Tony Scallon writes:
Recently, students from MTS charter school went to Washington DC for
the inaugural. They raised about 1/2 the costs. The school paid for the rest. The trip would
not have happened without both the schools support and the fundraising activities of the
students. I see the Neiman Fields as similar.
Jason Stone responds:
Tony is debating himself, around the question of "Should organized sports be subsidized?". The
Neiman Sports Complex is subsidized simply by being there. User fees don't come close to paying
for it.
The real issues on the table are mammoth cost overruns, operating losses due to under-utilization, and then the larger questions of the capacity of the Park Board to absord additional operations, the effectiveness of the Board in managing projects and the appropriateness of planned projects.
Of course organized sports should be subsidized in the parks. Let's just subsidize them to the same proportion that they are of the total park usage. Organized sports are tiny fraction of the total park usage. It appears they have had a disproportionate amount of money spent on them.
According to the Park Board, the following numbers apply to 2003 park usage.
5.5 million people visited the chain of lakes.
294,035 rounds of golf were played.
67,858 people went swimming at supervised beaches.
88,571 people attended concerts at Lake Harriet. 10,003 people attended concerts at Nicollet Island. 4,825 people attended concerts at Minnehaha Park.
52,788 people enjoyed the 3 outdoor pool facilities.
306,795 used the recreation centers for community use.
74,248 children used the Summer Playgrounds program which was nearly axed in the 2005 budgeting process until parents showed up in protest at a Park Board meeting.
On the other hand, city-wide fewer than 30,000 people participated in organized sports teams in the parks. Of those, 8,727 were in youth sports leagues. There were 669 youth sports teams, and 1,321 adult sports teams. There were 120 ages 5 to 8 sports teams.
There were 697 ball diamond games played at Neiman, and 1370 soccer field games played at Neiman. There are 3 softball, 2 baseball and 8 soccer fields at Neiman. So the average usage works out to less than 1 game per field per day during the summer season. That's a net cost of over $3100 per day or $280 per game during the season to the tax payer for Neiman sports complex for 30 years (using current operating loss and $14 million in bond payments, but excluding additional millions already spent or which may be spent over the 30 year period).
I'll go through budget numbers in detail at some point in the future, but it rather looks like the spending on organized team sports, versus other uses (such as passive recreation and other community interest programs) is way out of whack. In fact, passive recreation (walking, hiking, biking, bird watching, pick-up games, skiing, kite flying, picnics, boating, sail boarding, etc.) is by far the largest usage of the park system, easily out numbering all other uses by more than one hundred to one.
Beach swimming (despite 4 beaches being closed due to lack of funds) and Summer Playgrounds (proposed cut for 2005) both get far more usage than the Neiman sports complex. How many beaches could we keep open for $75,000 a year? How many Summer Playgrounds does $75,000 buy? (answer: almost half of them)
So, sure, let's subsidize organized team sports -- even for adults. But let's focus our tight budget on the places of greatest need, greatest use and top importance, and not on grandiose "legacy building" schemes or special interest groups. Let's maintain what we have, instead of taking on more debt to build bigger edifices to some park commissioners' egos.
Chris Johnson Fulton
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