April 22, 2026
FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – “It is a wonderful day to be a Californian,” California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot said.
State officials paid a special visit to the San Joaquin River Parkway on Wednesday.
“The real announcement is that today we’re beginning the process to establish three new state parks,” California Department of Parks and Recreation Director Armondo Quintero said.
Quintero says the current map of California state parks forms a loop around the outskirts of the state, so now he wants to fill in the middle.
That means adding more state parks, bringing California’s total number of state parks up to 283.
Quintero says they’re acquiring Feather River Park in Yuba County, north of Sacramento, Dust Bowl Camp in Bakersfield, and the San Joaquin River Parkway in Fresno and Madera Counties.
It’s the biggest addition to California’s state park system in decades.
“We’ve struggled a little bit, particularly with parks,” Governor Gavin Newsom said, explaining why they haven’t expanded the parks system in recent years. “We were frankly dealing with the existing space and deferred maintenance, and this constant dialectic about the fact that ‘We shouldn’t be focused on expansion. We’ve got to actually clean up what we’ve got.’ And we were stuck on that, mired in that for decades and decades and decades. And finally, we moved away from that scarcity mindset to a more abundance mindset.”
They say that by turning those areas into state parks, they’ll be able to protect the natural resources.
“Every California child deserves to grow up with the awe and wonder of nature,” California First partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom said.
