A resident's photo of the murky WPA-era pond at 6300 Moraga Ave drew 38 upvotes on r/oakland this week. The honest answer to what's happening: the city-owned pond sits in a monitoring gap, and a 2022 cleaning contract stalled.

On the oval pond at Montclair Park, at 6300 Moraga Avenue, the water has gone a color a neighbor this week described as worse than they'd ever seen it. Their photo — posted to r/oakland on Wednesday with a single question, "Is this algae?" — collected 38 upvotes and seven replies, none of which had a firm answer.

Neither, it turns out, does anyone with regulatory authority. The honest answer to what's happening at the pond is that no agency is officially watching it.

Alameda County's Environmental Health department tests recreational water weekly from April through October — but only at the swim beaches the East Bay Regional Park District operates, like Lake Temescal a few miles north. Montclair Park's pond is not in that program. It does not appear on California's statewide Harmful Algal Bloom map, and when the State Water Board issued regional bloom advisories ahead of Memorial Day this year, naming a lake in Alameda County among them, Montclair was not on the list. Whatever is greening the water, it has not produced a single logged toxin result.

Part of the confusion is over who owns the problem. The park district is often assumed to run it; it does not. The pond — a stone-lined, spring-fed water body built as a WPA project between 1938 and 1940, and folded into the Lake Merritt bird sanctuary — belongs to the City of Oakland's Parks and Tree Services division. It was last dredged roughly 12 years ago, at a cost neighborhood groups put near $1 million.

Since then, upkeep has slipped. Oakland Public Works pulled a mass of reeds from the pond's drain in March 2022, and the overgrowth returned. A city request for proposals to clean the pond and clear the reeds, due that July, stalled in 2023 amid staff turnover, with neighbors reporting the city unresponsive through late 2024. Whether a contract was ever awarded is not publicly documented.

So the pond sits between jurisdictions and between line items. Anyone walking the path tomorrow will see the same green water — and, for now, no sign posted to explain it.