Hayward City Council Goes HARD
In Which: People drink a lot at Tennyson Park, HARD complains about funding, and Council sure does love St. Rose.
HARD and City Council Join Forces
In an effort to facilitate better communication between the two agencies—possibly spurred by former Councilmember Sara Lamnin moving to the HARD Board of Directors—the Hayward Area Recreation and Park District (HARD) Board of Directors held a joint meeting with the Hayward City Council. They meet once a year to share out accomplishments and what each agency is working on that may impact the other.
Council Presentation
During the City Council presentation, Staff focused on homelessness initiatives, housing, and a joint endeavor to help out a resident on Faircliff Street where a landslide demolished a house. The hill appears to be a part of the Taper Property, according to some maps from HARD, which is why HARD had to be involved.
On the housing front, there are some new fun maps to play with: a Development Explorer and the Affordable Housing Dashboard. I hadn’t heard about these before now and they look really interesting. The Development Explorer puts all the different developments on a map, color-coded by development type. Click on a development, and you get a brief summary of the project, where it is in the process, and even some renderings that the developer submitted.
The Affordable Housing Dashboard has a map, too, with projects color-coded by development status (right now everything is either pre-development or in construction). There’s also info on the number of units, what level of affordability they have, how many there are, and how the projects were funded (with 6 different categories of funding). This is deep nerd stuff, but if you’re interested, there’s a lot of good info here.
All of this matters to HARD because unhoused people spend a lot of time in parks and, because they have no choice, contribute to litter and maintenance concerns. New developments also pay Park Impact Fees, which help bolster HARD’s bottom-line.
HARD Presentation
HARD’s presentation was a bit more wide-ranging, but focused on free/reduced price programming for residents, park usage, park maintenance, and public safety.
HARD got a good amount of ARPA money to offer discounted programming to residents and also got some grant money with Tiburcio Vasquez to essentially do the same thing, but in the name of Health. The benefit for us is that a lot of low-income residents have been able to access discounted—or even free—activities like swim lessons and recreation classes.
They also highlighted their use of a program called Placer.ai which uses cell phone data to try to get an idea of who is using the parks. Tracking software that uses AI sounds like a horrible combination to me, but there’s no other real way to gauge how many people are using the parks where everyone can come and go as the please. The upside is that the parks are popular and used by just about everyone in the Hayward community. Also, most of the park usage comes from Hayward—which shouldn’t be too surprising given its geographic dominance of the HARD area.
For park maintenance, they used a rubric that they put together to assess how well the parks are doing. The rubric heavily weighs graffiti, so a few parks that may have a small-ish graffiti problem had their scores dragged way down. But most of the parks scored really well. So well, in fact, that they’re going to re-assess the rubric to try to make it a little better and better represent what actually makes a good park—goodness knows graffiti isn’t everything.
Public safety focused on their rangers and the infractions that they’ve logged from the public. Most of them in 2023 were for park hours violations—HARD parks usually close at sundown—followed by pets off leash, smoking, camping, and drinking. One thing that wasn’t clear from the presentation was if these were unduplicated interactions or if, for example, someone camping after hours with a beer on them would get cited 3 times.
While most of the infractions happened in Hayward, most of the parks are in Hayward and they mostly align with where visitors are. When breaking things down by park, only two things stood out to me: Weeke’s Park gets more people camping there than any other park (39% of the total) and people really like to drink at Tennyson Park for some reason (75% of all instances). No real explanation was given for this last point, though there’s a lot of poverty and homelessness in South Hayward near Weeke’s Park, so that explains that.
Public Comments
There were two public comments that focused on the same issue: baseball fields. The comments came from Carlos and Sandra Archuleta, and centered around complaints about the readiness of local baseball fields and the lack of a HARD little league.
Council and Director Comments
Field of Broken Dreams
When it came time for the City Council to ask questions about HARD, most of Council made an attempt to get the Archuleta’s comments addressed. Councilmembers Julie Roche and Angela Andrews both asked after the status of the baseball fields. HARD General Manager Jim Wheeler responded that he assumed they were talking about Mt. Eden Park.
