Richmond, California
A civic pamphlet. Not a newspaper. No ads. Nothing for sale.
Publius
5 March 2026.
Cheese Park, formally La Moine Park, is a small neighborhood park with a playground, some grass, and no permanent restroom. If you have taken a three-year-old to a park, you understand that this is not a design detail. It is the whole design. A park without a restroom is a park with a timer on it.
On March 3 the Council took up item V.1: the appropriation of $8,213,680 in audited unspent funds from Fiscal Year 2024–25. Eight million dollars the City had, and had not spent, and could now decide to spend. In a city that pleads poverty on most nights, this is the rare item where the money is on the table and the only question is where it goes.
Councilmember Bana moved to approve the item with an allocation for bathrooms at Cheese Park. The motion died for lack of a second.
Then the Council proposed, in the words of the minutes, the following: to “reprioritize community needs”; to “install temporary prefabricated park restrooms”; to “develop a holistic Parks Bathroom Plan to address the needs of the entire community”; and to include Cheese Park in the Capital Improvement Plan “with a rating to move forward with other projects.” A motion by Vice Mayor Robinson, seconded by Councilmember Jimenez, passed 6–1, Councilmember Brown voting no.
A holistic Parks Bathroom Plan. I want to sit with that. I want to imagine the consultant scope, the community workshops, the slide with the heat map of unmet need, the phased implementation schedule. I want to imagine the toddler, legs crossed, standing at the edge of the sandbox while the plan is socialized with stakeholders.
To be fair, a citywide plan may well be wiser than one bathroom. Richmond has many parks and many neighborhoods, and a resident in one could fairly ask why another gets the restroom first. The temporary prefabricated units are a real thing a city can buy and place. If they appear at Cheese Park this spring, I will write that down.
But note the pattern. A specific request, for a specific building, in a specific park, with money available that night, became a general aspiration, with a plan to be developed, for the entire community, at a later date. Nobody voted against Cheese Park. Nobody had to. The motion that named it simply never found a second, and the motion that passed dissolved it into a policy.
The same meeting continued five items to March 17, including the Flock camera contract and a separate item specifically about Cheese Park’s restrooms, drinking fountain, and playground. So the bathroom will come back. It will come back as its own agenda item, after the money that could have paid for it has been assigned elsewhere.
There is a word for this in plumbing. The word is backflow.
The next regular meeting of the City Council is Tuesday, March 17, 2026.
— Publius