City staff is pressing pause on a move to change the purpose of sports fields at two parks in Santa Maria after some residents demanded the city to reverse its actions at a recent City Council meeting.
In early October, the city’s Recreation and Parks Department began removing the dirt and other infield material from ball fields at Simas and Minami parks, with plans to convert the fields into all-grass, multi-use areas for all sports, including soccer, football, and lacrosse.
“Our goal has always been to not deprive anybody of anything, but to make better use of the limited facilitates that we have,” Recreation and Parks Director Alex Posada told the Sun.
But baseball and softball players and coaches have pushed back on the changes. Some residents gathered to protest the move outside the Recreation and Parks Department in early October.
On Oct. 14, the city held a public meeting to discuss its plans to use the infield material taken from Simas and Minami parks to replace the material at Maramonte and Rodenberger parks to make the fields there more playable, Posada said. But residents expressed resistance to these changes at the workshop.
The day after the workshop, nine people spoke out about the conversion during the City Council meeting on Oct. 15, including Michaela Melena, who organized the protest outside the Recreation and Parks Department building.
“I’m here to ask that you reverse your decision to remove Simas and Minami fields,” she said. “The kids in this community deserve a place to practice.”
The impetus of this conversion can be traced back to 2014 when the city was in the midst of a wave of youth violence, Posada said. During this time, local groups told the city that it needs to provide kids with additional sports opportunities, especially for soccer.
At the time, the city and local groups began looking at ways to create a soccer complex within Santa Maria. Since then, Posada said the Recreation and Parks Department has applied for numerous state and federal grants trying to secure resources to build more soccer fields within the city.
But when these efforts didn’t prove fruitful, the department was left to work with the city’s existing fields, Posada explained. Based on a set of policies on sports field use and allocation that City Council adopted in 2015, the department identified Simas and Minami as under-utilized and presented plans to convert those fields to multi-use areas to the city’s Planning Commission in 2015, Posada said. The city began working on this conversion process in early October.
The four-year lapse between now and then can be attributed to the department’s limited resources, as well as its efforts to seek other revenue sources to fund soccer fields, Posada said.
At the Oct. 15 meeting, despite the item not being on the agenda, City Council directed City Manager Jason Stilwell to pause these efforts and bring a plan to the city’s Recreation and Park’s Commission.
“This was passed in 2015; it took four years to figure this whole thing out,” Councilmember Etta Waterfield said.
Councilmember Gloria Soto said she agreed with Waterfield that the city shouldn’t take fields from one sport to give to another sport, as it doesn’t address the city’s larger problem of needing more sports fields in general.
Posada acknowledges this is the underlying issue. He said the number of fields in the city used to be adequate, but now because most sports are played year-round, that’s no longer the case. Without additional funding, though, it’s hard to build more sports fields.
“We thought we came up with an idea that would be manageable as an interim approach,” Posada said. “Ultimately, the goal is to add more fields when the money becomes available.”
This article appears in Oct 24-31, 2019.