“To put it simply, Central Park is being destroyed, both physically and aesthetically.”
That was the conclusion reached by former Corvallis Councilor and Benton County Commissioner Kent Daniels in a fiery Sept. 16 email he sent to city officials and the Gazette-Times.
Daniels, a long-time parks and open space advocate who serves as vice president of the Friends of Corvallis Parks and Recreation, added that “the park has become a large living area and day camp for the homeless and for street people. People are sleeping in the park every day. Drinking alcohol and drug use are common behavior. And litter, trash and cigarette butts are everywhere.”
Daniels’ comments were echoed by Councilor Roen Hogg, whose Ward 2 includes Central Park, at the Sept. 18 Corvallis City Council meeting.
“I’ve seen people sleeping outside The Arts Center when I walk home from council meetings,” Hogg said. “Other cities address these things. Why can’t we? It’s been going on for a long time and people near the park are tired of it.”
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The Corvallis Police Department, meanwhile, is preparing a tactical plan for the park and its surrounding neighborhood. Beginning Wednesday that means the department will be focusing extra attention on patrolling in the park and officers assigned to other duties are required to use “unobligated time” to assist in the effort.
The plan, said Lt. Cord Wood, is scheduled to last 30 days, but the department reserves the right to continue the crackdown if the problems persist.
“We want to significantly reduce these behaviors,” said Wood, who noted the same litany of offenses as Daniels. “We’re hoping,” Wood said, “that people can go the park and not have to deal with these behaviors.”
This is the third Central Park-area TAP the department has initiated in the past five or six years, said Wood, who described the challenge as “another uptick in the behavior we see in the park periodically. Our ultimate goal is for us not to have to keep repeating this every few years in the park.”
The department will be deploying a couple of new tools in this tactical plan. First, the corps of community livability officers has reached six, a three-person increase paid for with $1.2 million in grant money from Oregon State University. Sgt. Joel Goodwin is in charge of the livability team, and he will be directing the TAP, Wood said.
The additional livability officers, Wood said, “will give us people (in the park) more days of the week and more hours of the day.”
The second tool is a “crime prevention through environmental design,” or CPTED, analysis that will be conducted during the tactical action plan. Officers will be looking for ways to reduce crime by altering the landscaping and physical attributes of the park.
“The way the park is laid out offers places for people to congregate and be out of sight,” Wood said. “That makes it attractive for drinking and hanging out and that begats some of the other behaviors — fights and public urination. Maybe if we make it harder to do things out of sight folks won’t be as inclined to engage in these behaviors.”
The department conducted a similar CPTED analysis for Central Park in 2015. The CPD worked with the Parks and Recreation Department on a project that included general maintenance and pruning that was designed to keep brush at a maximum of two feet high and have tree canopies hang no lower than six feet. The goal was to produce clearer sight lines and make it harder for violations to occur out of sight.
City officials also plan to consult with their counterparts in Ashland, where they reportedly have had success dealing with similar issues in famed Lithia Park, a 93-acre expanse which runs from the town plaza up into the foothills of Mt. Ashland. The park was designed by John McLaren, who also worked on Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Contact reporter James Day at jim.day@gazettetimes.com or 541-758-9542. Follow at Twitter.com/jameshday or gazettetimes.com/blogs/jim-day.