city’s southern neighborhoods to make sure their priorities were reflected in the city’s general plan update.
At that point, north Fresno had outpaced parks and open space to south Fresno neighborhoods by an over four-to-one ratio, according to the general plan.
Fresno BHC placed billboards and even attempted to wrap ads around city buses reminding residents across the city of the disparity, in a move to pressure City Hall to do more.
Barraza saw an opportunity to build momentum.
In May of 2015, he worked with the Rev. Juan Saavedra, then the lead pastor at Grace Methodist Church, near Roosevelt High, to host a community forum to generate some interest in the community around a park with soccer fields.
Cruz, the soccer coach and organizer, was one of the dozens of people in the neighborhood who showed up that night.
“Jose was there, painting a picture of the land that was donated to the city, and how we could actually use this land, and that the city at that time wanted to use the land for a vocational facility, which raised a lot of eyebrows,” he said in an interview.
The meeting catalyzed him and others to use their voices to advocate for the community.
From there, the community only got louder.
Barraza, in November of 2015, roused hundreds of members from the community, many kids in soccer uniforms, to march from Sunnyside Park to the abandoned lot on Peach Avenue, demanding a soccer complex, big enough to host regional tournaments.
But then-Mayor Ashley Swearengin’s administration couldn’t find a way to finance a park of that size without a new source of money. Her $5.9 million commitment from the city’s general fund to improving parks in south Fresno — along with building new ones in the Mural District and Martin Ray Reilly Park, nestled next to the 180 freeway at Chestnut Avenue, were publicly criticized by the Fresno BHC coalition, saying they weren’t audacious enough.
And a plan to build a vocational facility on the site, in tandem with State Center Community College District, was still alive. Sal Quintero, who represented southeast Fresno on the city council at that time, backed the school proposal instead.
Barraza wondered: If his own local government couldn’t find the money to build the park, could he create his own, quasi-government agency to do it instead? Using his relationships from his days as Fresno County’s economic development director, he got officials from the City of Sanger and Malaga County Water District — both more than a few miles from the park site — to agree to form a joint powers authority. Joining together with other governments allowed him to be able to chase grant funding for the park only available for local governments.
It was a bold move, creating a potentially competing government with the city. But it kept conversations about the park alive — in the press, but behind closed doors too.
“On the one hand, Bruce [Rudd] started to change his attitude with us when he realized that we were really not just interested in making noise, but we were serious about doing a project,” Barraza explained.
Their first order of business was to petition the National Parks Service in April of 2016 to donate the 49 acres of land to the joint powers authority, or the Soccer Authority, claiming the city was deviating from previously agreed-upon plans to build a park.
“As we were pressuring the City of Fresno, we were also pressuring the National Park Service, asking them to do their job. I would tell them, ‘Hey, you have terms and conditions under which you gave this land to the city, and you’re not enforcing it,” Barraza said.
In July, the National Parks Service sent a letter to the city, saying they were seriously contemplating the request from Barraza’s new quasi-government with Malaga and Sanger so that their requirement for building a park on that site could be met.
The pressure helped grease the wheels of bureaucracy.
That fall, work commenced on the first citywide parks master plan in over two decades — along with a plan to work with residents to prioritize which investments they’d like to see first, and a feasibility study on how to finance a major expansion in the city’s parks and recreation spaces.
This became kindling for what would become Measure P, the citywide sales tax for parks and arts that claimed 52% of voters’ support in November of 2018.
As community groups hashed out the details of the would-be ballot measure, Barraza marched on with the plan for his park. In February of 2018, he got the city council to allow his new joint powers authority to ‘adopt’ the vacant land on Peach.
The 18-month agreement came with stipulations: regular cleanups of the littered site; planting 120 trees and shrubs; installing 60,000 square feet of turf with irrigation. It was a test from the city: could Barraza’s group garner enough financial support on their own to demonstrate they had what it took to build the park themselves?
Over the next year, volunteers came from across the city — north Fresno churches, southeast soccer clubs, southwest community groups — to help clean up the site. Even a few politicians — including then city councilmember Luis Chavez, and Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula — showed up to help.
“To us, that was very important, the wonderful solidarity that we had from different groups that came to realize something was missing,” Barraza said.
But even as Measure P got a majority of support from voters, its legal status made future funding for the Peach park unclear, as Barraza’s agreement with the city came to an end.
He said he’d raised $200,000 for the project, including volunteer labor and pro bono professional services —- still far short of the $30 million capital costs that city manager Rudd had projected, even less than his projections of half-million dollars a year to maintain the property.
