Morgan Hill school district brass are standing pat with their proposal to dramatically increase sports facility use rates to offset thousands in annual maintenance costs, while local youth leagues are boiling over the abrupt plan that could severely impact their membership fees.
Representatives from many of the affected leagues, including Orchard Valley Toros Soccer, PONY Baseball, NFL Flag Football and Spirit Softball of Morgan Hill, met with Morgan Hill Unified School District staff earlier this month to discuss the proposed change from a daily to an hourly rate.
Those youth league representatives left the meeting still discouraged by the district’s plan, which they said would cause some individual organizations’ annual facility rental costs to jump by thousands of dollars.
The district has been charging a $15 per day, per facility fee to use school site fields. However, school officials are proposing a steady rate hike over the next three years with an hourly rate climbing to as much as $38.58 for nonprofit leagues and $77.17 for commercial use, according to a breakdown of the latest figures produced by the district.
After the Jan. 3 sit-down at the district office, district staff notified league reps via email of the slightly reduced hourly rates from their initial proposal, which will go before Morgan Hill’s school board for approval at the Jan. 23 meeting.
“We want to continue to partner with our community organizations to ensure recreation activities are available for our youth, but the district cannot provide access to facilities at a detriment to the district’s educational program,” wrote school district Executive Secretary Allison Murray in an email sent Jan. 12 to the local sports leagues.
But how much additional funds the district will generate from their new plan is up for interpretation. Several league representatives have indicated that they may no longer use the school district fields if the rates are too steep. The same reps added if they had to continue to use the district fields at the higher hourly rates, then they would be forced to substantially raise the registration fees for their participating families.
“I don’t think it’s fair what they are doing to the community, to burden families financially,” said Lisa Schmidt, a past president and board member for OV Toros, a recreational and competitive youth soccer league that is the largest user of school fields.
The proposed rate increases are based on an assessment from Facilitron, a district-hired company that receives its own cut of the rental fees for providing an online platform to make field reservations. Tom Evans of Spirit Softball previously said that Facilitron has been causing friction between sports leagues and their field providers throughout the region by raising usage rates.
“Everybody in that (meeting) room and in the community are going to be hugely impacted by this financially,” said Schmidt, adding that the impact on families “is going to price kids out of playing sports.”
PONY League President Anthony Dixon, who also attended the meeting with district staff and Facilitron, agreed with Schmidt’s assessment.
“The meeting, I feel, was pointless,” said Dixon. “It was them trying to make us feel better about why they are doing the fee increase. It really wasn’t an open forum.”
PONY baseball recently spent $16,000 of its own funds to build new infields at Britton Middle School and El Toro Elementary School. Additionally, Dixon said his league members, not district workers, are the ones who maintain the fields and keep the grounds clean by picking up trash and renting a dumpster to haul it away. Anthony Dixon, like other league reps at the meeting, was also upset that “no school board members were there to hear us out.”
When asked if he was notified of the meeting, School Board President Tom Arnett said he was “still studying this issue, and I welcome thoughts and comments from members of the community” leading into the Jan. 23 vote.
Evans said that his Spirit members “continue to work hard to get the fields (at San Martin/Gwinn Elementary) ready for the girls” and prepared for the upcoming spring season. “We have also been evaluating and working on the irrigation system to improve efficiency and insure coverage,” added Evans, who is concerned about the increased costs proposed by the district and Facilitron.
District rates pricier than MH sports complex
“I think we’d have to take a long look over whether we’d continue to use the field at Sobrato,” said Jeff Dixon (no relation to Anthony Dixon), who has run the local NFL Flag Football League since 2004 that uses the grass field at Sobrato High School for Sunday games.
Jeff Dixon noted the district’s plan would raise his field costs by 1,700 percent. “Going from a daily to an hourly rate, that’s a huge change,” he said.
Jeff Dixon is also the head of the Morgan Hill Youth Sports Alliance, which operates the Morgan Hill Outdoor Sports Complex on Condit Road and is in the same business of renting fields to sports leagues. He said the district’s proposed rates are “tremendously higher than the complex,” which provides well-manicured grass fields, as well as two large artificial grass fields, for various sports activities. The complex charges $25 per hour to local nonprofits for grass field use and $35 per hour for the turf field, according to Jeff Dixon. They also have reduced rates for what they call “home field partners,” which are organizations that have made an investment into the property such as OV Toros.
Schmidt said OV Toros’ annual cost for field use would jump from $8,000 to $120,000 based on the district’s proposal. She said the district does very little to maintain the fields to warrant such an increase and, furthermore, most of the wear and tear comes from the school teams since they use them on a daily basis.
Just like PONY paid out of pocket to improve the district baseball fields, OV Toros allocated $5,000 of its own money on grass seed and dirt to fix up the field at Sobrato and had volunteer parents do the labor without any help from district staff, according to Schmidt.
What the district proposes
At a Dec. 5 school board meeting, where the issue was tabled in order to notify the local sports leagues of their facility use plans, district staff explained that the rental increase would generate $300,000 in revenues for the district at full implementation, which would offset the costs to maintain the fields.
The plan is to phase in the increased fees over a three-year period. The district’s annual sports facilities operating costs are more than $9 million, according to Facilitron’s presentation to league reps.
In October 2016, the school board approved a rental storefront agreement with Facilitron. The contract stipulated that “the facility user will be charged a service fee of 5 percent of their use fee and the District will pay 5 percent of the fee to Facilitron which will be deducted from the fees collected.”
The district contracted with Facilitron, an online facility rental software platform, in January 2017 to allow sports clubs to make reservations for MHUSD fields through the online booking agent, according to the Dec. 5 agenda. District staff then asked Facilitron “to provide a comparison of the district’s costs for facility maintenance and capital replacement compared to actual facility use fees generated.”
According to Facilitron’s presentation, the district “has been subsidizing community groups over $300,000 (per) year in facility use.” The rate increase would help “to provide for the maintenance, restoration and replacement of facilities,” according to Facilitron.
