On Saturday, Take Back Santa Cruz, Save Our Shores and the Friends of Lighthouse Field will be launching a major cleanup campaign at Lighthouse Field. The 36-acre landmark has been seeing an increase in drug dealing, littering and illegal camping since 2007, the year that the city gave up its lease to the site and it reverted to State Park control. Given the current budget crisis facing California, the Parks Department is hard-pressed to provide the necessary protection for the area. According to Take Back Santa Cruz, “Whenever you pull the community out of an area, then this illegal activity is going to flourish.”
Sometimes, though, the solution for a problem site like Lighthouse Field can be simple. Everyone agrees that more visitors should be encouraged to visit the park, since this will scare off the drug dealers and illegal campers. The question is: What is it that is keeping them from coming?
Many people point to the leash laws in state parks, which require all dogs visiting Lighthouse Field to be kept on a leash. Opponents of the leash laws say that this drove dog owners away. After all, what is the value of bringing dogs to roam an area like that if they have to be kept on a leash? Nature abhors a vacuum, so when the dog-owners stopped coming, the addicts and vagrants replaced them, they say.
Not everyone agrees, though. Some parks officials claim that people are grateful that they can visit the park without being surrounded by dogs on the loose. “We have had many people who approach us and say they enjoy visiting without having dogs running and jumping on them,” says the state parks’ local superintendent Kirk Lingenfelter.
While the city has appealed to the parks department to loosen its leash laws, they have had no success as yet. At one point, the city even considered buying the park for $103,000, just so that it could minimize the leash laws. The price was right, but there were other factors to consider, such as expensive environmental impacts reports and the possibility of lawsuits by people who think Snoopy is a dangerous beast.
And so the Lighthouse Field Park has deteriorated, and Santa Cruz is all the worse for it. This Saturday morning, local groups are doing what they can to take back the park and make it family (and Fido) friendly again. Read more at Santa Cruz Sentinel.
