Long-Awaited Gymnasium Nearly Done : Encino: The Balboa Sports Center’s new $2.5-million building should open in the spring. It is the largest of its type in the Valley.

The most heavily used city park in the San Fernando Valley will soon have a new gym-recreation building.

Workers are putting the finishing touches on the 17,000-square-foot facility to serve the 80-acre Balboa Sports Center in Encino. But the $2.5-million building is not expected to open until spring because a city hiring freeze has made it difficult to staff, according to the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department.

While most gyms have a boxy look, this one features California mission-style architecture. It will house a gymnasium, meeting rooms, kitchen, weightlifting room, stage, and lockers and showers.

“Basically, it’s one of the nicest we’ve built in years,” said Al Goldfarb, a spokesman for the Recreation and Parks Department. “It’s long overdue. It’s a very busy park, but it hasn’t had a community center.”

Frank Catania, the department’s director of planning and development, said the gym is the largest of its type in the Valley.

“We expect it to be heavily used,” he said. “The community is very anxious for it to open.”

The building, paid for with a combination of city and state funds, is part of the master plan for the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, which also includes two golf courses, a lake and wildlife refuge.

The center at Balboa and Burbank boulevards has tennis courts, soccer and baseball fields, outdoor basketball courts and picnic grounds. The park attracts crowds of area residents on weekends--more than any other city park in the Valley, officials said. But until now, it hasn’t even had restrooms.

A community building to serve the busy center was proposed in the mid-1980s, but construction was delayed by financial constraints and opposition by homeowners to the initial location, which they complained would generate too much traffic. It finally was approved in February, 1987, by the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners after a compromise was worked out to locate the building near the center’s tennis courts. Traffic will be routed onto Balboa Boulevard instead of onto Burbank Boulevard, as originally was proposed.

The building’s design was meant to fit in with the park’s open-space environment, Catania said. Veniegra & Veniegra Architects of Los Angeles received an award for the project last month from the city Cultural Heritage Commission.

“The design is innovative,” Catania said.

Mega Construction, the contractor that began work last year, is finishing work inside the building and landscaping.

After the building opens, Bob White, recreation director of the sports center, will move from his present small office in the park. The center’s 40-team basketball league will play its first season in the huge gymnasium, which features two scoreboards, instead of at nearby high school gyms.

“There will be one large meeting room that can be partitioned into two,” White said. “We want to provide a variety of activities, like major sports programs and a day camp.”

The stage could be used for plays or concerts as well as for award programs and community dinners, Catania said.

Several more staff members will be assigned to the center to direct various programs, including crafts and fitness classes, officials said. But just how many is not known because of the hiring freeze, said Olga Singer, a special services coordinator in the Recreation and Parks Department’s Valley Region.

“We’re really in a tight budget situation,” she said.

Citywide, Catania said, the department builds or renovates an average of two facilities a year. The last facility to open in the Valley was the first city-operated fitness center for the disabled, a $224,000 project completed at Chatsworth Park in March, 1990.

Construction started in December at Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda on the Valley’s first city-owned indoor swimming pool, a $2.5-million project scheduled for completion in about a year. The city already operates 14 outdoor pools in the Valley.

Construction will soon begin on a $1.6-million community center at Paxton Park and Recreation Center in Pacoima and on a $1.5-million senior citizens center in Pacoima Park, Catania said.