Groups Disagree on Benefits of Police Academy : Government: Atwater Village residents want the $40-million training center built in their community. Elysian Park neighbors would be happy to see it leave theirs.

Residents of Atwater Village made a plea Tuesday for their community to be chosen as the site for a new Police Academy, while Elysian Park residents expressed vigorous opposition to an expansion of the existing facility.

“We welcome the Police Academy to our neighborhood,” Lois Comeau, a member of the Atwater Village Residents Assn. steering committee, told police and city officials during a public hearing at Lawry’s California Center.

After the meeting, Elysian Park residents, who had testified that they would like the existing Elysian Park academy to be vacated by the Police Department, said they hoped city officials would heed Comeau’s words.

“If the community of Atwater Village is opening their arms and saying, ‘We welcome and embrace you,’ the Police Department would be foolish not to look at that site very seriously,” said Sallie Neubauer, president of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park, which has long contended that the Police Academy is a misuse of public parkland.

The Police Department is examining six sites--including the now-vacant site of the former Franciscan ceramics plant in Atwater Village and the grounds of the existing academy--as locations for a new $40-million training center to replace the outdated and overcrowded academy.

The new facility will be built with money from a bond-issue measure approved by city voters in 1989.

A third proposed academy site in Northeast Los Angeles is on a portion of Southern Pacific’s former Taylor switching yard along San Fernando Road in Cypress Park. Two speakers opposed that site. The use of Taylor Yard for the academy--or for a proposed police driver-training facility--has been opposed by City Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents the area.

The other proposed sites are in the San Fernando Valley, but only two of those are under active consideration. The third, a Sylmar parcel owned by the Department of Water and Power, has been tapped for use as a training center for that department and will not be available to the police, said Steve Hatfield, assistant commanding officer for the Police Facilities Construction Group.

An environmental impact report completed in June concluded that the grounds of the existing center would be “the environmentally superior site” for the new academy, but that conclusion was disputed at the hearing by Elysian Park residents.

“This does not belong in a park, especially in a severely impacted urban park,” Neubauer testified.

Despite the findings of the report, Hatfield said the Police Department does not have a preferred site for the academy.

He acknowledged that when the environmental review process began nearly a year ago, the department had a predisposition to build the new center on the Elysian Park site. But now that police have looked at the other alternatives, he said, “we could very easily end up somewhere else.”

Hatfield also said that community sentiment will be an important factor in the final decision, which is scheduled to be made by the Los Angeles City Council in November.

Comeau, accompanied by four other Atwater Village residents, said residents and merchants in her community believe that the academy would be an ideal use for the Franciscan property, which was designated for a shopping mall until the developer was forced into bankruptcy.

She said that Atwater residents are “very nervous” about the prospects of a large commercial development there and believe that the academy would be less disruptive to the neighborhood.

“It just seems to be a nice fit,” she said. “They are looking for a site that’s neighborhood-friendly, and we are interested.”

Hatfield said police have identified the lower Los Angeles Reservoir Basin as their preferred site for the driver-training facility.