On Monday morning, City of Signal Hill Public Works Department closed Spring Street, Willow Street, Orange Avenue and California Avenue around the new Willow Springs Park and Sunnyside Cemetery, effectively severing the area off from the rest of Long Beach.
Signal Hill officials stated the roads will be closed indefinitely until they are properly engaged by the City of Long Beach and its Department of Parks, Recreation and Marine to determine the programming and design elements Signal Hill residents want in the future phases of the park.
The Long Beach Post was able to receive a copy of the unusually frank comments from Signal Hill officials, excerpts are below:
While Parks and Recreation staff in Long Beach has held multiple design workshops and surveys with their residents, we feel Signal Hill has been deliberately excluded from the design process. Residents of Central Long Beach, California Heights and Wrigley Neighborhood have been engaged through three separate public hearings in each of their respective neighborhoods, but we could not get even one in Crescent Heights?!? The City of Signal Hill just asks that our residents are treated by Long Beach the same as they treat their own residents.
As the first phase of Willow Springs Park, the scenic Long View Point has nothing on our Hilltop Park, whose elevation is twice as high and less than a mile away. We have seen that plans for the second phase of Willow Springs Park will include a golf driving range. Signal Hill already has one of those, right across the street from your park. It is almost like you are rebuilding our entire park system. Who does that?!?!
So before moving forward with future phases of Willow Springs Park, the City of Signal Hill has taken these extraordinary steps to get your attention. If you are not going to build a park that everyone [including our residents] can use, we will preclude everyone from using it. For Crissake, Signal Hill literally surrounds this park; shouldn’t we have some input into what this darn thing looks like?!?
The memorandum continued to include suggested park components including a paint-ball battlefield, mile-long Slip-n-Slide and motocross racetrack with, “those really big ramps.”
When asked how Signal Hill got the idea for the road closure, they pointed to the City of Compton who shut down their Sportsman Drive to cut-off access to a proposed truck facility in North Long Beach. The truck project was abandoned due to this move by Compton to protect their residents.
Having learned their lesson before, the Long Beach City Council is already having landscape architects design future phases of the Willow Springs Park to incorporate Signal Hill’s demands.
The Long Beach Post hopes you are having a splendid April Fool’s Day because there are no road closures around Willow Springs Park nor are there plans to put a large Slip-n-Slide in it. The above photo was Photoshopped for the purposes of this story.
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