Just up the road from Oakland and Berkeley, the city of Richmond is a minority and low-income community of 115,500 people — mainly Latino, Black and Asian American — with a major Chevron refinery whose pollution has been an ongoing source of conflict (the city just reached a $550-million settlement with Chevron to mitigate health and lifestyle effects of the refinery). It’s also home to an active port and soon — finally — a world-class park. Point Molate exemplifies the struggle for environmental justice in under-parked and over-polluted minority communities.
Political support in Sacramento and Washington helps, but the battle to guarantee the future of 413 acres of city-owned headlands relied on bottom-up organizing and determined citizen engagement that encompassed protests, local candidacies, ballot initiatives, neighborhood meetings, bilingual mailings, public testimony, photo and art exhibits, billboards, site tours and, of course, lawsuits. Democracy, in other words. The headlands site, Point Molate, a former World War II Navy fuel depot largely reclaimed by nature since its closure in 1995, lies just north of the Richmond Bridge.
It deserves its tagline: “The most beautiful part of the Bay Area no one’s ever heard of.” Yet it was almost lost to various development schemes until this summer, when the Richmond City Council voted to approve a $40-million deal to establish it as a fully protected park. The state will provide $36 million (in part through Gov.