Public Comment: Switch to a Grass Field While We Can Still Afford It
Ruts, divots and cracks in the Amherst High School track. Photo: Art Keene
The following public comment was offered at the joint meeting of the Amherst Regional School Committee and the Union 26 School Committee on November 28, 2023.
The promise to the Amherst Finance Committee back in April 2022 was that the District would not allow the high school’s unusable track to languish for lack of funds while in pursuit of a larger project. A split vote there allowed the project to proceed, but with stern warnings:
“The school committee has to be ready to move forward with just doing the track rather than the bigger project if the money doesn’t come up.”
“I would hate to see that we didn’t raise the funds and we’re still going for the large project and two years from now we still haven’t done the track.”
“My fear here is that we’re gonna get to the point we’ll be right on the edge and folks will postpone and postpone and that the one and a half million dollars we’ve appropriated will get eaten up by time and inflation.”
And yet, here we are. The timeline dictated by this latest RFP would push start of construction out to 2025 at the earliest. By then, cost escalation will raise track resurfacing to $1.8M. The two grass field options will have gone from less than $4M to $5M. A typical, likely crumb rubber, artificial turf option will have risen from nearly $5M to nearly $7M, and the specialized products promised by fundraisers would be much more than that. And no one has yet to explain where we would find the million dollars for replacement costs every 10 years or the purchase of specialized equipment required to maintain this artificial turf.
The fiscal realities are already clear. We must stop putting off the inevitable and bring people together around a solid plan that our students can start to actually use as early as 2025. Another Regional School District in our state faced the exact same situation that we do. They have just broken ground on what is almost identical to our Option 2 for $4.3M. We can have that too, but we must work together and we must pivot now to build a new, expanded, accessible track and grass field. The only realistic, but less satisfying, alternative is to simply resurface the track.
Maria Kopicki is a resident of Amherst