After dithering for weeks, the Parks and Recreation Commission voted Monday night to split the cost of doing fall maintenance on three town baseball fields with the Bromfield Baseball Boosters Club, continuing a five-year public-private partnership between the two organizations. But the commission left plans to maintain field hockey, soccer, lacrosse, and other fields up in the air, and has yet to deal with differences in the facilities available to Bromfield’s girls softball and boys baseball teams.
The decision to fund the boosters’ request was unanimous, with commissioners Doug Thornton, Michelle Lauria, and Steve Victorson voting to appropriate $3,119 for maintenance and a “spring tuneup” of the Pond Road baseball field, and $4,041 for Ryan Land fields 1 and 2. A fourth member, field liaison Joe Reynolds, was absent, but told the Press he opposed the move. The $7,150 total is one-third of the roughly $22,000 remaining in Parks and Rec’s field budget for this fiscal year. The total cost, for which the boosters club will pay half with money raised by its annual Christmas tree sale, is $14,000. The work will be done by an outside contractor, North Turf, the same company recently hired to complete the Ann Lees softball field.
While Monday’s vote guarantees that the town’s baseball fields will be ready for spring play, the commission has yet to appropriate any money for maintenance of the town’s remaining fields, including Ann Lees. No work was done last year on any athletic fields other than those for baseball at Pond Road and the Ryan Land, according to a recently released interim report of the Athletic Field Planning Subcommittee—and there is no maintenance plan for the current fiscal year. DPW Director Tim Kilhart has said repeatedly that he has only enough staff and equipment to mow and line fields. He and others have said that a long-term plan that includes aeration, leveling, reseeding, and fertilization is pointless, unless the town is willing to close its athletic fields for a year so the work can be done and the fields given a rest.
Baseball booster club president, Darren Magan, has been coming to the commission for the past five years to ask for matching funds, which have always been approved without controversy. But this time, when Magan came to the commission five weeks ago with his annual plan, Lauria, who is the newest member, balked, as did field liaison Joe Reynolds. Because the booster club offer was the only proposal on the table, and the window for fall maintenance was closing rapidly, Lauria said she felt pressured to approve it, even if the fields in question aren’t those in greatest need of maintenance. “I feel like the squeaky wheel always gets the grease, ” she said, a characterization to which Magan objected. BBBC might be the squeaky wheel, he said, “but we always come with a solution.” Faced with a 2-2 vote, Thornton tabled the proposal.
Time for decision
This week, however, Lauria reversed her earlier position and moved to approve the booster club’s two requests. “I just feel we need to make a decision and get something done,” she said. With winter just weeks away, it was now or never.
The board has vowed, in the words of commissioner Victorson, “to get its act together” to avoid last-minute decisions such as this. Last month, on the same night they postponed action on the baseball boosters plan, the commissioners voted 4-0 to enact a policy that requires them “to consider the allocation of maintenance funds according to field conditions and need,” not according to “who shows up first with a fist full of cash,” in the words of field subcommittee acting Chair Dan Daly. The commission also agreed that every year in July they would henceforth prepare a prioritized list of maintenance needs to guide the coming fiscal year’s spending. The worst fields would go to the top of the list, and the new policy could, for example, result in the allocation of less money to the town’s well-maintained baseball fields, and more to a field such as the McCurdy soccer field, with its known poor drainage. No such prioritized list currently exists, though the field subcommittee is working to create one. And though the commissioners declared more than once at meetings this past spring, summer, and fall that McCurdy is the field most in need of maintenance, they have not appropriated any money for its repair.
Question of gender inequity
School Superintendent Linda Dwight told the Press Tuesday morning that while booster club contributions to a particular sport can create gender inequities, the dollar amounts are less important than the relative quality of the facilities themselves. For example, she said, the addition of outfield fences, covered dugouts, new player benches, and a batting cage to the yet-to-be-completed Ann Lees softball field would help reduce the disparity between that venue and the baseball fields at Pond Road and the Ryan Land. Dwight said she is OK with Magan’s use of booster money to help with baseball field maintenance. “I would never want to see a well-maintained field get worse” or to discourage private fundraising, she said. But she acknowledged that the school must correct any disparity in quality between boys’ and girls’ fields that the spending creates. And come spring, Ann Lees will need a maintenance plan of its own.
Asked to comment on the vote at Parks and Rec Monday night, Harvard Youth Baseball and Softball Association President Larry Feinberg said he was glad that the years-long partnership with Parks and Rec would continue. “User fees and sponsorships don’t nearly cover [field] expenses,” he wrote the Press. “I believe this public-private cooperation [between Parks and Rec and the baseball boosters] has been working and is potentially a model for other programs as well, lightening the burden on individual organizations.”
Saving the town money
Parks and Rec Chair Thornton also defended the commission’s vote in an email to the Press. He noted that Parks and Rec has been matching funds for fall maintenance of “diamond” fields since 2015. Until 2017 this program included maintenance of the softball fields at Hildreth Elementary School. Deciding how to spend the Parks and Recreation budget is often contentious, he said, as the commission seeks to balance short term versus long term needs, fields versus tennis courts or the outdoor basketball court, or field maintenance versus acquisitions you can touch, such as picnic tables, bike racks, and mulch for the McCurdy Track playground. “This fall maintenance program demonstrates how the town can save money by collaborating with a group of sports organizations—a booster club and youth baseball/softball,” he said.
As fall budget season begins, the school plans to asks CPC for a $70,000 grant to repair the tennis and basketball courts at Bromfield. At the upcoming fall Special Town Meeting, Parks and Rec is asking for an additional $15,000 for “spring maintenance.”
