The three-year effort to block City Hall’s attempt to convert parks to plastic.
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August of 2003 an article ran in the local San Carlos throw away newspaper that
described the City’s plan to convert San Carlos’ largest park from natural grass
to artificial turf. This was a paper that I spent more time throwing away than
reading, but we were camping and I was in charge of starting the fire. I’m not
very good at building fires, so the more paper the better. The mention of the
park across the street from my house caught my eye and I rescued the article
from my fire. I read in amazement that a city in California could even consider
such a plan.
I’m in the park every day walking my dog and about a month after the camping trip I was approached by a woman I only half knew. She introduced herself as both a neighbor (she lives four doors down) and as the head of the local youth soccer organization. She knew I was coaching my son’s soccer team and hoped that I would help the soccer organization on its newest initiative.
“We would like you to help us build support for the plan to convert Highlands Park to synthetic turf,” she began. When I asked why, she went on to say, “San Carlos has extremely high youth soccer participation levels, but we aren’t very competitive relative to other communities.” I was horrified.
The pro-plastic people haven’t mentioned this underlying rationale since. Instead they claim that plastic is necessary to solve a myriad of problems.
I accepted her invitation to help, but I would focus on helping to defeat the plan. I approached the City’s Parks and Recreation Director and volunteered to “help” the City find a solution to San Carlos’ field space problem. He readily accepted I think because he figured he could easily talk me into supporting his plastic plan. While his words suggested he was still “investigating” his actions suggested he was “selling.”
Our relationship turned sour very quickly as it became clear to me that he consistently “cherry-picked” data and ignored anything that might not support his intentions. I was able to point to better solutions to almost every problem, except improving our competitiveness.
I thought the answer to the City’s lack of field space was obvious. While San Carlos has 8 fields in a City of roughly 28,000, neighboring communities with similar populations have significantly more fields, one has twice as many fields. We had a capacity problem that was not solved by plasticizing a park. We need a new field.
I struggled to convince anyone that this was the right answer. A new field didn’t really solve their problem. What they wanted was a year-round field with lights and no other park in the community has a lit soccer field. The general belief was that the City leaders would not vote for more lights. It has to be plastic so they can play all winter long and needs lights for evening practice. It became clear that the stated objective of growing demand was not the real problem. It was more wins for San Carlos.
I had no experience with local government and didn’t really know how I could make an impact. I assumed that government would value logic and analysis similar to how it works in the private sector. That turned out to be a poor assumption.
The park today has grass that after 13 years of intensive use is showing signs of wear. The City hired an expensive grass consultant who basically said, “use it less.” And they did.
As a result of this consultant, all fields throughout the City became rationed. The fields were put on a schedule and periodically closed for reseeding. The soccer community had to cut back their twice-weekly practices from two hours to just an hour and a half. And they were angry.
The Parks Director deflected this anger by proposing that they convert one park to plastic and they loved the idea. Everything started to fall in line for the plastic push and he was confident that they could begin the conversion quickly. He was wrong.
I began by quantifying the benefit of converting a natural grass field to synthetic turf. There would certainly be fewer closures and more playable hours, but the benefit relative to the cost was small. In financial terms, the return on investment was significantly higher by building a new field. I identified some school property that I thought would be appropriate for a new field and demonstrated that even without lights it was cheaper and produced more new playable hours. This didn’t help the artificial activists and so it was ignored.
When an easy answer wasn’t clear, the City formed a committee. When I wouldn’t agree with the plan the Director brought in a mediator. When that didn’t work the committee was disbanded. But the Director wanted to move forward. He took the proposal to the City’s Parks and Recreation Commission in February of 2004. They liked the concept of plastic, but not at this park and voted for plastic at a different school site. Essentially ignoring this vote, the Director attempted to go over everyone’s head and immediately take it to the City Council. This is where it died its first death.
The City was struggling with a huge deficit and had other issues that seemed more pressing. The Mayor killed the item for a “few years” until the synthetic supporters screamed and yelled. And so our local government decided to form a new Committee to study the problem in even more depth.
The pro-plastic people used their youth sports mailing lists to organize a strong army of volunteers for this new Committee and managed to fill the advisory committee with their representatives. I was appointed to this committee but of the 28 members very few were truly independent.
The committee held its first meeting in the Spring of 2005 and met twice a month for nine months. From the very first meeting it was clear that the majority of committee members had one goal: convert Highlands Park to plastic. I quickly adopted my role as agitator as I continued to challenge the approach and conclusions the group was forming.
“I find you offensive,” said the representative from the Adult Softball League as she stared directly at me in one of the early Committee meetings.
“Me? Why? What did I do?” I asked.
“You continually refer to ‘synthetic turf’ as ‘plastic.’ This isn’t like the old Astroturf. The industry has standardized on the term ‘synthetic turf.’ I think you should use that term because it’s impolite to continually cheapen the product by calling it plastic,” she said challenging me.
“Well maybe instead I’ll call it ‘plastic with bits of little ground up rubber tires sprinkled on top,’” I replied. I went on to inform her that converting the park to plastic would leave me feeling cheapened. Needless to say this comment didn’t make me any new friends and I kept calling it plastic.
My use of the word “plastic” was no accident. There were a few of us on the pro-grass side and we knew we would lose the vote of this Committee. Instead, we were focused on the five votes that really counted—the City Council’s vote. In the next meeting, as if by magic, the plastic people began referring to it “all weather turf.”
