Speaker 4: Thank you. Next item is 12.
Speaker 0: Please report from Parks, Recreation and Marine recommendation to receive and file a report on the DeForest Park Vision Plan District nine.
Speaker 4: Take the negative motion in a second, please. Can I get a second? Okay. Second Council is in the house. Can I get the member of the public please comment.
Speaker 5: Our first speaker is Alexander Young.
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 5: Yes. Please begin.
Speaker 3: Me. Hi. Yeah. Good evening, honorable members. My name's Alex Chung, and I represent City Fabric. We're a local nonprofit design studio located here in Long Beach, and we're dedicated to reshaping communities through collaborative design, planning and policy development and advocacy. We have the honor of providing capacity to the Report Park Vision Plan Team through community engagement, design and planning. Working closely with the City of Long Beach Conservation Corps of Long Beach, Campfire, Angela's Council, the Forest Park Neighborhood Association, and the larger the fourth Park community over the past year. And just wanted to state that we're in full support of this vision plan. And we want to emphasize how much this vision plan and the process of developing it was a community led and data driven process. We held three rounds of public outreach using both online and in-person tools and shared in multiple languages for people of all ages and abilities. As a nonprofit dedicated to serving communities in need, we have we have been working with Knauf on these for several years now, on several projects related to parks and open space. And we find that the area has 2.9 acres of open space per 1000 residents, which is in stark contrast to the citywide average of 5.6 acres of open space per 1000 Long Beach residents across the city. So we hope that the City Council and City of Long Beach will favorably choose to invest in the fourth park, and we hope to continue working with the community to realize their vision. Thank you, Councilmembers.
Speaker 5: Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item.
Speaker 4: Thank you. With that, please go ahead. Actually, Cosmo Richardson, did you do you have any comments or do you want answer? You want to start quickly?
Speaker 2: I got comments in the staff report.
Speaker 4: Why don't we do let's go ahead and do I do want you to comment first sort.
Speaker 2: Of a turn. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: And we're going to suffer for this.
Speaker 2: Great. Well, so this is an important project. I want to say thanks to staffer for their work on this. This was sort of the third master plan, open space master plan in the series of master plans that the ninth District has has led over the last five years or so. First was the the uptown open space plan. Second was the Halton Park Master Plan. And now we're moving on to the the fourth part plan. And we find is investing in these plans really puts us in a position to actually bring down draw down additional regional resources and state resources in order to implement some of the changes in our in our parks. And additionally, the Speaker mentioned the open space deficit. We have to be really creative about finding opportunities to expand open space. And so we're really proud of all of these plans, but especially this one here with the Forest Park plan, particularly in the way that it's. We're partnering this with Conservation Corps and Campfire to implement a better vision for a cleaner and safer and more active Forest Park. So that said, let's hear the staff report.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Mr. and Mr. Richardson. We will be getting a staff report from Brant Dennis, our director of Parks and Rec and Recreation, and Meridith Reynolds.
Speaker 2: Thank you. City manager, honorable mayor and members of Council were real pleased to bring presentation before you this evening for the Forest Park Vision Plan. I'd like to introduce Meredith Reynolds, who's our bureau manager of Parks Planning and Partnerships. I'll provide a brief presentation. Thank you, Meredith.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Good evening, Mayor. Members of the city council will walk you through a presentation here this evening that outlines the effort for the Diverse Park Vision Plan. This vision plan is meant to provide the strategic guidance for future investments and improvements to this park to maximize the impact and best serve the community to enhance the overall park user experience. This particular vision plan was funded in collaboration with our partners. We have worked with the Conservation Corps, Campfire Angeles Council, City Fabric and the Ninth District to put this together. This is also part of kind of a larger investment from our proposal and grant funds. With the partners here. You'll see two other items on the council agenda this evening related to right of entry permits. These are early action projects that came from this plan. And I just wanted to point this out in advance before jumping into the vision plan. So there is some additional funds from the Conservation Corps of Long Beach that they were able to secure for an early action project that you'll see in the vision plan for an environmental center and also a proposed right of entry for Campfire Angeles for some trails project that they were able to secure grant funds from the Port of Long Beach as another early action project. With these two items, should they be approved this evening, we would be returning to the City Council in a future meeting for long term leases for these partners to operate and continue their investment in the park. Back to the vision plan. As a councilmember mentioned, this is a long term effort that began earlier in 2016 with the L.A. County identifying North Long Beach as having a very high need for parks. And that was followed by the Uptown Open Space Vision Plan, which identified a series of parks in need for vision plans and improvements . And we began this effort in August of 2019, where we were able to perform some site analysis, park assessment. And that was followed by a series of workshops through the spring, both with in-person stakeholder engagement when it was possible, and then online engagement when it was not due to COVID. The item went to the Parks and Recreation Commission in June, and we're here before you today. Part of our work on this includes existing conditions and analysis of the existing plans. You can see here some of those demographics that we paid attention to and that we sought out as a part of reviewing existing conditions. Overall, through the series of engagements, we held 13 public workshops and stakeholder meetings. We had 156 park assessment and community surveys completed, and all in all of which you will see seven ideas that culminated into the final idea that is in the vision plan. The park assessment was where we have folks