PROS

Overview of the PROS Plan

The basic purpose of Belmont’s Parks, Recreation, and Open Space (PROS) Plan is to set the framework for decision makers in the planning, maintenance, development, and or rehabilitation of Belmont’s Parks and open space system for a 15-year horizon. Belmont’s last PROS plan was completed in 1992, so it was long overdue for a revamp.

What’s happened so far in Belmont’s PROS Plan process

In February of 2021, the City kicked off the PROS plan process, which was expected to take one year to complete. The City did an outstanding job of creating a community-driven plan, and bent over backwards to get input from the entire community. The process included 19 Parks and Recreation Commission meetings, four City Council meetings, 11 focus groups, a community-wide survey that got more than 2,800 responses, a dedicated website (www.belmontPROSplan.com), and an “open house” event at Waterdog open space, where the public could talk directly with city staff and the environmental consultants that it hired.

Although the process was originally supposed to take a year, it got dragged out to over a year and half, thanks to a handful of affluent homeowners who live next to the trailheads. They demanded wholesale changes to open space policies that were totally out of step with the community’s wishes. They showed up at just about every meeting, berating the commission and staff, demanding severe restrictions to recreational use, including having Waterdog open space designated a “nature preserve,” excluding bicycles from all singletrack, and completely decommissioning the popular Lake Loop trail.

All of the issues were thoroughly evaluated by City staff, as well as the city’s independent environmental consulting firm. The conclusion was that the habitat in Belmont’s open space is healthy, and that existing multi-use recreation policies are not causing significant harm to the environment. For example, the trails consist of 1.3% of the land in the open space, and of that 1.3%, less than 10% had significant erosion. No reason was found to make radical changes to Belmont’s inclusive policies—which have been in place for over 30 years—of allowing hikers, cyclists, trail runners, and dog walkers to share and enjoy all of the trails. Data from the PROS plan confirmed that over 80% of the community wants to keep these inclusive policies in place. The PROS plan includes new policies to balance recreation and conservation by adding safety features to trails and protecting riparian habitat.

In short, the plan followed the science, gave the community what it wanted, and built in recommendations to continue to keep our open space sustainable and in great shape. The Parks and Recreation Commission unanimously voted to approve the plan and send it to City Council, and City Council was supposed to vote on it at its July 26 meeting. (The final draft plan can be viewed here.)

A single homeowner has thrown sand in the gears of the PROS plan

Unfortunately, the PROS plan has now ground to a halt because a lawyer, hired by failed 2018 City Council candidate Deniz Bolbol, has threatened the City with a lawsuit under CEQA.

What is CEQA?

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is a California statute passed in 1970 and signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan to institute a statewide policy of environmental protection. CEQA does not directly regulate land uses, but instead requires state and local agencies within California to follow a protocol of analysis and public disclosure of environmental impacts of proposed projects and adopt all feasible measures to mitigate those impacts. Generally speaking, CEQA only applies to “projects” that a public agency does that has the potential to either (1) cause a direct physical change in the environment or (2) cause a reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change in the environment.

CEQA law is very complicated and technical, and complying with it is very costly for public agencies. It is usually beyond the expertise of even the most seasoned city attorneys, and typically, specialty legal counsel and CEQA consultants have to be brought in. Unless the City can prove CEQA doesn’t apply to its action (by proving exemptions or preparing complex documents called “negative declarations” or “mitigated negative declarations”), it must undergo an Environmental Impact Review (EIR) process, which can take many months or even years. EIR costs cities tens of thousands of dollars in staff and consultant time.

The dark side of CEQA and “greenmailing”

At this point, you may be scratching your head and thinking “wait a minute, how is the PROS plan a “project,” since it’s just a plan and a framework for the future, and it doesn’t break ground on any new construction?” CEQA shouldn’t apply to the PROS plan, and the city shouldn’t have to delay it for months or spend tens of thousands of dollars to do an EIR. But here’s the problem: CEQA allows a person suing the city to recover their attorney’s fees if they prevail in a CEQA suit. (But the City doesn’t get to recover its fees if it prevails, so it’s “heads you lose, tails I win.”) This has spawned a cottage industry of opportunistic lawyers who bring questionable CEQA suits, run their fees up to the hilt, and “greenmail” cities. (The Atlantic wrote an excellent article about this here.) Most people have heard of frivolous “shakedown” lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—CEQA lawsuits can be very similar.

