All those slithering, nasty black snakes? Gone.

Yes, all of them.

So are thousands of golf balls, car doors and chunks of metal debris.

It was all sucked out of Machado Lake, along with 246,000 cubic yards of polluted sediment, at Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park on the border of Wilmington and Harbor City.

The three-year project to clean up the runoff water and the rambling park surrounding it under Proposition O is now 75 percent finished, city officials said. A reopening of what’s promised to be a cleaner, more natural 231-acre oasis is slated for spring.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” said Joanne Valle, who heads up the Park Advisory Board for Harbor Regional Park.

Work has been going on since 2014. But progress only recently has become noticeable to passers-by and motorists. With the lake dredging — the biggest part of the $111 million project — completed late last year, construction has expanded outward to the surrounding park areas.

Park improvements

“People will be jogging by and ask, ‘When will we get our park back?’ ” said Alvaro Prada, lead construction manager at the site.

Prada’s response: soon.

And it will all be worth the wait. Among the new features:

• Paved pathways and 600 additional trees throughout the park area.

• New grass and mulch throughout, along with an irrigation system

• Four fishing piers and two shoreline fishing platforms

• Cleared vegetation that in the past attracted non-native wildlife, homeless encampments and meet-up areas for criminal activity

• Pedestrian bridges and benches

A cleaner lake

But the main attraction will be the much cleaner (and deeper) water in the 40-acre Machado Lake.

While always presenting an outwardly appealing oasis-like vision from a distance, the lake’s beauty was deceiving.

The collection of dirty storm runoff water was, in reality, a perfect host for toxic sediments, pesticides, trash and non-native species, including snapping turtles and black water snakes — and an alligator — that all wound up there in recent years.

Many of the problems were pushed into the public limelight when the alligator named Reggie, an illegal pet that had grown too big for his San Pedro owner, was dumped into Machado Lake in the summer of 2005.

The highly publicized, 6-foot-long rogue reptile lived there for two years, often drawing sightseers and television cameras, before he was captured and taken to the Los Angeles Zoo, where he remains a popular attraction.

Meanwhile, swarms of non-native black water snakes — Nerodia fasciata — were discovered populating the lake in more recent years. Sold for as little as $10 on the black market, the snakes became popular with teen boys but made lousy pets. Many of them wound up dumped into the lake. A team of wildlife biologists tried to pluck as many as they could out of the lake in 2010, but the effort barely made a dent.

Proposition O clean water bond

The long-awaited cleanup, authorized by Los Angeles city voters in 2004 with the passage of the Proposition O clean water bond, was delayed initially due to the city’s lengthy bidding process.

Machado also was, by far, the biggest project included on the list of Proposition O projects.

Then, adding to the delay was the discovery of an endangered songbird — the Least Bell’s Vireo — at the park, requiring additional studies and environmental permits, but it didn’t stop there.

“One little guy keeps coming back to the site (to nest and to mate), so whenever he comes back we have to just move out and give him a 500-foot buffer,” said Katie Doherty, project manager with the Los Angeles city Bureau of Engineering.

The park — situated on Vermont Avenue between Pacific Coast Highway and Anaheim Street — has become a hub of construction equipment and work crews.

A biologist is on site to work with city engineers and construction crews as work proceeds.

Lake dredging

The hydraulic vacuum dredging process brought up nothing of criminal interest, city officials said, commenting on earlier speculation about what secrets might lie at the bottom of Machado Lake. But there was plenty of trash.

Some native wildlife from inside the lake was removed before the work began.

The bottom of the lake — which went from 4 to 6 feet deep — is now sealed with an expanding AquaBlok bio-layer cap that will keep the bottom clean. That still needs to be topped with a sand layer for burrowing underwater wildlife such as native snails to thrive.

The park’s storm drains — the largest is 102 inches — are being connected to a continuous deflection system, or CDS, an underground stormwater treatment unit that automatically separates trash out of the collected water streaming in from higher ground on its way to the lake and, the ocean, said Markos Legesse, construction manager.

Once the trash is separated, a much cleaner water flow results.

A fresh oxygenation system also still needs to be installed that will help continuously circulate the water in the lake.

Fishing piers

With the dredging process complete, the focus now has shifted to the surrounding park areas and also to creating fishing piers — for what will eventually be a catch-and-release program — and pedestrian bridges.

There also will be planted areas surrounding the drains and along the lake shore. The invasive, non-native plants and vegetation that provided cover for illegal activities and encampments on the far shore near the golf course and Los Angeles Harbor College, meanwhile, has been cleared, opening up the shoreline all the way around the lake.

Camp Machado, which offered camping programs for local youth, is expected to start up again and improvements are being made to the boathouse. A full-time ranger will be assigned to the park once it reopens, according to Diana Bulnes, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

“All of the recreational uses of the park will be improved,” Doherty said.

But most of it will take some time.

Stocking the lake with fish, for example, will come a bit later, Doherty said, after California Fish and Wildlife officials have a chance to monitor and check the water over a period of time.

Years ago, paddle boats were available at the lake. While it remains questionable whether on-the-water uses can ever be brought back, it is a future possibility, Doherty said.

Better days ahead?

As for the problems of dumping in the lake and homeless encampments, Prada said the experience of Echo Park — that included a smaller, 13-acre lake that was cleaned up with Proposition O funding a few years ago — provides hope for Harbor Regional Park’s future.

Echo Park near downtown Los Angeles also was plagued with homelessness, prostitution and drug dealing, he said.

When the park and cleaned-up lake reopened, “the community took it back,” he said.

It’s not problem free, however. A man was fatally stabbed Thursday night at Echo Park Lake and, in April the body of a missing 27-year-old man was found floating in the lake.

But Echo Park has seen new life and community use, Prada said, since the work was finished.

“When you have families around,” he said, “the bad stuff goes away.”