A widely anticipated plan to improve the little league baseball fields at Mead Park is being pushed back one year after those overseeing the project received higher-than-anticipated cost estimates, officials said Wednesday night. Unveiled last year, the project to create larger dimensions at Mellick and Gamble Fields and to install new fences, light poles, bleacher areas and a scoreboard originally had been pegged at about $950,000 and was to start this fall. Recently, however, a cost-estimate came back about $600,000 higher than that, according to Scott Werneburg, president of New Canaan Baseball, and officials are not willing to rush into a project now without further pricing out of materials as well as total confidence that it could be wrapped up by spring. “The prudent course of action was not wanting to risk onset of winter and not being able to compete our fields and risk losing our spring season,” he told members of the Town Council during their regular meeting, held at Town Hall. “And the smart course of action is to take our time, get through this process and hopefully have our selected contractor this fall and be able to order early and plan everything to go to construction in August next year after the baseball season has ended.”
The re-engineered project will accomplish many of the big-ticket items originally imagined, he said: turf on the infields, increased playability, improved drainage and new backstops, scoreboard and fencing.
