General Manager
East Bay Regional Park District
Welcome to the East Bay Regional Park District. As I look at the growth and innovative legacy of this agency over the past decades, I feel extremely proud. The Park District was founded in 1934 in the middle of the Great Depression by everyday citizens who wanted to protect open space and create recreation possibilities for the health and well-being of their fellows. They were visionaries before their time. Nearly eighty-five years later, the result is the current East Bay Regional Park District which provides the green fabric of the East Bay with more recreation opportunities than those citizens of yesteryear could have ever imagined.
The direction of the Park District is guided by our 2013 Master Plan document, which will continue be our planning guide over the coming years. Building on an eight-decade legacy of preserving regional parks, trails and open space, in 2017 we again forged ahead with innovations benefiting the quality of life for millions.
As always, we continued our unwavering commitment to protecting open space and the environment. And we continue to be a Bay Area leader in the national movement of Healthy Parks Healthy People, an initiative to foster understanding about the benefits parks and open space have on individual physical and mental health, as well as on the health of our communities and the environment as a whole.
The East Bay Regional Park District signed a lease to operate the historic, newly renovated “Bridge Yard” building located at the foot of the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge. The 25,000-square foot industrial building was the former maintenance hub for the Key System public transit service that traversed the bridge until 1960. The Bridge Yard building will serve as the recreational anchor of the future East Bay Gateway Regional Park where the last remaining pilings from the old Bay Bridge will be reused to create a new shoreline public access observation platform.
In 2017, with the East Bay’s growing and increasingly diverse population, the Park District continued to utilize innovative partnerships to help residents connect with nature.
The report showed that Regional Parks:
The report also showed that every $1 spent yields $4 in public benefit.
The benefits of parks are as important now as they were in 1934: parks give families a chance to enjoy nature and stay healthy together with free and very low-cost options for recreation and exercise.
The Park District’s accomplishments are based on the value of transparency. We hold the public’s trust through meaningful stakeholder engagement and unfettered access to timely and reliable information on decisions and performance.
I hope you will explore our website and discover our wonderful East Bay Parks.
Sincerely,
Robert E. Doyle
General Manager
East Bay Regional Park District
Left to right, Tom Leatherman, Superintendent of four East Bay National Park Service sites, with Secretary Jewell and Robert E. Doyle at site of future visitor center, Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial.