Goal Is to Raise $200,000 a Year : Private Group Pitches In to Help City Parks

San Diego attorney Edward (Ned) Huntington is something of an authority on city parks. His 98-year-old father has used them for more than five decades, his daughter works at one in Mission Bay, his 11-year-old son is an avid patron of the havens citywide, and Huntington himself has frolicked in them for about 50 years.

This wisdom might help prepare him for what may be a formidable goal--to raise $200,000 a year from the private sector to preserve what he and others consider one of the city’s greatest assets.

The tax lawyer Wednesday was elected chairman of the newly established Friends of Parks and Recreation Foundation, a nonprofit group that plans to raise money for the city’s outdoor and youth programs.

Returning the Favor

“San Diego has one of the most spectacular park and recreation systems in the country,” said Huntington, a former president of the county Bar Assn. “We want to give something back to the system that has given us so much.”

The task will not be easy. Public sentiment for the city’s parks was tested in two ballot measures in 1987 and found wanting. Voters turned down measures that would have provided funding to spruce up the city’s two landmark parks, Balboa Park and Mission Bay Park.

But an executive board made up of city, corporate, law and sports celebrities--former San Diego Chargers’ head coach Don Coryell, baseball’s Steve Garvey and former San Diego Police Chief Bill Kolender, to name a few--should help pull in donations, sponsorships and matching funds from businesses, service clubs and the public, said Mary Ann Oberle, deputy director for the city’s Park and Recreation Department.

The Friends of Parks and Recreation Foundation is the result of a campaign by the San Diego Ecology Center to garner private money for the city’s park department, which oversees more than 220 parks and a multimillion-dollar budget. Organizers of the volunteer-run foundation hope to raise at least $200,000 each year to finance park improvements, equipment and supplies, and youth and child-care programs, they said.

Target Parks

Initially, at least 60% of the money raised will be used for parks and programs in low-income or minority neighborhoods, where improvements are needed most, foundation members said.

“We’d like to target areas where children and parents can’t afford to pay,” said Oberle. Proposition 13, passed in 1978, required the department’s programs to be self-supporting, so many in low-income areas have been dropped, she said.

The announcement of a private foundation for city parks came before today’s City Council meeting, at which several city-operated recreational youth programs are on the budgetary chopping block.

At risk is an after-school child-care program, which could be cut from 74 schools to 37, and a portable pools program, which offers swimming lessons in neighborhoods without pools. The city would save about $600,000 with such cuts, Oberle said.

Most council members support the endangered programs, said Paul Downey, a spokesman for Mayor Maureen O’Connor. The mayor led the fight during her 1986 mayoral campaign to reinstate the after-school child-care program after it had been defunct for several years, he said.