Bite-Sized Updates From Around Town

In Which: The City spends grants on infrastructure improvements, HARD promotes a sports league in South Hayward, and BART is looking to develop in Hayward again.

Nothing like a long weekend to play with a content schedule. Although news keeps happening, we keep being a very small team. If you like the work The Hayward Herald is doing and want to help us bring more news to Hayward readers, drop us a line. In the meantime, here’s something to sate your appetite for Hayward Happenings.

City Council Consent Items

The City Council likely won’t talk about any of these because they’re mostly approving things they already approved, but that doesn’t mean that you all don’t want to keep an eye on them.

New Signals Coming To Winton and Tennyson Corridors

Adaptive signals are ones that change the timing based on traffic volumes and posted speed limits in an effort to somehow magically make traffic safer and also faster. We’ve written a bit about this before, but that’s because the project is being done in bits and pieces—this update is to get the fiber optic cables and cameras installed to wire it all up to City Hall.

The issue I have with it is induced demand—making traffic flow more freely will induce more people to use that route, instantly jamming up traffic again. The Staff Report alleges that it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing idling times, but doesn’t address concerns about increased traffic volume due to faster traffic flow. This section of work may cost up to $283,000 to finish up.

Urban Forest Inventory Incoming

The City of Hayward has been a Tree City since the 80’s, but doesn’t have a truly comprehensive tree inventory or tree management plan. Using a grant from the USDA, the City is going to pen a contract with Planit Geo to both do a full urban tree inventory and train City Staff on a new software to help drive tree management going forward.

The inventory is estimated to take 8 months, with the assessment taking a further 6 months—including training for City Staff on the new software they’ll be using. This will give the City a lot more data on our urban forest canopy, where trees are planted, and allow them to better plant trees in areas that need them. And it’s all grant funded so it doesn’t affect the City budget in the slightest.

New LED Street Lights Incoming

The City also got a $100,000 grant from the Department of Energy to convert existing street lights to LEDs. The City will have to front the money initially for the street lights, but will be reimbursed for the full cost after construction is finished. The money is expected to cover converting 200 street lights and should save the City about $28,000 per year in energy savings.

Here is a map of the prioritized areas where they’re looking at replacing the lights.

Hayward Area Recreation and Park District (HARD)

The Hayward Area Recreation and Park District (HARD) receives very little outside attention—their previous Board meeting had 3 whole views on YouTube and at least 2 of them were me—but they’re a big presence in Hayward. Let’s find out what they’re up to.

Partnering With HPN For South Hayward Sports Programs

HARD received a $100,000 grant from Downtown Hayward Promise Neighborhood to fund free sports leagues in South Hayward. The program is aimed at increasing sports participation in low-income families by funding a full after school sports league. HARD will provide all the equipment and jerseys free of charge, hold the practices and games on school campuses directly after school, and provide transportation for inter-district games—though it’s unclear who the other district might be.

It is also unclear why the Downtown Hayward Promise Neighborhood is funding a sports program in South Hayward, which also has its own Promise Neighborhood Grant. The brief Staff Report provides no justification for moving funds earmarked for the Downtown areas to South Hayward—though it is clear that South Hayward neighborhoods also need funding.

La Vista Park Continues To Take Shape

The La Vista Park project has been in the works for 7 years and is moving past its most recent roadblock. After the City of Hayward sent the project out to bid and found that all bids far exceeded the budget, the City was forced to reassess the plan and downscale them. The most recent draft includes play areas, picnic areas, a parking lot, a bioretention basin with a soccer-sized sports field, a basketball court, a dog area, a restroom and maintenance building, a section of the Foothill Trail, and a smaller neighborhood park at 16th Street.

That may sound like a lot, but the project is almost 50 acres in size. As a part of the agreement between HARD and the City, HARD is contributing $15,400,000 to the project—of which the City will reimburse $6,700,000 with park in-lieu fees on the new developments nearby. HARD will use Measure F1 Bond money, savings from the Energy Efficiency Program project, and money from the Canyon Middle School Sports Field project—though there are no details in the report about what happened to that project.

Sun Gallery Gets Rent Waived

HARD is considering waiving the rent that The Hayward Area Forum for the Arts—operators of the Sun Gallery—pays on the Sun Gallery building, which HARD owns. The Staff Report doesn’t go into many details, but says that leadership transitions have resulted in the need to “rebuild the organization,” suggesting that they don’t have the money to pay the $5,232 annual rent for FY 2025.

Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART)

BART is often an agency doing a lot nowhere near Hayward. The fact that Hayward is divided between three different Directors, drastically reducing its importance to any of them despite having two BART stations, may play a part in it. But there was one thing that caught my eye.

Transit Oriented Development Plans

BART, like many transit agencies, owns a lot of actual land. In and around the BART stations, there are often huge plots of land that BART picked up decades ago in various stages of development. And with its current financial problems, it would make sense for BART to use that land to develop some much-needed housing to both gather rent revenue and drive transit use.

Enter Transit Oriented Development—basically building housing near transit. If you ride BART, you’ll likely see a lot of big apartment complexes, especially around Fruitvale Station. But you see a lot less of that in the more suburban areas like Hayward, even though one of the stations is right Downtown in an area zoned for more dense development. BART apparently already did one Transit Oriented Development in Hayward back in 1998, but it’s unclear what that development was—perhaps the townhomes near City Hall—and South Hayward had a development completed in 2017—likely either the Metro Six55 Apartments or the Cadence Apartments between Dixon and Mission.

However, in Downtown, there’s an enormous lot that seems to get a lot of use as a holding ground for all of BART’s construction equipment. According to the Staff Presentation, some kind of development at Downtown Hayward Station is in the pre-solicitation Planning phase, so maybe it won’t be sleeper storage forever. But that’s the very smallest of first steps to a project, so don’t expect anything there any time soon.

HUSD Has Gotta Be Here, Right?

Everyone should know that HUSD is dealing with some serious financial problems. They’re over $50,000,000 in the hole and, without taking serious action, won’t be able to pay their bills by May. There was a Board meeting on the 12th, but it was over 8 hours long. Some of that was closed session, but there’s still 4 hours of actual meeting focused exclusively on the budget.

I want to reassure you lovely readers that I haven’t forgotten about it, but I want to do this very important meeting some justice. Expect a write-up soon—Tuesday at the latest—and we’ll try to get a Spanish language version out, too.