Every Saturday morning, Arvind Kumar and his husband Ashok Jethanandani work to pull weeds and protect native California plants, but not in their own yard. Instead, they’ve spent the last 20 years trying to fix years of neglect and unsafe water at Lake Cunningham Park in their East San Jose neighborhood.
They have been focusing on stinkwort for the past five years. It is an exotic species that comes from southern Europe, northern Africa, and southwestern Asia. It is sticky, smells like camphor, and is painful to touch.
They have been working hard to bring the park back to its former glory. Now, Congressmember Jimmy Panetta’s $850,000 in government funds and the hard work of San Jose Councilmember Domingo Candelas are giving them a boost. The cash will be used to improve the lake’s.
The project is important to Candelas because he learned to swim in the lake and went to the park with his family as a child. He said that the extra money is a good thing for making the parks in East San Jose more fair.
She told San Jose Spotlight, “It’s progress, and now we can start that work instead of just talking about it.” “This allows us to actually put some actions in motion.”
Candelas’ five-year plan to fix up the park ran into some money problems along the way. Voters passed Measure T, a $650 million disaster preparedness bond, in 2018. But last year, money from that bond was taken away from the lake restoration. The council gave about $3.2 million from Measure T cash to improve the quality of the water in Lake Cunningham in 2021.
The park in East San Jose is a free spot for families to get together. But Alice Kaufman, who leads policy and lobbying for the Green Foothills preservation group, said it’s a lot more than that.
“Parks with the green spaces and the trees and everything … they cool the temperatures during heat waves, they absorb storm water during flooding, they clean the air, they provide a habitat for birds and insects,” she told a news conference. “They’re just oases of green in the middle of a city.”
The East Side has more than just Lake Cunningham to deal with when it comes to the environment. People who live and work on Alum Rock Avenue have pushed for faster cleanup of the toxic fuel spill that could make people sick if they breathe it in.
Kumar said that he and his husband will keep fixing up Lake Cunningham Park to protect important wildlife for the neighborhood.
“It feels like breathing…” He said, “It’s important, you can’t live without it.” “Being in nature is like that.”