Anaheim Neighbors Launch a Campaign to Get Park, Center

A church-based organization, concerned about rising gang violence in a Latino barrio near the Disneyland Hotel announced Thursday that it will campaign for a city-sponsored community center and mini-park for area youth.

Oscar Picazo, a member of the St. Boniface Parish Community Organization and a nine-year resident of Anaheim’s Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood, said: “We need something. We need help with job skills and social services. And we especially need activities for our children because, right now, it’s getting too easy for them to become gang members.”

For years, Picazo said, he and other residents have complained about the lack of city services, especially for the bilingual residents and children in the area.

Delia Varela, another resident, added, “We have all paid taxes for years and years, but the city hasn’t invested anything in our community, except promises.”

Need Acknowledged

Christopher Jarvi, Anaheim’s director of parks, recreation and community services, acknowledged the need for a community center to help an estimated 4,000 mostly low-income residents living in the area.

But Jarvi added that the group’s choice of a site for a center and park is land that is owned in part by the city’s utility department and Southern California Edison Co.

“That’s why we’re recommending the city not consider the group’s choice, but spend $50,000 to study the area and determine what solutions are available to us,” Jarvi said.

However, Rabbi Moshe Ben Asher, a consultant for the group, said that $50,000 should be used instead as “seed money,” through the Orange County Community Consortium. The consortium is a private coalition of social service agencies that recently began a neighborhood social service center in a low-income, multiethnic neighborhood in Santa Ana that is similar to the Jeffrey-Lynne area.

“And representatives of our group plan to attend Tuesday’s City Council meeting and voice our opinion when this study comes up on the agenda,” Asher said.

In addition, the group plans to submit a proposal for a study of the needs of the Jeffrey-Lynne area, said Donna Gambale, a consortium spokeswoman.

Jarvi indicated that the city, at this point, would welcome the proposal. Tuesday’s City Council hearing, he said, was scheduled to take public comments on how the city should spend its community development block grant funds.

Jarvi said his department is seeking a solution that “everybody agrees to.”

“We could be putting good money into a project that sours, and we don’t want to do that. We recognize that there are some community problems there (in the neighborhood) that need to be dealt with, and that’s why we’re going to quantify what needs to be done there.”

Under existing city policy, he said, a neighborhood park should be available within half a mile of all city residents, but that provision hasn’t been followed throughout the city.

In the case of Jeffrey-Lynne residents, he said, “they’re unfortunately on the border between two parks, Palm Lane and Stoddard Park.”

One city proposal for the Jeffrey-Lynne area calls for spending $67,000 in community block grant funds to help solve the neighborhood’s rising gang problems, Jarvi said. The money would be used to hire two outreach workers through Turning Point, an anti-gang private agency in Garden Grove, he said.

The parish organization, which has turned its efforts toward improving conditions in the Latino neighborhood, was first organized after residents opposed Redevelopment Director Norm Priest’s Katella redevelopment project, Asher said.

The City Council later rejected the $2.7-billion, 35-year Katella plan. Priest, who received heavy criticism from City Council members for his handling of the project, later resigned.

The project was to have raised revenue to improve sewer, street and freeway systems in a 4,500-acre area centered on Disneyland. In addition, officials said the project would provide money to clean up substandard housing, including the Jeffrey-Lynne area.

So far, the parish group has received the support of Disneyland executive Jack Lindquist, who intends to send a representative to a parish organization meeting being held today at 7 p.m. in the St. Boniface Parish Hall, 100 N. Harbor Blvd.