The Long Beach City Council may ask the city manager to look into the possibility of acquiring open space near the Los Angeles River to create a future park, a move that comes amid opposition to a proposed RV storage facility on an open parcel of land near the Los Cerritos neighborhood.
A memo from three members of the council—Mary Zendejas, who represents the Downtown area, Roberto Uranga, who represents West Long Beach, and Al Austin in Bixby Knolls—requests that the city manager identify funding opportunities at the local, county, state and federal levels to pay for potential open space they can find.
The item will be presented to the City Council on Tuesday, Feb. 2. If approved, the city manager would have 60 days to return with a report.
Park equity has recently become a hot-button item in certain areas of Long Beach, most notably in communities near the Los Cerritos neighborhood where residents have opposed the building of a storage facility on a former toxic dumping ground.
Austin said that the request to find open land would look for land citywide and is not aimed at a specific parcel, meaning that the storage facility some residents are opposing will still go to the City Council for further review.
The memo also references the Long Beach Riverlink plan, which was implemented in 2007 to identify open spaces near the river for future parks. So far, the Deforest Wetlands and Molina Park redeveloped land near the river and opened to the public in 2018.
Los Angeles County recently updated a decades old master plan to renovate park spaces along the LA River.