Following a unanimous vote three years in the making, members of a committee charged with overseeing youth sports in New Canaan are poised to recommend formally that organizations using town-owned fields be assessed a $20 fields usage fee per player per season.
The Youth Sports Committee following its 5-0 vote likely will recommend the mandatory fee to the Park & Recreation Commission, which is scheduled to meet Wednesday. If the fee finds support there, the advisory commission would go to the Board of Selectmen for approval.
“The town wants to make it [the fee] mandatory which I think is very acceptable and it would be very helpful,” committee member Sally Campbell said during the Youth Sports Committee’s Oct. 5 meeting, held at Lapham Community Center. “And we found a way that when we collect it, it will go into [the parks department’s] budget, and we will make sure it is all spent every year, so that there is no risk of it not being spent when people are assessed a fee.”
The committee’s 5-0 vote comes three-plus years after a divided Board of Selectmen appointed the group, and two months after Selectman Beth Jones urged the group to meet its charge and operate with greater transparency.
In the past, Campbell said, the $20 per-person fee had been requested by the committee as a donation, and while groups such as soccer and lacrosse paid it outright, others rather funded work on the fields by writing a check to a “Special Projects Fund.”
That system drew criticism from some, including Selectman Nick Williams, who pushed for the Youth Sports Committee’s creation. To this point, New Canaan in divvying up coveted—and, with youth sports themselves expanding, increasingly scarce—access to playing fields at public parks, has been at the mercy of groups that may stake a claim by funding capital improvements, Williams have said.
While the Special Projects Fund system may remain in place separately—the fields usage fee will only go toward operating, rather than capital expenses for the parks department—the approximately $74,000 annually that the new fee is expected to generate will go toward basic upkeep and maintenance of heavily used fields.
“So if your child is playing soccer or baseball or whatever, for every season they play this will be a $20 fields usage fee, which the funds will all go back into [Parks Department Superintendent] John [Howe]’s coffers,” Campbell said.
Recreation Director Steve Benko, an ex-officio member of the Youth Sports Committee, said that “there is no guarantee that the money is going back into your budget.”
Howe, also a nonvoting member of the committee, clarified that town finance officials agreed to pay for individual fields line items out of the mandatory fee, though technically the money will come into New Canaan’s General Fund.
“At any point in time, the town could cut my budget and they could increase my budget, too,” Howe said.
Committee member and New Canaan resident Garland Allen—who as an athletic director in towns such as Greenwich, Conn. and Ridgewood N.J., has dealt with similar issues in the past—said parents are keen to have any money they pay to a town for a specific purpose such as this, go to where they intended it.
“They don’t want us to raise money to have it taken away with a cut,” Allen said.
Youth Sports Committee members voting in favor of the mandatory fee included Campbell, Allen, Tara Clough, Tracey Karl and Chairman Chris Robustelli.
Robustelli said that, after it’s implemented, the mandatory per-player fee should be collected 60 days from the start of a youth sports organization’s season.
That timeline “is fair insofar as they [youth sports organizations] are getting the money 30 days into the start of the season, and we are asking them for 60 days, which gives them a reasonable amount of time to get their books in order,” Robustelli said. “At 120 days you might start to lose track and then you are into the next season.”
What provision has the Committee made for those families, particularly those with multiple sports-age children, for whom the fees would be a financial burden?
William this came up during the meeting—specifically, with multiple sports running year-round now, that families with multiple children face thousands of dollars in fees and other expenses annually—and members of the Youth Sports Committee said each sports has funds they make available through programs such as scholarships to families who need it.
This is ridiculous. Our taxes are going up at unprecedented rates and now tax citizens children for using the fields our tax dollars built. Enough already. What is next a road tax, breathing tax. Bring employee benefits and perks in line with the private sector and use that money.
I’m not sure we were aware that the fee was optional. I know we’ve paid this fee for NCSB every spring season for the past four years as well as the fall season. We only have access to two fields at Waveny to share among 5 teams and the high school team. Even with scheduled games on the master schedule, the field is not always dragged or lined for play. Fee or not, there is no guarantee that the maintenance is going to get done.