Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Bradley Murray, 7, takes a swing during practice with his Angels teammates earlier this year at the Congress Springs playing fields.

Play field talks off to rocky beginning

By Sarah Lombardo

The first meeting of youth sports and city officials to negotiate future fees for the use of playing fields met with mixed reactions.

While some sports officials said the meeting was well-organized and a good first step toward working out an agreement, other league representatives said they felt as if the city was avoiding important issues and simply going through the motions of seeking input.

City staffers said that disagreements or not, at least everyone who was invited to the meeting showed up--and that indicated everyone was willing to work at reaching an agreement.

The meeting was the first of several planned to discuss joint-use agreements between the city and local sports organizations for playing fields. Representatives from the American Youth Soccer Organization, the California Youth Soccer Association, Little League, local school staffs and districts, and the City Council were in attendance, as was the city's recently hired project manager, Jay Beals, and staffers from his company, Beals Landscape Architecture.

The meetings came about after sports officials complained that a new fee established for the use of the fields--Congress Spring Park, in particular--was gouging local kids.

The city had proposed that sports leagues pay $12 per child for use of Congress Springs Park. According to previous contracts, the leagues paid a flat fee of $1,500 per season for exclusive use of the play fields, which amounted to about $3 per child for Little League and about $1 per child for AYSO.

The city said the new rate was necessary to maintain the fields and to prepare for the maintenance of future fields proposed for construction at local schools in the area.

With the city's new policy to make everything as cost-recoverable as possible, staffers said user fees would have to be increased to help pay for upkeep. As it is now, City Manager Larry Perlin told league officials in April, fees do not come close to covering maintenance costs.

The new contracts were apparently previously negotiated with sports officials by the city's Recreation Department. Little League agreed to the new system on the condition that certain one-time major improvements be made to Congress Springs Park and that AYSO also agree to the new fees.

AYSO didn't.

Larry Fine, AYSO regional commissioner for the Saratoga area, said the new fees were too high. He said it would amount to a jump from $1,500 per season to more than $14,000 per season for the soccer league.

And members of most sports leagues said the fields were already in bad shape and questioned what the extra fees would be spent on.

City officials agreed to renegotiate the contracts with input from all of the leagues, but some league officials claimed that the June 30 meeting didn't allow for free discussion and that the city was avoiding the issue of where current maintenance funds went.

City staffers agreed the meeting was emotionally charged. But administrative analyst Irene Jacobs pointed out that everyone in attendance had the same goal. "What was encouraging was that everyone there wanted a solution," she said.

Susie Dymoke, president of Saratoga Little League, defended Beals against some officials' claims that he dominated the discussion, not allowing certain issues to be discussed.

"He did put us all on the same page," she said. "He laid out the ground rules. I know some of the businessmen were unhappy with the way things went, but some things had to be said and said at the beginning."

The next meeting is scheduled to take place July 28 from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Emergency Operations Center of City Hall.

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