Pinole Creekside Park Planning
The Friends of Pinole Creek Watershed has been working hard to promote the establishment of a new park alongside Pinole Creek. The planned site, known as Pinole Creekside Park, extends from Pinole Valley Rd to Sarah Court, between the Pinole Valley High School and the Pinole Valley Shopping center. Currently there is a trail that follows the creek and is frequently used by the students. Unfortunately, the trail has not been maintained, is lined with non-native weeds and the creek shores are overgrown and choked with blackberry. FOPCW regularly conducts trash clean-ups along this creek and was successful in getting two new trashcans installed.
The trashcans have helped, but the idea of truly converting this trail and its corridor into a park was conceived to increase its stewardship by the students, local businesses, and the neighboring community at Sarah Court. BASE (https://www.baselandscape.com/), a landscape architecture firm in San Francisco agreed to complete a pro-bono concept design for Creekside Park and the trail. (Click on the images below). These designs were then used by members of Pinole Earth Team to gather input on the concepts from other students and the general public by holding “tabling” events along the trail and at the Shopping Center.
All the comments were submitted back to our BASE contact MaFe Gonzales and were incorporated into a final concept for the park. In June 0f 2025, FOPCW was contacted by the San Francisco Bay office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to meet and discuss the Creekside project. The EPA team toured the Creekside trail and checked out the fish passage. They indicated that the Creekside Park project would be eligible for a design and implementation grant for the 2025 cycle of the San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund (SFBWQIF). However, changes in the political leadership of EPA in Washington resulted in this grant opportunity being canceled.
March 2026 Update: The City of Pinole staff have been very supportive of the project and worked closely with FOPCW volunteers in developing new grant proposals. The City of Pinole applied for a CalTrans Clean California Grant (https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/clean-california-local-grant-program/) to implement phase 1 of the Creekside Park project. In February, the City announced they had been selected for a grant of $299,000. This funding will support the removal of non-native plants, the installation of native species alongside the trail, and the purchase of amenities such as picnic tables and interpretive signs. At the same time, EPA announced a new grant opportunity (https://www.epa.gov/sfbay-program/funding) for the San Francisco Bay. This grant required a 25% match, and the CalTrans Clean California grant qualified as the 25% match. On March 3, the City submitted an application of this EPA grant for an additional $1.2 million to complete the Creekside Park project AND complete restoration along the creek all the way from Creekside Park to the Bay.
The City envisions the Creekside Park project as a partnership with FOPCW, the Nations of Lisjan Tribe, Pinole Valley High School Earth Team, CiviCorps, Pinole Creek Unhoused Stewards cohort of Safe Organized Spaces Richmond (SOS Richmond), and the Contra Costa County Flood Control & Water Conservation District. If the EPA grant is awarded the project will be implemented over the next four years.
