State, Youth Sports Advocates Clash Over Best Use of Parks

Last December, Gov. Gray Davis posed for pictures with the Latino boys and girls from a local soccer league to celebrate the state’s conversion of two old rail yards near downtown Los Angeles to parkland. As a woman held aloft a sign that said “Gracias Santa Davis,” the governor promised to bring state parks closer to the people.

The occasion culminated a long campaign by a coalition of community groups and environmentalists who were locked in a struggle for control of the land with developers who wanted to build industrial parks on both sites.

But, as it turns out, the state’s purchase of the land was just the beginning of a contest over the fate of the two parcels, known as the Cornfield and Taylor Yard -- a struggle that underscores the competing visions for park space in Los Angeles.

Last month, when state officials shared their vision for the parks at neighborhood meetings, community groups learned to their surprise that preliminary plans included no soccer fields or baseball diamonds, and that the state had no intention to ever build any. As the officials explained it, the mission of the California Department of Parks and Recreation is to protect natural resources and preserve historic sites, not to oversee ball fields. That, they said, is the city’s job.

The state’s position infuriated the community activists, who now feel used and misled by the politicians and environmentalists who enlisted them to join the open-space campaign with color-coded maps of emerald soccer fields. More broadly, it has touched off a debate on what urban parks should be, with the activists challenging the prevailing practice at California state parks to maintain land as undeveloped open space.

“We are all very upset over this betrayal,” said Raul Macias, a Mexican immigrant who worked to start his own clothing factory, became prosperous, and now spends $25,000 a year to buy poor boys and girls cleats and uniforms to play soccer. The league Macias founded, the Anahuak Youth Soccer Assn., has grown to more than 1,400 children. But it still has no playing fields to call its own, a void he expected the new parks to fill.

State parks officials “do not understand the reality of this area and what happens” in traditional parks, he said. “They fill up with people who like to drink and smoke marijuana. I am all for preserving rocks and trees and those things, but to me, it seems more important to help the children first.”

Led by then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles politicians ensured that Proposition 12, a huge parks bond issue on the 2000 ballot, contained millions for urban open space. Last year, by tapping that money, the state spent almost $60 million to buy the Cornfield, a 32-acre parcel near Chinatown, and a 30-acre chunk of Taylor Yard beside the Los Angeles River in Cypress Park.

State parks officials insisted they never promised playing fields to anyone, a position not disputed by any of the community groups. Furthermore, they pointed out that although the state has no such plans at the Cornfield and Taylor Yard, it is trying to broker an arrangement by which city officials could provide more playing fields.

With help from state and city politicians, the state parks officials are discussing plans to have Los Angeles manage ball fields at Taylor Yard, and are exploring a land swap that would allow the city to take over part of Taylor Yard to provide sports programs. City parks officials are receptive to both ideas.

State officials are not in favor of a similar arrangement at Cornfield, however, arguing that it is more suited to a traditional state park with benches, meadows and trees.

“We want to serve Los Angeles, and we think we can serve Los Angeles by providing important cultural and natural spaces, and working with local officials to see that there are playing fields,” said acting state parks Director Ruth Coleman. “State parks’ mission, and it is in statute, is to provide statewide resources. It has to be a place anyone, from Fresno to Los Angeles, could use at any given moment.”

“There are no villains here, just a gigantic misunderstanding,” said Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), who noted that without the state’s intervention, both sites would be industrial parks by now.

Nevertheless, Goldberg said, it may be time to redefine the mission of the state parks department in urban areas, and she is considering sponsoring legislation to do just that. State officials strongly disagree, and say that requiring them to run recreation programs would overburden a system of 274 parks that already faces some difficult decisions due to California’s $34-billion budget deficit.

But In Los Angeles, a city starved for open space, proposals for new parks are increasingly prone to disputes over how the land should be used. Most of Los Angeles, but especially the Eastside and the city’s central urban core, has less park land than the six to 10 acres per 1,000 people recommended by the National Recreation and Park Assn. It should be no surprise that gangs have become an epidemic in many parts of the city, recreation advocates argue, given the paltry opportunities for athletic activities. The city as a whole has roughly 4.2 acres of park land acres per 1,000 people, according to a USC study.

“It has taken 10 years for us to get this far,” said Ramon Muniz, a Cypress Park resident who has participated in the public debate over Taylor Yards for years and is wary of the new promises that playing fields will eventually be built. “How long is it going to take?” State officials in recent years have begun aggressively acquiring land for urban parks in response to political pressures from Latino legislators and activism from environmental groups who want to plant an apron of greenery along the heavily developed banks of the of the Los Angeles River. The buying spree has been financed largely by bond measures passed with disproportionately high support from urban Latino voters. But the state has yet to adapt to what those voters expect of their parks, critics say.

Many urban park users are immigrants from Mexico and Central America and see their local parks as gathering places akin to the small town squares of their native countries, a UCLA study found.

“The state’s understanding of parks is largely based on the outdoors: mountains and rivers and open space,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes, who represents the neighborhoods where the two parks are being planned. “This area lost all of that a long time ago, and what we have is a need to relieve the pressure caused by the high-density development in this area.” Though state officials say they don’t have the money or authority to build and manage playing fields near the new urban parks, an attorney representing the Anahuak youth soccer program said the state has allowed baseball diamonds near million-dollar mansions at Malibu Bluffs State Park, and a polo ground and soccer field at Will Rogers State Park in Pacific Palisades.

“Loose talk from state parks that their mission is to protect natural resources is just plain wrong, and we’ve called them on it,” said Robert Garcia, a former federal prosecutor and now a lawyer with the Santa Monica-based Center for Law in the Public Interest. “If they can provide public playing fields for wealthy white communities in the west side of town, they had better do it for working-class Latino communities in Cypress Park.”

The area within a five-mile radius of the Cornfield site, which includes Chinatown, is 68% Latino and 14% Asian, and has a median income of $28,908 -- far below the state median of $47,493, according to 2000 census figures. Similarly, the area surrounding Taylor Yard, which includes Cypress Park and Highland Park, is 56% Latino and 17% Asian and has a median income of $32,863.

By contrast, the area around Will Rogers State Park is 70% white and has a median income of $70,333. Malibu is 89% white, and one-fourth of its residents have incomes over $200,000, census figures show.

State officials say they never wanted permanent playing fields in Malibu or Pacific Palisades, which they say were put in as a result of local political pressure on the California Coastal Commission and other state agencies. And state parks officials said they are pushing to shut them down. To provide active recreation at Taylor Yard, a former Union Pacific switching station, state park officials say they hope to enter into a partnership with the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

“I know we are going to see active recreation there, because the political will is there,” said Melanie Winter of the River Project, one of the environmental groups that pushed for a park at Taylor Yard.

At the Cornfield, however, state officials are committed to a more traditional state park, noting the site’s extraordinary history. Buried beneath the Cornfield, named for a farm that once was there, lies a piece of the zanja madre, or mother canal, which carried water from the Los Angeles River to the city’s earliest Spanish settlement. It is also close to a former Native American settlement of the Tongva people, the region’s prior settlers. It was also a 19th century locomotive stop where many of Los Angeles’ early white inhabitants first set foot in the city.

“People have to be cognizant of the fact that it is significant that the state is now becoming active in urban parks in Los Angeles, and we should not make the experience a negative one for them,” said Manuel Mollinedo, the general manager of the city Recreation and Parks Department. “What is happening right now is that we have so little open space that everyone is focusing on these sites instead of looking at the big picture.”