Dracena Park Bridge Project Gets Thumbs Up from Piedmont Park Commission

Piedmont's Park Commission gave its blessing Thursday evening, May 23, to a proposed footbridge in Dracena Quarry Park.

The bridge is an Eagle Scout project for Cole Becker, a Piedmont High School junior and the son of Mark Becker, a Piedmont resident and president of a design-build construction firm, Mark Becker Inc., that is providing much of the expertise for the project.

The commission sent the project forward to the Piedmont City Council with a unanimous positive recommendation and about 10 conditions, including an updated cost estimate, a performance completion bond and a requirement that all costs associated with the bridge be paid for with private (non-city) funds.

The item is expected to be on the agenda for the council's June 3 meeting.

The bridge will cost an estimated minimum of $35,000 if built of redwood and $43,000 if constructed with of yellow cedar, Cole Becker told the commission Thursday. He apologized for not yet having supplied the city with a detailed written budget.

Becker said he is setting up a donation website through the umbrella crowdfunding organization gofundme.com. He said about 15 percent of the cost has already been paid to professional consultants, including an arborist and geotechnical experts. His father has promised to make up any gap between donations and the final cost of the bridge.

He also said the design has been changed somewhat from his original proposal, from a suspension bridge to a beam support structure.

Several park commissioners noted that the project appears to have strong support from Piedmont residents, including immediate neighbors of Dracena Park, and that the majority of some 40 emails received before Thursday's meeting favored approval of the bridge.

The footbridge would span a ravine leading to the off-leash dog area in Dracena Park. It's in about the same location as an earlier bridge that was removed by the city in the 1970s because of vandalism.

The commission meeting drew one speaker who opposed the project, Piedmont resident Chris Harvey, who said he spent decades overseeing construction projects at UC Berkeley.

Harvey said the proposed bridge is "beautifully designed," but leaving Dracena Park in its natural state maximizes its beauty.

He said the earlier bridge had a valid purpose — to cross a creek that no longer flows through the park — but Becker's proposal is simply "new construction." 

He also said Dracena Park has a "traditional drinking space for Piedmont kids" and that the bridge could become an "attractive nuisance."

He said that for construction of a pedestrian bridge across Hearst Avenue that linked two UC Berkeley undergraduate residence halls, "We chose to enclose it all the way up, with glass on top. Eighteen-year-olds do stupid things, especially when drinking."

Tim Rood, a member of the city's Budget Advisory and Financial Planning Committee, asked whether the bridge proposal might be subject to formal environmental review and whether the Planning Commission should also review the project.

Mark Feldkamp, the city's parks and project manager, said park improvement projects typically do not go through the environmental review process and most have not been reviewed by the Planning Commission.

Cole Becker told park commissioners that the seed of his proposal came from walking in Dracena Park with his dog and seeing abutments from the previous bridge that he played on as a child. That led to asking his father about what purpose the abutments originally served, he said.

He said actual construction of the bridge would take one to two weeks and would require closing the off-leash dog area to the public during that period.

The construction work would be done by qualified union labor, he said, while he and perhaps one or two other Scouts would help with clean-up and similar tasks.