High School Girls’ Soccer Teams Practice Getting Down and Dirty

Here’s mud in your eye--and on your socks, T-shirts and gym shorts too.

Last week, we told you of the boys’ soccer team at Santa Monica High School, which resisted the urge to play on a muddy field by running 40-yard laps on the school track instead.

On Monday and Tuesday, with heavy rains again pounding the area, the girls’ varsity and junior soccer teams showed no such restraint.

Westside laundries 2, parents 0.

On both days, the girls hit the playing field, which after a straight week of rain had become a soup of standing water, loose sod and mud. On Tuesday, the deluge was so fierce the players washed after practice by standing beside the gym under streams of water that cascaded from gutters on the roof.

“If European teams play in the rain, why can’t we?” asked one wet player.

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HOWARD’S BILL: With the one-year anniversary of the Northridge earthquake and the deadline for 1994 income taxes both approaching, Rep. Howard L. Berman(D-Panorama City) this week reintroduced a bill to permit disaster victims to deduct their casualty losses from their federal income taxes.

Current law already permits victims of federal disasters to deduct their personal losses if damages exceed 10% of their adjusted gross income, plus $100. In other words, a family making $50,000 a year would have to have $5,100 in damages to earn the tax relief.

Berman wants to wipe out the 10% threshold, a step that one estimate said would cost the federal government about $22 million a year.

Showing the bipartisan appeal of the idea--at least within the earthquake zone--Reps. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) all signed on to the tax relief proposal as co-sponsors. Last session, the bill never got past the Ways and Means Committee, which was bogged down in President Clinton’s health reform package.

In reintroducing the bill Thursday, Berman said: “Every dollar taxpayers have to send to Washington is a dollar not spent in their devastated local communities. They could spend that money putting contractors and builders to work--or they could use it in local stores to buy items to replace damaged possessions.”

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ZEV’S DIGS: When Zev Yaroslavsky left his City Council seat last month to become the newest county supervisor, he initiated a scramble to see who would get his highly coveted office on the third floor of City Hall.

The space is desirable because it provides a large office for the council member, includes a private conference room and is only steps away from the council chambers, where council members meet three times a week.

The winner of the office scramble was Councilman Mike Hernandez, who beat out Councilman Richard Alarcon because Hernandez has been in office longer. The custom at City Hall is that seniority rules when it comes to office assignments.

Alarcon gets the consolation prize: Hernandez’s old digs, which are slightly more spacious than the offices Alarcon now occupies and which provide the councilman with his own private bathroom.