A new vision for Ives Park is coming into focus

Three local groups have ideas for Ives Park. One will be presenting their plan to the Sebastopol City Council tonight

Looking east into Ives Park from Jewell. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

Everyone in Sebastopol knows that Ives Park—once the jewel of the town—needs work. The question is ‘How much work, of what sort and at what cost?’

The city has known about the problems with the park for more than 15 years. Back in 2010, Press Democrat reporter Bob Norberg called Ives Park “worn and tired and in need of a face-lift,” and, despite an expensive Master Plan created in 2013, it has only gone downhill since.

Now, three local organizations—the Friends of Calder Creek, the Friends of Ives Park, and Sebastopol Rotary—are offering different solutions to the problems posed by the park’s decline.

Here’s a quick look at what the three groups have planned.

Friends of Calder Creek

Friends of Calder Creek is headed by Sebastopol resident Ann Riley, who has worked in the field of stream naturalization since 1982. Starting in 2021, Riley collaborated with Jessica Hall of the California Urban Streams Partnership (CUSP) to create the Calder Creek Restoration and Vision Concepts, an ambitious plan to naturalize Calder Creek through Ives Park and ultimately all the way to the Laguna.

The Sebastopol City Council approved this plan in September 2022.

Now Riley and Hall are collaborating once again to kickstart the build-out of Phase I of the Calder Creek Restoration plan, which would naturalize a section of Calder Creek from High Street to roughly the middle of Ives Park. The creek currently runs in an open concrete channel. The naturalization would remove that channel and then flatten and widen the creek’s banks—which would take up a large portion of the center of Ives Park—and restore the creek’s natural sinuous geometry, making it a winding, meandering creek once again.

“We were looking at a stream that is not being given the room it needs to meander,” Hall said in an interview with the Sebastopol Times.

At the April 15 city council meeting, the Friends of Calder Creek will request that the council pass a resolution authorizing the submittal of two $1.8 million grant applications—one to Sonoma County Ag & Open Space and one to the Department of Water Resources—to be used for Phase 1 of the naturalization of Calder Creek.

Phase 1 will restore the creek from High Street to the middle of Ives Park at the little concrete structure known as the weir. You can see the area in question in dark green below:

The dark green section on this map represents Phase 1 of the Calder Creek Naturalization plan. (Rendering provided by Ann Riley)

Riley said that these grants, if the city won them, could pay for Phase I, without any money from the perennially cash-strapped city of Sebastopol.

“There’s no community we’ve ever worked with that could afford to do stream restoration on their own,” Riley said.

She said it’s a particularly good time to apply for grants for a creek project.

“Over the years, this whole idea of restoring urban streams and rivers has become very popular with the legislature, and this past fall, Proposition 4 was put on the ballot. It won. That infused hundreds of millions of dollars of grant money into all those agency programs,” she said. “So now is the moment, because these state agencies just got this proposition passed, and their bank accounts are full and they’re looking for projects.”

Riley said that after seeing what CUSP did with the naturalization of Cordonices Creek in Berkeley, the Department of Water Resources asked if CUSP had another project in the works that needed funding.

“And I said, ‘We would like to restore Calder Creek in Sebastopol. And they said, ‘Oh, that’s great. Go for it. Apply to us for that.’”

That’s one of the grant applications the council will be considering at their April 15 meeting.

Part of a bigger (and more controversial) plan

Phase I is just the beginning of a bigger plan to open the creek the whole length of the park—and ultimately through the city itself to the laguna.

The naturalization plan for Calder Creek envisions opening the creek in four stages: the first stage is Ives Park; the second stage is High Street to Main Street; the third stage is from Main Street to Petaluma Avenue; the fourth phase goes through the Railroad Forest along the Joe Rodota Trail.

The Phase 1 naturalization of Calder Creek through half of Ives Park is just the first piece of the puzzle. Ultimately CUSP et al want to naturalize all of Calder Creek as it flows through the park. Here’s the plan for that:

Opening the creek through Ives Park. (From “Calder Creek Restoration and Vision Concepts”)

Here’s a sketch of what the upper reaches of the creek in Ives Park would look like:

Rendering of what the upper reaches of the park, near the stage, might look like. (From “Calder Creek Restoration and Vision Concepts”)

Enticing, right? But CUSP’s plan to naturalize the creek all the way through Ives Park has drawn criticism from some people who worry that a large section of their community park is about to be replaced by the creek.

Friends of Ives Park

Although they are tentatively supporting Phase 1 of the Calder Creek Naturalization Plan, a group called the Friends of Ives Park has broad concerns about the larger creek naturalization project in Ives Park:

• They worry about its financial viability (given the city’s scarce resources). This concern includes not just the initial investment to restore the creek, but the ongoing cost for Public Works of maintaining the extensive landscaping around a naturalized creek.

• They’re concerned that a creek naturalization on the west side of the park (where the stage is) will damage the park’s ability to serve as a large community gathering spot.

• They worry about the safety of an unfenced creek in a public park.

• Finally, they say the city’s grand vision of a naturalized creek has gotten in the way of simpler and less expensive ways to beautify the park, such as replacing the ugly chainlink fencing along the creek and updating the landscaping.