As one California Court of Appeal recently noted, "something is very wrong" with CEQA if it can so easily be "subverted into an instrument for the oppression and delay of social, economic, or recreational development and advancement." Tiburon Open Space Committee v. County of Marin (May 12, 2022, A159860) Cal.Rptr.3d (2022 WL 198892)

In our opinion, the CIty of Belmont is now being “greenmailed” by a single homeowner who is disgruntled that the final draft PROS plan didn’t conform to her extreme views. The City’s environmental consultants found no scientific or policy reason to include unprecedented restrictions to recreation in the plan that the homeowner was demanding, so now the homeowner is suing to try to get her way. Because the City now faces the threat of an award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees (thanks to CEQA’s unlevel playing field), it must now hire CEQA attorneys and consultants and spend tens of thousands of dollars to refute all of the claims of a single homeowner and her lawyer.

What’s next?

When will the City complete its CEQA process and finally approve the PROS plan? Nobody can say for certain, but at minimum it will be several more months. We are confident that the City will dot all of its “i’s” and cross all of its “t’s” to make sure the PROS plan will come out intact through this process. It may require some minor tweaks to be fully CEQA compliant, but we hope the City will stand up to this legal bullying and won’t make any fundamental changes to the plan. Unfortunately, this further process is going to significantly delay the plan that the Parks and Recreation Commission worked so hard on, and it will cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

I want everyone to be able to enjoy the trails in Waterdog. What can I do to help?

Because the CEQA process can be so long, it’s almost certain that the next City Council, not the current one, will be making the ultimate decision on the PROS plan. At this juncture, the most important way to preserve our access to open space is to vote for and support candidates for City Council and Mayor who take an inclusive approach to open space management.

At the upcoming November 8, 2022 election, Belmont will be electing its very first at-large mayor (elected by the whole city). The two candidates are Julia Mates (current mayor and councilmember) and Warren Lieberman (current councilmember). Our members have interviewed both candidates to get their positions on open space. Julia Mates is clearly the best candidate for those who feel open space should remain open to all. Julia is not a mountain biker, nor does she have any ties to the cycling community, but she hikes the open space with her school-age children, she understands Waterdog’s culture and traditions of sharing, and she solidly supports inclusive open space management policies. We support Julia Mates because she has a “we’re all in this together” approach, and her vision includes keeping the open spaces open and accessible to the whole community.

In stark contrast, Warren Lieberman has been in office for nearly 20 years, and we think he would use his office to take care of special interests. His political patrons and allies include the very people who are trying to limit access to our open space. He has consistently spoken in favor of segregating trails and designating “hiker only” trails. One of his campaign platforms is to “re-commit to protecting our parks and open space” which is a dog whistle to his well-heeled constituents who are working to keep people out away from the open space that adjoins their houses. Unlike Mr. Lieberman, Julia is not beholden to these special interests.

At this point, the single most important thing we can do to keep our open space open is to support Julia’s bid for Mayor. If Mr. Lieberman wins, he and his allies will push to delay the PROS plan and revise it to restrict access. One of his closest allies wrote an article in the San Mateo Daily Journal calling for exactly that. The bias and misinformation in that article was called out here and here. (Note: if the article/letters are behind a paywall, clear your browser cookies.)

There are several ways you can help Julia win, including donating a few bucks to her campaign, displaying her lawn sign (if you live in Belmont), and spreading the word among your friends and neighbors. We encourage you to visit www.juliamates.com where you can learn more about her. Her website has a contact form to request a sign, and a donation link.

Another way to help is letting City officials know you want them to keep managing Belmont’s trails in an inclusive way, as they have for the past 30+ years, letting them know you support multi-use trails, and that you don’t want to see any major changes to the current draft of the PROS plan. You can email the City at prcomm@belmont.gov, citycouncil@belmont.gov, and info@belmontprosplan.com. The City values input from open space visitors from neighboring communities, because they are stakeholders too, but it’s especially important that it hears from Belmont residents because those are the City officials’ direct constituents.

You can also speak directly to the City Council and Parks and Recreation Commission during public comment period at their meetings. At every meeting, whether or not the PROS plan is on the agenda, you can speak on that topic, either in person or via Zoom. The City’s page showing upcoming meetings and agendas is here.

