Lake Balboa to Be Filled and Ready for Use Next Week

Water will begin flowing Monday into Lake Balboa in Sepulveda Basin, enabling the San Fernando Valley’s only public boating and fishing lake to be open for use by late next week, city and federal officials have announced.

Reclaimed water from the Tillman sewage treatment plant will be pumped into the 27.5-acre, 10-foot-deep lake, topping it off at 72 million gallons by Thursday.

“It’s wonderful. We’ve been waiting for it a long time,” said Dick Ginevan, chief Valley supervisor for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

“At long last, San Fernando Valley residents will have a lake nearby to use for fishing or boating--or just to enjoy as scenery when they picnic and play in Lake Balboa Park,” said Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles), who played a key role in securing federal funds for the lake and other recreational improvements.

It will be winter before the lake is stocked with trout and other fish, but officials said a fly-casting cove will be open for practice immediately. Aquatics staff of the Recreation Department will offer canoeing classes in September.

There will be no swimming in the lake, but two lifeguards will be on duty during daylight hours starting Monday, officials said.

The Valley has been without a lake since the silt-choked lake at Hansen Dam closed a decade ago.

The new lake is the centerpiece of 160-acre Lake Balboa Park, which opened in 1990. Park visitors have been able to picnic or toss a Frisbee, but have had a giant hole instead of a lake, as a scenic backdrop.

Officials have been working since then to complete a pumping station and two-mile-long pipeline that will deliver water from the Tillman plant to the lake and to three golf courses in the basin.

Ginevan said 2,000 trees, most of them now six to eight feet tall, have been planted around the lake, paid for by money and labor donated by business groups. Eventually, hundreds of cherry trees will ring the lake, with taller trees behind them to shut out views of the city.