Parks promised to poor California areas unbuilt years later

(AP) — A decade after California voters were promised $400 million worth of parks in some of the state's poorest neighborhoods, an Associated Press review finds fewer than half of the 126 projects that received the money have been built, as Democratic lawmakers push to add another $1 billion to the program.

In the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Florence, Jennifer Schott won't let her kids play outdoors, nor is she willing to make the eight-minute walk through gang territory to the nearest park.

No one told Schott, who directs a mental health facility in the high-crime neighborhood, that the state has shelled out $5 million for the city parks department to replace vacant industrial buildings with 4 acres of grass, basketball courts and a community garden.

Based on guidelines that prioritized the neediest communities, the state parks department chose 126 parks and recreation center projects and awarded them $396 million from a pool of 900 applicants that requested $3 billion, data provided by the department show.

The state, local and nonprofit groups putting the money to work have broken no promises in taking a leisurely pace, because the original ballot measure made no commitments about how long it would take to build the parks.

The regulatory hurdles largely blamed for the delays are ubiquitous in California and make it extremely difficult to build a house, let alone a public park, in under a decade, said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

"A lot of these kinds of safeguards of planning and permitting and regulating are important, but make it so that doing anything in California takes time," said Jon Christensen, an environmental humanities researcher at University of California Los Angeles who studied the program earlier this year.