By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
YACHATS – More than 60 trails and parks supporters turned out Saturday to celebrate nearly three years of planning, overcoming obstacles and hours of volunteer labor to create two small city parks along Ocean View Drive.
“Really, these parks are a story of perseverance by many people,” Mayor Craig Berdie said in brief remarks before the official ribbon cutting. “It’s a true demonstration of the Yachats spirit.”
The parks – Sunset Park South and Sunset Park North – are about 1,200 square feet in size and represent a formal makeover of soon-to-be city property that people had used for decades to admire the ocean view. They now have accessible walkways from Ocean View Drive, new or refurbished benches set in concrete pads, small trails cut through thick salal, and hundreds of native grasses and plants.
Longtime Parks and Commons Commission member Michael Hempen said the parks sprung from a suggestion by trails advocate Bob Langley after the city designated Ocean View Drive as a one-way road and decided to install delineators to separate traffic from walkers along the 804 Trail.
“‘We should make these parks’,” Hempen said Langley told him.
The idea stalled for a bit because no one knew who should spearhead the project. Yachats city hall and management was in turmoil at the time and the all-volunteer trails team mostly took on maintenance tasks, not park design and creation.
But Hempen said trails advocate Joanne Kittel told him “How can we not do this?”
So planning started, with sketches and ideas and walk-throughs led by Langley, Hempen and Adam Altson, who lives along Ocean View Drive and who later joined the Parks & Commons Commission.
“Everybody has ideas,” Berdie told the crowd Saturday. “But they had a detailed plan.”
Berdie championed the project when he was on the Parks & Commons Commission, convincing the city council in October 2021 to allocate money – now about $30,000 — to pay for work not done by volunteers. That included buying nearly 1,400 small native plants that volunteers hoped could be planted right away but ended up being stored for two years at a state parks nursery near Beaver Creek.
In order to do the plantings, the city had to hire a contractor to scrape off several inches of compacted gravel next to the road. But that could only be done after first hiring an archeological specialist to determine – and get it OK’d by Oregon State Parks — if the gravel removal would not disturb any Native American shell middens. Nothing was found.
The contractor also removed oversized boulders initially placed between the trail and the parks and replace them with smaller rocks.
The work also met resistance from former city manager Heide Lambert, who wanted the parks planning to stop and go through a city project-review process still under development and also wait for Lincoln County to officially turn over the street and right-of-way to the city. Then the city’s insurance company weighed in about the dangers of creating public areas near an oceanside cliff – a concern that finally had to be knocked down by the city attorney.
“It felt the more they worked the more resistance they met,” Berdie said Saturday.
All that changed with Lambert resigned in May 2023 and interim city manager Rick Sant soon green-lighted what most felt was a simple project.
“Let’s get this going,” Hempen said Sant told him.
Last June the trails group and other volunteers finally got the go-ahead to clear salal and plant hundreds of plants, protecting them with plastic orange fencing. Then Altson and David Rivinus, who lives across the street from Sunset Park South, dragged hoses across the street all summer to water them.
The plants have taken hold and carefully marked gravel paths lead to benches installed by Angell Job Corps students. The trails team will now include the parks in its bi-monthly maintenance work.
And Saturday, the idea, the plan and the work of a community was honored by a trays of cookies from the Yachats Ladies Club, a few speeches, and a ceremonial ribbon cutting.
“In the face of barriers,” Berdie told YachatsNews, “persistence is important.”