Updated 2026-09-04

Westlake Park Saved!

Thank you to everyone who showed up and made your voice heard!

On September 4, 2026, the Olympic Club notified the city that it is withdrawing from the memorandum of understanding for the Westlake Park field project. In its letter, general manager Tim Muessle wrote that the club is “respectfully withdrawing from the MOU authorized in June of this year between Daly City and the Olympic Club regarding the Westlake Park fields.” Nothing is signed. The park stays ours.

Let’s keep the momentum

This worked because enough of us showed up. We wrote emails. We would not let it drop. That is the model. A public park stays public only as long as enough neighbors are willing to notice what happens to it.

Winning this one does not mean we stop paying attention. Daly City has plenty more decisions ahead that will shape this city for the next thirty years, and most of them will get far less attention than a park did. If this fight is what got you paying attention to what the city is doing, stay with us. We will let you know what is next.

The original page, for the record

Everything below is preserved exactly as it read during the campaign.

The Olympic Club wants a third of our park for thirty years

Daly City is negotiating a deal to let the Olympic Club, a private San Francisco athletic club, renovate Westlake Field in exchange for 30% private access and a members-only clubhouse on our park. Nothing binding has been signed yet, so it is not too late to make our voice heard.

The August 13 town hall has been cancelled. The next public meeting is the City Council meeting on Monday, September 14.

Jump ahead to what you can do ↓

Below is the deal as the club itself described it, and why we think it should not happen at all.

What the club is asking for

At the July 29 town hall the club’s athletic director walked through the most recent version of the proposed deal. These are its own figures:

• A 15-year term, with three five-year extensions. Thirty years at the outside.
• 30% of the field’s bookable hours, between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. In practice: 4–10 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, 6–10 p.m. Wednesday, and all day Saturday. That is 30 hours of a 98-hour week.
• $50,000 a year in rent, prepaid, with $250,000 paid up front.
• A members-only building on park property, for storage, locker rooms and a social room.
• Fencing. The club says the field would stay open during open hours, and also that it may need to lock the field to protect the new surface.
• Synthetic turf. Our natural grass field, replaced with plastic.
• Pickleball courts where parking spots are now, plus dual pickleball lines on the rebuilt tennis courts. The club says that layout is still being worked out.
• A dog run, because more club time on the field means more enforcement of the existing no-dogs rule. Where the run would go is undecided.

In exchange the club promises to pay for the renovation and the upkeep. Its plans say nothing about the playground. Nobody here is against a better park. We are against it costing us access to land that is already ours.

Why this is a bad deal

A public park is not a leasing opportunity

This is the part that gets lost in the schedules and the dollar figures. Westlake Park was set aside for public recreation. Handing a third of it to a private club for a generation does not make it a better park. It makes it a club facility that the public is allowed to visit on the days the club does not want it.

We have the least to give

Daly City has roughly 83 acres of parkland for about 100,000 residents. The Olympic Club sits on roughly 365 acres for about 11,000 members. They have more land per member than we have per thousand residents. The club is not short of grass. We are. Asking the city with the least park space on the peninsula to hand over a third of one of its fields is backwards.

$50,000 a year is not a serious number

That is about $4,100 a month. It is roughly what one family pays to rent one house in Daly City. The club would pay about that much for a third of a public park, and it is not tied to inflation, so by the end of a thirty-year term it is worth around half of what it is worth today.

Thirty years is not a partnership, it is a generation

A child born this year would finish high school before this agreement ran out. They may even have kids of their own! Nobody signing it will be on the council when it ends. The people who will live with it are the ones being asked to accept it now, and they are also the people least likely to show up and protest. We need your voice!

They want the hours we actually use

The club describes weekday evenings and Saturdays as underutilized. Those are the hours working parents can get their kids to a field. Junior Giants plays Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and the club’s own earlier presentation listed it as a conflict. If the city believes those hours are empty, it can publish the field’s reservation records and show us.

“Public-private partnership” is doing a lot of work in that sentence

The public brings the land. The private club brings a check and takes the prime hours. It also gets a members-only building and courts we cannot use. Membership at the Olympic Club is by invitation. Almost nobody reading this could join it if they wanted to.

We would lose the grass

A natural field becomes plastic, and plastic fields wear out and get replaced every ten to fourteen years. That is a permanent change to what the park is, decided in a negotiation most residents only heard about this summer.

The club’s design firm calls this third-generation turf: shorter blades, organic infill instead of tire crumb, third-party safety testing. Millbrae heard the same reassurances and banned the product anyway. Installing synthetic grass or artificial turf has been illegal there, citywide, since January 1, 2024. The ordinance lays out why. The materials contain PFAS, phthalates and PAHs, “chemicals that are known carcinogens, neurotoxicants, mutagens, and endocrine disruptors.” The plastic sheds as it wears and washes into the storm drains and the watershed. The carpet keeps rain from soaking into the ground. And a worn-out field ends up in a landfill, because in the ordinance’s words the ability to recycle the material “is neither fully developed nor available.”

At the town hall the club said the worn-out carpet would be “removed, recycled, replaced.” Millbrae’s council put it in law that the recycling technology does not exist yet. Those two claims disagree, and the difference should be settled in writing before anyone tears out a grass field.

We are not the only ones in this fight. In San Francisco, neighbors of Crocker Amazon Park are pushing back right now on the same grass-to-plastic conversion, and their summary of the turf research is the clearest short read we have found. The Olympic Club itself does not put plastic where its members play their marquee sport: the golf courses next door are natural grass, kept immaculate. Synthetic turf is what it proposes for us.

What we still do not know

Where every council member stands

Five people will decide this. We want all five on the record, by name, before the vote.

The current deal, in writing

The terms at the top of this page come from a spoken presentation, because that is the most recent version anyone outside the negotiation has seen. The memorandum the council approved on June 22 says a 20-year term; at the town hall the club called that number an error from an old draft and said 15 is correct. The documents from June 24 have not been published at all. Publish the current draft before asking anyone to accept it.

An independent review

The turf safety claims come from the club’s design firm. The cost and savings figures come from the club and from a staff slide, and the analysis behind them is not public. Has the city commissioned an independent environmental review, or a traffic study for a schedule that adds evening sessions three weeknights and all day Saturday? If those studies exist, publish them. If they do not, say so before signing anything that lasts thirty years.

The noise plan for pickleball

Anyone who has stood near a pickleball court knows the sound carries. The proposed courts would sit near homes. Nothing presented so far mentions noise at all.

What you can do

Ask for something specific. Vague opposition gets thanked and shelved. Ask the council to reject the agreement, ask each member to state a position on the record, and ask the city to publish the June 24 documents and the field’s reservation records.

Sources

Everything above comes from Daly City’s own record, plus a recording of the July 29 town hall, which the city does not stream or minute. The synthetic turf section also draws on Millbrae’s ordinance and on the Crocker Amazon campaign in San Francisco.

• June 22 memorandum of understanding
• June 22 City Council meeting
• July 27 City Council meeting
• July 29 town hall: recorded and transcribed by this site’s author.
• Millbrae’s prohibition of synthetic grass and artificial turf, chapter 8.65 of its municipal code, in force since January 1, 2024. The ordinance text and staff report are linked from that page.
• Keep Crocker Real, the neighbors fighting the same turf conversion at Crocker Amazon Park in San Francisco.