Richmond, California
A civic pamphlet. Not a newspaper. No ads. Nothing for sale.
Publius
26 March 2026.
I promised in March to write down whether the restrooms appeared at Cheese Park. This is not that column. This is the column about the plan.
On March 24 the Council finally heard the Cheese Park item that had been continued from March 3 and again from March 17. Its full title is a small poem of municipal hope: “Cheese Park (La Moine Park) Improvements—Permanent Restrooms, Drinking Fountain, Playground Safety, Toddler-Area Fencing, Children’s Bike Garden, and Completion of Volunteer-Led Repainting.” The recommended action was to adopt a resolution directing staff to prepare a comprehensive work plan for those improvements, plus sports courts, senior activity spaces, teen areas, and fitness equipment. It passed 6–0.
Note the verb. Not build. Not fund. Prepare a comprehensive work plan.
Three weeks earlier, on March 3, the Council had $8,213,680 in audited unspent funds before it. A motion to allocate some of it to Cheese Park’s bathrooms died for lack of a second. The motion that passed called for temporary prefabricated restrooms, a holistic Parks Bathroom Plan for the whole city, and the inclusion of Cheese Park in the Capital Improvement Plan “with a rating.” So by the end of March, Cheese Park had been promised a portable toilet, a citywide bathroom plan, a capital-plan rating, and now a comprehensive work plan of its own.
That is four documents and zero pipes.
I do not mean to mock the volunteers who started repainting the play structure themselves, whose unfinished work is named right there in the item title. They are the best people in this story. They saw a problem, bought paint, and started. The City’s answer to their initiative was to direct staff to plan how to complete it.
There is something almost tender about a government that loves plans this much. A plan is a promise you do not have to keep yet. It can be presented, revised, received, and filed. It can come back in a year with a new cover. Its great virtue is that no toddler can tell the difference between a plan and nothing at all.
The same night the Council approved, on consent, a construction agreement of $5,297,064 with Azul Works for the Shields-Reid Park and Community Center. So the City can build a park when it decides to. The difference is not money and it is not competence. It is whether the item arrives as a contract or as a wish.
Cheese Park arrived as a wish. It has now been granted a plan. I will keep the promise I made in March and report when water runs.
The next regular meeting of the City Council is Tuesday, April 7, 2026.
— Publius