Nonresidents May Have to Pay More to Use City Parks

Residence may soon have its privileges.

After years of suffering from a dwindling tax base as people fled Los Angeles for tonier enclaves nearby, city officials are seeking a bit of revenge.

According to a motion passed unanimously by the City Council on Wednesday, people who live elsewhere may soon have to pay a premium to use Los Angeles’ parks and golf courses, while those with L.A. addresses would get first dibs on recreation programs.

“All over the city, we have people calling in saying, ‘I can’t get my kid in because we have people from other communities.’ Then you start thinking, ‘Hey, who’s paying for these parks?’ ” said Steve Soboroff, chairman of the parks commission. “If you’ve got a Nordstrom credit card, you get to go to the sale a week earlier. I think that should be the solution: If you have a city card, you get to sign up earlier.”

The issue sprang from the Cheviot Hills Recreation Center, a Westside park whose day camp has only 400 slots, but which was flooded with 1,000 applicants--20% from outside the city--on the first day of registration.

There are similar situations at other outposts, particularly in neighborhoods that abut city borders. In Woodland Hills, for example, officials said parents--some from Calabasas, Agoura Hills and Burbank--started lining up at 3 a.m. to get their children into basketball programs.

“I think if you’re in the city and you’re paying taxes, you should have the first option to have the facilities available for your use,” said Mary Thompson of Woodland Hills, who brought her granddaughter Alexis to the playground at the recreation center Wednesday afternoon. “If you’re in an unincorporated area of the county, the county should provide those facilities.”

Soboroff, City Councilman Mike Feuer, who sponsored the motion, and officials at the park department said they don’t have reliable statistics about where the people who use the city’s recreational programs and facilities reside.

Other Southern California cities have differing policies regarding resident use.

Beverly Hills and Burbank, for example, make outsiders pay a surcharge for programs, and give residents a head start on sign-ups, according to Debby Rolland, recreation supervisor for Los Angeles’ western district. Santa Monica and Culver City offer residents early sign-ups, but have the same fees regardless of where people live, she said; Calabasas, like L.A., treats everyone equally.

Feuer’s motion asks the park department staff to consider the question broadly--everything from how to give city residents a leg up on access to summer camps to whether people from Pasadena should have to pay more when visiting Travel Town in Griffith Park.

But some officials said they are concerned that a two-tiered system would be too complicated to administer, and that higher prices for outsiders will leave some programs undersubscribed and, eventually, canceled. Such a step may be too drastic for a problem that plagues only a handful of the city’s 160 recreation centers.

“The surcharge is not going to make much of a difference to the residents of Beverly Hills, but it may make a big difference to the residents of the county [unincorporated area] in East L.A., or the city of Montebello,” Rolland said. “If you’re only charging $3 for a class, and you start surcharging $3, you may have just priced out part of the population.”

Soboroff said a better solution would be to examine overpopulated and underused facilities, then improve programs citywide so people stop flocking to a handful of successful spots.

“Wherever we have a problem, we should take a hard look at the parks [nearby] and try to alleviate that problem,” he suggested. “We have to improve programs so people won’t bypass their neighborhood parks.”