The city declared the tax defeated, having not reached a two-thirds threshold typically required for special taxes. But in 2017, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ‘two-thirds’ rule didn’t apply to taxes that went on the ballot through the citizen petition process, as Measure P did.
Fresno Building Healthy communities sued in February 2019, and ultimately won. In early 2021, the city council voted to stop challenging the case in court and decided to start collecting the tax.
In the meantime, California voters had also approved a statewide bond in 2018, Proposition 68, with a hefty set-aside for parks in underserved communities.
Barraza prepared a presentation to the city council in April of 2019, asking them to join forces with the Soccer Authority and apply for $4.9 million in Prop 68 funds to get a first phase of the park, with a few soccer fields going.
But they declined, and applied for funds to support other priorities at Radio Park, Quigley Park, and a new park just around the corner at Church and Orangewood Avenues instead.
“The Orangewood and Church park was just more shovel-ready at that time,” explained Fresno County Supervisor Luis Chavez, who was on the city council at that time. “And the size of the grant just wasn’t big enough for us to really get the [Peach] park going.”
It didn’t matter anyway. The state shunned the city, opting to infuse a few million into the renovation of Calwa Park, led by Fresno Building Healthy Communities, which was still in a tense legal battle with the city over implementing Measure P.
The next June, the city approved $90,000 to get the Peach park ‘shovel-ready’ — the usual environmental and traffic studies sometimes required before applying for major grants, paving the way for the Soccer Authority to apply on their own.
In December, the city applied again to Prop 68 — and again didn’t include the Peach park, although the Soccer Authority put their own hat in the ring this time.
It was shut out again.
By 2021, Measure P funds were finally starting to get out the door, and Chavez greenlit Mayor Dyer’s appointment of Barraza to the newly-formed Parks Commission, designated to oversee the new revenue.
But city leaders were less than thrilled to immediately begin a park-building blitz with the new money. Voters were promised a massive overhaul of existing parks, so that became the priority, said White.
And a park of this size — requiring tens of millions to build — would take a few years of Measure P revenue to accumulate. The ballot measure doesn’t allow city leaders to bond against the revenue — a typical process used to finance large infrastructure projects, said White, the city manager.
There were competing priorities across the city. Every councilmember wanted a shiny new park for their district.
Chavez and Mayor Jerry Dyer saw an opening with the massive influx of ARPA, or pandemic relief funds, headed to the city. They negotiated a deal to set aside $8.5 million for the first phase and secured a unanimous vote of the council in January of 2022 to make it a city priority. Dozens of community members sent in letters urging the council to support the motion.
“Luis very much made this a priority,” emphasized White. “Luis and the mayor made it happen.”
The park, with two multi-use sports fields and two playgrounds under construction, still has a ways to go before it reaches the vision from the community.
The first phase of the South Peach Avenue park cost about $11.7 million, according to Dyer. The funding was reached using $9.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, $1.9 million in impact fees, $611,000 in Measure P money and about $15,000 using the city’s general fund.
A second phase envisions more soccer fields, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball field. The city is planning to apply for a grant to move this next version along.
North of the railroad tracks, a third phase includes a large space for community gardens, dog parks, and walking paths.
The city’s Parks After School, Recreation and Community Services department director Aaron Aguirre spoke at the park’s groundbreaking on Feb. 12, sharing that he grew up not too far from the Peach park site. He said that, as a kid, he’d spend time reminiscing on how the area could one day be used as a community gathering space.
“And to be able to deliver that here, with the help of you all and the administration and council behind us, it’s truly a privilege,” Aguirre said.
Dyer said that the South Peach Avenue park could be open to the public by the end of this year, as long as the weather doesn’t present any challenges.
In the meantime, Fresnans can help name this new park through an online vote available on social media. Voters can choose from the following 10 finalist options: Arbor Legacy Park, Golden Fields Park, The Grove, Harvest Horizons Park, Heritage Harvest Park, Peach Park, Peach And Vine Park, Seed And Stone Park, The Vineyard, Vine And Legacy Park.
All the options are meant to reference the history of the land.
Cruz said he wants the community’s legacy on the project to be remembered well. Barraza hopes the city will reconsider the naming process to include nominations from the community.
“This project started as an impossible dream. If I would not have had the experience I have in county government and knowing what it takes to make things happen in local government, I would have given up,” Barraza said.
“In this case, the residents of southeast Fresno made it happen.”
Fresnoland reporter Pablo Orihuela contributed to this story.
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