Last year the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to work with the Kimmelman Foundation to repurpose a portion of the struggling Victoria Golf Course in Carson as a public recreation facility. The release last week of an initial study unveils a first look at the proposed changes for the facility at 340 Martin Luther King Jr. Street in Carson.

The project - called the Carol Kimmelman Sports and Academic Campus - calls for redeveloping "new recreation programs that would offer sports and academic enrichment services to underprivileged youth...and the general public," on the northeast 87 acres of the current 178-acre golf course. Designs by MEIS Architects envision mostly open space, as well as a handful of support buildings.

A proposed tennis center, which would span approximately 29 acres, would be a spectator venue featuring 12 hard courts, 50 tennis courts of different sizes, and seating for up to 1,200 people. Other offerings within the tennis center space would include a 100-meter sprint track, two basketball courts, and parking.

The remaining 58 acres would serve as a soccer center, including two full-sized artificial turf fields, two natural grass multipurpose fields, six full-sized natural grass fields, a support building, and parking.

Construction of the Carol Kimmelman Campus is expected to occur over months, starting immediately after project approval - currently anticipated to occur in April 2019. Completion is tentatively scheduled for summer 2020.

Plenitude Holdings, LLC, which holds the development rights for the southern half of the golf course, is planning a separate project that would also include sports and recreation facilities, as well as entertainment uses, restaurant space, a community center, and a park.

The new campus comes in the wake of a 2016 parks and needs assessment by the County's Department of Parks and Recreation, which found that Carson has an average of 1.5 acres of park space per 1,000 residents - less than half the countywide average of 3.3 acres per 1,000 residents.

The Victoria Golf Course was built on a former landfill and converted to its current use in the mid-1960s. The northernmost portion of the former landfill already serves as a park.