With almost no fanfare, crews have been stealthily at work, building what will eventually be Visalia’s largest public recreation area. If you haven’t heard of the East Side Regional Park before, there’s a good reason. It doesn’t officially exist yet. Sort of.
A Park Bigger than Mooney Grove
Currently, the biggest park in Visalia isn’t a city park. Largest at present is Mooney Grove Park on the far south end of town. The popular county-maintained, all-purpose recreation spot covers 100 acres of mostly undisturbed valley oak forest originally sold to the county by the Mooney family in 1906.
The East Side Regional Park will be half again as large, covering 148 acres in total. And it’s about as far on the other side of town from Mooney Grove as it can be. It will sit just to the north of Highway 198 on the Mineral King Avenue frontage road. Eventually, it will cover most of the property between Road 152 and about Road 148 – which currently does not extend north of Highway 198.
And the park will someday extend all the way north to Houston Avenue. That’s more than a mile away. This park is going to be enormous.
Walkers, Joggers Already Enjoying Future Park
About half of East Side Regional Park will eventually be covered in a series of seven ponds. On conceptual drawings and plans, the ponds are listed as Basins A-G. The first pond – Basin G – is already finished. Health-minded Visalians are already showing up in droves.
“People are saying it’s being used very heavily,” said Chris Crawford, city engineer at Visalia’s Engineering and Building Department.
Basin G sits along Mineral King Avenue at the park’s southeast corner. It’s ready for use.
“The parking lot is done,” Crawford said. “The trail goes around it, and the landscaping is in. That basin is basically done.”
The second pond – Basin D on the park’s east edge – will be the next area of construction to see action.
“It’ll for the most part look very similar,” the city engineer said. “There’ll be some differences, but it’ll look quite similar.” All seven ponds will be bordered by exercise trails and surrounded by trees, benches and picnic areas. Together, the water features will take up more than half the park’s area.
Mill Creek and the Oakes Ditch will both traverse the park.
Planning, Finding Funding Took Years
While the new park doesn’t have the storied history the smaller, older park – Mooney Grove was saved from being harvested for firewood by the quick work of a concerned citizen of Tulare who arranged to preserve the trees in perpetuity – it’s taken a lot of effort to get it started. Reaching this stage in the East Side Regional Park’s ongoing creation began more than a decade ago.
Conceived in 2013, the city didn’t find funding to start the project until six years later in 2019. That year, City Hall received a $2.45 million grant from the California Department of Parks and Recreation’s Land and Waste Conservation Fund. For its investment, the state expected the city to convert an old groundwater recharge basin into a park with a trail system, exercise circuit and a disc golf course.
The plan in place now goes far beyond that. And the money to make it happen is coming from several sources, Crawford said.
“There’s some of the groundwater money the city gets is going into these basins, too,” he said.
Other funding has come from the Tulare County Association of Governments’ Measure R Trails fund, the city’s recreational facilities fund, Proposition 1 money and groundwater recharge and waterways funding, he said.
Park Grew in Scope over Years of Planning
The grant awarded back in 2019 didn’t mention anything about how big East Side Regional Park’s planned footprint would eventually become. And that’s because the original concept only covered 81-plus acres. At the time it was planned to rival the Riverway Sports Park.
But as more funding has been found, the size of the project has grown to nearly double the size of Riverway. Riverway Sports Park covers only 83 acres. The original grant proposal only mentioned trails and the disc golf course. The list of planned amenities has grown greatly since then.
The conceptual drawing of the East Side Regional Park’s layout is tentative, and plans will change as construction continues. And citizens will get their say.
“Keep in mind this is a conceptual plan,” Crawford said. “When we get closer to design, they’re going to get more public input.”
Park to Serve as Focus for East Visalia
But the plan for the park is already pretty nice.
At the far north will be a 3-acre dog park. It will sit beside the “agriculture education barn,” a sort of industry museum and learning center. South of that on the park’s west side are clusters of softball and youth baseball fields. Those are surrounded by full-size, lighted soccer fields, and lighted tennis and pickleball courts, and lighted basketball courts. Rounding out the sports facilities are the 18-hole disc golf course, an aquatics center and a cricket pitch.
The east side of the East Side Regional Park is given over entirely to water features. Among the ponds and waterways will be a large, open lawn for events, a 30,000-square-foot community center, an amphitheater with seating for 1,500 and a “resource center” that will be an education center about groundwater, a groundwater recharge facility and a so-called “water wise” garden.
Parking lots, playgrounds and picnic areas are spread throughout.
The location is no accident. The new park will provide recreation space in a part of town where there’s very little of it now.
“That was kind of the reason for the placement of this,” Crawford said. “The East Side Regional Park was to just get more park space into that part of town.”
Park Also Helps with Groundwater Recharge Effort
But there’s a second important reason the East Side Regional Park is where it is. The smallish recharge basin that is now a landscaped pond and exercise trail has been there for decades. But the political climate has changed recently, and the state has new laws demanding local groundwater sustainability agencies find ways to protect the state’s overdrawn aquifers. So, the upgrades of the land, its beautification, are also part of the city’s effort to put some water back underground.
Since the basin was in place, that’s where the city started with the park’s creation. And that’s about as far as they’ve gotten.
“That’s what we’ve got, the basins, right now,” Crawford said. “We’re kind of progressing slowly with the basins and the park out there, as money becomes available.”
The project, however, will probably go into higher gear soon. More extensive efforts are in the works.
“I would say we’re talking 2025-26,” Crawford said. “You may see it start this year.”
State Throws City Planners a Curveball
Not too long after the city started planning for the East Side Regional Park, the Caltrans started setting its own agenda for the area. And the two sets of plans may clash.
Right now, the state’s transportation department is reworking the interchange of Highway 198 at Lovers Lane. But the project is only a stopgap measure. The overcrowded interchange has been a problem for decades, reaching the point traffic sometimes backs up onto the highway, so in about 10 years, Caltrans plans to build a new interchange as a long-term solution.
Unfortunately, the two-mile long highway redesign project may overlap with the city’s new park.
“The big thing with this is city staff is working with Caltrans at the moment,” Crawford said. “We’re kind of seeing where Caltrans is going with that 148 Interchange.”
The plan calls for a new north-south road that would run either next to or through the park. A rerouting of the frontage roads will also significantly widen Highway 198’s footprint just where the city wants to put its new park.
But the interchange is at least six or seven years away from starting. And it may not impact the city’s plans for the park at all. No one knows yet. It’s too early to tell.
“Caltrans is still a little way off from doing anything meaningful in terms of design,” Crawford said. “We’re trying to work with them to get an idea if the project is going to encroach.”
The city has already dug a couple of new wells to provide water for the park’s landscaping, and the Caltrans project may require them to move. The state agency is aware of the city’s plan and of its concern about overlap.
But Crawford isn’t overly worried.
“City staff and Caltrans have a good relationship,” he said. “They have a good history of working out projects that are the best for the community they can.”
City Hopes Citizens Take Care of East Side Regional
Perhaps because East Side Regional Park is still not officially a park yet, with much of it still looking like untended open space without signage, it hasn’t been treated as well as it should be. In general, Visalians pick up after themselves and don’t abuse the amenities the city provides. But it seems they need a reminder.
City officials caution that park rules apply at the popular new spot. No electrical vehicles are allowed on the trails, and visitors need to pack out the trash they bring in, though trash cans are available.
Dog-owners will have to bring their own poop bags, as none are yet available. And city staff says visitors need to stay on the trails and out of the basins. The basins are muddy and can be dangerous. Other open areas should be avoided as spring continues to arrive so that newly planted awns can grow.