Inner-City Park Sprouts From Tons of Malibu Soil

South-Central Los Angeles is getting its own bit of beachfront real estate.

Tons of soil that broke away from a Malibu bluff during a landslide in June is being used by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to build the agency’s first inner-city park.

“We are moving a bit of Malibu to South-Central,” said Paul Edelman, a deputy division chief for the conservancy.

The soil will be used to create artificial hills and earthen berms for an eight-acre park that will feature trails, meadows, oak and sycamore trees, shrubs and a nature center on an empty lot at the corner of Compton and Slauson avenues.

Burns Pacific Co., a Thousand Oaks-based contractor, was hired by Caltrans to clear more than 300,000 cubic yards of Malibu soil that had toppled onto Pacific Coast Highway. The company began this week dumping dozens of truckloads of dirt at the park.

The firm is donating the soil and providing the grading work for free, saving the conservancy about $400,000. By donating the dirt, the firm avoids paying to dump it in a landfill.

About 100,000 cubic yards of soil will be needed to build the park’s topography, and about 25% of that will come from the Malibu slide, said Ed Lassak, a foreman for the contractor. The rest of the soil might come from construction of the Alameda Corridor, the $1.9-billion rail and truck expressway connecting downtown Los Angeles and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Lassak said.

“If we get another slide, that would be great because we can just haul that in too,” he said.

The park is on the Department of Water and Power’s old “pipe graveyard,” a weed-choked lot that has been used for years to store thousands of rusting pipes. The fenced-in lot is in a mostly industrial area, surrounded by recycling centers, auto shops, warehouses and fast-food restaurants.

The conservancy is leasing the parcel for $1 a year from the DWP, which has owned the property since 1909.

The mounds of dirt mark the long-awaited start of construction on one of the largest parks in South-Central Los Angeles.

The idea grew out of a dispute between the agency and Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters, who had questioned why her inner-city constituents should support the conservancy’s ongoing efforts to acquire acres of wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains. She argued that the agency wasn’t doing enough to provide her constituents access to the mountains.

The discussion eventually led to a plan to build a $3.5-million inner-city park designed and built by the conservancy using funds from recently approved state and county park bond measures.

Construction was scheduled to begin more than a year ago but was delayed because of bureaucratic disputes over the bond funding.

The park’s landscaping should be completed by next spring so that it can open by next fall, Edelman said.

The park is designed to simulate the features found in the conservancy’s mountainside wilderness areas.

“It’s really going to be a variety of Santa Monica Mountain ecosystems in a microcosm,” said Lisa Soghor, a design director for the conservancy. “The whole park will function as a living laboratory.”