Kids’ cross-country club gets slight reprieve from city runaround

Today, against all odds and the laws of nature, I present to you a glimmer of hope in the war on bureaucratic intransigence.

The children of the Northridge Pacers cross-country club, on the verge of being kicked out of O’Melveny Park in Granada Hills for the crime of running on the jogging path, appear to have gotten at least a temporary reprieve.

The nonprofit after-school club has been offering healthy, adult-supervised recreational activity to kids for about 30 years, and that’s a good deed that could not have gone unpunished forever.

For those who missed the story, the Pacers — ages 5 to 14 — practice twice a week from August to October and usually have one cross-country meet during that time. I went up there to watch a workout, and it seemed hard to imagine a more suitable terrain for kids to run long distances than in the scenic 672-acre park, which has been referred to as one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

There wasn’t a problem for the Pacers until recently, when a city Recreation and Parks Department employee suddenly worked himself into a lather over the presence of running children. He seemed to believe that the runners might block access to firetrucks in the event of an emergency. OK, Smokey, but isn’t it possible they’d have the sense to get out of the way?

First the city threatened the Pacers with a ban; then allowed them to stay, temporarily, by charging an hourly fee that soon pushed their tab above $450.

That employee, Jimmy Newsom, lives in a city-owned home in the park. When I asked him how much he was paying for the privilege, he said he received a “reduced rate” on his rent.

He wasn’t lying. It turns out the rent is $300 a month in a neighborhood where places rent for easily five times that amount.

The city has several such homes in the park system, and the resident-caretaker has a 24-hour responsibility to keep an eye on things. He told me his biggest concern was that runners might block the fire road. But still. You’re paying next to nothing to live in a park, so don’t throw a fit when kids drop by to get a little exercise.

David Fleck, a Pacers parent, said Newsom seemed to have an attitude when dealing with Pacers director Jennifer Graves.

“He went right up to her and got in her face,” said Fleck, a lawyer whose kids have been Pacers for years. Fleck was so ticked off, he asked for the records that revealed the terms of Newsom’s $300 rental arrangement.

Fleck said that on a second encounter between Graves and Newsom, “The first words out of his mouth were something like, ‘You won’t win this.’ We all kind of scratched our heads. Tell us what battle we’re fighting. What are we trying to win?”

The right to run in the park, of course.

At one point, as Graves got bounced around the bureaucracy like a human pinball, an official told her the Pacers would have to find another place to do their running.

Some L.A. Unified schools and other clubs use the park on occasion, and, allegedly, some neighbors have grumbled. They don’t want visitors parking on their streets or using the park for athletic activities.

Some of the crankier members of the neighborhood council were inclined to side with them, arguing that the park was meant only for “passive” activity.

But the neighborhood council has backed off for now, the city is working on guidelines as to who can use the park and for what purposes, and Graves was cautiously optimistic after a chat with a recreation official.

A statement last week from Mayor Eric Garcetti called it “unacceptable” that Graves didn’t get better customer service from the city. Garcetti said he had instructed his staff to give the Pacers some answers as soon as possible, and that “we need to prioritize keeping this youth group active in the community.”

The mayor stopped short of guaranteeing that the Pacers can call O’Melveny Park their home field, so I called Michael Shull, the recreation department general manager.

Shull, who stepped into the top job two years ago, is slowly rebuilding the department after losing several hundred staff positions in the recession. He said he’s hiring again, adding parks, trying to establish recreation on LAUSD campuses after school and on weekends, upgrading the department’s dreary “sorry for our mess” website, and building better relationships with groups like the Northridge Pacers.

“We want them in the park,” Shull said before hedging just a bit, saying lots of groups want to use O’Melveny and “if we can’t find room there, we’ll find room somewhere else.”

As I noted previously, O’Melveny is the city’s second-largest park behind Griffith, and there’s been plenty of room for decades. If there were a better alternative for the Pacers, they would have moved long ago.

When I pressed Shull for a more specific answer, he said:

“We have no reason to believe they can’t continue at O’Melveny.”

Go Pacers.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATstevelopez