A longstanding agreement between Vashon’s park and school districts that allows community recreation groups to use school facilities while keeping user fees low will cease to exist in its current form after its expiration next month.

While no decisions have been made about exactly how the new agreement will look, or even if there will be one, a proposal on the table could result in increased user fees by as much as 300 percent.

At a special Vashon Park District (VPD) board meeting last Tuesday attended by many members of community sports groups and two former park board members who both spoke out against ending the agreement, current VPD board members explained that they have come up with three new agreement options. Currently, the so-called Commons Agreement allows community recreation groups, such as the island’s lacrosse, soccer and basketball programs, to use school district facilities — fields and gyms — when they are not scheduled for school district use. The park district schedules the community’s use of school facilities, controls community access and also pays the school district $100,000 each year — a fee meant to help the school district with its more than $700,000 of annual facilities maintenance costs.

But this annual fee has been a point of contention for the park district which, with two new board members elected in the fall of 2015 among three incumbents, has recently turned its focus to creating a strategic plan, reinstating programming and addressing more than $5 million in deferred maintenance projects all with a $1.2 million budget.

“All of these things need to be addressed. It’s just a matter of time. This $100,000 can go toward those projects,” VPD Executive Director Elaine Ott-Rocheford said last Tuesday.

The VPD board’s three new agreement options, which come after two meetings with school district officials, all involve eliminating the $100,000 annual payment. The first option proposes no payment, but keeps everything else in the agreement the same. The second option involves changing the agreement to have Vashon Island School District (VISD) control community access, as well as assign user fees. The fees would be collected by VPD and handed over in-full to VISD. Ott-Rocheford said the park district collects about $33,000 in user fees annually. Sixty percent ($20,000) of those fees come from users who hold events on school facilities. The remainder comes from community use of Agren Park and the VES Fields. Under option two, if fees were to remain as they are, the school district would receive only the $20,000 in school facility user fees.

The third option, which was suggested by VISD Superintendent Michael Soltman at an earlier meeting, involves the park district not paying the annual fee and the school district taking over all responsibility for the setting of user fees, scheduling of facilities (both school and park district), access to facilities and fee collection. VISD would raise user fees to make up for the loss of the $100,000 payment and would keep all user fees from both park and school district facilities. VPD’s only responsibility would be to maintain park district facilities.

VPD would gain the $100,000 and lose the $33,000 in user fees. But, the organization would also be able to dismiss the staff members it has to provide scheduling and access.

“The net effect comes to a benefit of about $90,000,” Ott-Rocheford said.

VPD chair Karen Gardner, who is one of the two new board members, said previously that the $100,000 fee is not based on evidence and that a “more equitable” agreement needs to be reached.

But, recently, VISD Human Resource Director Amy Sassara conducted a study of facilities usage based on data obtained from both the park district and the school district and found that “over 75 percent of the use of school district athletic facilities is during after-hours community access periods while the $100,000 fee equates to only 13.6 percent of the cost of servicing and maintaining the facilities in question.”

Last Thursday, Gardner dismissed Sassera’s report and said field use statistics are subjective.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether the school district gives us spreadsheet of this and that. Who knows what the reality is,” she said.

For VISD, the reality is all three agreement options currently on the table would mean the district would be short $100,000, at most, each year.

“We think the $100,000 is more than accounted for,” longtime school board member Bob Hennessey said last Tuesday. “We’re a school district, we’re not in the business of providing parks and recreation programs. We would seek to recover fees. The users are the losers if the Commons ends.”

According to VISD documents compiled by Sassera and Executive Director of Business and Operations, Matt Sullivan, there are multiple approaches to user fee increases if they become necessary. One approach is to increase the per-hour use fee from $5 per hour to $15 per hour over three years, while another approach is to begin the $15 per hour fee effective next year.

There is a different option that has not come up in discussions yet: the negotiation of a lower payment to VISD instead of a complete elimination of the agreement. Neither VISD nor VPD has brought up the option in recent meetings, as a complete elimination of the agreement seems to be the only option on the table. However, reached last Thursday, both Gardner and fellow VPD board member Scott Harvey said the board is open to a renegotiation of funds instead of a complete end to the 23-year-old agreement.

