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The Pleasanton Planning Commission unanimously approved a conditional use permit for a local soccer club to operate a new futsal facility at the Alameda County Fairgrounds during its July 23 meeting.
The Ballistic United Soccer Club’s year-round facility will feature three outdoor futsal courts in an area of the fairgrounds just east of the off-track betting building.
The facility, once fully constructed, will be open from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., Sunday through Saturday. However, it will temporarily cease operations annually during the Alameda County Fair over the summer and the Scottish Games during Labor Day weekend.
“We’re very excited to have more soccer facilities and more usage of the fairgrounds and more activities for kids and adults,” Commission Chair Ken Morgan said during the meeting. “I’m also excited to find year-round uses for that 250 or so acres that we have there that get very little use on an ongoing basis.”
The conditional use permit application for the new facility was originally slated to be approved by the commission during its consent calendar portion of the July 23 meeting. Consent calendar items are considered routine in nature and are typically approved by a single vote.
However, the item was pulled for discussion by Commissioner Stephanie Wedge who questioned why she saw grading and asphalt being laid down prior to the commission’s approval after having driven past the site that same day.
Community development director Ellen Clark, along with associate planner Jenny Soo, both explained that while the fairgrounds is run by the city and the county, the county is the one that issues any building permits for the fairgrounds while the city handles permits regarding what goes on within the fairgrounds.Â
Following that discussion, the commissioners had questions about a proposed public announcement system that was included in the staff report. The commission ultimately struck the public announcement system proposal from the application after hearing from soccer club board members that they did not plan on having any such systems.
Some of the other concerns brought up during the meeting were the lighting and the potential noise that could come from the late hours and the generators that would fuel the lights. However, staff assured the commission that the lights that would illuminate the fields would be facing down.
“Lighting design, you can typically make sure that the design avoids those offsite glare and sort of really focuses on the court rather than outside and causing problems there,” Clark said.
She also explained that there are remedies the city could take in case residents complain about noise or the late hours of operation.
“The measure that we have allows us some initial authority to go in and say ‘Hey, you’re too loud,’ … or at worst case, bring it back to the commission if there are repeated issues,” Clark said.
She explained that the commission and the city could modify things like the hours of operation, but that the city would prefer to go to the soccer club to see if they could address the concerns before taking that course of action, to which some of the board members from the club said they would be open to working with the city to address such complaints.
The soccer club’s application will lease approximately 52,500 square feet of land from the fairgrounds in order to run the outdoor facility over the next five years, which would allow for programming such as futsal training, matches and tournaments.
The three proposed futsal courts would each be approximately 70 feet by 110 feet in dimensions and would be equipped with a storage box, a portable generator and benches for players. A roughly 7-foot-tall mesh fence would also be set up around the perimeter of the entire facility as well as inside to divide the three courts.
“This is a super exciting project for the city,” Ballistic United board member Michael Nieto said. “We’re trying to find more space for the kids to play more and this is a great opportunity that came to us. We’ve been looking at where we could potentially put something like this (since) pre-COVID.”
