A Benicia resident for 35 years, Carol is also a board member for the Benicia Library Foundation and the Benicia Historical Society, serves on the city’s Tourism Committee, and takes an active role in the costume shop for Benicia Old Town Theatre Group. Her husband, Bob, is an environmental planner who joined the Benicia State Park Association board this summer. When Carol talked to Benicia Magazine in late July, committees were developing plans for everything from security and maintenance to volunteer staffing and fundraising on behalf of the local state parks. City staff was working on proposals for a private-public partnership needed to keep the sites open. Benicia council members are scheduled to consider options for different levels of commitment on September 6, then the city’s plan would go to the state. “I’m a real optimist,” Carol said. “I think we’ll be able to keep the status quo in terms of the number of days the sites are open if we can come up with an operating agreement.” The capitol and Fischer-Hanlon House are open Saturdays and Sundays, and the State Recreation Area is open Wednesday through Sunday. But getting to that point will require diligent work and a large commitment from the city and volunteers. “This is like a birthing process—and someone said that I’m the midwife,” she says. “It’s really messy.”
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to run either of these sites. We’ll have to have a state employee on site along with the volunteers. The state owns it and they won’t relinquish ownership. I’m not sure the State Park Association is ready to take on the full operations at this time. But there are literally people coming out of the woodwork willing to help—other nonprofits contacting us to help—so it’s giving us more confidence that this could occur. But it’s scary. Do you have an estimate of how much it will cost to keep both state parks open? We can have a bare-bones operation at the capitol and Fischer-Hanlon House for about $40,000 a year. That’s with two paid, seasonal people, for two days a week, but no benefits, disability or workers’ comp, and that doesn’t take into consideration utilities or supplies like toilet paper for the bathrooms, so the overall costs will be higher. When we’re talking about operation of the State Recreation Area, we’re talking six figures. The historic sites are much less because we don’t have as large an area to maintain. What has the state done to prepare for closing the parks? We were told [in July] that the state started building cases for the archives and artifacts in 2008. … We’ve learned that there were measurements taken for plywood to go over all the windows. They’ve taken measurements at all 70 sites, though not all of them have historic homes. The state required recently a listing of costs to inventory [the buildings]. We were in the garden recently and the ranger said they’d had to give cost estimates on restoring the garden if it were abandoned. These are 100-year-old plants. How do you restore those? B
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