Two of our members, Thaddeus Block and Paul Sheng, wrote a guest article with positions that the Waterdog Open Space Stewards—and most of the Belmont community—broadly support. We call on the City Council to pass the PROS plan in its continuation meeting on July 26.

The draft for the Parks, Recreation, and Open Space (PROS) Management Plan is up for a vote tonight, and we support this plan. The small group of anti-recreation have been emailing and marshalling every resource they can to blast this plan. We need your help to counter their negative wave of feedback to the city ahead of tonight's vote. Here's what you can do:

• Email the Parks & Recreation department and City Council at citycouncil@belmont.gov , prcomm@belmont.gov and info@belmontprosplan.com. Do this even if you've done it in the past...it works! We need to counter the incoming negative voices. See the end of this message for a sample email you can use to craft your own.
• Attend the meeting (details below), either online or in person, and please be positive about the plan. Try not to engage the negative voices; just be positive about the plan and multi-use recreation at Waterdog.

Read on for more details! Thank you!

Tonight, Tuesday July 12, 2022 at 7:00 p.m., item 9A on the Belmont City Council meeting agenda is to vote to adopt the draft Parks, Recreation, and Open Space (PROS) Management Plan. The draft plan is the culmination of an exhaustive public process over the past 18 months, and thanks in part to our advocacy, the draft plan commissioned by the Parks & Recreation commission essentially recommends that the status quo is maintained, i.e. having all of Waterdog's trails, including the singletrack, remain multi-use and open to bikes (as well as hikers, runners, and dog walkers).

There is a small, but highly organized group of anti-MTB activists (working in conjunction with the Sierra Club) that are aggressively lobbying City Council to make changes to the plan, demanding to study it further (read: give them more time to oppose it), demanding trail closures and hiker-only trails, and so forth. They will be at tonight's meeting in force. If you can, please attend the meeting and make public comment. You can either attend in person at City Council Chambers, City Hall, One Twin Pines Lane, Belmont, or via Zoom. (Go to Zoom Conferences for the City of Belmont select “Join” and enter Meeting ID: 95745673035. Use the Raise Hand feature to request to speak). Note: you do not have to be a resident of Belmont to make public comment, but comments from Belmont residents can carry more weight since they're the direct constituents of City Council.

Even if you can't make public comment at the meeting, it would be extremely helpful if you could send a brief email in support of continued multi-use/support of the draft PROS plan (which can be viewed at https://belmontprosplan.com/) to citycouncil@belmont.gov, prcomm@belmont.gov, and info@belmontprosplan.com. Because the anti-MTB activists are flooding City Council with letters, it is very important that City Council receives positive emails from the trail using community on this issue to balance out the avalanche of negative emails. Please send emails ASAP, as the meeting is tonight, and they need to arrive in time for the councilpersons to read. Thank you for your support!

Sample email

I am writing today in support of the proposed Parks, Recreation, and Open Space (PROS) Management Plan. I support multi-use trail recreation, and am happy to see the science-based approach the city has taken with this plan.

In particular, I support the Plan's following recommendations:

• The continued designation of Waterdog's trails as multi-use
• Unofficial legacy trails be officially recognized, and signage added for them
• Stream and waterway crossings be improved
• Calming features be added to single track trails in order to decrease speeds and increase challenge (fun) for riders
• Guidelines on trail maintenance and erosion control and (and look forward to volunteering in the parks for trail work)
• New trails be added to the Open Space
• A one-year pilot of a Class 1 e-bike policy be performed

Thank you,

(Signed)

We are thrilled to announce that we have crossed a major milestone: our membership now includes over 3,000 people who are invested in the outcome of recreation at Waterdog.

In a recent PROS committee meeting, commission member David Braunstein fell into the all-too-common "both sides" fallacy, implying that those who oppose recreation in the open space should have their views taken with the same weight as the overwhelming majority who support it.

The community has soundly rejected this anti-recreation agenda, as illustrated by failed runs for City Council on this platform by the loudest and most persistent of this minority, Pat Cuviello and Deniz Bolbol. These would-be ringleaders complain over and over, while those who support the Stewards' stance on recreation at Waterdog swell into the thousands. Their attack on the Crystal Springs Cross Country Course was also met with outrage by the community.