go out into the park and evaluate what they see using a paper survey tool. So we did two of these at two different days, two different times. We had 22 park assessment participants. These were available in multiple languages. And really here, trying to get a sense of the kind of first person experience from our users. Then we held our first series of workshops. We had three of them. They were the same content, just different days and times in multiple languages. And we had an activity board, as you see here in the photo. These are some of the ideas that came out of that activity. And so we had little kind of player chips that would indicate whether there was good placement or bad placement of existing amenity, good activity, bad activity where there were opportunities and challenges and participants got to put their activity chip on a large scale map to indicate what they saw during their site assessment. You'll see here the different sections of the park. And here is the south end of the park. From there, we ask some additional questions through some public surveys. We found that the park is active and very active during the day and the night and throughout the entire week. We heard a lot about the convenience of being able to walk from the neighbors neighborhood into the park. There is a lot of attractiveness of the park because of the trails and the new wetlands just south of the park. And there were a lot of information that the community was able to provide about some of the improvements they would like to see. From there, we had a second series of workshops, four of them in all for the community, and then three specific stakeholder workshops where the community was able to take a activity board again and sort of more in-depth design their park as they would like to see it in the future. So here are the different ideas that came out of the different groups through this community engagement. And you'll see in the legend, in the bottom right corner the different types of activities people had identified. So arts and education programs, events. Fitness and health classes. Sports. Park improvements. Youth programs. And other. And then finally in the third workshop series, we whittle it down to two ideas, and folks were able to view that during our virtual public workshop in a follow up survey. So here are some of the types of questions where we were able to really clarify what the community wanted to see. So they preferred design. Number two, they had some preferences related to replacing the existing community center and maximizing space. And then there were some concerns about unsafe driving behavior. And so what additional kind of safe streets improvements might be useful? There's a handball court that separates the park and provides a visual barrier. There was support for removing that in favor of other activities. You'll see some of the different kinds of levels of demand for the different play here. And then finally, I asked we asked about prioritizing small projects, medium projects and large scale projects to get a sense of folks sequencing and priority. After all of that, here is a final vision plan concept. Going from north to south. In this case, it is right to left. The northern part of the park was identified for a discovery trail and use camping access to Los Angeles River as well as some fitness stations. There is ideas to have a environmental education center and enhance the community center and entry plaza. There is a desire to have some community gardens where the playground exists now and pulling the playground to the front of the park where there's eyes on the children and you can easily access it without changing the grade or a kind of right off of the parking lot. There was a desire to extend the Nature Trail and Creek to have a small dog area, a community amphitheater and plaza where the handball court used to be, and then continuing some of the walking and skiing pedestrian and bike improvements and making sure that the fields were playable with the new concession stand and restroom toward the southern end near the ballfields. I'll give you a sense of some renderings of what this could potentially look like when all phases are complete, once funding has been identified. Here you will see that Re-Envisioned playground in front of the courts next to on street parking. And then finally here you can see the amphitheater and these sports fields with some embankment seating and that the topography allows for at this particular location. I mentioned some of the early action projects and the funding that has been secured. So the Conservation Corps has secured additional funding for the Environmental Education Center, and CAMPFIRE has secured that grant from the Port of Long Beach. So we do have a lot of momentum built behind this plan and this effort. With that, I will conclude the presentation and I will stop sharing my screen and will be available for questions. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Vice Minister, so quickly, I thought there were two slides from the the items that are coming up next. If we could just see those. If we can see those, that will be helpful. So we don't have to do a presentation on the next two items that are related.
Speaker 1: Happy to. Just one moment. There you are, sir.
Speaker 2: Okafor There was a rendering of the stewardship center. There's no rendering the stewardship center.
Speaker 1: And we consolidated it into this this presentation. If you give me one moment, we're going to pull that off for good.
Speaker 2: If you wouldn't mind, just send that over to me and I'll share. Another community, members of the Forest Park are really excited about this. And thank you. I just want to thank you to sit, you know, Meredith and everyone on the team that's worked hard, especially our partners, Conservation Corps and Campfire, who have stepped up to really adopt this park and to offer services to the broader North Beach community. It's kind of a big deal. Campfire was in North Long Beach before the 91 Freeway was established and 91 freeways brought in. They moved their facilities. They acquired facilities in East Long Beach and left North Long Beach. And with this project, it's pretty cool because it's a part of Hitler Family's history returning. So as a part of the Uptown Renaissance, if you will. So thank you all for for your time and indulging us. And congratulations to the Forest Park neighbors. Thank you. And we do have a comment on this already.
Speaker 0: Yes, we did.
Speaker 2: Okay, fine. Would you please come up the vote?
Speaker 0: District one.
Speaker 1: I.
Speaker 0: District two. I. District three.
Speaker 1: I.
Speaker 0: District four.
Speaker 2: I.
Speaker 0: District five. By District six. By District seven. By District nine. Buy motion carries.
Recommendation to receive and file a report on the DeForest Park Vision Plan; and, accept Statutory Exemption SE-20-082.  (District 9)