10 Parks to Get Upgrades

Walking through Green Meadows Park in South Los Angeles, Donald Smith cast a critical eye on the recreation center, with its badly peeling paint and its broken windows, and shook his head sadly.

“It looks like they need to tear it down and start from scratch,” said Smith, an area resident, as dozens of children played on a covered porch at the 1950s-era building.

But repairs are unlikely for the Avalon Boulevard park any time soon.

An ambitious effort to refurbish Los Angeles’ run-down and heavily used parks at the rate of more than one week has slowed to fewer than one a month. And Green Meadows is not on the list for this year.

In the eight months before he left office in June, former Mayor Richard Riordan ordered city recreation officials to do quick make-overs on 37 of the worst parks.

This fiscal year the city budget is only slated to upgrade 10 of the remaining 138 recreation centers and parks. The dramatic slowdown has some officials and community leaders asking why the city couldn’t maintain its momentum.

“It’s way too slow,” Councilwoman Jan Perry said. “It is not adequate at this point.”

Perry said there are parks in her district that have the same problems of broken lighting and decrepit buildings that existed when she was a deputy to Councilwoman Rita Walters in 1998.

Parks Director Ellen Oppenheim admitted that years of deferred maintenance have left many more parks in need of repair than are currently budgeted for upgrades. There is a list of 50 that she would like to fix up if she had the money and staffing.

“We’ve never had adequate funding to support maintenance at the level we would like,” she said.

Riordan’s demand that the department expedite the cleanup of selected parks, made after fed-up neighbors of one run-down park confronted the mayor, resulted in the formation of the Clean and Safe Spaces, or CLASS, program. But the park-a-week goal was difficult to meet, overburdening an insufficient staff that had trouble juggling multiple projects at once.

“That was frankly a grueling pace to sustain,” Oppenheim said.

At the urging of Mayor James K. Hahn, council members and others, Oppenheim is working on a proposal to expand the cleanup program to 24 parks next year. That would still be far off the pace set by Riordan and would leave dozens of run-down parks in need of repairs.

“Thirty-seven might have been a big number for the department to handle, but they can certainly handle more than 10,” said Councilman Jack Weiss, chairman of the council committee overseeing parks.

Neighborhood Health Tied to Quality of Parks

Weiss said the challenge will be finding money for an expanded program in a budget expected to see dwindling revenue because of the souring economy. But, he said, park repairs need to be a priority because the health of parks is tied to the health of neighborhoods.

“There may not be any city facility where people spend more time than in a park,” Weiss said. “Nothing is more discouraging to people than a park in disrepair.”

While many city officials believe the Clean and Safe Spaces program provides a big payoff on a relatively small investment, its budget was cut substantially in June. The city spent about $1 million to fix up the 37 parks done before Riordan left office. But this year’s budget, approved by Riordan and the City Council before Hahn took office, provided just $215,000 to spruce up 10 parks.

If a park is targeted by the program, buildings get a fresh coat of paint, new lighting is put in, flowers and other landscaping are planted, trees are trimmed, and new playground equipment is installed.

“It is quite a dramatic improvement,” said Marilyn White, who coordinates the program. “It’s amazing how communities will notice right away. All of a sudden the recreation center sparkles.”

Carol Parnes, who walks with her husband for exercise in the park at the Panorama City Recreation Center, said the improvements there have made a big difference. “It was kind of trashy,” Parnes said. “It looks a heck of a lot better now.”

Despite the accolades, the program is seen by many as a stopgap measure while parks wait in the long line for more major improvements under Proposition K, a park bond approved by Los Angeles voters in 1996 to provide $750 million in park improvements over 25 years.

The Times has reported how a lack of project managers has resulted in Proposition K projects facing delays and cost overruns.

While the Green Meadows recreation center is not on the current list for improvements, its recreation coordinator, Brandee Crawley, said she was told there is an expectation that it will eventually be torn down and replaced with Proposition K money.

But city officials have not finalized the financing of the new center, which requires matching funds that have not been obtained.

As a result, the one-year design process has not begun, and no date has been set for the start of construction.

Meanwhile, Crawley and the park’s patrons have to make do with a substandard facility. “It definitely needs help,” she said.

Demand for Repairs and New Parks

During a brief tour, she noted that the flooring of the basketball court needs to be replaced and that the court is not to the right scale. The building also lacks space provided in more modern buildings for teen programs. Children end up playing out on the sidewalk.

One of the younger children who uses the center after school, 12-year-old Harmon Preciado, pointed out cracks in the wall and broken windows. “It’s ugly,” he said.

The demand for an expansion of park repair programs is hitting the department at the same time it is facing growing pressure to do something about the dearth of parks in the city.

Los Angeles ranks 17th among major U.S. cities when it comes to park acreage, falling behind Phoenix, San Diego, Kansas City, Mo., and Dallas among other cities, Oppenheim said.

Last week, the City Council adopted a resolution asking the city administrator and chief legislative analyst to research alternatives for acquiring and developing land for new parks, including the use of organizations such as the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to expand the parklands.

Councilman Ed Reyes urged the city to look at urban and industrial parcels that are not being used and have fallen into neglect.

“We should be looking for opportunities to be creating open spaces in areas we traditionally would not consider ideal for parklands but that do have hundreds of children,” Reyes said.

“They do have apartment structures around them without any kind of recreational space.”

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Parks Listed for Upgrades

Ten park facilities have been selected for improvement in the fiscal year ending June 30 as part of the Clean and Safe Spaces program:

* 109th Street Recreation Center, Watts

* Echo Park

* Loren Miller Center, Jefferson Park

* Sepulveda Recreation Center, Panorama City

* Trinity Recreation Center, Central Los Angeles

* Costello Youth Center, Eastside

* Harbor City Park

* Rancho Cienega Sports Center Park, Southwest Los Angeles

* Sylmar Park

* Valley Plaza Recreation Center, North Hollywood