He said, “Mt. Eden Park has a long history of that little league helping to take care of that field. All of our little leagues help take care of their fields and maintain them. I’m not sure about what’s not ready before Saturday, when little league starts, but we’ll make sure they are.” Councilmember Andrews then suggested more open communication between HARD and the little leagues to ensure that this kind of situation doesn’t happen in the future.
When HARD Director Paul Hodges responded, he took a different approach. “I know there’s been a lot of changes [in the last 15 years], especially with parents’ attitudes.” He elaborated, “part of the problem [of declining little leagues] is because parents would rather give you a couple bucks than to go out and paint the field and stuff and be part of the community.” He eventually pivoted, “It’s probably a different thing that’s happened to you guys,” and encouraged them to come to a HARD Board meeting to say their piece there and get it addressed by the full cohort of HARD staff.
Coordinated Efforts
Multiple Council Members and HARD Board Members expressed interest in further coordination on projects. La Vista park featured heavily in comments from Directors Lamnin and Rosen, and Councilmember Andrews. Other ideas included Councilmember Zermeno requesting more coordination on efforts around the unhoused residents in Weeke’s Park, Councilmember Goldstein looking to work together to engage residents in park maintenance, and Councilmember Syrop seeking to coordinate outreach and communications between the two agencies.
It Costs How Much?
A lot of discussion focused on cost. Despite the slide outlining the number of scholarships and reduced fee programs that HARD had offered, the City Council pressed on cost. Councilmember Bonilla asked “are there scholarships available for people who may have some kind economic hardship for these classes? I know my own nephews went through some of the classes and they could be a little hard to sign up for—sometimes could be cost prohibitive.”
Councilmember Andrews also pushed for low-cost events from HARD, as well. “I feel like there’s a lot of classes but those events are pretty reasonable or free. What are we looking at in the future?” HARD staff responded by listing numerous events that were on the horizon or had happened recently and may happen again: a Family Fun Day, a Teen Series, the Touch A Truck event, and the Weeke’s Park event.
Approaching the issue of cost from a different angle, Councilmember Syrop asked if there were plans to update the registration process. General Manager Wheeler’s response was a brief negative, prompting Councilmember Syrop to explain his concern, “As I go through the sign up process to register, maybe a request for the PIO here is to surface that scholarship information next to the fee amount. Because… it didn’t feel that clear that there was a scholarship option.”
This concern about fees—which, it must be said, are much cheaper than comparable fees for other companies and park districts—seemed to put General Manager Wheeler in a defensive frame of mind. “We’re trying to serve 309,000 people over 100 square miles. Our budget—$41,000,000 a year—the Education Revenue Augmentation Fund takes $21,000,000 of our property tax a year for schools in California that we never see. If I has $21,000,000 a year more, we’d probably be sitting here having huge parties in really nice big parks that look like somewhere over in the suburbs.”
To HARD’s credit, it’s not their fault that the State decided to take money from them to lower the State’s obligation to pay for K-14 education. That’s classic California nonsense. But this whole thing was prompted by a request for a small design change to their registration to make the existing scholarships more prominent. It felt more than a little off-topic.
HARD Asks for Something, Too
When it was his turn to speak, Director Rick Hatcher was the only Director to actually ask the City for anything: a seat at the development table. “When we see development coming into Hayward… I’m always looking at it and talking to developers and saying ‘Hey, make sure park-like features are in there.’ I think getting to the table is something that we can really look at as a joint working process for us.”
If you look at some of the parks that developers have put together, they can be nightmarish. A prime example is the parks at Cannery. This is not a good park. Speaking as a parent who took his child there, it’s not fun for kids and it’s not fun for parents. Multiple parks in this development are similarly anemic and un-fun. Having some people who actually care about parks to design parks that aren’t just amenities used for a cheap write-off would help a lot.
The Budget Is Reviewed
A budget can be painfully complicated and boring to look at. But nothing can get done without money, and if you look at a budget as a moral document, looking at a budget can show you what an organization really believes is worthwhile. This mid-year budget review doesn’t get into a huge amount of detail, but it does have some important takeaways.
One big one is that total expenditures are up over $9,000,000. Most of that comes from two sources: old projects from last year that didn’t get finished and we’re still paying for, and buying the movie theater building. Those two alone wiped out the over $10,000,000 in extra money the City took in.
