Fair Ball?

Since the West Valley Girls Softball League filed a lawsuit voicing its disgust over the disparity between boys and girls playing fields, there has been no shortage of politicians stepping up to the plate.

First up, Steven L. Soboroff, president of the city’s Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners, quickly assembled a plan to increase availability of playing fields and called for a public meeting.

Next, Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer asked the Department of Recreation and Parks to report on its policies for assuring that girls have equal access to city sports facilities.

Councilwoman Laura Chick also took a turn, pledging at a public meeting to help find more places for kids to play, noting that city planners had failed to anticipate the demand.

Even representatives of some privately operated baseball leagues, who initially balked at a proposal by Soboroff for boys to share fields with the girls, eventually pitched in and offered to do just that.

Despite the outpouring of support, however, none of the proposals has yet produced an easy resolution, due in part to what city officials describe as a shortage of available playing fields in the West Valley. Also, the city’s current policy for dealing with private leagues is so entrenched that it is proving difficult to reassess.

For five decades parents and volunteers of 10 private baseball leagues have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate Valley sites leased to them by the Department of Recreation and Parks. The results are striking: elaborate baseball complexes with pristine fields, complete with snack bars, bleachers and batting cages.

The girls want the opportunity to create the same sort of paradise, which is at issue in the lawsuit filed in April by the American Civil Liberties Union on their behalf. The suit alleges that the city’s permit process has resulted in inequality for the girls league, which hasn’t received the same opportunities to develop its own home fields as other private leagues have.

“We’re trying to get at the heart of why this happened,” ACLU attorney Rocio Cordova said. At least part of the answer dates back to another era when an unwritten policy evolved that allows privately operated leagues to lease public land from the city for $1 a year.

Jan Zatorski, acting assistant general manager for the Valley region of the Department of Recreation and Parks, said it is her understanding that in some cases, City Council members in office decades ago intervened on behalf of the private baseball leagues to secure land for them to lease from the city.

“There was politics at play,” Zatorski said.

Officials at Odds Over How to Proceed

City officials have different views as to whether the status quo can be maintained or whether the system must be revamped to accommodate the girls’ needs as well as the needs of future leagues.

The issue is complicated by the fact that for decades parents and volunteers have spent time and money improving the sites used by the private baseball leagues.

“The policy is, if we get a good program operating, we’re going to keep it operating if we can accommodate it,” Assistant City Atty. Mark Brown said. “The department is being forced to take a look at that because of the allegations that have surfaced in the lawsuit.”

On a recent afternoon, Rob Glushon, past president of Encino Baseball Inc., gave a visitor a tour of the Little League’s facilities, located off Hayvenhurst Avenue just south of the Ventura Freeway.

The league spends $100,000 each year keeping its five fields in immaculate condition. Thousands more dollars funded the site’s fields, dugouts, snack shop and bleachers, all used by the league’s 600 members who play on 40 teams.

Since Encino Baseball first obtained a permit for the property in 1955, the site has grown rich in facilities and steeped in tradition.

Glushon played on the same fields when he was 12. As the coach of the Mets, he tossed practice pitches last week to his 9-year-old daughter, Jaime, one of about 60 girls in the Encino league.

The West Valley Girls Softball League--for girls ages 5 to 15--should get a shot at creating the same experience, Glushon said, as long as it doesn’t cut in on the private baseball leagues’ practice and playing times.

A former deputy to now-retired City Councilman Marvin Braude, Glushon said he knows there are public parcels available in the West Valley that would be suitable to develop as ball fields.

“These are the kind of accouterments that West Valley girls want,” said Glushon, waving a hand toward one of the emerald-colored fields. “They deserve the same opportunity as the other leagues.”

Currently West Valley girls play on four fields at three locations--two fields at Canoga Park High School, one at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills and a fourth at Shadow Ranch Park in West Hills. At El Camino, the girls play on a field that is shabby in comparison to those in Encino.

Parents must bring chairs from home if they want a seat, and the same goes for refreshments. The inequities, according to David Berman, president of the West Valley Girls Softball League, are what compelled him and other parents to play hardball with the city.

“For years these girls have resigned themselves to doing without and compromising,” Berman said. “I’m going to fight like hell to do what should have been done years ago, and that is to give the girls a home of their own where they can improve and grow.”

Berman said he envisions a convenient and safe location somewhere in the West Valley. The site would include four fields where the private league’s 400 members on 30 teams could purchase snacks and watch each others’ games, allowing the older girls to serve as role models for the younger ones.

Such a home would end the girls’ nomadic existence and enable their parents to begin making the sort of improvements that the other leagues have achieved.

But finding the right location has proved difficult.

Until last year, West Valley girls had been issued a permit by the Las Virgenes Unified School District to play at Calabasas High School, in part because some league players are Calabasas residents. According to Donald Zimring, the district’s deputy superintendent, the permit was not renewed because the league did not adhere to restrictions regarding noise, parking and playing times.

Zimring said the league turned down offers to use other district facilities. “We would have worked with them anywhere,” he added.

But Berman contends that his league adhered to the district’s conditions and was a good tenant. Problems arose, he said, when a few neighbors began complaining about lack of parking.

And after investing thousands of dollars improving the fields at Calabasas High School, Berman said, with no guarantee that the league’s permits would be renewed annually, he feared falling into a similar trap at other schools.

Before the lawsuit was filed, Los Angeles recreation and park officials, acting on a request by Councilwoman Chick’s office, offered West Valley girls use of four sites. The girls accepted an offer to use a field at Shadow Ranch Park, but declined to use fields at both Woodland Hills and Knapp Ranch parks.

Inconvenience, Crime Fears Cited

A fourth offer for the girls to use four fields at Lanark Park in Canoga Park was rejected, according to the ACLU’s Cordova, out of concern over the occurrence of crime at the park and because of its inconvenient location.

“We believe we were not offered prime times that we could have been,” Berman said of the city’s offers. “Basically what we were offered were the leftovers.”

The league’s response to the city’s efforts has frustrated some officials. Yet there’s no denying that the filing of the lawsuit--and the national spotlight it has cast on Los Angeles--has pushed city officials to seek a resolution.

To increase field availability, Soboroff, for example, is looking at ball field usage at public parks and how it might be more efficiently assigned. He and other city officials also support so-called joint-use agreements with Los Angeles Unified School District that call for the use of Proposition K funds to improve school playing fields and other facilities in exchange for their use after school hours.

Feuer, who chairs the Arts, Health & Humanities Committee, which oversees the Department of Recreation and Parks, is examining whether the city can improve the way it issues permits to private leagues to ensure the process is fair to girls.

At the same time, he wants to ensure there are incentives for leagues to invest private dollars to upgrade public properties.

He is considering such ideas as encouraging leagues without permanent homes to pay for the installation of lights to increase play time at existing sites in exchange for a percentage of the play time. Similar deals could be struck if leagues were willing to share maintenance costs.

“It’s a scarce public resource, and the solution is going to be some sort of sharing arrangements,” said Daniel Hinerfeld, a spokesman for Feuer.

Soboroff has backed away from his earlier suggestion that the private leagues share fields, after league representatives, many angered by his proposal, convinced him that the fields were already being used to capacity.

At a meeting late last month, however, several leagues, including Encino Baseball Inc., displayed a change of heart by offering to share their fields with the girls softball league if the girls would be willing to help with maintenance expenses.

Cordova said her clients plan to consider all offers carefully, and she hopes a resolution to the lawsuit will set a precedent for examining the city’s permit process in the future.

“This is about girls trying to seek an equal playing field from the city,” Cordova said. “That equality should have been there in the first place.”

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