This handful of people tries to pit user groups against each other, and pushes a false narrative that this is a battle between hikers vs. bikers. The PROS survey and other public input consistently shows that hikers, cyclists, dog walkers, and runners all want the same thing: a continuation of Waterdog’s decades of successful shared-use policies. To the extent there are two groups, they consist of (1) a handful of people who are demanding radical and wholesale changes to open space policies, and (2) the rest of the community.

Let's reject this "both sides" premise once and for all, implement the sound improvements recently proposed for the open space, and get back to enjoying this incredible resource.

Summary

• We're getting close! The PROS commission will soon be making recommendations to the Belmont City Council for adoption, and now is the time to rally support for recreation at Waterdog.
• A draft Recreation Use Assessment was just released by the Belmont PROS commission. An officially-sanctioned, independent third-party environmental assessment found that Waterdog is in good condition, and that multi-use recreation has not had an “undue negative impact” on the open space.
• The Waterdog Open Space Stewards are happy to largely support the recommendations in this draft assessment, including the Recreation Emphasis Alternative and Habitat Protection Emphasis Alternative additions to the Base Plan.
• We strongly support formally recognizing existing trails not currently mapped, part of the Recreation Emphasis Alternative.
• We do, however, oppose three recommendations: to turn Ensatina Trail into a hiking-only trail; to turn Labor of Love into a biking-only trail; and to decommission redundant trail segments. We believe that all trails in Waterdog should remain multi-use, and that “redundant” trail segments allow for varied experiences in a small area.
• We support the recommended pilot policy to allow e-bikes on Waterdog's trails, as a way to further assess what kind of impact their use has on the open space.

Actions You Can Take to Help

• Please write to the Belmont City Council in support of multi-use recreation! This is perhaps the most crucial time, as the PROS commission and Belmont City Council will be making decisions based on these recommendations soon. See the end of this article for a draft you can use to craft your email.
• There will be an open house from 5-7 on Monday, June 13th at Hidden Canyon Park. Please attend and show your support in person! We would love for people who can balance the negativity of the loud minority opposing recreation in Waterdog with rational, positive input. Bring kids and their bikes! More details here.

The Longer Version

Waterdog is in Good Shape!

The City of Belmont has released the first public draft of its Recreation Use Assessment, and there's a lot of good news in it for proponents of keeping Waterdog open to the types of recreational uses it currently permits. We are happy to see that the recommendations are in line with our mission to keep multi-use recreation intact in Waterdog, and we support the draft recommendations, with three exceptions.

A major highlight of the assessment is that Belmont hired an independent professional consulting firm to conduct an environmental assessment of the park (and some nearby trails), and they found that "wildlife habitats in Waterdog Lake and San Juan Canyon are in good condition suggesting that the current trail usage and trail density are not having undue negative impacts". We knew this to be the case from our time in the open space, and it's fantastic to see it validated by biologists.

The Exceptions

With that in mind, we hope that the city will choose to remediate the parts of the park that are in need due to erosion, but otherwise leave the nature of recreation in the park intact. In particular, two recommendations we oppose would restrict the user groups who would be permitted to use two trails in the system, Ensatina Trail and Labor of Love. In the case of Ensatina, the draft recommendation is to turn it into a hiker-only trail. Just as with Lake Loop Trail, Ensatina was built by volunteers from the cycling community, but meant to be shared by all user groups. The basis for the recommendation was “the low tree branches and unique shady experience that may encourage slow travel through this area.” In our view, this is not a good reason to systematically exclude an entire user group, and break with decades of Belmont’s tradition of allowing all user groups to use and enjoy all the trails.

Similarly, the draft recommends turning Labor of Love into a biking-only trail. We strongly believe that these recommendations are trying to solve a problem that does not exist: multi-use recreation has been working well at Waterdog for more than thirty years, and we want to keep all trails open to all user groups. As a practical matter, the trail is mostly used by cyclists, but we don’t think it's fair to exclude hikers, runners, and dog walkers if they want to use it. Additionally, we feel that a single use designation for any trail will open all trails in the park to being individually litigated. Our community does not need unnecessary new battlegrounds further diverting focus from our goal of making the park a great experience for everyone. (In the case of Labor of Love, there is an additional recommendation to adopt the currently unofficial one-way designation. While we generally feel that trails in the open space are best left open to travel in both directions, we support this recommendation, which is in line with how the trail is already being used.)

