Quick Switch Made in Sports Complex Plan

In a sudden action that keeps alive recent controversies over back-room decision-making, Long Beach officials have pulled the plug on a commercial sports complex proposed for El Dorado Regional Park and are proposing to move it to an industrially contaminated central city location.

Supporters of the sports park complex hope the new plan, billed as a compromise, will end a bitterly divisive political fight.

Although that might be achieved--the compromise was applauded by both sides of the El Dorado Park fight--it also opened a new chapter in the controversy over city officials making decisions and then presenting them to the public only after most of the I’s have been dotted and Ts crossed.

The new plan was announced late Monday by two members of the City Council, Mayor Beverly O’Neill, City Manager James C. Hankla and other city officials.

Even though the deal was presented as a nearly complete plan, with maps presented, funding provided for and political support all but assured, it caught several key players by surprise.

City Councilwoman Jenny Oropeza, for one, was furious, saying she was cut out of the decision-making process and not told of the announcement even though her district near downtown would be one of those most affected.

“It’s been a closed-door process all the way,” Oropeza said Tuesday. “It’s not the way elected representative bodies should be operating.” Some other elected officials also complained privately about the closed process.

One element of the deal calls for $3 million to be transferred from a park in Oropeza’s inner-city district to the new project, which would be built on city land adjacent to Signal Hill.

“I am deeply concerned and troubled by the way this has happened,” said Oropeza, who was en route back to Long Beach from Washington, where she was on city business. “A plan of this magnitude should not have been put together without the full disclosure to the public and a full discussion by the City Council.”

The chief sponsors of the plan, Councilmen Les Robbins and Mike Donelon, said that the legally required hearings will be held and an environmental impact study will be performed.

“All we’ve done is said this is a potential site. It can be done here. Now we go through all the feasibility studies,” Donelon said. “There will be public hearings, environmental hearings. Now we begin the process.”

The controversy is the latest in a series involving the City Council that has generated opposition, lawsuits and charges that the city is run by a small group of influential decision makers.

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Long Beach is facing a lawsuit contesting, in part, the fast approval of the Aquarium of the Pacific, now under construction, which critics say was approved without proper hearings or study. Another suit, filed by manufacturers, says the city is circumventing procedures in diverting redevelopment agency money from one part of town to another. Another group of residents is protesting the speed and manner in which the city decided to lease naval station property in the port for use as a supertanker container terminal.

The new sports complex proposal came about because the city lost yet another lawsuit. In that suit, residents charged that City Hall ran roughshod over environmental impact requirements and improperly approved the plan, which calls for the construction of softball diamonds for adults where wine and beer could be sold.

City officials, as part of the court-ordered study, looked at alternative sites and presented a 51-acre, city-owned parcel near Signal Hill.

The new location would end community opposition on the east side of the city, but some major trade-offs would be required.

The proposed plan, using hillside land found to be contaminated, will be about twice as expensive to develop as the proposed site in El Dorado Park, because the ground will have to be cleaned up and the park will have to be terraced, officials said.

The extra costs mean that the city would have to divert $3 million from another park in Oropeza’s district.

According to Robbins, the city will also have to scrap plans on the El Dorado Park site for an expanded senior center and upgrading of park roads.