With this extra money, the City is better off than it was in the adopted budget, but not by much. The reserves are still expected to be wiped out in the next 4 years. The only solace is that for most of the past 5 years, the City has predicted being in the hole—using reserves—but has wound up ahead—adding to the reserves—instead. Also, the movie theater purchase is a loan, so starting in FY 26 the City should be taking back over $500,000 per year in loan payments. That can’t hurt.
There’s also $8,300,000 in unused ARPA dollars that needs to be encumbered—as in there’s a contract signed that it will be used on—by the end of this year. If the City doesn’t use it, they lose it. City Staff put forward 8 different projects that the money could be used for:
Replacement of Lost Revenue (just add it to the general fund!)
Homelessness Public Education Campaign ($75,000)
FY25 Funding for South Hayward Parish Year-Round Operations ($1,000,000)
Calendar Year 2025 Safe Parking Pilot ($1,000,000)
Additional Navigation Center Funding for On-Site Meals and Operational Expenses ($500,000)
FY 2025 Motel Voucher Program ($50,000)
Affordable Housing Development ($5,000,000)
Expansion of Together for Hayward eGift Card Program (Anything available)
You’ll notice most of the ideas are for homelessness and housing services. Staff obviously recognizes the reality that homelessness and housing costs are the most important thing to Hayward residents. But then you see the general fund and it tells a different story.
When it came to Council questions, they were all over the map. Councilmember Roche asked about consultant fees—a scourge to be sure—which cost $500,000 this fiscal year. Staff said it was carry-forward from the previous year for work that had been done, but not paid for yet.
Councilmember Bonilla asked about the Employee Home Loan Program ($1,000,000) which would, in theory, be a consistently replenished fund to provide loans to City employees to help them buy a home. The program will provide loans of up to $150,000 to as many people as it can afford to. Since they’re loans, it will be paid back so others can use the money. A bit neo-liberal, but a good program.
Speaking of which, Councilmember Andrews pushed Staff to try to complete development projects faster so the City could realize some of the tax revenues. Staff responded by performing the polite equivalent of throwing their arms in the air and exclaiming “We’re doing the best we can!” But the exchange led to Staff calling out local State Sanctioned Monopoly and Bane of Rate Payers, PG&E, for taking an inordinately long time to process applications that hold up development. Highlighting their complete disregard for everyone, regardless of whether they’re developers or residents or municipal governments.
During the brief public comments period, Supervisor Elisa Marquez—who had been sitting in the audience for over 2 hours at that point—read a letter highlighting the money that the City had committed to St. Rose Hospital.
Councilmember Syrop pushed to commit the $8,300,000 of unencumbered ARPA funding to be recommitted to the General Fund to buy the City time to spend it beyond the December 31 deadline. After expressing support for homelessness and housing services, Councilmember Syrop suggested some kind of program around the unhoused youth in the Hayward Unified School District—several hundred at last count. He encouraged Council to “get creative… and really specific with targeted programs and ways we can spend those ARPA dollars.”
Councilmember Andrews highlighted the eGift Card Program. “We are fortunate to have 2.8% vacancy rate in our downtown. The national average is 5.3%… That is something that is really done by our community, our small businesses. We have a lot of smaller businesses, we don’t have a ton of corporations… but we’re seeing these companies leave communities, but what’s staying are small businesses and we need to support them.”
Mayor Mark Salinas also asked Staff how much the City had given to St. Rose so far and the total was over $2,000,000 in various grants and gifts over several years. The comments then turned almost exclusively to St. Rose. Councilmember Dan Goldstein said that St. Rose is “important, not just because the Mayor was born there.” Every other Councilmember agreed with the importance of the hospital, at the expense of the entire rest of the budget discussion.
Mayor Salinas ended the discussion by saying, “St. Rose is more than a hospital. It’s a Hayward institution… They have a mission. They will serve everyone, regardless of their ability to pay… We really need to think long and deep about how we keep that hospital sustainable and ongoing.” Perhaps if we stopped being the only country in the developed world that doesn’t have some form of nationalized healthcare, St. Rose would be able to fulfill its mission without running the constant risk of financial ruin.