Recreation Is More Than Fun And Games : Parks: Restoring youth programs is critical to improving the inner city’s quality of life.

When Paul Alba went to work on June 28, he went to save lives. Instead, he may lose his.

Alba, 29, is a lifeguard at the Will Rogers Park swimming pool in Watts. He is a role model for the community--a hero who willingly stepped in to protect a 13-year-old being “initiated” by older gang members. Other gang members scaled the pool fence and severely beat Alba. He is still in a coma.

Within a three-day period of Alba’s attack, five other lifeguards also were beaten by gang members.

New admission fees have contributed to the atmosphere of “haves” in the pool and “have nots” outside the fence. After the fees were adopted in April, attendance at the pool dropped from 600 a day to 300; after the attacks on the lifeguards, attendance dropped to 50 a day.

Even though Supervisor Yvonne Burke has persuaded corporate donors to defray fees at inner-city pools this year, recreation, parks and youth service agencies in Los Angeles County are in danger. Consider the following: the budget for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s youth services program, which offers an array of arts, crafts and sports after school and during vacations, has decreased from $17 million to $6 million in the past decade. Also, in the past 10 years, the city’s parks have lost half of the 4,000 full-time staff, many of whom were recreation specialists. Since the tax-cutting Proposition 13 was passed in 1978, the county parks have lost 1,400 of their 2,200 employees. Nonprofit youth agencies also are struggling because of the four-year recession.

User fees and adult volunteers help alleviate the cuts in funding, but in many areas, especially the low-income neighborhoods, volunteers are not available and families cannot afford user fees.

Public recreation, though poorly funded, is the only game in town. Two recent national studies from the Carnegie Foundation and the Trust for Public Land document the decline of organized recreation nationwide. Carnegie notes that teen-agers have five hours of unsupervised time each day, time that is too often occupied by negative recreation--gang-banging, drug use and early sexual activity. The Trust for Public Land has found that youth crime drops when adequate recreational opportunities are available in low-income neighborhoods. Both studies conclude that, though the demand for recreation is strong, cuts and civic apathy have scrambled the supply.

In a recent Times Poll, Los Angeles residents ranked parks and recreation second out of 14 elements that provide a satisfying life in Southern California. Proposition A secured 64% of the vote for the successful $540-million Safe Neighborhood Parks and Open Space Act of 1992. In 1993, a poll taken for Rebuild L.A. interviewed 1,000 people living in the riot zones; they ranked youth services and park and recreation facilities as the two most desired government services in their community.

While politicians have been slow to respond, many agencies and grass-roots groups are fighting to save parks and youth programs. People for Parks, a nonprofit, multiethnic organization, has observed this problem and has launched the Campaign to Reinvent Urban Recreation in Los Angeles. We will have a day-long conference Saturday at the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom at Upper Franklin Canyon Park, West Hollywood. The idea is to provide services of social and economic value through building partnerships that involve grass-roots organizations, police, politicians, business leaders, environmentalists and nonprofit and public agencies.

Arthur Ashe in his biography commented on the ability of recreation programs to increase life chances. While he noted that recreation cannot solve all the problems of the modern, urban world, Ashe declared that “we have an obligation to do something to counter this social and spiritual plague. Too many people have given up.”

We don’t feel that Los Angeles is ready to give up on the Paul Albas and the young people who use the Will Rogers pool. We just need to get organized.