At the private briefing meeting held for Superintendent Sophia Pina-Cortez last month regarding the soccer field fence, all community leaders in the room affirmed and verified their support of the MVCC Blueprint’s safe fence layout.
I detailed why public access policy, “walk on play”, is an important Mar Vista community value—as evidenced by the stack of petition forms totaling 500+ signatures from our adult and youth stakeholders which I presented to her at that same meeting.
Is there any reason why a parent and child should not be able to walk onto Mar Vista Soccer Field on a sunny morning, or at noon, and kick the ball around if the field is not permitted out to a group?
This shot was taken at one of the regular noon pickup games at the field.
Note the little boy [in the yellow t-shirt] playing with his parent.
Soccer is a family and community building sport.
It transcends generations.
So, is there any REAL reason to exclude groups of working adults, who come out to play pickup games before work on weekdays [an LAMC noise ordinance compliant activity, by the way] or at noon--as happens on any basketball court in this city?
When the people of the City of Los Angeles approved Proposition K [and this ball field was a specific project in that proposition], they never intended to block walk on public access to field spaces simply because surfaces changed from grass to plastic to stand up to more hours of play.
They never intended contract agreements with user groups to take precedence over public access.
They never intended the fencing of large OPEN portions of our public parks, shutting off public access to public amenities, and the enforcement of severely restricted hours at those amenities.
Given the trend towards synthetic turf, and given the approximately 22 independent schools [which will have little or no field space onsite] coming online in the western Los Angeles area over the next few years, preserving walk on public access to all our synthetic ball fields becomes critically important.
Good public policy.
Access for all our stakeholders.
Now.
