Thirteen public restrooms in Mission Bay Park are now closed. Last year the city tried to remove more than 180 fire rings. The Mission Beach Lifeguard Station deteriorated to the point that a structural evaluation called for its immediate closure. And across multiple parking lots, the city’s response to after-hours activity and maintenance challenges has been to install gates and impose timed overnight closures.
These unfortunate decisions are not isolated incidents. They are predictable results of a system that has lost the ability to deliver basic, consistent care for one of San Diego’s most important public assets.
Mission Bay Park was granted by the state of california as tidelands trust property and permanently dedicated as a public park for the benefit of all San Diegans over 80 years ago. It was conceived as a generational public asset — a place of open beaches, boating and shared enjoyment that would serve the region for decades to come.
As trustee of these tidelands, the city of San Diego carries a legal and fiduciary responsibility to maintain the park for public benefit. For most of its history the park largely fulfilled its promise, despite chronic underfunding. But it has never been as neglected as it is today.
A pattern of poor decisions raises a fundamental governance question: How do we create effective, sustained stewardship for a major public asset like Mission Bay Park when the default governmental structure is optimized for short-term political and budgetary cycles?
Mission Bay Park generates substantial and sufficient lease revenue from the businesses operating within it to sustain the park as the state envisioned it. Voters recognized the structural problem in 2008 when they passed Proposition C, dedicating lease revenue above $20 million to park improvements. That reform, however, contains two critical flaws.
The first $20 million — a threshold frozen in time with no inflation adjustment — continues to flow to the General Fund for any municipal purpose. And the dedicated funds above that threshold may only be used for capital projects, not for the daily operations, cleaning, staffing and patrols required to keep facilities open and usable. The result is a park that can build new playgrounds while being forced to close its restrooms.
Mission Bay’s challenges are generational in scale. Its ecology, master plan implementation and long-term infrastructure require the kind of sustained, professional stewardship that annual budgeting and four-year political cycles are structurally ill-equipped to deliver. This is not a failure of any single administration; it is a structural feature of how decisions about long-horizon public assets are currently made. The mismatch leaves important obligations under-resourced even when the underlying need is clear.
Effective alternatives exist — and they are proven. When New York City’s iconic Central Park fell into severe decline in the late 1970s, citizens founded the Central Park Conservancy, a public-private partnership that has since raised and invested hundreds of millions of dollars while the city retained ownership and policy control. A dedicated governance structure with stable funding creates clear accountability and supports the consistent, professional stewardship a park requires. An expanded partnership for Mission Bay can do the same.
The Mission Bay Park Conservancy exists today to serve as a constructive partner. We are prepared to develop and implement targeted pilots focused on reliable daily services, smarter enforcement and operational improvements.
San Diegans deserve a Mission Bay Park that honors the vision and legal obligations under which it was granted as public trust land. The current pattern — responding to maintenance and operational challenges by reducing services and restricting access — will not produce that outcome.
It is time to build governance structures capable of delivering real, sustained stewardship for this generational public asset. The Mission Bay Park Conservancy is prepared to lead that effort.
Bradley A. Schnell serves as founder and board chair of the Mission Bay Park Conservancy and operates Mission Bay Beach Club, a hospitality business on a Mission Bay leasehold.
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