This is work in progress, with conditions and government actions continually changing. Please bear with typos and rough edges.
In six months, the east side of Aquatic Park has been shorn of decades-old bushes and trees. From from the south entrance circle at Heinz north well past Dwight — close to Dreamland for Kids playground, large industrial buildings again loom just beyond a steep, bare railroad grade, much as in the 1930s when the park was new.
These busy transcontinental tracks, built in the 1870s, sit on the old Bayshore bluff. The park’s lagoons were hastily built in the Great Depression. Because the railroad owned the shoreline, a feeder to the new Bay Bridge — today US 80 — had to be built on fill offshore. The lagoons, with pipes to the Bay, kept a trapped finger of Bay from becoming a cesspool of raw sewage and pollution from industrial West Berkeley. (Much more on park history here.)
The bare slopes of the steep railroad grade loom over immediately adjacent wetlands, with springs and seeps severely damaged. With a likely record El Nino approaching, environmental requirements do not require erosion control until October 31. Only small plants are required, with a short monitoring period.
Because Berkeley missed or ignored notifications from at least 2020 until the project was approved in 2024, it found out only when park users saw construction flags in 2026. The Parks Depart quickly cobbled together support from the railroad and other sources to plant trees. These two efforts do not appear coordinated.
Below: photos looking NE (left) and SE (right) show the park west of the foot of Dwight Way (top left in both photos) on May 3, before clearing, and May 15, afterwards. The cut brush has been removed.
Although visitors and city officials came to think of the railroad’s land as park, land owned by the Union Pacific Railroad extends well west of these tracks. The tracks also are bordered by vital buried sewer, water, fuel, and communications pipelines. High groundwater and West Berkeley’s shallow aquifer, percolating or piped through the slope, created narrow wetlands — springs, ponds, and marshes — that watered the vegetation that hid industrial buildings east of the tracks.
The railroad takes back its land: The railroad began planning to rebuild a bottleneck underpass at the Port of Oakland by at least 2000. In its crowded urban corridor, the most convenient nearby place to reshuffle trains delayed during the multi-year project was the relatively undeveloped park south of the Dreamland for Kids playground, where two sets of tracks sat rusted and unused.
Planning for this detail in the big project seems to have gotten serious about 2000. Multiple notices to the Berkeley Parks and Public Works Departments were missed or ignored. With no input from Berkeley. the railroad’s first application for environmental approval, to the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, included compensation for damage to Aquatic Park’s wetlands — by planting along the tracks in Albany north of Codornices Creek. After Regional Board staff pushed successfully to narrow the project, reducing loss of land in Aquatic Park, the railroad in 2024 submitted a new application which was approved by state and federal agencies.
This approved plan maps the narrow strip of wetlands at the foot of the old shoreline bluff as almost entirely on park property (This may be open to question). It maps and includes protection for only one of four creeks that flow from the wetlands to the main lagoon — this one clearly starts on the grade itself. It says that sinceany environmental harms will be only short term, the railroad doesn’t need to do costly mitigation. Except at the long recognized creek, the railroad only has to plant or seed from a short plant list, with low requirements. After just five years instead of ten as for mitigation, up to half of vegetation may be invasive and another quarter may be bare. Antique tanks and pipes built for vanished heavy industries. which still spew pollution into the lagoon in winter, were left in place.
Berkeley’s jarring wake-up: Having missed or overlooked all notifications, Berkeley.knew nothing of this. Disc golfers sounded the alarm in early April 2026, when they saw construction notices and stakes threatening their popular course. Hasty meetings — with park users, advocates, and agencies — seem to have led to a partial settlement that may not yet be written.
Here is what appear to be outcomes so far:
- Paying Park Department to plant: According to the Parks Department, through grants and direct payment, the railroad will give Berkeley’s Parks Department about $200,000 for around 1000 new trees and other plants. Disc golfers lost space but not holes. This is not yet clearly related to what the Waterboard or existing state and federal certifications require.
- Loss of opportunities: By missing the planning process, Berkeley may have missed chances to get rid of antique sewage infrastructure, including dangerous deep tanks. It also may have missed the chance to lessen the impact of legacy pollutants such as PCBs, heavy metals, and hydrocarbons from former West Berkeley heavy industry and the railroad tracks themselves. Plans so far do not mention dust control or other reduction of this legacy pollution. Click here for advocates’ letters with background on these issues.
- Inaccurate plan and plan not followed: The railroad’s approved plan has significant inaccuracies and has not been followed. A single coir roll, or log, is often placed where it would not protect wetlands. Nothinng else is required until Oct. 31 — and then only a single layer of jute mesh.Tree and brush removal trashed the marshy headwaters and springs where most of these creeklets originated.
- Heavy work in the park: The railroad did much of its clearing in mid-May, removing the tall eucalyptus trees and other vegetation close to the tracks. Access was mainly through the Bayer campus east of the tracks, and most wood is to be removed that way, as the plan provides. But also as the plan provides, some heavy work was done in the park, particularly turning one spring, where a camp was removed, into a large swath of mud.
- Unknown effects on wildlife: Loss of the eucalyptus, as in the photos above, means loss of trees used by herons and egrets, raptors and songbirds, and migrating monarch butterflies. Some trees and stumps were left for a time because birds were nesting in them. These are now gone. These species generally have no special legal protections. critical infrastructure has exemptions from many environmental requirements. And tall trees next to passenger trains are not a good idea. New trees, if maintained, could eventually be better habitat.
- Limited requirements for rehabilitation: The little “rehabilitation” that the plans require will be based on a handful of unflattering photos taken by the railroad in 2020 and 2022.
- Plans do not seem to expect great success from re-planting. The Regional Water Quality Control Board’s approval allow up to half of all vegetation to be invasive and up to a quarter of the area to be bare after five years. For a very small area where trees are required, the length is 10 years. This may be realism. In Aquatic Park, the Parks Department has mowed two previous grant-financed restorations of native plants into oblivion, and native wildflowers and grasses seeded as required by the Board were overrun by weeds within two years. As the railroad work went on, Parks staff fixed a broken water main that had been leaking for eight months — leaving a large area of bare soil a few feet from the main lagoon’s edge. The Parks Department also routine mows wet cattail areas, leaving ruts, and fills low spots with chips.
- No action to correct state’s official ignorance of any problem in Aquatic Park’s lagoons: The application makes clear that the state is officially unaware of any problem with water quality in the park’s lagoons. Abundant finding show, and the city’s many studies and grant proposals point out, that the lagoons are unsafe for body contact or fishing, eutrophying, plagued by scummy algae and die-offs, frequently exceed allowable bacteria levels, are losing depth, and lack adequate circulation and water exchange with the Bay. The lagoons are not on the state’s 303d list of impaired waters, essentially because a typo conflated them with San Francisco’s Aquatic Park. Thus legally, as far as the state is concerned, Aqauatic Park’s lagoons are pristine. This limits enforcement action aganst anyone, not just for the railroad. Correcting this on the state’s normal schedule takes years. Nothing has been done.