Friends of Ives Park includes some of the most civic-minded people in town including Lisa and Steve Pierce (members of the Climate Action Committee) [transparency note: the Pierces are friends of mine]; Lawrence Jaffe (president of the Grange and last year’s Citizen of the Year); and Jim Corbett, aka Mr. Music, who has also voiced concern about the project.

All of these people are longtime environmentalists—the sort that would usually be first in line to support a creek naturalization—but they’re also protective of the role that Ives Park plays in the life of the community.

“I feel like the park has very strong community institutions: the pool, the baseball field, and the Center for the Arts, but that the connective tissue of the park is suffering because we’re not investing,” Jaffe said, “and there are really no big improvements planned because everything’s held up because of these plans to do something with the creek. So even the low-hanging fruit—adding flowers, making the fencing more appealing—they’ve all been waiting for several years now, because who wants to do anything when we’re gonna get this big grant and change everything, right?”

“Our biggest concern is that Sebastopol is going to wake up, after these bulldozers are regrading the park, and say ‘Wait a minute. Nobody told us!’” said Lisa Pierce, noting that the space available for events would shrink by roughly half.

Jaffe sees this as a clash of two worthy value systems: “I just want to say that for the people who designed the creek restoration project—which in the abstract I love—but their constituency is not the people of Sebastopol. Their constituency is the biology of the creek. They’re not asking these same questions. They're not approaching it from the civic side. They’re approaching it from the ecological and biological side. So there’s part of it, I think, that is not part of the conversation yet.”

Pierce also said that if the citizens of Sebastopol decide that a naturalized creek through the whole park is really what they want, she could accept that. She just thinks most people either don’t know or haven’t thought about the costs of the project—both financial and in terms of lost event space.

“While we support Phase 1, we want to make very sure there isn’t a Phase 2,” Pierce said.

In the meantime, Friends of Ives Park is hoping to work with the city to improve the park with small do-able projects.

“Let’s do somethings we can actually get done,” Pierce said.

They would like to replace the chainlink fence with something more attractive and to re-landscape in the middle stretch of the creek that hasn’t been channelized and make it accessible to the public again. Other ideas include adding more benches arranged for conversation, improving the landscaping, and repairing pathways. Pierce said they could use both private funding and small grants to achieve these ends.

Sebastopol Rotary’s plans in Ives Park

Friends of Ives Park is not the only group interested in moving ahead with improvements to the park. Sebastopol Rotary is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year and is making a multi-million investment in Ives Park to mark the event.

Rotary Club Member Rollie Atkinson said that Rotary had three projects in the works:

“Number one is a new Jewel Avenue entrance with new signage and an ADA ramp. Number two is replacing the Little League concession stand and bathrooms. And number three is enhancing the open space that’s there right now next to the Redwood Grove and near the concession stand that will be called the Rotary Centennial Plaza,” said Atkinson, who is also a reporter for the Sebastopol Times.

Rotary would like to complete these improvements over the next two years.

Preliminary drawing for Sebastopol Rotary’s improvements to Ives Park. (Illustration from the Rotary Club of Sebastopol)

Regarding the Calder Creek Naturalization Plan, Atkinson said, “Rotary is very cognizant of not stepping on anything that the city might want to do, in regard to the Ives Park Master Plan.”

What’s the city been doing?

The city is in a peculiar position. As the owner of Ives Park, the city is in charge of what happens there. But because of its ongoing financial woes, the city hasn’t been in the mood to dream big—or even small—about Ives Park. It has concentrated instead on bare-bones maintenance. This has left a leadership vacuum that various groups—Friends of Calder Creek/CUSP, Friends of Ives Park, and now Sebastopol Rotary—have rushed to fill.

Councilmembers Phill Carter and Sandra Maurer have been talking to all three groups, trying to get everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction. For the moment, their efforts seem to have worked.

“CUSP couldn’t go forward [with the grant application] because there were competing groups that were upset and not talking to each other—and if they don’t all talk to each other, you stay in this loop for a while, right?” Carter said. “So Sandy and I had gotten all the groups together so they could talk. Finally Friends of Ives Park had a meeting with CUSP, and they agreed to only [have the naturalization] go up to the weir, and when that happened, that kind of fixed the whole situation.”

At least for the near term.

Ultimately, though the fate of the various projects proposed for Ives Park is in the hands of the city council. Tune in to the April 15 city council meeting to see how this first round goes.

---

A short history of Ives Park and its creek

The Ives Park Master Plan, adopted by the city of Sebastopol in 2013, gives this brief history of the park:

Ives Park, Sebastopol’s oldest park, was founded in the 1940s as a bequest by [Catherine] Ives of San Francisco, who had enjoyed playing in the area as a child. Ives Pool opened in April 1946, and aerial photos from that time show that other than the major remodeling of the pool area, the park had changed little since then.

Before the park was established, George Calder’s grist mill was located nearby, powered by a mill pond on Calder Creek, likely near the current pond site. Later, a tannery was located near the site of the present-day Veterans building. The tannery owners probably channelized the creek as a flood control method. They probably also dammed the creek at the current pond to give themselves a water supply for their operation. Most of the existing fencing was likely installed in the 1970s.

From Sonoma West Times & News, 1997 (Courtesy of Western Sonoma County Historical Society)

---