Supervisors OK Development of 2 Soccer Fields in San Pedro

Development of two soccer fields on a grassy San Pedro hillside to replace those lost last year at the old Bogdanovich Recreation Center was approved Tuesday by the County Board of Supervisors.

The board approved a 25-year lease of nine acres at Friendship County Park to the city of Los Angeles, which hopes to open the Cumbre Drive fields to youth soccer games by late August.

The supervisors’ unanimous vote culminated an 18-month effort by youth sports advocates who have lobbied for new fields since the Air Force reclaimed the 22-acre Bogdanovich park for construction of officers’ housing in April, 1987.

“This will begin to even things out,” said David Conetta, a city recreation official who has overseen the search for new playing fields.

“I believe the community still feels a pressing need for more soccer fields, because the sport is very popular. But it does even out what was lost at Bogdanovich,” he said.

Mike Lansing, executive director of the San Pedro Youth Coalition, said his group welcomes the fields but sees them as a mixed blessing.

The swap of playing fields is hardly even, he said, because a baseball diamond and acres of flat open space for team sport practices were also lost when Bogdanovich was closed.

In addition, the new fields will supplant rare hillside open space that is now used for general recreation.

“We’re glad to get anything we can back, but it’s just not close to what the community needs,” he said.

The lease requires no payment to the county, but park officials say the city expects to spend $200,000 to level and replant the new soccer fields, install an irrigation system and five rows of portable bleachers, construct a perimeter fence and build an access road from 9th Street on the north.

The fields are west of Western Avenue and immediately east of the old San Pedro Park, which was renamed Bogdanovich Recreation Center last spring. Restroom facilities and a 74-space parking lot already exist.

The city decided eight months ago to build the soccer fields at rolling, 128-acre Friendship Park, Conetta said. But it did not forward the proposal to the supervisors because the county was concerned that construction might eliminate a habitat of the Palos Verdes blue butterfly. At the request of the city, Audubon Society officials investigated and found that the butterfly would not be affected.

Soccer teams that had played at the heavily used Bogdanovich park facility now play on a makeshift field at the Upper Reservation of Ft. MacArthur, “the old hand-grenade field,” Conetta said.

But Lansing said that field is closed for four months during the summer for military use and the grass must be revived for the fall soccer season.