Town officials on Tuesday approved the $45,000 purchase of a machine made by a robotics company that will lay out painted lines on New Canaan’s athletic fields.
Tiny Line Marker ProX
The town has been trying out various paint machines over the years and has identified one, from Kennesaw, Ga.-based TinyMobileRobots, that has been shown to save significant time and manpower in laying out the fields, according to Parks & Recreation Director John Howe.
“If we need to lay out a soccer field the field sizes and layout will be pre-programmed and updated as they change,” Howe told the Board of Selectmen at its regular meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
“As an example, girls lacrosse changes their field sizing, it seems like every year, but it’s probably about every five years. They make little tweaks to the field. But this machine will lay out the whole field using GPS and cellular technology. We demo’d this exact one in Waveny and in about 20 minutes it laid out the whole field. With that said, that would probably take two guys about two hours by the time they’re done running strings and everything else. And the field came out perfect.”
First Selectman Kevin Moynihan and Selectmen Kathleen Corbet and Nick Williams voted 3-0 to approve the purchase of the Tiny Line Marker ProX model by Parks & Rec in the 2024 budget year, which starts July 1.
The selectmen asked how many fields and sports the machine will take care of (all of them), whether it uses a pesticide paint (no, the same watered-down latex paint already in use) and whether it will be used to repaint the fields (no it will be more efficient to use a ride-on paint machine for that).
“It will even lay out parking lots if we want it to,” Howe said. “Like the Fourth of July, we put some lines out there for parking cars to make it more efficient. It will take care of that. We use it mainly for the initial layout.”