The bottom line is we’re against creating special trail privileges for classes of users no matter who they are. Keeping the trails open for everyone provides all trail users with a sense of unity and community, and is the most fair, equitable, and inclusive way to manage the trails. A publication by the Bureau of Land Management, Guidelines for a Quality Trail Experience states:

• “Sharing helps build a trail community. Visitors are encouraged to cooperate in order to preserve and protect a common resource, and encountering other types of users on a trail helps to establish mutual respect and inspire courtesy.
• Shared-use trails take better advantage of available space and trail mileage. Quite simply, they provide more trail for everyone to enjoy.

We also oppose a third recommendation, which would “decommission redundant trails”. We don’t believe any trails at Waterdog are redundant. Trails are not about getting from one place to another, but are about creating varied experiences along the way. If anything, we believe the city should consider adding trails at Waterdog.

E-Bikes

There has been a lot of discussion about e-bikes in Waterdog during this process, and the assessment recommends a pilot policy allowing Class I (pedal-assisted) e-bikes on Waterdog's trails for "at least 1 year" to allow for further assessment. We support this direction to gather more data about this emerging user group within the park.

San Juan Canyon

The assessment also covers trails in San Juan Canyon, across Ralston Avenue from Waterdog. While our group is focused on Waterdog, we are happy to see the same kind of recommendations made for Waterdog apply there. We believe that an inclusive multi-use approach is appropriate in San Juan Canyon, as it is in Waterdog.

Conclusion

Overall, this Recreation Use Assessment supports the mission of the Waterdog Open Space Stewards—to keep Waterdog open to multi-use recreation—and we are happy to see that reason and science have been applied to help make the recommendations in the draft. We thank the PROS commission and the City Council for its patience and hard work in getting to this point. We are looking forward to refining this draft into a form that our membership can support for adoption by the Belmont City Council.

Draft Email

Send to: prcomm@belmont.gov, info@belmontprosplan.com

As a user of the Waterdog open space, I wanted to write to support multi-use recreation on the trails there. The trail system was built and is maintained by the community, and all trails there should continue to be available for hikers, bikers, and dog walkers to enjoy, as they always have been.

I support the Waterdog Open Space Stewards, and agree that the draft recommendations published recently are what the community is asking for, with the exceptions of any trail closures and the single-use designation of two trails in the open space. I feel that all the trails should be open for all user groups to enjoy. Thank you for using a scientific approach to policy making in Waterdog; please apply the same kind of data-based decision making to these two trails, and leave them open to all users.

I look forward to Belmont having a fully inclusive recreation plan for Waterdog that will keep it a great place for all users to enjoy for years to come.

The Belmont Parks, Recreation, and Open Space (PROS) Master Plan process is making its way through the Parks & Recreation Commission and ultimately to City Council. The Master Plan is a planning blueprint for the next 15-20 years to guide the City's network of parks, facilities and recreational services for the future, including Waterdog open space.

There is a small but aggressive group of anti-recreation activists in Belmont whose goal it is to ban mountain biking from the Waterdog open space area. They are waging a campaign to have Waterdog designated as a "nature preserve" in the Master Plan and severely limit recreational access to the trails. They have even hired a biologist to perform a biased study advocating for a complete ban of bikes. If they succeed, mountain bike and other recreational access to Waterdog could be lost for the next 20 years. They are very organized and have a dedicated website that vilifies mountain bikers.

This week is a very crucial juncture in the process. On Tuesday, April 5, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. there is the fourth and final meeting of the PROS Advisory Committee, where recommendations will be made about open space. You can view and/or make public comment at this meeting on Zoom by registering here.

This coming Wednesday 4/6/22 at 7:00 p.m. the Belmont Parks & Recreation Commission has its regular meeting. Item 6.E. on the agenda is to receive an update on the PROS plan, which includes the open space element. (The agenda includes the link to view and/or make public comment via Zoom if you're so inclined.) The staff report can be seen here.

Please take a few minutes to send an email to both info@belmontprosplan.com and PRComm@belmont.gov to let them know you support continued multi-use access to Waterdog. Waterdog has been successfully managed as a mutli-use trail system for decades, and the trails have been sustainable based in large part due to volunteer trailwork by cyclists, through the Waterdog Trailkeepers. Note: The advisory committee and commission welcome input (via email and/or public comment at meetings) from all people who use the open space, whether or not they are residents of the City of Belmont.