Beverly Hills spent the spring arguing about a number. The city had proposed doubling pickleball and tennis court fees, from $10 to $20 an hour for residents, and the town halls got loud enough that the council walked the increase back before it ever took effect. That fight made the local paper. It made the council meeting run long. It is also not the decision that actually determined where you can play pickleball in this city right now.
The decision that mattered came from a decibel meter, not a budget spreadsheet. A city-commissioned noise study found that pickleball on Court 1 at the La Cienega Tennis Center exceeded the Los Angeles County recommended guideline of 50 decibels, measured against the residential edge along Le Doux Road. That single reading did more to reshape where you're allowed to play than any fee schedule the council debated this year.
The Fight Everyone Watched
The fee proposal was the kind of thing that gets people to show up to a city meeting. Tennis fees were set to jump from $10 to $20 an hour for residents and $14 to $30 for non-residents. Pickleball fees followed the same curve. For a sport that had exploded in popularity at both of the city's public facilities, a price increase north of 100 percent read as a penalty for showing up.
After several town hall meetings in March, the Beverly Hills City Council settled on $12 for residents and $17 for non-residents at its April 21 meeting, with Mayor Craig Corman presiding. Resident Sobhit Arora told the council the revised number felt like something the community could live with. Council candidate Andrew Kole, who had been one of the more vocal critics of the original proposal, called the new prices fine, though he added that the process the city used to get there had been flawed.
What got less attention in that meeting is that the city's tennis and pickleball program didn't need the money. Fiscal year 2024-25 revenue for the program came in at $999,549 against expenses of $784,372, a surplus of more than $215,000. The fee increase wasn't rescuing an insolvent program. It was funding the physical reshuffle the noise study had already made necessary, and covering the cost of converting more tennis courts to pickleball to meet demand.
The Reading Nobody Argued About
Pickleball courts are quieter to build than they are to run next to a house. The paddle-on-ball sound is higher pitched and more repetitive than a tennis rally, and Beverly Hills' Recreation Services Manager Michael Muse told the council that the sound study confirmed what residents on Le Doux Road had already been saying: the court closest to their backyards was over the county's guideline.
The fix wasn't a fine or a lawsuit. It was a floor plan. The city's answer was to pull pickleball off Court 1 at La Cienega, restore it to tennis, and shift the sport's growth toward courts positioned farther from residential lot lines. Councilwoman Mary Wells captured the tradeoff when the city laid out that final stage last year, saying she'd seen firsthand how much community pickleball builds, especially for older players who've found new friendships through the sport, and that the city wanted to support that without making it someone's neighbor problem.
That's the quieter thesis here. The fee number is what residents fought over in public. The decibel number is what actually decided the map.
Where the Courts Actually Sit Now
After two rounds of conversion, the city settled on an uneven split between its two facilities.
Roxbury Park Tennis Courts kept its four dedicated pickleball courts, unchanged through the whole process. Those courts became the steady baseline while La Cienega absorbed most of the churn.
La Cienega Tennis Center ended up with the larger footprint. The city converted two additional tennis courts there, on top of what already existed, bringing the facility's total pickleball court count to 12, even after the noisiest court was handed back to tennis. If you're deciding which facility to try first, La Cienega now has three times the pickleball capacity of Roxbury, which matters if you've ever tried to book a court on a Saturday morning and found nothing open for a week.
A few operational details changed alongside the courts themselves:
- Reservations now run through the Playbypoint app, with new rules that took effect for bookings starting January 25, 2026.
- Getting resident pricing requires uploading proof of residency, a utility bill, mortgage statement, or lease agreement, directly in the app.
- Resident members can book up to seven days out. Non-resident members are capped at four days.
- Courts at both facilities close Mondays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. for washing, and cancellations inside six hours forfeit the court fee.
- The city explicitly prohibits using public court reservations for organized clinics, leagues, or meetup groups without prior approval, which is worth knowing if you've been informally running a Sunday round robin.
None of that shows up in a headline about a fee vote. All of it is what actually determines whether you get a court this month.
What This Says About How the City Solves These Problems
The pattern here is worth remembering the next time Beverly Hills has to referee a fight between a popular amenity and the neighbors living next to it. The city didn't split the difference on the noise complaint the way it split the difference on the fee complaint. It didn't ask Le Doux Road residents to tolerate a quieter version of the same court. It moved the sport somewhere else within the same facility and let La Cienega's larger footprint absorb the growth.
That's a different kind of compromise than the one that played out in the council chamber over pricing, where public pressure produced a number roughly in between the original ask and the status quo. The noise question didn't get a number in between. It got relocated. If you live near a public court that starts drawing complaints, the acoustic finding is likely to carry more weight with the city than the popularity of the sport itself, and the fix is more likely to be geographic than financial.
For residents who play, the practical upshot is straightforward. La Cienega Tennis Center is where the capacity is now, Roxbury Park remains the smaller, steadier option, and the app-based membership system means the days of just walking up to an open court are over at both. If you've been meaning to try it, the four courts at Roxbury and the twelve at La Cienega are both open to residents willing to verify their address once and book a week ahead.
City services like this rarely make it into the conversation about what it's actually like to live somewhere day to day. But the courts you can book, the noise you don't have to hear from your own backyard, and the small civic fights that get resolved quietly on a Tuesday afternoon are as much a part of Beverly Hills as anything on Rodeo Drive.
If you're weighing a move into a neighborhood like this one, the details that don't make headlines are usually the ones worth asking a local about first. Amir Jawaherian has spent his career inside Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the other legacy neighborhoods that make up this stretch of Los Angeles, and knows the difference between what shows up in a listing and what it actually feels like to live somewhere. Schedule a Private (Confidential) Consultation when you're ready to talk about what's next.
