Police Consider 6 Sylmar Sites for Training Centers : Law enforcement: Officials will discuss three of those locations for a high-speed driving school at a public meeting tonight.

The Los Angeles Police Department, looking for a site for a new police academy and high-speed driving school, is concentrating its search on the rugged landscape of Sylmar, which has much of the city’s rare, remaining open space.

Three of four proposed sites for the 50-acre police driving school are in Sylmar, where police officials will hold their first meeting tonight to hear public comments on the proposals. The fourth is Taylor Yard, the idle Glassell Park railroad yard near the banks of the Los Angeles River.

The public meetings are part of a process to pick sites both for the driving school and a new 25-acre police academy, to replace the aged facility in Elysian Park. After sifting through 1,900 proposed locations, the department has narrowed the list to the four alternatives for the driver training facility and six for an academy--three of which are also in Sylmar.

The $5-million driver training school is among 11 Police Department construction projects to be built with revenue from a $176-million bond issue approved by voters in 1989. Recently, Los Angeles police have been sharing a driver training facility at the Pomona fairgrounds with other law enforcement agencies, said Steve Hatfield, assistant commander of the department’s Police Facilities Construction Group.

The new driving school would also be used to train drivers for other city agencies in accident avoidance, Hatfield said.

The three Sylmar sites under consideration for the driving school are the Van Norman Dam Basin owned by the Department of Water and Power on the west side of the Golden State Freeway just below the Los Angeles Reservoir; another DWP parcel at San Fernando Road on the east side of the Golden State Freeway, and a site west of Olive View Medical Center that has been slated for a business park by county planners.

Tonight’s meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Olive Vista Junior High School, 14600 Tyler St.

On Tuesday, police and planning officials will meet with the public at Irving Junior High School, 3010 Estara Ave., Los Angeles, to discuss the Taylor Yard site. Meetings on the police academy sites will follow on Tuesday, July 9, at Irving, and Thursday, July 11, at Olive Vista, both at 7 p.m.

Sylmar sites under consideration for the police academy are a location east of Olive View Medical Center and two DWP-owned tracts--the one being considered for the driving school east of the Golden State Freeway at San Fernando Road, and the Lakeside Debris Basin, east of the Golden State Freeway across from the Van Norman Dam Basin.

“We have gone through a site-selection process that started with 1,900 parcels,” Hatfield said. “It’s been a very lengthy and time-consuming process, but we have to meet the needs of the Police Department without any more negative impact on the surrounding community than is absolutely necessary.”

Use of the Southern Pacific Transportation Co.’s old railroad yard is opposed by Friends of the Los Angeles River, a nonprofit group that wants the banks of the 55-mile-long river turned into parkland. Taylor Yard is also on the list of prospective police academy sites, and is large enough to handle both the academy and the driving school, Hatfield said.

“We’re totally opposed,” said Lewis MacAdams, a director of the river group. “This is an area we see as combining riverfront park and low-income housing. We see the Taylor Yard as an incredibly valuable piece of urban development that shouldn’t be taken over by single-purpose agencies.”

Hatfield and community activists said the preferred site for the driving school is the Van Norman Dam Basin because of its relative isolation. Noise and traffic are the main concerns of Sylmar residents, who criticized earlier plans to build the driving school on at Bledsoe Street and Encinitas Avenue that would be surrounded on three sides by houses.

Margaret Whittington, chairman of the Sylmar Community Plan Advisory Council, said she is pleased with the current choice of sites and welcomed a police facility in the area. She said her main concern was that the driving school could also be used to train city and county employees.

“That could be garbage trucks, dump trucks, it’s not specific,” Whittington said. “The community was concerned about the kind of traffic that would be coming in and the volume of traffic.”

Hatfield said the driving facility will include classrooms, administrative offices, a garage for storage and a shop for repairs. It will have a track for practicing high-speed chases, an area for learning how to recover from skids and another for avoiding accidents. Users are expected to include about 300 police recruits at a time, Hatfield said.