USOC Approves San Diego Facility : Olympics: Walker elected president. Steinbrenner reelected a vice president.

After a weekend of tense negotiations, a group representing San Diego received approval Sunday from the U.S. Olympic Committee to resume construction on a $61 million training center.

Sandra Baldwin, appointed Friday to lead a USOC committee that will serve as a liaison to the San Diego National Sports Training Foundation, said that work will begin immediately on the $44 million first phase of the project, which is expected to be completed by next October.

It appeared as if construction might be delayed for at least six months, when LeRoy Walker, elected Sunday as the USOC’s president for the next four years, said he preferred to appoint a task force to study whether the project was still viable.

Walker said that some national governing bodies for Olympic and Pan American Games sports that initially agreed to send athletes to the facility had lost enthusiasm in the three years that the project has been on the drawing board.

But two other USOC officials, executive director Harvey Schiller and outgoing president Bill Hybl, pushed through a resolution Sunday in a meeting between the USOC’s executive committee and the San Diego group.

“We discussed every option, from us funding the remaining construction costs, to them providing the funding, to delaying it for two years, to abandoning it altogether,” Schiller said. “At the end, we said, ‘We have an existing contract. Let’s proceed.’ ”

Left undetermined was how the second phase of construction will be funded, but Schiller said that the USOC was persuaded that the San Diego group can raise the money, despite its recent financial problems, believed to be caused largely by the lagging economy.

“The position of the USOC is that we will not be involved in the fund raising,” Hybl said, although he acknowledged that the organization has committed to pay operation and maintenance costs when the center is completed.

With his election Sunday by the 95-member board of directors, Walker, 74, became the first black president in the USOC’s 92-year history.

“I don’t mind people saying that I was the first black president because I know that I went through all this and achieved it on merit,” said Walker, who will resign his position as executive vice-president of Atlanta’s organizing committee for the 1996 Games.

Walker replaces Hybl, who became president 13 months ago after Robert Helmick resigned because of ethical questions.

Other officers elected in secret balloting were vice-presidents Mike Lenard, Ralph Hale and George Steinbrenner, secretary Chuck Foster and treasurer Baldwin. Lenard, Steinbrenner and Foster were incumbents.