San Juan Capistrano residents enjoy going out to community-installed birdhouses on the San Juan Creek trail, near the intersection of Via Sonora and Calle Arroyo.
The City of San Juan Capistrano is looking to modify the bird park for safety reasons and enlisting the community’s help in doing so.
City officials held a meeting with residents at the site of the bird park on Wednesday, May 3, to outline their plans and address concerns that the makeshift bird park would go away. Mayor Howard Hart said the city is committed to keeping the bird park.
“Even if everybody agrees that this was a great volunteer park, we would still have to alter it from its current condition because they don’t meet city safety standards,” said Councilmember Troy Bourne, whose district, District 2, represents the area. “When we’re doing bike trails, we don’t put rocks that close to it. We don’t install pavers this close to it.”
The bird park has been around for decades. It currently has a variety of birdhouses, including numerous ones on a table with wooden shelves and others on a smaller sit-down table.
“It’s just a really fun little place where families gather, children come,” resident Julia Swanson said. “They paint these houses. They bring them down here and it’s something that’s really special to our community. Every single time I drive by here, there’s someone here either putting up a birdhouse or kids playing or somebody’s sitting at a bench.”
Swanson said she was pleased with the city’s response.
“I think that they are going out of their way, not just to tear it down and leave nothing,” Swanson said. “I think that’s really kind of awesome.”
The park also has benches and what Bourne said is “volunteer masonry,” meaning community-installed stones—the latter of which will not be permitted.
The bird park will be altered by this summer. Residents will go through formal city channels—such as the Parks, Equestrian, and Community Services Commission and city staff—to work out the exact details of the new park.
Some current aspects of the bird park may be able to stay, such as the birdhouses, native plants, and the park being visible from the street.
“All of those things, we can incorporate into a legal, safe park,” Bourne said after asking residents what they want to keep at the park. “We would replace some of the volunteer furniture with some city-purchased furniture that’s mounted appropriately.”
“We would take some of these plants off from immediately adjacent to the trail and move them 5 feet or more back from the trail so the kids have a chance to fall without hitting their head on the rock or a plant or something like that,” he continued.
However, the so-called “frog pond” further down the trail, which has a community-installed bridge over the creek and bench, will be removed because it is a “vector” for potential disease from insects, among other reasons, Hart and Bourne both said.
“When we alter the flow of water, in the heavy rains, now you’ll see there’s a 12- to 18-inch drop-off adjacent to the paved trail,” Bourne said. “As volunteers, we’ve altered it to create the pond. We’ve dammed it up. Now it’s eroding and undermining the trail.”
The frog pond was created around six to eight months ago, Swanson said. Her 8-year-old daughter, Kirra Swanson, wrote a letter to Bourne and Public Works Director Tom Toman urging them to preserve the frog pond after the city posted a sign saying they would take it down.
“I posted on Nextdoor and a lot of people who really wanted to save these places (responded),” Swanson said. “We thought when we got back from spring break that the frog pond was going to be gone but then we came back to another notice about this meeting. I’m really proud of my daughter.”
There are also safety concerns if someone traveling the trail, including kids on bikes, fall and hurt themselves, Bourne said.
“None of us want that to happen and not just because we don’t want to get sued,” Bourne said. “At the same time, the tragedy is not that we lose $2 million as a city. The tragedy is that the kid hits his head on the rock, and we deserve to pay $2 million because he has to recover.”
The city can allocate funding for the modified park once details are hashed out, Bourne said. That funding is expected to come at the start of the new fiscal year.
“I would expect that this is not going to be a line-item budget,” Bourne said. “I think this is going to be a council discretionary allocation of funds, so be gentle.”
The city does not want to set a precedent where residents can create makeshift parks without going through an official process, Bourne said.
“If you make this one awesome and another neighborhood comes and says ‘we want to do something like that,’ then we in our district can say, great, the process is go to the Parks Commission, explain what you’re trying to do. We make sure it’s safe, make sure there’s funding, and then we move on,” Bourne said.
However, Hart said the city is not looking to micromanage the park once it’s modified and will leave it up to residents to self-police the area.
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