CITY HALL SKETCH: The Pickleball Wars, Chapter 47

In which Hermosa Beach reopens four pickleball courts and pretends everything will be fine this time.

The Kelly Courts pickleball renovation is approaching completion. New surfaces. New fencing — ten feet tall now, because six wasn't enough to stop the climbers. New gates. New separation between the tennis and pickleball courts.

What hasn't changed is the argument.

On Monday night, staff presented the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission with two options for the reopened courts. Option 1: add Sundays. Option 2: go full seven-days-a-week, nine-to-nine.

Chair Barbara Ellman, who has spent eight years - yes, eight years - mediating the pickleball wars, launched into a retrospective of her bruising pickleball journey with the intensity of a Ken Burns documentary and the neutrality of a plaintiff's attorney.

"I am so offended that this has come back the way it has," she said.