Officials meet on level playing field to ‘clear the air’

Deepa Bharath

City and school district officials met last week to examine what has

fast become the controversial way they share the community’s limited

number of sports fields.

The meeting, held on Aug. 31, was significant because it opened

the door to some necessary discussion, Costa Mesa City Councilman

Mike Scheafer said.

“We needed to get together and start a dialogue because this is

being perceived as a huge problem by the community,” he said.

The so-called joint-use agreement between the city and the school

district has been in place for more than a decade. But in the past

months, it has found a new place at the center of debate and

controversy after Costa Mesa High boys athletic director Dave

Perkins’ July 1 resignation and boys basketball coach Bob Serven’s

decision to step down on April 3. Among other problems, the coaches

said they were tired of picking up trash after games and putting in

their own time and resources to improve the fields.

Quality of the fields was, in fact, one of the major issues that

surfaced at the Aug. 31 meeting, which was attended by two council

members, two parks and recreation commissioners and several city and

school district officials.

The city needs to work on field maintenance issues and identify

funding sources to help them bring the fields to a certain standard,

said parks commissioner Byron de Arakal.

Talking to school district officials helped “clear the air” on

field-improvement issues, Scheafer said.

“We realized that the school district has a lot of other

priorities now, like getting their classrooms and facilities ready

for the school year and making the Measure A improvements,” he said.

“We also talked about the possibility of contracting field work to an

outside company and the legal issues surrounding it.”

School board member Dave Brooks said another challenge the school

district faces when it comes to field use is to figure out what is a

good time to make the improvements.

“We get a tremendous amount of field use in our city,” he said.

“We can’t seed the fields one week and have everybody using them the

following week. So, we would have to shut them down during that

time.”

The school district is not happy with the condition of the fields,

Brooks said.

“But we are working diligently to get them to the condition we can

be proud of,” he said.

Scheafer has also suggested that the different entities form a

single working group or an ad hoc committee to tackle the specific

issues relating to the joint-use agreement and field use.

“The purpose of this group will be to look at this critical issue

in our town, which we need to do something about,” he said.

The group has not yet been formalized, Scheafer said.

Another part of the problem this group will tackle is the issue of

field ambassadors, who monitor how the fields are used and help park

rangers enforce the rules. They are another sore point with coaches

who complain that they are too rigid and don’t use common sense when

it comes to citing coaches for using fields without permits or

parking illegally.

One coach, cited in July, has said he plans to fight the ticket at

his October court date.

The working group will look at how that problem can be resolved,

Scheafer said.

“Maybe we need to give them a little flexibility and better

direction,” he said. “But coaches too need to realize that the

ambassadors are doing their job and are not there to harm them.”

Empowering school ambassadors with discretionary power may be a

tricky issue, de Arakal said.

“They should be able to have some discretion without mangling the

permit process,” he said. “But we need to make sure that it doesn’t

set a precedent where people start stepping over the line. We need to

look at it more carefully.”

The joint-use agreement, which got dragged into the issue, is a

solid document, de Arakal said.

“We encourage all user groups and coaches in the community to

understand the rules of the joint-use agreement,” he said. “Without

our joint-use agreement and field-use policy, we’ll have people with

pitchforks and shotguns fighting for our fields.”

* DEEPA BHARATH is the enterprise and general assignment reporter.

She may be reached at (949) 574-4226 or by e-mail at

deepa.bharath@latimes.com.