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L.A. County’s Road to Recreational Apartheid

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<i> Tom Epstein is director of People for Parks, a nonprofit organization that supports parks and open space throughout Los Angeles County</i>

Los Angeles County is about to eliminate the recreation from our Department of Parks and Recreation. The budget recommended by the county’s chief administrative officer cuts recreation programs by 75% and calls for firing 350 employees, most of whom coordinate recreation activities at the county’s neighborhood parks.

Under this plan, 77 parks used by millions of Los Angeles County residents will lose their recreation supervisors. No longer will a responsible person known to the community be the park’s eyes and ears. Instead, park users will be greeted by locked doors--even after school and on weekends, when park usage is heaviest.

Consider the impact of this proposal on these county parks:

--In East Los Angeles, 50 children attending summer day camps at Belvedere Park would be displaced, summer lunch and toy-loan programs for disadvantaged children would be discontinued. Cultural events like the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration would be cancelled;

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--At Roosevelt Park in South-Central Los Angeles, recreational basketball at the indoor gym and a wide range of social activities for older people would end; preschool, English-as-a-second-language and arts-and-crafts classes would be terminated; and a recreation supervisor who has kept gang activity to a minimum at this facility for 25 years would be let go;

--In the Antelope Valley communities of Pearblossom and Littlerock, heavily used community centers would be closed, displacing civic meetings and jeopardizing the only sports leagues in the area.

The county’s recreation supervisors are as vital to their communities as the programs they coordinate. They are role models for youth who frequent the parks and who need positive adult leaders; they are catalysts for community outreach and involvement, and they are guardians for their parks, helping to keep the facilities safe and well-maintained. In addition, each recreation supervisor attracts 15 to 20 regular adult volunteers to help oversee youth activities in neighborhood parks.

Parks with recreation supervisors often serve as vital community centers, especially in inner-city areas. Without recreation directors, communities lose much more than a dance program or basketball referee. They lose the only worthwhile alternative many young people have to the unsupervised idleness that leads to gang membership and drug abuse.

If the proposed budget cuts are made, the county’s recreation duties will be handled by 24 administrative personnel who work far from the parks they serve. Their primary responsibility would be to process requests from groups that can pay to use park facilities. As with so many other vital services in the post-Proposition 13 era, recreation programs will be accessible only to those rich enough to afford them. A condition in Los Angeles that one academic has branded “recreational apartheid” will continue to grow.

This action couldn’t come at a worse time. Gang warfare and drug dealing have already driven peaceful park users from at least 70 city so-called “dead” parks. Passage of the county’s proposal would ensure that even more neglected parks litter our urban landscape, and that millions of county residents would be denied access to their own community parks.

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At the time Proposition 13 passed in 1978, the county Parks and Recreation Department had 2,300 employees. Today, it employs only 942 people, while almost 2 million more people live in the county. How can our county parks department keep up with the growing demand for recreation services with a continued decimation of park and recreation funding?

The proposed recreation cutback will save a little more than $2 million of the county’s $9.2-billion budget. At the same time, thanks to Proposition 70 (the statewide park bond act of 1988) spending on county parkland and buildings is increasing dramatically, from $11 million this year to more than $50 million next year. If these priorities persist, the county will manage many more park structures while it dismantles the recreation programs that give the facilities their vitality.

Recreation has a value that cannot be measured in dollars alone. We can all remember an idyllic summer afternoon in the park that helped restore our peace of mind, if not our sanity. Public recreational facilities help maintain a quality of life in Los Angeles to which people from all over the world are drawn. As crime, traffic and urban congestion get worse, recreation provides an increasingly critical source of relief, whether one enjoys soccer, swimming, a family picnic or a quiet stroll in the woods.

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