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The new expansion of Jackie Robinson Stadium is the latest example of Veterans Affairs allegedly prioritizing profit over veterans.
On February 10, a brief piece in the LA Times announced “several planned improvements” to UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium, including an entirely new practice field named for mid-20th century Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca.
It sounds boring, and the parties who negotiated the land deal are betting on your thinking so.
The expansion to Jackie Robinson Stadium is part of a long history of corruption within the West LA VA Campus, and the latest attempt to quietly privatize and profit from the 388-acre site federally intended specifically for the enrichment of veteran’s lives. (Disneyland is only 100 acres, for scale). This land and its surroundings are also built on Tongva Land — a fact that is rarely acknowledged by the WLA VA or UCLA. The VA administration and those renting on the property commercially have been under increased scrutiny in the past decade for brokering land deals representing millions of dollars in commercial gain, with little-to-no reinvestment in the veteran community. In the case of Branca Field, key players for the VA and UCLA did not want to disclose the new land agreement at all.
“Advocates who are a little testy out there are gonna get up in arms when they see there’s another ball field being built,” said Executive Director of Community Engagement and Reintegration Services Robert McKenrick in a meeting with VA and legal associates on January 29, leaked to KNOCK.LA by a whistleblower. McKenrick described a negotiation made with UCLA to allow the new baseball field to be built in exchange for the VA regaining parking spaces for exclusive use, which the university had previously used for overflow parking at baseball games.
“That being said, there’s a FOIA request out there and the response to the FOIA request is going out in a week or two,” he continued, explaining that the requester was a “UCLA news media guy.” He told his team that they would need to work with UCLA to announce the field before this FOIA request could be independently reported on, “this will get out ahead of us if we don’t get moving on it quickly.”
McKenrick mentions in the recording that UCLA’s PR department intended to frame the expansion to the Stadium without mentioning the VA’s connection to the land, and describes UCLA’s forthcoming press release as what would eventually be published in the LA Times. The piece makes no mention of the VA or UCLA’s troubles with Jackie Robinson Stadium’s land use, and focuses instead on Branca Field’ historical naming, the efforts to fundraise for the field, and the university’s enthusiasm for the expansion.
The reasons for obscuring Branca Field’s place on VA land are clear — the field was constructed for exclusive university use on land where around 40 unhoused veterans currently live in a tent city called Veteran’s Row outside the campus walls, awaiting services and protesting the VA’s inaction. The nearly 400-acre campus has current operating land deals with UCLA, the Brentwood School, and significant construction related to the Purple Line Metro extension project. These leases exist alongside normal veterans’ facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, where a program allowing unhoused veterans to camp outside of VA buildings and receive meals and services has been running since last spring.
At the West LA VA campus, this is business as usual.
While Brentwood is known as an affluent white neighborhood, most famous as the place OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife Nicole…
Read More: The West Los Angeles VA Would Prefer You Didn’t Look Into Its Corrupt Land