On a foggy weekday evening, the swings and monkey bars at Westlake Park still fill with the usual after-school crowd, kids chasing bubbles while parents catch up on a bench near the community center. A hundred feet away, in front of the park's pale yellow post-war building, a different kind of gathering has started showing up lately: residents holding signs about plastic turf and land grabs, organized under a banner called Save Westlake Park. Both scenes are true at once, and that's the actual story here. This is still a neighborhood park doing what neighborhood parks do, and it is also the subject of the most contested land-use fight Daly City has had in years.
Here's what most people scrolling past the headlines don't realize: Daly City already tried a version of this deal, just seven months earlier, at a park three miles away. The Westlake proposal isn't a first experiment. It's a second, much bigger bet on the same idea, and the size of the ask has grown considerably between the two.
What the Olympic Club Put on the Table
Westlake Park today has outdoor tennis courts, a community center, a grass field, and a small playground. The Olympic Club, a private San Francisco athletic club founded in 1860, wants to change most of that. In a presentation to the Daly City City Council on June 22, 2026, the club outlined a public-private partnership that would bring:
- Artificial turf replacing the current grass field
- New lighting and scoreboards for evening play
- Added spectator seating
- Resurfaced tennis courts plus new pickleball courts
- A modular clubhouse on park property, for the club's exclusive use
- Security fencing around the renovated field
The club has offered to cover the roughly $10 million in capital costs, take on long-term turf replacement (city discussion put the expected lifespan of synthetic turf at eight to ten years before it needs redoing), handle field maintenance, and pay Daly City $50,000 a year in rental fees plus water costs.
In exchange, the club wants dedicated time on the field. At the June presentation, the term discussed was a 20-year deal with three five-year extensions. By the time the proposal reached a packed town hall on July 29, the number being described had shifted to a 15-year base term with the same three five-year extensions, up to 30 years at the outside. The hours being requested have stayed more consistent: priority access to roughly 30 percent of the field's bookable time, concentrated in the hours families actually use it most, weekday evenings from 4 to 10 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6 to 10 p.m. on Wednesdays, and all day Saturday. Reporting on the proposal has put remaining public recreational access at no less than 25 hours a week.
None of this has been signed. The council pulled the memorandum of understanding off its consent calendar in June specifically to slow things down and gather community input first, which is why the process has since moved through a senior-focused meeting on July 28, a neighborhood meeting on July 29, and was supposed to include one more town hall on August 13.
Daly City Already Ran This Play, at Marchbank
The reason to pay attention to Westlake isn't that field-sharing deals are new territory for Daly City. In January 2026, Sacred Heart Cathedral broke ground on its own partnership with the city at Marchbank Park, a few miles from Westlake. That deal gives the private high school access to the field three hours a day after school, some Saturdays, and additional time during summer for school-run camps.
Set the two deals side by side and the scale gap is hard to miss.
| Marchbank Park (Sacred Heart Cathedral) | Westlake Park (Olympic Club, proposed) | |
|---|---|---|
| Partner | Private high school | Private athletic club |
| Started | Groundbreaking, January 2026 | Not yet approved |
| Weekday access | About 3 hours after school | Up to 6 hours, two evenings a week, plus a 4-hour evening block |
| Weekend access | Some Saturdays | All day Saturday |
| Term | Not publicly specified at similar length | 15 years, up to 30 with extensions |
Marchbank was a modest trade: a few after-school hours for a facility upgrade. Westlake asks for something structurally different, a full day every Saturday and multiple full evenings, locked in for up to three decades. If Marchbank was the test case, Westlake is the city deciding how far that model can stretch.
The Meeting That Didn't Happen
The clearest signal of where things stand right now isn't anything said at a podium. It's a meeting that got canceled.
On August 12, Daly City's Department of Library and Recreation Services announced that the town hall scheduled for the next evening, August 13, had been called off at the Olympic Club's own request. That date mattered because Daly City holds no regular council meetings in August. The August 13 town hall was the only remaining public forum before the earliest date a binding agreement could reach a council vote, the next regular meeting on September 14.
The cancellation didn't stop residents from showing up anyway. Roughly 50 people gathered near the park that evening with signs opposing the deal, organized under the Save Westlake Park name, arguing the trade amounts to handing away public land for a generation in exchange for amenities the club would use most. That energy had already shown up once before, at the July 29 town hall the city did hold. That room ran packed and standing room only, public comment ran heavily against the proposal with only a small handful of the more than fifty comments made in support, and two council members, Teresa Proaño and Pamela DiGiovanni, were reported to have shown up to hear it.
Whatever side of this a Westlake resident lands on, the sequence is worth sitting with: the one remaining forum designed to gather feedback before a vote got pulled by the party asking for the deal, and the community organized around the park anyway, without a microphone.
What Happens Next, and When
September 14, 2026, at Daly City Hall is the date that actually matters now. It's the first regular council meeting since the cancellation, and the earliest point at which a licensing agreement could come up for a binding vote. Public comment at council meetings typically runs at the start of the agenda, with each speaker given a couple of minutes and no requirement to sign up ahead of time, so residents on either side of the debate can still weigh in directly.
It helps to remember why this conversation started at all. Westlake Park's most recent city-funded improvement was a 2023 renovation of its fitness courts, and the city's 2026-27 budget lists a master plan for the park as a priority, with $70,000 set aside in 2025 just to develop that plan. Councilmember Juslyn Manalo, who grew up in Daly City, said during the June meeting that the field needs attention. That's the tension underneath all of it: a park that genuinely needs investment, and a private club offering to provide it in exchange for time nobody has agreed to give up yet.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Live Near the Park
Westlake's identity has always been tied to places like this field, the tennis courts, the walk to the playground after dinner. A change of this size to shared open space is the kind of thing that shapes daily life in the neighborhood long after the council vote happens, whichever way it goes. If you want more of what makes this corner of Daly City tick day to day, our Daly City neighborhood guide and our earlier look at weekend life around Daly City's parks and views both dig into what residents actually use these spaces for.
We'll keep watching this one through September 14. If you have questions about what's happening in your specific pocket of Daly City, or you're trying to understand how neighborhood amenities like Westlake factor into local property values, reach out to Bryan Cruz and Rey Ancheta. And if you're curious what your own home is worth in today's market, our team's Instant Home Valuation tool is a good place to start.
