What's at stake:
Gov. Gavin Newsom's Earth Day announcement means Fresno is getting a new state park. Six properties under the supervision of the San Joaquin River Conservancy will be transferred over to California State Parks.
After four decades of piecing the San Joaquin River Parkway together parcel by parcel, the state is preparing to hand six of its properties — 874 acres in all — to California State Parks, giving the long-stalled greenway its first permanent institutional landlord.
The new San Joaquin River Parkway State Park is one of three that Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed Wednesday under the “State Parks Forward” initiative — billed as the largest expansion of California’s state park system in decades, alongside Feather River in Yuba County and Dust Bowl Camp in Kern County. If approved, the additions would bring California’s total to 283 state parks, more than any other state.
A six-person agency has run the San Joaquin River Conservancy on grants and contracts since 1992, and the transfer would put six of their properties under the control and supervision of California State Parks.
That includes three Friant-area sites — Friant Cove, the 64-acre Wagner property and the 170-acre River Vista. It also includes three around Highway 41 — Sycamore Island, the Van Buren Unit and Wildwood Native Park. Together, the six properties represent close to a third of the Conservancy’s holdings.
For the Fresno area, the handoff tees up an operational shift decades in the making. The Wagner parcel was acquired in 2000, River Vista in 2001, Sycamore Island — a former gravel-mining site purchased from Jim and Carrie Moen — in 2005, and Wildwood in 1996, the first Madera-side property the Conservancy ever bought.
Kari Daniska, the San Joaquin River Conservancy’s executive officer, traced the transfer to a routine “agency drill” her office completed for the California Natural Resources Agency, in which small state agencies are asked what would make their work easier.
“I said, ‘Well, you could have state parks take over these Conservancy properties,'” Daniska said. “They have the classification structure. They have peace officers, they have park aids. They have everything that you need to make a park work.”
The Conservancy has six employees total and operates most of its holdings through contracts with the nonprofit San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust. “It took about a year for us to get from my original response to the drill to working with parks to transfer these six properties over to them,” Daniska said.
For the River Parkway Trust, which has run Sycamore Island and other Conservancy lands under contract, the move solves a looming problem. The Trust’s Sycamore Island operating contract expires in June 2027, and a $15 million appropriation secured in 2021 by state legislators Joaquin Arambula and Anna Caballero was restricted to operations and maintenance.
“Now we have an answer. We’re not going to be falling off a cliff in June of 2027,” said Sharon Weaver, the Trust’s executive director. Unlike the American River Parkway in Sacramento, the San Joaquin has never had a joint-powers authority or dedicated funding stream.
State parks brings rangers, interpreters and a century-old contracting apparatus — along with a direct line to the governor’s office at budget time. That infrastructure has been missing for most of the parkway’s history.
Of the roughly 5,900 acres envisioned in the 1992 state law that created the Conservancy, about 4,200 are now in public ownership. But only a fraction of that land is regularly open to visitors.
Lost Lake Park, Woodward Park, Jensen River Ranch, Ball Ranch and Sycamore Island anchor most public access. River Vista — one of the properties now heading to state parks — has never opened to the public. Acquisition, in other words, stopped being the parkway’s hardest problem years ago. Turning acquired land into land people can reach did.
Whether the state park designation can expand public access is the open question.
John Shelton, who ran the Conservancy until 2023, said the transfer will let ambitious projects move faster. But he offered a caveat: state parks has historically done little restoration work at nearby Millerton Lake State Recreational Area, and in deficit years the agency tends to shift scarce dollars toward “bigger places, like some of the state beaches.”
Big habitat work on the parkway, he said, will likely still depend on outside funding from the Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Board or federal partners.
The transfer doesn’t fix everything. River West Fresno — the 500-acre, Fresno-side site the Conservancy has tried to open for more than a decade — isn’t on the state parks’ list and remains stuck on a court-ordered access road through Spano Park that the City of Fresno has yet to build. The planned 22-mile trail from Friant Dam to Highway 99 is still a series of disconnected segments. And Arambula has publicly questioned whether the Conservancy spent its biggest recent appropriation the way the Legislature intended.
In the near term, the transfer opens several long-stuck doors. River Vista has sat closed for years, Weaver said, because of a broken bridge in the river that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently determined is creating a Chinook salmon spawning habitat and should not be disturbed. Weaver said she’s hoping state parks can find a way to finally open the property around it.
One of the nodes of acquired property by State Parks is near a proposed CEMEX blast mine near Friant. The state park transfer does not have immediate implications, however, for the blast mine, Shelton and Weaver said.
And Daniska floated a possibility that would be a first for the parkway.
“I personally would love to see there be camping offered at Sycamore Island,” she said. “I think that would be a great place for people to come and go camping right along the river.”
