Updated 2026-08-02

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 next public meeting is Thursday, August 13.

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.

In exchange the club promises to pay for the renovation and the upkeep. 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.

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.

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.

• 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.