Dunwoody’s mayor and City Council voted Dec. 12 to award the design contract for two new baseball fields at Peachtree Charter Middle School to Skyline Engineering and Construction for a total of $98,000, including contingency funds.
The design contract was originally for $81,890 and included a 10 percent contingency fund for the project not to exceed $90,000.
Some council members said they were receiving emails from residents wanting to somehow overlay a girl’s softball fields on one of the baseball fields. The council approved adding on another 10 percent contingency fund of $8,000 to specifically be used to examine and determine if such an overlay will work.
The council also agreed that artificial turf will be used on the fields that will be utilized by Dunwoody Senior Baseball and also the middle school.
The Dunwoody mayor and City Council voted unanimously Nov. 14 to enter into an agreement to swap Dunwoody Senior Baseball fields in Dunwoody Park to the DeKalb schools for Austin Elementary and $3.6 million in cash. The $3.6 million is expected to cover the construction costs of the two new fields.
As part of the agreement, the city will construct two new baseball fields on about 8 acres of property at Peachtree Charter Middle School that will be used by the school and Dunwoody Senior Baseball league that mostly serves middle school boys.
The school district will then build a new 900-seat Austin Elementary where the current baseball fields are located, in Dunwoody Park and adjacent to the Dunwoody Nature Center. The city will then get the property where the current Austin Elementary is located to rebuild into a park space.
Cost analysis for artificial turf versus natural turf. Click to enlarge.
Don’t stop at “overlaying girl’s softball fields”. With a little creativity (butting the fields up together, fencing on tracks for automatic removal, etc.) you can also provide a soccer field and lacrosse field. Actually if you really work at it, you can make it unusable for pretty much everyone.
The fight to use the fields for many sports is partly the result of squandering the PVC park property and selling it to Wieland. This was one of the last remaining tract of lands and could have been used for multi-purpose athletic fields. And also the result of not properly configuring Pernoshal Park. Between the 2 plots of field, one could have had a variety of fields for different purposes. But the land was sold and Pernoshal Park was configured in a manner to not maximize its use (we can put basketball in nearby Brook Run front and there is already passive parkspace at nearby Brook Run). Now we are all fighting to make the baseball field workable for all remaining sports. It didn’t have to be this way. It isn’t this way in other towns in the U.S.
Why not use the 100+ Brook Run acres? The PCMS “deal” is government at it’s worst. Nobody with any real power (and guts) cares about youth sports.
I believe Brook Run is required to be 30% active and 70% passive. Not sure if this is a county requirement to Dunwoody or a state requirement to Dekalb (when property changed from GA to Dekalb) that then transferred to Dunwoody. When you add in active components thus far, we may be near 30% but not sure (skateboard park, playground, 1 mile bike trail around). Who knows if the 30% limit can be changed. There are talks to put in fields in back portion of park – everyone wants baseball fields there but city seems insistent on a multi use field back there. I suppose the city could just go ahead and develop it as they see fit and risk whatever repurcussion and put in baseball, softball and then convert PCMS to multi use and be done with it. But, PVC and Pernoshal Park should be fields for whatever sport and PCMS should be multi use (should have been fixed by county long ago) and HS should be fixed (by county long ago).
We need to stop the madness. Laws, rules, regulations are forever changing. To argue that the use of Brook Run is somehow fixed is nonsense. Look at all of the sports facilities in Forsyth County (for example) and you will find that every one has plenty of green space, walking trails, etc. If those in power want it, it will happen.