After loud protests from gardeners over a nearly fivefold increase in city fees at Ocean View Farms, the community garden at Rose and Centinela won a temporary reprieve from the payment hike.

The Los Angeles Recreation and Parks commission voted last year to charge “cost recovery” fees to Ocean View Farms and eight other community gardens throughout the city.

The fees were intended to recapture the costs of services to the gardens such as water, inspections and maintenance of common areas. But the decision caused an outcry among gardeners, who questioned the size and necessity of the fee hike.

As a result, the commission decided at its Jan. 5 meeting to suspend the fee increase until at least March, when it will have received the results of a study on the fee hikes. No date for the completion of that study has been set.

“The fees have been postponed until further study,” said Andrea Epstein, a spokeswoman for Recreation and Parks. The commission's "field staff is looking at each organization and coming back to the commission to make a recommendation as to the fees.”

The decision to raise fees was not widely publicized when it was made in July.

When gardeners learned of it and protested, the Recreation and Parks board of commissioners scheduled a November meeting to explain. Many of the roughly 130 gardeners who attended were upset at the size of the fee increase, from $25 to $120, which could be a burden on gardeners with fixed or low incomes.

But the fee hike also raised protests from gardeners who said there were few or no costs to recover. That’s an especially big issue at Ocean View Farms, which incurs zero costs for the city and does not pay any city fees.

“We pay our own water, we pay our own bills, we are not staffed in any way by the city, and we don’t ask them for any assistance or funding,” said Christy Wilhelmi, a gardener and Ocean View board member who helped represent the garden at Recreation and Parks board meetings. “So there would be no reason to impose a fee on us for zero services rendered.”

In fact, a Recreation and Parks report presented at the January meeting said as much. Though Ocean View Farms' land is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, its yearly $30 plot fees go to a nonprofit organization created to run the garden.

“When our slide came up on the slide show, both the president of the commission and one of the commissioners sitting next to him said, ‘Why are they even on our list?’ ” said Wilhelmi, who also owns an organic gardening business, Gardenerd.

The Recreation and Parks report showed that different gardens had different costs, needs and legal statuses—some are on land not owned by the city. To develop one policy that addresses all of those needs, commissioners authorized the study expected in March. Epstein declined to comment on what the results might be.

Wilhelmi said she expected the city to eventually charge Ocean View Farms a reasonably sized land-use fee, and that its gardeners generally seem satisfied to wait and see.

At the January meeting, Recreation and Parks Commission President Barry Sanders suggested that gardeners from different areas form a self-governing body. Wilhelmi said she thought this was a suggestion for the gardens that actually use Recreation and Parks services to instead create a volunteer work force, “to tend the property as a community, like we do.”

“I can tell you from talking to the other reps at the meeting, they would be happy to have it that way, because they feel that they are not getting their money’s worth,” Wilhelmi said.

“It is very clear ... that several people in the Department of Recreation and Parks Commission don’t feel like [the effect on low-income gardeners] is a big enough issue. They’re looking at making up $82 million in budget deficits this year.”