Volleyball Leagues in Jeopardy?

Long Beach’s Beach-Park and Recreation departments has scheduled a community meeting Tuesday with two private volleyball leagues that were told the city plans to take over their operations this summer, according to their owners.

A city official told the owners of East End Volleyball (EEVB) and Evolutions Volleyball, two businesses that have hosted leagues in Long Beach for more than two decades, that the city will not renew their permits this summer and will start a city-run league, said EEVB owner Richard Heiles.

Heiles and Kevin Kilarney, owner of Evolutions Volleyball, only learned of this decision through second-hand sources, Heiles said, and promptly visited the office of Bob Piazza, the new commissioner of the Beach-Park and Recreation departments, in early March.

“The city just decided this year that they weren’t going to renew our programs and that they told us they were going to take it over,” Heiles said Monday morning.

Later on Monday, Heiles and Kilarney met with Piazza and Mike Robinson, director of community development, who sat in for City Manager Jack Schnirman. They agreed to hold a community meeting on the department’s proposal at the Recreation Center at 7 p.m. Tuesday. 

Heiles and Kilarney started their leagues in Long Beach during the mid-1980s. While the leagues compete against one another, in many ways they work as one league, sharing equipment and hosting events together. They boast a collective membership of about 1,200 players who participate in weekday and weekend matches, tournaments and pickup games.

The owners also said that during the life of their leagues in Long Beach, they have generated an estimated $500,000 in revenue for the city.

“Between Kevin and myself, we gave the City of Long Beach about $65,000 [in fees] last year,” Heiles said. Kilarney did not return requests for comment.

In 2010, the city raised the rate for teams to play from $100 to $150, and former City Comptroller Sandra Clarson said the city earned $63,850 in 2010 from collected volleyball fees, a 50.4 percent increase over volleyball revenues in 2009.

Meanwhile, Heiles said that once word about the city’s decision to deny their permits got out to the volleyball community — particularly through a mass email he sent to league members encouraging them to contact city officials to express discontent with the decision and to threaten to join leagues in surrounding communities instead — Piazza and city officials started to back peddle, saying that a city-run league was only a proposal.

“We do not think the city should just come in and take away a very valuable program that functions smoothly and will probably be a shell of itself in two years if this is allowed to happen,” Heiles wrote in his email.

But Robinson said that no such decision has been made, at least not before the department presents a proposal to the city manager. “At this point, I’m very comfortable in saying the city has not made any decision, whether we’re taking it over, or if the leagues are going to keep it,” Robinson said Tuesday morning.

The idea to consider taking over the leagues that play on the city's beaches stared at the Rec, Robinson said, after department heads there considered complaints about the leagues from police, lifeguards, sanitation workers, beach and boardwalk-goers, residents and even members of the leagues. Matters of police enforcement and trash pick up are costing the city, Robinson said. 

“Number one, there’s a problem with open drinking when the volleyball leagues are playing,” he said. “So it’s come up as a quality-of-life issue. What started the conversation is: how are we going to enforce this more? We need cooperation from the league owners and from the players themselves.”