I pushed the committee to find a mathematical model for measuring any given solution. We formed a sub committee to do just that. The four-member sub-committee was comprised of two grass people and two plastic people. I came to the first meeting with what I thought was a balanced model that would easily allow us to analyze any possible scenario. The plastic people didn’t trust it and argued every last assumption. We spent two hours early on arguing about what time the sun set and if the county’s rain records were accurate. After six hours the plastic people objected to my model and yet never offered any counter proposal. Clearly numbers were not their friend.
While this was all going on, the community was starting to take sides.
The Little League baseball community, whose Board I had joined, was largely against the concept of plastic ball fields. Little League voted against converting the park and shortly thereafter the City changed its field closure field so that reseeding now happened during the baseball season. Coincidence? Not likely. The Director claimed, “We’re merely optimizing our field closure schedule.” I guess the idea of inflicting a bit of pain on Little League to win its support is what you might call hardball. The strategy worked, after two years of mid-season closures, the Little League Board reversed itself.
There are two soccer leagues in the community one that accepts everyone and a second that is more competitive and is selective. We have kids in both leagues. The leagues began a steady stream of communiqués to their mailing lists about the necessity of plastic. They had the same bad habit that City Hall used of presenting just one side. Unlike the leagues they run, the rules of this game became win at all costs. At one point we got an e-mail that said to all parents that unless you sign a petition and support plastic in the park, your child won’t be allowed to practice.
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issue was clearly the more controversial than any other issue in the past couple
of decades. City Council members each received well over 400 letters and e-mails
and ultimately would hear over 7 hours of reports and public comment. After
nine months the committee disbanded with a vote of 21 to 7 in favor of
converting Highlands Park to plastic. Calling it the “common sense” approach
they smiled like Cheshire cats. What they didn’t realize is that they were
losing.
The City Council appointed two of its members to chair the committee. In the end they wouldn’t vote in the committee but would represent 40% of the real vote when the issue went before the Council. While the pro-plastic people relished in the brilliance at stacking the make up of the committee, we were playing to an audience of two.
At the final committee meeting, and after some private lobbying, the two chairs came to the committee with a compromise proposal. Within moments of presenting a compromise to convert school property instead of parks to plastic, a counter proposal was offered and voted to an overwhelming victory.
The artificial activists seemed to ignore the fact that they seemingly lacked the support of 40% of their ultimate vote, but there were other things to concentrate on. We formed a Minority subcommittee for the express purpose of offering a differing recommendation. We also activated our neighborhoods and built committees of people with energy and money. We hired a lawyer (who offered more guidance than action) and began our grass roots effort to build support.
The next stop was a February 2006 meeting of the Parks and Recreation Commission. The room was overflowing with people. Staff, Majority and Minority made presentations followed by public comment. The Majority’s omnibus set of recommendations included selling City-owned open land to help finance the conversion. This had the effect of sparking dissent in these neighborhoods and of the 80 speakers that came forward the majority of them objected to the recommendations in one form or fashion.
What the plastic people didn’t realize is that the committee’s power was greatest if it could have formed a consensus. What emerged was a deep schism in the community. No politician likes to take sides and thus offend a chunk of the community. By lacking agreement we effectively put the responsibility for compromise in the hands of the politicians. That’s what they did; they compromised.
The Parks and Recreation Commission ultimately ignored Staff and the Majority and sided with the Minority, which they viewed as a balanced compromise of “plastic is OK as long as it isn’t in a park.”
The plastic promoters were outraged. They angrily accused Commission members of disrespect and dereliction of duty. Remember, that the plastic people are the same people running our youth sports programs. These are the people responsible for teaching our kids about good sportsmanship and fair play and they were also the ones shouting and yelling after public comment was closed.
None of us tree-huggers was ready to celebrate, but we felt like this was an important first step. The only battle that would matter was at the April 10th City Council meeting. After 5 hours the meeting was continued until May 8th for another 4.5 hours.
It had been almost three years and as many committees and finally we were poised for a decision. The Mayor asked each council members to issue opening statements. Most talked about themes that concerned them but didn’t reveal their hand. One council member came out firing declaring that the best solution was clearly to convert Highlands Park to plastic.
After an hour of discussion this same council member would make a motion to convert Highlands Park to plastic. None of the other council members would second the motion. The council would go on to vote for a series of actions that included fixing some fields with new grass and creating plastic fields at two middle schools.
Again vocal members of the sports community demonstrated their sportsmanship as they stormed out of the room shouting objections as they exited.
We won! The City would get a plastic field but not at a park.
It never felt like I volunteered for this fight, but I certainly felt it was my duty to never back down. In the process, I developed strong relationship with many of my neighbors but clearly angered as many who I once considered friends. There were some relationships where we tacitly agreed to simply not discuss the topic and other relationships that unraveled as a result my role. After we won, I was approached by numerous people who offered private congratulations but clearly didn’t want others in the community to know which side they supported.
I learned many lessons. While we were fighting about grass versus synthetic turf, the community was wrestling with seemingly more important issues. Two ballot measures one to reduce traffic and a second to prevent the City from firing fire fighters, both lost in the election. I think I learned that the world revolves around self-interest. Neighbors fighting a “not in my backyard argument” against parents fighting for “a solution that will happen fast enough to benefit my kids.” Finally, I learned that local governments make decisions differently than private enterprise but that marketing fundamentals work equally well in both environments.
Greg Harris
May 19, 2006
Click here to see a TV news story on the San Carlos turf issue.
© Greg Harris, 2006