Dear Editor,
A five-month collective effort by Friends of Lake Temescal to stop the Oakland City Council from contracting to allow two massive LED day-and-night billboards next to Temescal Regional Recreation Area has prevailed: The billboard proposal—which included five locations in Oakland—has been quietly withdrawn by its sponsor, Council Member Charlene Wang.
Wang, along with Council Member Noel Gallo, had put forward the measure asking the City Council to approve the erection of the LED billboards. Each would have been up to 85 feet above highway level, illuminated on two sides, and would have measured from 48 to 60 feet wide and from 14 to 20 feet high.
Additionally, the measure would have allowed billboards on highways where they have been forbidden up to the present moment. There are no billboards on Highway 24 from Walnut Creek to the MacArthur Maze, and there are no billboards on Highway 13. The two locations next to Lake Temescal were to be on the PG&E substation property adjacent to the park.
The billboard proposal was withdrawn, at least for now, at the May 7 City Council Rules and Legislation Committee meeting. A staff member from Charlene Wang's office asked the committee to remove the current billboard proposal from future scheduled City Council meetings. The committee voted to approve its removal.
For her part, to this day Wang has not responded to correspondence from many citizens who wrote to her opposing the billboards. In the future, a new version of the billboard proposal could be resubmitted.
The Friends of Lake Temescal organization (I am one of the leaders of this group) spearheaded what became widespread opposition to the billboard proposal. The organization was joined by the Alameda County Democratic Party Central Committee, the Sierra Club Northern Alameda County group, and Council Members Zac Unger and Janani Ramachandran in opposing the Lake Temescal billboards.
Support the Lake Temescal Restoration Project
Friends of Lake Temescal is a loosely knit group that champions Lake Temescal. Since 2019, it has worked on restoring the lake itself, which suffers from chronic toxic algae blooms.
A 1977 EPA report on Lake Temescal quantifies what has been lost with the ongoing decay of the lake. In 1977, according to the EPA report, 750,000 people visited the park in one year, and 150,000 of them used the beach and lake. The report noted the following: “A peak day during the four-month swimming season brings as many as 3,000 people to the lake’s beach and swimming area.” In 2024, with the decline of the lake, visitation to the park had dropped to 222,000, according to park district figures. And most likely, less than 1,000 people swim there over the course of a year.
Members of the public can track and join the effort to persuade the East Bay Regional Park District board to fund a lake restoration project by monitoring the Friends of Lake Temescal Facebook site.
By Jeffery Kahn
Rockridge resident
