This story was originally published by Berkeleyside.
With an air of celebration, the East Bay Regional Park District board voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a $175 million deal to acquire the former Golden Gate Fields racetrack, a major step in turning the 162-acre bayside site into a public park.
The transaction, which essentially seals the park district’s ownership and management of the new park, sets the stage for what is likely to be a long and lively planning process. It will shape the look, feel and offerings of what is today a shuttered racetrack complex, complete with a one-mile track, grandstand, stables, dorms, restaurant and other support facilities, and roughly 50 acres of parking lot.
Golden Gate Fields, which straddles Albany and Berkeley, with about three-quarters of the property in Albany, closed in June 2024 after more than 80 years of horse racing.
“This is a matter of statewide interest. It isn’t just going to serve the people that live near Golden Gate Fields, but everyone in California, people that visit California,” said state Sen. Jesse Arreguín at the meeting. Arreguín, who represents the area, led efforts to secure state funding for the park.
“I really look at this as an opportunity to create a new Crissy Field on our side of the bay,” he said, referring to San Francisco’s large waterfront park in the Presidio that was once part of a U.S. Army base.
A decades-long dream for many, the park picked up considerable steam earlier this year when Gov. Gavin Newsom approved $125 million in state Proposition 4 climate bond funding to buy the land from the Stronach Group, a major player in U.S. horse betting, which has owned Golden Gate Fields since 1999.
The remaining $50 million comes from $20 million in park district Measure WW funds, a 2008 voter-approved bond that the district board also approved this week, and $30 million in donations and grants that have yet to be secured, according to Allison Brooks, a park district assistant general manager for external affairs. The $30 million includes an expected $25 million grant from the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority.
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The seller has set an end-of-year purchase deadline, and the buying process is fast-moving and complex, Brooks said. “A very complicated negotiation with many sensitivities.”
The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation organization, is serving as a kind of first buyer or pass-through owner, purchasing the land and dealing with the seller. Once everything is finalized, the trust will immediately transfer the property to the park district, likely early next year. It launched efforts to buy the property even before the Prop. 4 funds were announced.
“The thing about willing parks into existence: It requires a few things. One is tremendous patience. Another is vision, and the third is luck,” said Robert Cheasty, executive director of Citizens for East Shore Parks, a strong advocate of the plan. “What luck, that we got the right governor at the right time, when we had a willing seller.”
Many park supporters at the meeting, including some who’d promoted the idea for years, donned colorful T-shirts or held signs declaring “Golden Gate Fields, Racing towards a world-class park.”
One of these, Norman LaForce of the Sierra Club, said he’d been working on the issue for 40 years, against doubters saying it would never happen. “There are a lot of moving parts to this racehorse to make it cross the finish line,” he said.
Money for buying racetrack comes with restrictions on what park can be
Several boxes still need to be checked, including expected approvals later this year from two state agencies within the California Natural Resources Agency that are providing some of the $125 million in Prop 4 funds: the State Coastal Conservancy ($60 million) and the Wildlife Conservation Board ($53 million). The other $12 million is from other Natural Resources agency funds. Prop 4 money is doled out to different subagencies for grant-making.
Most details of the new park, including what it will include and how it will be configured, are open concepts waiting for the planning table, Brooks said. A public process will “kick-start shortly after we acquire it,” she said. Planning will be robust, and community input key, including from Albany and Berkeley, she said.
“We want it to be fun; we want to engage people.”
Much of the funding under Prop. 4 must be used for specific purposes consistent with the climate bond legislation, primarily habitat restoration and enhancement, returning the area to its historic wetlands before development started reshaping the bay shore in the 1880s, and boosting coastal resilience or response to climate change and sea level rise.
Prop. 4 also earmarks park creation and expanding access to the outdoors, including for disadvantaged and vulnerable communities.
“A large part of it will be habitat restoration,” Brooks said. Roughly 30 acres of the property is submerged.
The racetrack is built on what was once a rocky promontory surrounded by marsh and tidal zones, called Fleming Point, which was flattened by dynamite in the 1930s, with the blasted chunks used to fill in surrounding wetlands, including where the track is today. Before this, the site was home to an explosives company and a Berkeley garbage dump, triggering the Berkeley-Albany garbage war of 1908.
“The opportunity to build back habitat in an urban area is just too great to pass up,” said Whitney Grover of the Golden Gate Bird Alliance, echoing many passionate public speakers at the meeting who talked of the critical need to restore coastal bird habitat along the Pacific Flyway, a major migratory route stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.
Other pieces of funding, such as the park district’s Measure WW, have some flexibility of use, including for amenities that serve park users. Examples from other parks include the Tilden golf course, Little Train and Lake Anza snack bar.
As part of the deal, the seller will demolish all the buildings, but not the parking lot. If demolition isn’t complete by the end of the year, there’s room for renegotiation.
How it will all come together, from piecing together funding requirements and zoning to balancing community needs and wants, lies ahead as a park is born, Brooks said. So does finding the money to build, shape and run it.
“We recognize this is an amazing resource that a lot of people care about. But some aspects are dictated by the purchase funding,” Brooks said. These will be explored in the public planning process, she said.
“We need to understand what the parameters are and see what’s allowable. And create a really great design. We will lay those out transparently.”
The city of Albany, in particular, faces an estimated $2 million a year in lost tax revenue from the park deal, and many residents and officials are urging the park district to consider ways to mitigate that loss. This is part of learning what’s possible, Brooks said.
The new park won’t be part of the Eastshore State Park, but contiguous, with the Bay Trail running through both.
The site’s future has been debated for decades
Debate about what should replace the racetrack, fueled by the site’s prime bayside location with Golden Gate views, dates to at least the mid-1980s, paralleling early work on creating McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, which was established in 2002.
Ideas have ranged from protected open space to a conference center, shopping district and housing. When Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2011 solicited proposals for a never-realized second campus, the Stronach Group offered up Golden Gate Fields, an indication of its waning commitment to live horse racing as the industry nosedived. (UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station won the second campus competition, only to have the concept crushed by budget woes.)
Albany tax revenue has always been central to the talk. In 2008, Albany conducted an extensive waterfront planning process, including the racetrack, centered on public input.
In recent months, some Berkeley and Albany residents called on the park district to slow down the process, reexamine the terms, including price, and consider incorporating some of the racetrack elements as part of the new design.
This includes Brennan Cox, a Berkeley landscape architect who has worked on major Bay Area projects, including Treasure Island, and been vocal about his concerns about the Golden Gate Fields transaction, while supporting the site’s transition to a park.
Brooks said she believes many ideas are on the table at this point. It’s a huge site, she stressed.
“The idea of creating a park for everyone where people can enjoy different amenities, a variety of activities — we want to explore those opportunities as part of the planning process,” she said. “So everyone sees a place for themselves at the party.”
Brooks added that the district is already brainstorming ways to use the property right away, before any construction. “We don’t want this to just sit idle with a fence around it for years.”
This article was originally published on Berkeleyside and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
