I recently met with Jacob “Jake” Gilchrist, the new RPD project manager for the Dolores Park renovations project. Initially, Mary Hobson was the project manager.
According to Jake, “RPD shuffled a number of capital projects around so that we could more effectively balance our workload.” Mary’s focus has narrowed to the playground renovations and Jake has taken on the larger park renovation project. Lucky or cursed? You decide.
Where’s Our Website?
I sent an email last week to RPD and Supervisor Dufty’s office inquiring as to why, after six weeks, we still don’t have a RPD sponsored Dolores Park Renovation project website as was promised at our community meeting on March 3? HUMPH! What’s the deal? He replied stating that the website will be up soon, and “since I am new to the project I would love to chat with you directly soon! As we work internally to our ducks in a row on the project, I’d like to start meeting with community organizations as soon as possible.”
We met the following day. Below are the highlights from our conversation.
Website
Turns out that bureaucracy is bureaucracy is bureaucracy and what it takes a techie nonprofit steering committee member 15 minutes to do (thanks Rob), it takes a city department seven weeks to do. There is the technical stuff, the design, there’s the legal screening, there’s the proofing and the whatnots and whosits. Bottom line is it will be up end of this week. We’ll post the link on our website the moment it pops into our inbox.
Survey
RPD is going to do a survey to understand community interests, needs, wants, and issues. This will be done by walking the park with clipboards and providing a link to the survey online. We’ll be sure to post that link too.
Jake will be at Dolores Park for our first annual event on May 1 from 12:00-5:00. Mark your calendars. More to come on that very very soon.
Community Meetings
The next community meeting was scheduled to happen in May or June. It’s gonna be in July. Why, because Jake is new to the project. He’s got 8 other projects, and he wants to meet with community groups first.
He wants to gather community feedback and present it at the first (second) meeting. At this meeting, Jake said we will also discuss what we can and cannot do from a budgetary perspective, technical constraints, legal requirements, the initial site analysis and finally, if we (the diverse groups of lovely people) can create a shared vision for the park. Can we work together people?
Individual Meetings with Community Groups
Jake is spending some time reaching out to the various community groups that are associated with the park to get an understanding of the various perspectives on issues, and interests of each group. Since we called and bugged him first, we got the first meeting. Woo hoo!
Jake wants to meet with all of us. So dear peer orgs, informal social groups, bloggers, and media, this is it. The door to communication is open. Contact him. He wants to talk to you.
Lastly, if you can muster it, go easy on him, he’s about to get bombarded with inquiries and requests. He’s just one man and we are a large group of very opinionated passionate people.
Contact Info
Jacob Gilchrist
Project Manager
Capital Division
San Francisco Recreation and Park Department
City and County of San Francisco
30 Van Ness Avenue, Fifth Floor, SF, CA 94102
email: jacob (dot) Gilchrist (at) sfgov (dot) org
phone: 415-581-2561
fax: 415-581-2540
www.parks.sfgov.org
