Debra Grabelle was throwing a ball into the bay for her dog Basco on a recent afternoon at Point Isabel, the way she has for years, when someone told her about the fence. A permanent one, along the water's edge on the north side of the park, meant to keep dogs out of the mudflats where shorebirds feed. She didn't flinch. "I can have him swim over there, it's OK," she said, nodding toward open water. "I'm more concerned with the bigger picture than him being able to catch the ball here."
That bigger picture is worth spelling out, because it's not one change. It's two, moving in opposite directions, and they happen to be converging on roughly the same year. Point Isabel, the 50-acre off-leash park that a million and a half people visit annually, is about to lose a slice of its water access to a shorebird protection fence. At almost the same moment, six miles up the shoreline, a shuttered horse track is being bought for $175 million with the intention of turning it into new parkland that would eventually link up with the trail Point Isabel regulars already walk every day. One story shrinks the park you know. The other quietly sets up a version of it ten times larger. Most people who walk here have heard fragments of both. Almost no one has been shown how they fit together.
The Fence Nobody at the Dog Park Asked For
The East Bay Regional Park District has proposed installing permanent fencing along North Point Isabel, the strip of the park that borders McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, to keep dogs out of the mudflats and marsh that shorebirds use for feeding. The district describes it as part of a broader restoration effort that also includes sea-level-rise mitigation and repair to the site's aging landfill cap, done in partnership with California State Parks. Biologists identified the alignment of the fence based on where the most vulnerable habitat sits, according to district spokesperson Bates, who told Richmondside the park district is aware of dog owners' concerns and open to discussing them.
Lew Jacobson, board chair of Point Isabel Dog Owners and Friends, walks the park twice a day with his own dogs and has come around to supporting the project, even knowing it means a temporary closure of parts of North Point Isabel expected around 2027.
"It's going to take time. But you can't have dogs and heavy equipment at the same time. I think the future of off-leash walking in Point Isabel depends on this mitigation project."
Not every regular agrees on the method. One longtime walker who has come to the park nearly every day for decades called the fence proposal an overreaction, arguing that dogs rarely reach the mudflats to begin with. Another PIDO member, Eileen Cohen, used the same word in her own email to the paper. But PIDO itself, a nonprofit with more than 2,500 members that works directly with the district to keep the off-leash program running, has taken an official position in favor of fencing, so long as it stays "as visually un-intrusive as possible." The group's written comments to the district put it plainly: without some kind of barrier, there's a real risk of dogs wandering into sensitive marsh, and protecting that habitat is what keeps the broader off-leash arrangement politically sustainable for the long run.
That's the part easy to miss if you only hear "fence" and picture something walling off the whole park. What's actually planned is a targeted barrier along the most sensitive stretch of North Point Isabel, not a closure of the dog park as a whole, and even the people most invested in unrestricted access have concluded it's the price of keeping the rest of it.
The Same Shoreline, Six Miles North
While that debate plays out at ground level, a much larger deal has been moving through Sacramento and two city councils that will eventually change what this whole stretch of coastline looks like.
Golden Gate Fields, the horse racing track that operated on the Berkeley-Albany border for more than eight decades before closing in 2024, is under an option agreement with the Trust for Public Land to be purchased for $175 million and transferred to the East Bay Regional Park District. The 161-acre site sits in the middle of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, the same 8.5-mile chain of public shoreline that Point Isabel belongs to, and its acquisition would close what former Albany mayor Robert Cheasty called the last major gap in that chain. "This crowning achievement is a major milestone for our shoreline," Cheasty said when the deal was announced.
The money is worth pausing on, because the headline number obscures how the deal is actually being funded. The park district is putting in $20 million, money it set aside from a bond measure voters approved back in 2008, nearly two decades before this purchase became possible. Governor Newsom's revised state budget proposed covering $125 million of the purchase through Proposition 4, the parks and climate resilience bond voters approved in 2024. If that funding holds, roughly seventy percent of a $175 million shoreline acquisition would come from state climate money, not from park district reserves or new local taxes. The Trust for Public Land is covering the rest through private philanthropy. Local zoning already points the site toward exactly this outcome: both Berkeley and Albany have long restricted new housing on the parcel and limited it to water-oriented and recreational uses, so a park was always the most likely next chapter even before this deal existed.
Once complete, the property would connect a run of open space that already includes:
- Albany Beach
- McLaughlin Eastshore State Park
- Point Isabel Regional Shoreline
- The Albany Bulb
- City of Berkeley waterfront parks
- Brooks Island Regional Preserve
EBRPD board member Elizabeth Echols, whose ward includes the property, called it "a dream come true for the East Bay Regional Park District Board of Directors" and said restoring the land to a more natural state would help protect nearby communities from the effects of a changing climate as much as it would protect wildlife. The purchase still has to close, and the trust has until the end of this year to raise the remaining funds and finalize the deal, with transfer to the park district anticipated in early 2027. Park officials have said publicly they hope the site could be open to the public in roughly five years, meaning something closer to 2031 for anyone picturing an actual walk across the old track.
Two Changes, One Year
Here's what ties these stories together instead of leaving them as two separate items in a newsletter. The fencing at North Point Isabel and the transfer of Golden Gate Fields to the park district are both currently pointed at the same year: 2027. In that same twelve months, the park you already walk gets a little smaller in one specific, well-documented corner, while the shoreline it belongs to takes its biggest single step in decades toward becoming something much larger. That's not a coincidence worth reading into, exactly, but it is a useful correction to how most people think about a place like Point Isabel. It isn't a fixed backdrop that occasionally gets a new bench or a repainted line. It's an active, still-negotiated piece of land, and 2027 happens to be the year both of its live negotiations are scheduled to resolve.
If you walk here most mornings, the practical version is this: expect signage and some fenced-off sections along North Point Isabel starting around 2027, not a closure of the park itself. And keep an eye on Golden Gate Fields over the same stretch of time. The purchase, the funding, and the eventual public opening are still working through a process with real steps left, including the trust closing on the deal by the end of this year and the district taking over sometime after. But the direction is set, backed by a park district that has been waiting on this specific parcel since a bond measure passed in 2008, and by a state now willing to put real money behind it.
Point Isabel has never really been static. It was leased to the park district in 1975 as mitigation for a mail facility next door, built on land that was once part of a landfill, and shaped by decades of quiet negotiation between recreation and habitat. What's happening now, the fence and the far larger deal up the coast, is that same negotiation continuing in public, with dates attached.
We live in this neighborhood too, which is part of why we pay attention to changes like these long before they show up in a listing description. If you're thinking about your own next move in El Cerrito, Richmond, or anywhere nearby along this shoreline, and want to talk it through with people who actually walk these trails, Souza Niroomand Team would love to sit down and talk.
