By Brooklynn Wong
Residents continue to express opinions on how “LARC Park” ought to be designed. The roughly nine acres donated to the city (near the corner of Cerritos Avenue and Lexington Drive/Denni Street) by the owners of the Los Alamitos Race Course (LARC) have been the center of some recent controversy in Cypress. Those residents that have been vocal in expressing an opinion say they want a multi-use park that is unlocked and open to public use. They have been spooked by any number of rumors, including but not limited to, that the park will be mostly made up of soccer fields, potentially for only a couple of organized sports clubs to use, and locked when not in use.
City staff has denied some of these rumors, and said that they are taking residents’ desires into consideration, but it’s all still fluid.
Construction is not set to begin until 2021, with a goal of having the park completed by the end of that year.
A couple of residents active in the community went to the Recreation & Community Services Commission meeting last Tuesday to make sure city staff hadn’t forgotten about them.
Resident George Pardon raised concerns that a survey that had been sent to the community about the park was “biased,” and said he would prefer a park in the style of Stanton Central Park, with lots of different amenities.
Another attendee at the meeting said there is “no fun place for teenagers to go in Cypress,” and that this drives them to spend their leisure time in other cities, so the design ought to be one that is versatile and offers infrastructure that will attract young people.
After the meeting, Cypress Recreation and Community Services Director Cameron Harding said that at this point the city is moving forward with a schematic that does include “athletic fields,” but there has been no concrete decision on what percentage of the park will be left over after that for other amenities, or what those other amenities will be.
There will be more community meetings in the next few weeks to discuss these amenities. The dates have yet to be announced.
And just what will the park’s official name be? The Recreation & Community Services Commission discussed this too at their meeting last week. Harding explained that the City Council advised the Commission to handle the naming, and the Commission then decided to reach out to the public. Harding said at some point a survey will be put out, likely on social media and the city’s website, for anyone who wants to to chime in, and they hope to have three to five names to recommend sometime in the fall.