Playground or Preserve? : Citizen Group May Settle Debate Over White Point Park’s Future

When Mike Lansing thinks of White Point Park, he hears the sounds of children playing. He sees baseball diamonds and football fields--fields where San Pedro youngsters could stretch their talents and their muscles, “without being like a herd of 10 million ants, one on top of the other.”

Ken Malloy has a far different vision. When Malloy thinks of White Point, he summons up images of history lessons and nature trails overlooking the Pacific. He sees a well-managed state park where families could discover native plants like lemonade berry and California sagebrush and learn about the park’s history as a Nike missile site.

Both Lansing and Malloy claim they speak for the majority of San Pedro residents.

And their views highlight a sharp debate within the community: whether to develop White Point as a city park that would provide San Pedro youngsters a place to play, or to give it to the state, which would turn White Point into a natural preserve attracting Californians from all over.

White Point Park is a 115-acre parcel, shaped roughly like a triangle, on a bluff along the southern coast of San Pedro. During World War II, Americans of Japanese descent who lived there were relocated and interned, and the Army took control of the site.

The Army built coast artillery sites and bunkers on White Point during the 1940s; sometime around 1957 a Nike missile battery was built there. The Nike base, along with an Army Reserve facility, was deactivated in 1976.

The Army deeded the park to the city in 1978, although the city has since returned about 13 acres to the Air Force for military housing. Except for the former missile facilities, the land has been vacant for years and is closed to the public except on special occasions.

On Oct. 7, hundreds of San Pedro residents are expected to show up at Peck Park for a public hearing to decide White Point’s future. The hearing is sponsored by the White Point Citizens Advisory Committee, a 14-member panel appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and harbor area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores. The group is expected to deliberate for several months before making a recommendation on what to do with the park.

Because the committee expects a large and emotional crowd, it has already set up ground rules for the hearing: Those who speak will be determined by random drawing, and each speaker will have three minutes.

Said committee Chairman Jerry Gaines: “It’s a very high interest issue and we are setting up for 400 chairs. We picked the biggest facility we could. There is no clear consensus in the community that I’m aware of.”

Malloy agreed. “I never thought there would be such a division of opinion as there is about this piece of property,” he said.

Earlier this month, the committee published a 78-page report detailing, among other things, the biological, archeological and military history of White Point. The report is available to the public through local libraries.

The report, while drawing no conclusions, outlines four options for the now-vacant 102-acre parcel. For each, the study considered how the park would be managed, finances, impact on the environment--including traffic projections and how wildlife would be affected--and how each option would fit in with other recreational facilities already available to San Pedro. The options also specify what would happen to Royal Palms State Beach and White Point County Beach, two rocky coves at the base of the bluffs.

The options are:

Leave all three sites as they are and not develop a park.

Leave Royal Palms as it is, and build a public golf course on White Point and the county beach land. Although this is a little talked-about option, Gaines said a developer did approach the committee with a proposal for the golf course. The developer, who spoke only on the condition that he not be named, said he would build the 18-hole course with private money and lease the land from the city.

Leave the beaches as they are and build athletic facilities, to be managed by the city, on part of White Point Park. Lansing, director of athletics for Mary Star-of-the-Sea High School and a spokesman for a coalition of youth groups in San Pedro, said his group is “demanding” that 35 acres of White Point be set aside for athletic fields, a track and a parking lot.

Create a state park out of all three sites. Malloy, as well as some homeowners who live near the park, favor this option, saying the state has more money to maintain and protect a park than the city. They believe the state would do a better job controlling problems caused by gangs, which they said have taken over the two beach areas.

State officials call White Point one of the few remaining undeveloped shoreline properties in Southern California that is geologically stable enough for a state park. But, they say, the state will accept control of White Point only if it can have all 102 acres, with no land set aside for athletics or other uses. State officials say they do not intend to put athletic facilities at White Point.

Until earlier this year, White Point seemed destined to become a state park. Neighbors favored it. Environmentalists favored it. Los Angeles city officials favored it, as did the Legislature when, in 1983, it authorized the state Department of Parks to study the idea. The study recommended consolidating White Point and the two state beach areas into a state park.

In April, however, that consensus fell apart when the city returned the 13 acres of White Point to the military for Air Force housing, along with a city park, the Martin J. Bogdanovich Recreation Center. Had the city not done so, the Air Force could have reclaimed all of White Point because of a clause in the agreement turning the land over to the city.

Although officials lauded the plan, saying it would preserve the remainder of White Point for a state park, Lansing’s group--the San Pedro Youth Coalition--was against giving up the 22-acre Bogdanovich park and its athletic fields.

In June, the coalition jumped into the debate over White Point, calling for athletic facilities on the “last large piece of unencumbered land that San Pedro will have at its disposal for many, many years.”

The citizens advisory committee has recommended that the city build sports fields at two other parks in San Pedro to make up for the loss of Bogdanovich park. Lansing says this is not enough.

Speaking before a group of harbor area businessmen earlier this month, Lansing said San Pedro has lost eight athletic facilities since 1950. During that time, he said, the population of San Pedro and nearby Rancho Palos Verdes--whose residents use San Pedro athletic facilities--has doubled.

“We need, for our community, certain things,” he said. “We don’t need another state park.”

Counters Malloy: “What people in Los Angeles--and people in San Pedro--need is a place to get away. We’re stuffed in, we’re pressed in, in San Pedro. We have no place to go to expand our vision, to see the horizon.”