Event Marks $11-Million Park Project

Todd Ciocca, 71, leaves his Northridge home and goes to Lake Balboa Park once every couple of weeks in search of old memories and a little peace and quiet.

“I just like to walk around here,” Ciocca said Tuesday. “It reminds me how the Valley looked when there was some open space left.”

Behind him, across Lake Balboa, a group of politicians and officials were packing up charts and papers and heading back to work. The city of Los Angeles and the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers had just completed a signing ceremony, where they agreed to split the cost of an $11-million preservation and expansion project inside the 2,100-acre Sepulveda Basin, the largest park in the San Fernando Valley.

Ciocca, who once fished for crawdads in creeks near the basin, hadn’t heard much about the agreement, but was happy to learn that 184 acres of land would be decorated with native plants, trails would be expanded, and new athletic fields would be constructed.

“It’ll give the young people around here something to see besides apartment houses and stores,” Ciocca said.

The agreement calls on the corps and the city to spend $5.5 million each on a two-year project to improve facilities at Lake Balboa Park, Balboa Sports Center and Hjelte Park, and to construct new athletic fields.

In addition, existing nature preserves, used by migratory waterfowl as a foraging area, will be expanded and planted with riparian, oak savannah, oak chaparral, buckwheat and native grasses. The basin’s reclaimed water system--treated waste water--also will be expanded.

“The development in the basin is a great example of the kind of superb public facility that it is possible to create when two levels of government share resources and work toward common goals,” said Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), who helped obtain federal funding for the project.

The Sepulveda Dam and Reservoir, completed in 1941, is an important part of the flood control plan for the Los Angeles County drainage area. Constructed after a devastating 1938 flood, the basin regulates runoff from a 152-square-mile area. The Department of Recreation and Parks leases 1,600 acres of the basin from the Army Corps of Engineers for park uses.

Local environmentalists, who’ve fought various proposals for development in the basin over the years, said Tuesday they were generally pleased with the agreement, but wondered why they did not have more time to review it.

“The maps look pretty good,” said Glenn Bailey, a founding member of the Coalition to Save the Sepulveda Basin. “But we’re wary about giving anybody a blank check to fool around in here. We’d like time to review it.”

Jill Swift, a former parks commissioner and member of the Basin Users Group, was worried about schematic drawings for the project that included a 40-acre swath of land inside the basin to be used for a future arts park. Swift’s group had opposed the arts park because of the extra pollution and traffic that the proposed facility would create.

“When you start putting up buildings in a flood plain area, you’re going to have real problems,” Swift said. “You’re displacing soil. We’re shocked that the plans include land for that arts park.”

But a landscape architect for the corps said the arts park was left in the plans only because no one was told to delete it.

“It’s just there conceptually,” said Deborah Lamb, an architect in the corps’s district environmental design section.