Frogard Schmidt could no longer stand looking at the dry, dilapidated water fountain along her daily walks near Concord’s Todos Santos Plaza – an eyesore that has bothered the owner of the aRt Cottage since at least 2024.

“I was tired of looking and picking up garbage around a fountain that’s no longer working and being used, for all the wrong reasons,” Schmidt said. “Someone had to complain about it, so I did and got the ball rolling. But nothing happens fast.”

After a months-long deep dive through property records, thanks to Schmidt’s pressure, Concord city officials announced in August they were officially off the hook for overdue maintenance – pushing responsibility for tens of thousands of dollars in repairs onto the managers of the senior living complex on the Concord Plaza Tower property to restore the water’s flow.

But after the property owners opted not to do so, the shabby water feature at 2020 Grant St. will instead be filled with soil and native California succulents – joining a long list of planters and other landscaped features replacing once-prestigious fountains across the Bay Area that have now run dry.

Local experts and public works officials say the trend is driven by neglect, which can quickly lead to vandalism, bacteria and other expensive challenges.

Concord is far from alone. Major public fountains across the Bay Area have sat parched for years – a symptom of the expense and time required to keep up with the complex mechanics and chemistry behind the public installations. Some were shut off to save money during the pandemic and never turned back on, while others have slowly faded from memory without a community fighting for their preservation.

But Schmidt thinks that’s a loss that doesn’t need to trickle into Concord’s quality of life.

“I want young families in my neighborhood, where they can feel safe, push their strollers up and down the streets and have a good life,” Schmidt said. Reflecting on nearly 15 years living and working just blocks from the city’s downtown, she said her activism around the fountain was a better way to give back to the community than simply complain. “Sometimes you have to make your own happiness,” she said.

Paul Cowley, an Alameda-based landscape architect-turned-consultant who recently retired after more than four decades, said ​​it’s easy for even the most intricate fountains to face similar fates if they lack three things: a consistent budget, adequate maintenance crews, and local stewardship.

Cowley, who became one of the “go-to” experts in these kinds of renovations while running Potomac Waterworks, estimated that 99% of the fountains he’s worked on in recent years were privately funded, but added that public agencies most often had success when integrating fountains into the costs of ongoing development.

Regardless of who pays, he said, water fountains, features and sculptures most often fall apart when funders underestimate the complexity of mechanical pumps, chemical treatments, sanitation requirements and other elements of daily upkeep.

“They either age gracefully or become a disgrace over time – that’s the ebb-and-flow cycle that happens with historic artwork, particularly public artwork,” Cowley said. “It’s always going to fluctuate from being a point of pride to a point of neglect, but it all comes back to whether people get invested.”

The potential payoffs of that investment is on full display in a town thousands of miles from the Bay Area that has not only maintained its popular downtown fountain, but made it a point of pride. The roughly 12,000 residents of Madison, Indiana chipped in directly to help preserve the Broadway Fountain, a local landmark. Andrew Forrester, executive director of tourism for the city, said that when combined with local arts funding, this engagement creates more than a selfie spot for visitors.

“It’s one of those things that’s become a gathering place, an icon,” Forrester said. “I think if the community would need to step up again to help, they would. Smaller cities can have more of that tangible sense of pride — we know our neighbors, we wave at people as we walk down the street and we all have a buy-in to that fountain.”

But closer to home in Santa Clara, Councilmember Suds Jain said the city doesn’t have enough money to refill the two fountains at Franklin Square Mall, which were emptied to cut costs during the pandemic.

He appreciates how fountains can bolster tourism, civic pride and other public benefits, but he remains hesitant to commit to any new plans without a dedicated funding stream or larger conversation about development in the downtown.

He highlighted how Santa Clara doesn’t have its own public arts fee or other dedicated pots of money to fund these projects outside of the city’s general fund, which is already short hundreds of millions of dollars to tackle existing maintenance to-do lists.

“Some people may think of fountains as being unnecessary – I don’t actually agree,” Jain said, pointing to businesses along El Camino Real and Santana Row that have managed to keep water features functioning nearby. “But we’re not talking about just running a fountain in your backyard. Government has a huge liability for everything we do.”