At long last, the Pleasanton City Council is expected to approve a spending measure Tuesday that will provide more than $4 million in public and some private funding to preserve, restore and expand the significant buildings, artifacts and remnants at the long-proposed 7-acre Alviso Adobe Community Park. When completed in early 2008, the park will offer a unique opportunity to explore past generations of habitants in the Amador-Livermore Valley, from the Ohlone Indians and their ancestors, the Spanish settlers and ranchers and the subsequent European settlers who developed today’s Tri-Valley, including a replica of the Meadowlark Dairy that provided California’s first pasteurized milk production.
One of the early advocates of restoring the old Alviso Adobe is David Hartman, a fourth grade teacher at Lydiksen Elementary School. His passion in preserving this important piece of Pleasanton’s history started years ago. Recognizing the value a restored historical park would offer their age group, his students contributed $150 which they gave to the city on his behalf in 2000. Those fourth graders are now high school sophomores and, like Hartman and the hundreds of others throughout the community who have contributed to the effort, are anxiously awaiting Tuesday night’s vote that will finally get their favored project under way
Although always supported politically, the problem the city has faced is the continuing and growing gap between rising costs for building out the Adobe project and the initial budget which both contributions and city capital appropriations had anticipated. By last month, that funding gap had grown to $1.7 million. With construction costs escalating, council members and City Manager Nelson Fialho decided to bite the bullet and take money from other planned projects and programs to fully fund the Alviso Adobe project now before new cost estimates make it more expensive. With an ever-increasing number of costly capital improvement projects on their priority list, the council’s decision comes at a time when further delays to the Alviso Adobe project might have caused it to be forgotten forever. Besides, although temporary repairs have shored up the deteriorating 150-year-old adobe, major restoration must come soon before the building crumbles away.
As a member of the Alviso Adobe Community Park Task Force, Hartman has urged the city to find the money to move forward with what he calls Pleasanton’s “legacy in the 21st Century,” an extraordinary hallmark that witnessed how different groups of people played a role in the Tri-Valley’s development. The park will offer a walk-through history continuum of human habitation of American Indians, Californios Mexican and European descendants who lived here, with actual demonstrations of early tool-making, baking and milking techniques and sanitation. Unlike Pleasanton’s many public parks, Alviso Adobe will have no soccer fields, no group picnic sites and no playground equipment, only its own uniqueness as an historical and cultural center unlike any other in the Bay Area—an authentic living testimony soon to be preserved forever by a community that treasures its past.
