Pay (more) to play: Judge reverses his UCLA lockout order, orders increased rent
Vets fume over reopening of the ballpark, which has UCLA paying the VA $600,000 to resume baseball activity at the fields, with a looming move-out date of July 4, 2025.
In what veterans described as a bitter reversal, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter on Monday ended the month-old lockout of UCLA from the university’s Jackie Robinson Stadium on disputed land on the West Los Angeles VA campus.
During a courtroom hearing, the judge said he was undoing his lockout order because temporary modular homes for more than 100 disabled and homeless veterans could be installed before LA’s rainy season without using the stadium property. UCLA will pay the VA $600,000 and resume activity on the stadium and practice field through the baseball season, with a move-out date of July 4, 2025, unless a longtime settlement can be reached, Carter said. UCLA attorney Raymond Cardoza said the university would not pursue an appeal it filed earlier asking for emergency relief from the lockout.
Long Lead has been reporting from Powers v. McDonough every day court has been in session, and we will continue to follow this issue in this newsletter. Subscribe here to get updates sent direct to your inbox as soon as they publish:
In September, Carter ruled the VA had violated the law by leasing parts of its 388-acre property to UCLA, the Brentwood School, and others, and ordered the VA to build thousands of temporary and permanent housing units for homeless and disabled veterans. More recently, he has convened a series of hearings to negotiate immediate installation by the VA of 106 units of modular housing.
Preparations for the housing, including a site visit Monday, continue, but last week the VA announced it was appealing Carter’s judgment, including the temporary housing order.
VA lawyer Brad Rosenberg said the VA’s appeal and request for a stay on Carter’s orders would be filed this week. The judge set a hearing on the stay request Nov. 7 at 8:30 a.m.
Plaintiff’s lawyer Roman Silberfeld told Carter veterans vehemently opposed reopening Jackie Robinson Stadium. “The increase in rent is a pittance,“ he said. “It doesn’t benefit the veterans.”
Carter however said unless plaintiffs wanted to bulldoze the baseball facility, the ballfields were a “wasting asset.”
Veterans said they were surprised and dismayed by the ruling. “It’s a travesty,” said veteran and advocate Rob Reynolds. “UCLA pays its coach $1 million in salary, more than for the whole stadium.”
The VA last week said in a statement the judge’s order would irreparably harm its budget and divert from other veteran services.
“It’s sad,” said Jeffrey Powers, the lead plaintiff. “The VA is fighting us, UCLA is fighting us, and all we want is housing for our veterans.”
“The VA is fighting us, UCLA is fighting us, and all we want is housing for our veterans.” — Jeffrey Powers
Asked if he had a response, Robert C. Merchant, director of the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, said the agency would stand on its statement last week.
During the hearing, Brentwood School attorney Jonathan Sandler said his client was considering intervening in the appeal. Brentwood earlier had reached a $5 million preliminary settlement giving veterans more than 50 percent use of its luxury athletic facilities, which are also located on the VA campus. A “fairness” hearing to decide if the tentative settlement is reasonable is set for Nov. 13.
On Monday, Carter also discussed other sites where veteran homes could be placed. The VA, which over the past decade has struggled to open 1,200 permanent units under an earlier court agreement, argues there is no more campus land available for housing.
One of the promising sites experts have located for permanent housing is a ball field near the Brentwood gate to the campus, but Carter said he had heard “a whole set of rumors” that it may have been contaminated by nuclear medical waste in a landfill. Merchant said the VA has a report and officials promised to produce it.
The next hearing is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 7 at 8:30 a.m.
Post script: Why does the UCLA baseball team play its games on VA land, anyway?
UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium sits on just over 10 acres of the West LA VA campus, land formerly known as the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. This arrangement has been at the center of veterans complaints against the government for decades. What follows is reporting from Home of the Brave, Long Lead’s feature on LA’s unhoused veterans crisis:
In 1926, Congress explored the sale of 160 acres of the Pacific Branch to the State of California, which sought to establish a larger campus for what would become the University of California, Los Angeles. In return, the federal government would receive $1.5 million, which it could use to create fireproof barracks. Ultimately, UCLA struck a deal with a different landowner in 1929, cutting the ribbon on a Westwood campus abutting the Pacific Branch to the east. The 160 acres of Pacific Branch land later became a large part of the Los Angeles National Cemetery, which, as of 2024, has interred more than 90,000 veterans.
Four years after the scuttled deal, UCLA’s baseball team relocated from Westwood to the Soldiers Home, where Pacific Branch and American Legion-fronted teams played. The university continues to field its collegiate baseball team on the West LA VA campus as of 2024, while the veteran-associated clubs do not.
The VA also formed associations between its hospitals and medical schools. In 1947, it formalized a medical research partnership with UCLA that took over four buildings on the north side of the VA campus. The following year, Congress passed another law allowing the VA to transfer 35 acres of the Soldiers Home property to the state of California through a quitclaim deed so UCLA could use it as a medical school.
“Our aim, actually, is to be in such proximity that we are actually almost one in operating in a very integrated manner,” Dr. Charles Modica, director of the Veterans Administration Center in Los Angeles, later testified to Congress in 1967.
But a landmark shift arrived in September 1958, when Congress formalized the VA’s evolving role by passing Public Law 85-857. The law established the comprehensive veterans’ benefits system that we know today — but also, according to the VA, removed the department’s authorization to build and manage permanent housing for veterans. Instead, the agency, and therefore its West LA campus, would narrow its focus to healthcare, cemetery services, and other benefits.
Neighboring institutions interpreted the 1958 law as an opportunity to use “surplus” VA land for their own purposes. UCLA campaigned for 44 more acres of VA land. Brentwood officials floated building a road through the property. A local official advocated for building a community park. By the early 1960s, none of these deals had materialized, but the borders of the Soldiers Home had begun to erode.
The university has leased more than 10 acres on the VA campus dating back to 1981. That February, UCLA held its first game at a massive new baseball facility that the VA allowed to be built on campus grounds. “Located on the site of old Sawtelle Field, Jackie Robinson Stadium provides the Bruins with one of the top college baseball fields in the nation,” reads a 2013 description of the facility that notes its verdant setting “along trees in a natural environment.”
In August 2013, a federal judge deemed the arrangement, and eight others, illegal. In response, the university secured what someone involved in the execution of the VA’s leasing agreements described as a “special relationship” in the form of a lease for the stadium involving a 10-year commitment to pay rent and provide at least $13.5 million in in-kind support to the veterans. It was tucked into the West LA Leasing Act, a 2016 law co-authored by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, two California lawmakers with close ties to the school. “They did that because the regents are the most juiced-up players in California life,” explains a source involved in the leasing efforts, “and because VA needs a huge number of UCLA medical residents.”
This exemption emboldened UCLA to expand its footprint via the stadium through a practice field named after another famous Dodgers ballplayer, Ralph Branca. In a January 2021 call discussing the plan that was later leaked to the press, VA brass worried that “testy” veterans’ advocates — already vocal about the growing “Veterans Row” encampment of homeless vets on the sidewalk outside VA gates during the COVID-19 pandemic — would “get up in arms” over the deal, which would allow the construction in exchange for the VA regaining use of some parking spaces. The practice field opened the following year.
For more on the history of the West LA VA campus, read Part 2 of Home of the Brave: “The Rise and Fall of the Soldiers Home.” For more on the relationship between the VA and its lessees, read Part 4: “Carving up the Map.”
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