“We don’t necessarily want to end the agreement. I think at the end of the day, the consensus is we pay them (VISD) something,” Harvey said. “We want to work with them.”

An email from Soltman to Ott-Rocheford sent Sunday urges VPD to consider other options, like a payment plan.

“If the park district is facing difficulties within its operating budget and desires some flexibility from the school district regarding a payment schedule, our board may be open to such a discussion as long as there is intent to make the full payment within a reasonable period of time,” Soltman said in the email.

VPD currently still owes VISD $50,000 for the current year’s Commons Agreement as part of an agreement made earlier this year when VPD said it was unable to pay.

The park board’s conversations about the Commons Agreement began in February as the school board worked to finalize its most recent bond attempt. While brainstorming solutions to fund the replacement of Vashon High School’s all-weather turf field — which is expected to occur eight to 10 years after the field’s construction is completed in summer 2018 — Hennessey volunteered the idea of using VPD’s $100,000 fee. It was just days after a phone call from Hennessey to the park district explaining the proposition that the park board held an emergency meeting and voted to renegotiate the Commons Agreement. At that early February meeting, VPD board member Bob McMahon expressed frustration that VISD would use “our money for their thing,” referring to the high school’s new field. Currently, community groups use the high school field; both boys’ and girls’ lacrosse games are held there, and school officials have been clear that if not for the massive amount of community use at school fields , a new field would not be being built. Hennessey has explained that the amount of use the McMurray Middle School field sees is incredibly damaging, and part of the reason to build an all-weather field at the high school is to take some strain off of the McMurray field.

However, Gardner insists that the proposition to use the VPD funds for the field replacement was not “the single motivator” behind the VPD board’s decision to renegotiate the Commons Agreement.

“The reality is you’ve got two new members on the board who question everything (Bob McMahon and Gardner). And we said, ‘Why?’ and no one is giving us a good reason. That’s when Bob (McMahon) started doing research trying to find someone doing it like we do,” Gardner said.

McMahon began looking at interlocal agreements in other cities in the state and country and said none entail a flat payment to a school district. For example, locally, on Mercer Island, the city collects user fees from community groups using the high school stadium and gives a portion of those fees to the school district based on a fee schedule that is adjusted each year. Across the sound, an agreement between the Highline School District and surrounding cities allows each entity to use the other’s facilities and be charged only for direct costs (those that can be easily assigned to a specific activity).

“That’s how we ended up where we did,” Gardner said. “We’re a board doing the best we can to make sure taxpayer money is spent well.”

The Commons Agreement has been in place in different iterations for the past 23 years. The VPD payment to VISD has varied from $40,000 to the current $100,000, and facilities maintenance responsibilities have also changed. Eight years ago, when the school district was financially hurting, the agreement stated VPD would be responsible for maintaining VISD facilities. The park district board raised its annual levy 5 cents to cover those maintenance costs. Those costs were estimated to be $150,000 in 2010, according to an August 2009 Beachcomber article. In 2012, concerns grew over whether VPD would be able to continue the maintenance responsibilities, and the current agreement, signed in 2013 and spearheaded by former VPD commissioners David Hackett and Bill Ameling and VISD board member Hennessey (all of whom were at last Tuesday’s VPD meeting) returned maintenance responsibilities to VISD with the $100,000 payment from VPD.

At last Tuesday’s meeting, Hackett and Ameling both expressed surprise and anger at the current VPD board’s consideration to end the agreement.

“I am surprised and stunned,” Hackett, who is the fields coordinator for the Vashon Island Soccer Club, said. “This (Commons Agreement) supports hundreds of thousands of use hours on the VISD fields. We, the users, will be left floating.”

Discussions continued at VPD’s regular board meeting Tuesday after press time, and there will be an update on this issue in the next edition of The Beachcomber. The current agreement expires on June 30, but both VISD and VPD have said that there will be a new agreement in place by then and that public access to school facilities will not be cut off.

“We’re not going to hold the community hostage. Kids will still be playing on the fields, I can guarantee that,” Hennessey said.