Park district lands $75,000 grant for field repair

Published 11:35 am Wednesday, April 2, 2008

By AMELIA HEAGERTY

The Vashon Park District has been awarded a $75,000 grant to make improvements to a baseball field at the old Vashon Elementary School a mile north of town.

The district plans to shift the location of the field to make room for a full-sized lacrosse and soccer field next to it and to repair a field that commission chair David Hackett called “a rolling surface, with some holes.”

The baseball field is standard size for softball teams and 9 to 12-year-old baseball players, said commissioner Joe Wald. Vashon Youth Baseball teams practice and play on the field, as do third- and fourth-grade soccer teams.

The state Recreation and Con-servation Office announced the grant on Monday, according to Wendy Braicks, executive director of the park district.

The district will install an irrigation system for the northern baseball field, as well as drainage, so that the field can be used in the spring and fall, she said.

The field will get a new layer of topsoil and rough grading and will be moved “a tad to the east” to create room for other components in the park, Braicks said. The irrigation will come from a well system costing $35,000, Wald said.

The park district had originally planned to put drainage in the baseball field’s infield and outfield but found the costs to be “astronomical,” adding $80,000 to $90,000 to the project’s price tag, Wald said. So project planners opted to drain the infield only, hoping the new soil mix would keep it drained enough, he said.

Fencing, a backstop, dugout and relocation of the batting cage are also on the list of improvements.

The project, phase one of the district’s master plan for the elementary school site, begins in June, after baseball season is over, according to Hackett.

All told, the project will cost $235,450, leaving $165,450 still needed after the grant. Braicks said this is the “community match” to the grant, and she expects it to come in the form of “in-kind donations.”

Groups and Islanders involved with the park will donate whatever they can, from cash to raw labor to skills, including architectural design.

The project will only end up costing the park district $20,000, Braicks said, and that might not be money spent, but hours spent by park staff.

Hackett said this project is a first step towards addressing the “severe shortage of fields on the Island.”

“This is part of the park district’s response,” he said.