A community workshop was held on April 24 to discuss the fate of the culturally significant murals. In spite of cooperative efforts to hold a positive, unifying meeting, it did not go as planned.

Our goal is that the City of SB change the Ortega Park Master Plan. This is definitely proving to be difficult. However, because the City has not shown a good faith effort to work with the Ortega Park Murals Rescue Project, this group is also calling for a redesign of the Ortega Park Master Plan - In no uncertain terms.

Here is their May 1, 2021 statement:

The Ortega Park Mural Rescue Project and a collective group of its supporters are prepared to challenge the City's Parks and Recreation Department's Ortega Park Master Plan. After 6 months of advocating for the preservation of the murals in the park, it is now clear that the Parks Department continues to stall and play games with the community. 

After agreeing to work closely with the Parks Department to produce the very successful community outreach event at Ortega Park on April 24th, the community was exploited during the event by the Parks Department. They failed to communicate appropriately with the community stakeholders planning the event. Which caused confusion and frustration, when a new group of organizers calling themselves the "Save Ortega Park Art Committee" entered the event unannounced. 

We later found out the Parks Department assisted with the formation of this group and knew ahead of time that they would be coming into the park to speak. The reason why this situation caused confusion for the event organizers and the community was due to this new group's message calling for the implementation of the Master Plan as is and that the artists joining this new group wanted new opportunities to paint murals and be compensated. 

This stance was clearly orchestrated to control the narrative regarding the design of the park and to contradict our efforts to preserve the murals. The community stakeholders and the other City staff who helped to plan the April 24th event, had invited the artists associated with this new group to be a part of the event's presentation. We were told 3 weeks prior to the event that they were not interested in participating. 

After that, Assistant City Administrator Rebecca Bjork confirmed that all of the artists associated with Ortega Park would receive a $100 stipend for participating with the event. I personally reached out to the Parks and Recreation staff to inform them of this development. The email I sent out with this information was never returned with a response and I was essentially ignored. 

This lack of communication and coordination for an event co-sponsored by the City was a disingenuous ploy against the community and especially against those who were involved with the planning of the event. Therefore, I hope you can understand why most of us were confused when this new group showed up. 

We have been involved from the onset of this effort. We have watched the Parks Department attempt to conceal aspects of the design approval process and now after the April 24th event, they exposed themselves to be clearly deceitful in any effort to engage the community or the Eastside neighborhood. What the Parks Department tried to accomplish was a classic case of divide a conquer against those of us organizing to preserve the murals. The exploited the community, the artists and their own staff. These are all people of color and resulted in a blatant racial attack against the Eastside community. 

On the positive side, the Ortega Park Mural Rescue Project is now aligning with formidable female of color leadership and with members of our indigenous community. They are assisting with the development of an outreach effort to contact this new group in order to unite all of us together. The strength of unity is our current priority for moving forward.  We must demonstrate that we are all now related due to the horrible behavior the Parks Department used while the planning of the April 24th event unfolded.

Lastly, the 8.5-million-dollar grant application for Ortega Park was submitted incomplete in February. It requires an environmental report regarding the significance of the murals and design approvals from the Historic Landmark and the Planning Commissions. All of this needs to be completed by June 12th. I asked Parks Director Jill Zachary about this timeline after learning that she would bring the Master Plan back to City Council for an update at the end of May. This is her response.

         "We have been working on other projects this week and looking at the various timelines and will be back in touch next week." Jill Zachary.

                                                                                                      
The Ortega Park Mural Rescue Project is committed to a new redesign of Ortega Park by reclaiming the park, preserving the murals, the creation of new public art opportunities, a design to include the neighborhood's desires for new amenities, a new swimming pool and soccer field and ensuring the park is vibrant with activities by developing a cultural community arts hub within the new design. There is also reason to believe that the design for a skating facility in the Ortega Park Master Plan was tainted. We should have more information regarding this situation in our next update. You can contact Victoria Valente if you want more information now regarding this situation at vicks93103@yahoo.com.

Thank You,

The Ortega Park Mural Rescue Project

Here is a link to their petition:

Preserve the Legacy of the Murals in Ortega Park