EDISON FIELDS:
AN IMPORTANT FIRST STEP

On Monday night, the Recreation Commission held their third public meeting to discuss the proposed Edison School fields project. I’d like to thank all who attended, and especially Recreation Committee Chair Jennifer Gilman and Vice Chair Russ Howell for all of their efforts in guiding this process. I would like to provide you with my perspective on where things currently stand. 

It’s important to first reiterate why this proposal is even being contemplated: We have incredible youth sports and recreation programs in town, yet we don't have adequate fields to meet the needs of our kids participating. 

Over the past 20 years, youth sports has grown dramatically, with a welcome expansion of girls’ teams. In that time, we’ve only added two fields at Houlihan/Sid Fay, which isn’t nearly enough to keep up with demand.  

In spite of the Town’s best efforts to adequately maintain our grass fields, it’s just not practical to do so with the daily hours of continuous play from thousands of athletes where demand far exceeds capacity. The personnel and chemicals required to properly maintain grass fields is not something the Town, nor the Board of Education, can reliably sustain, which we experienced first hand last year.

When schools and team sports were suspended during COVID, our DPW used the down time to aerate and reseed some of our grass fields at Tamaques. Today, all of that work has been undone in just the few short months since daily practices have resumed. As a general rule, experts suggest it takes at least four grass fields to equal the amount of play possible on one turf field, a standard that is not possible to attain in our densely populated residential town.

To help us solve this challenge, the Town hired Brandstetter Carroll, a preeminent and nationally recognized recreation consulting firm to assess our parks and recreation programs, benchmark Westfield relative to comparable communities across the country, and make short and long term recommendations to ensure Town resources reflect residents’ priorities. 

Brandstetter Carroll spent nearly a year in Westfield, hosting public forums, walking every park, interviewing community stakeholders, and surveying residents. The net result of this public process was our first ever comprehensive Strategic Parks Plan, adopted unanimously by the Town Council in February 2020, which provides a ten-year roadmap for our recreation facilities and programs, with new playing fields being just one of hundreds of recommendations. The Recreation Commission subsequently prioritized the top ten areas of focus, which includes the Edison field project. 

Since July, in response to our request for public input, we’ve heard from neighbors at three publicly held meetings, two neighborhood advisory meetings, and our Town Council meetings. We also viewed the comments at the most recent BOE meeting, and have received many emails representing a range of opinions.

We’ve heard neighbors’ concerns about traffic, parking, noise, lights, environmental safety, and flooding, further exacerbated by Ida, and we’re doing our best to address each one. We’ve also heard from our sports leagues, players, coaches, and parents, who overwhelmingly voiced their support and need for new playing fields during the public input process of the Strategic Parks Plan and at recent Council meetings.

These sports families are tired of traveling to other towns for practices and “home” games, often forcing parents to juggle competing schedules for multiple kids playing in various locations. They’re tired of paying other towns to use their fields when they pay property taxes to Westfield. They’re tired of endangering their kids who play at Tamaques on dirt fields that are hard as concrete from overuse, and using their car headlights to light up football practice in the fall. 

Every year we let these issues persist, thousands of Westfield families will continue to bear the unnecessary burden of time and money to have their kids play sports elsewhere. With every year that passes, we are asking our kids to assume unnecessary risk to play youth sports on unsafe fields here at home. It’s way past time to come together to figure this out.

Our collective job is to minimize the impact on our neighbors, and use this proposed plan as an opportunity to finally improve issues in and around Edison School so the neighborhood is not as burdened as it is today. While we still undergo cleanup from Ida, it’s important for residents to know this project could provide us the opportunity to redirect water away from flood prone areas around Knollwood Terrace and Robinson’s Creek. 

We are sincere in our desire and commitment to do so. 

The Recreation Commission has heard residents' concerns and scaled back the initial Edison turf fields proposal by nearly half, reducing the neighborhood impact and allowing for natural grass for Edison students and neighbors. The revised plan they presented on Monday reflects their desire to balance the current field shortage, neighbor concerns, and costs, which have also been reduced by half to $9MM -- which will be funded primarily by the recent PILOT agreement with Elite Properties, mitigating the tax burden on residents. 

Why Edison?

Let me be clear: Edison is not and never was intended to be the only location for new fields. We intend to start with Edison because it solves for the largest capacity increase in the shortest amount of time, with future consideration for Elm Street, Tamaques, and/or Memorial as recommended in the Parks Plan. There’s also no reason to assume that turf fields today will be replaced with turf fields in ten years if adequate field rotation is accomplished.

Clearly, Edison alone will not solve the field shortage, but it is the best first step.  And there is still much work to do to bring a plan to fruition, including further and ongoing conversations with the Edison neighborhood advisory group, and evaluating the findings of the commissioned traffic and parking study due in December, which will inform a proposal to eventually be shared with the BOE for consideration. 

I want to thank everyone for their valuable feedback that have been brought to us to this point. You can check out last night’s presentation on our website, and continue to provide your comments at edisonfields@westfieldnj.gov. I sincerely hope we can continue to work together to find a solution that mitigates the neighborhood impact while providing the much needed benefit to the community at large. And please, let us not forget that we are all neighbors first, doing our best to work together to solve a very complex problem in our community, for our community.