Editorial Editorial (July 30, 2004)

Play ball!

Newly energized youth sports leaders have won their two-year battle to build much-needed athletic fields on the publicly owned Bernal property. Faced with a referendum being advanced by long-time Parks and Recreation Commissioner - and City Council candidate - Jerry Thorne and Bob Maas, president of the Ballistic United Soccer Club (BUSC), the council accepted the initiative, sparing advocates a campaign to win voter approval Nov. 2. Thousands of registered voters had already signed the "Initiative to Save our Community Park," which Thorne and Maas co-authored, and its passage in the voting booth was expected. The plan endorsed by the council was the result of hundreds of hours of meetings by the Bernal Community Park Task Force, which Thorne chaired. It held public meetings starting in 2001, with an understanding that athletic fields would occupy up to 50 acres at the northeast corner of the 318-acre Bernal site. Along the way, the council veered from that plan, choosing instead to sponsor a design competition for Bernal. The winning design in that competition, picked by an independent panel of architectural and land use specialists July 17, was M. D. Fotheringham Design of San Francisco. His plan, which is likely to also win the council's final approval Aug. 31, recommends placing the sports fields almost exactly in the same northeast corner.

After Aug. 31, Thorne's task force can reconvene to reconcile its plan with Fotheringham's design. Still to be decided will be which consultant to use. The design competition authorized by the City Council awards a cash prize of $10,000 to the winner or the chance to be considered for handling the overall Bernal property development, an agreement that could be worth millions of dollars over the next 20-30 years. The new sports fields, alone, could cost up to $26 million, with $5 million already allocated and ready to spend on three lighted baseball fields, the top priority. Since 2002, the city-appointed Community Park Task Force and city staff have paid a different consultant, RRM Design Group, and it's that plan that is in the council-approved initiative. City Manager Deborah McKeehan and the council will have to determine if RRM Design or Fotheringham handle the design work going forward.

The new sports fields are a tribute to both Thorne's task force and Bob Maas, whose BUSC has long taken a lead in sports fields and sports policy development in Pleasanton. They are also the result of teamwork among many sports leaders and factions that not long ago were sometimes at each other's throats over field assignments and recruitment efforts. Maas, especially, deserves credit for convincing coaches and club leaders that no matter what their particular sport, gaining field space on Bernal and at other locations in a city nearing buildout, where open space is increasingly at a premium, can only be achieved by a cooperative effort. BUSC stepped to the plate on its own last year in raising $500,000 that it contributed to the city toward building Val Vista Community Park and the three new soccer fields located there.

With the development of the new lighted baseball fields on the property, city officials and soccer enthusiasts can turn their attention to replacing baseball on the lighted Upper Bernal fields east of First Street. The plan is to tear out the grass and install artificial turf that would allow year-round games, including tournaments, for Pleasanton's girls and boys soccer teams that have gained regional and national recognition in championship play.

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