City to explore joint use of MUSD baseball fields

The Maricopa City Council and staff met on Saturday morning to discuss the Capital Improvement Plan, which is a 20-year planning document detailing the city’s need to build parks, libraries, buildings and more.

The document helps direct council members in allocating our resources, personnel, and operating costs from the present until 2028.

The project especially focuses on Maricopa’s need to add or expand parks and libraries. The plan also mentions the possibility of combining public safety facilities, as well as increasing the safety, mobility and connectivity of transportation.

The City Council acknowledged residents’ concerns about such issues, stating that the main challenge is that parks, public safety and transportation are grossly underfunded. The priority of those involved in this project is to find alternative revenue sources.

All three issues seem to affect residents the most, although the recent focus has been on the need for more parks and recreation facilities.

The council mentioned an expansion of Pacana Park, particularly regarding the addition of baseball fields. The city has planned to spend $2 million on the expansion, with $200,000 set aside for design.

According to a spokesperson for Parks and Recreation, four to six baseball fields will be needed to keep up with the growth of youth sports programs.

In order to accommodate the high number of children interested in baseball, players have to share elementary school fields. As a result, Maricopa Little League has been losing players who are over 12 years old, as the small size of the elementary school fields forces them to travel to other cities to hold games.

Other programs would also suffer without additional facilities. The soccer program has so many children wanting to play that as many as 50 kids have been turned away this year due to the limited availability of the fields during the week.

Also in the works is the development of a softball program for girls ages seven to 14. Such a program would increase things for youth to do in Maricopa, but clearly the present number of fields would not support such a venture.

One idea that was brought up at the meeting by City Manager Kevin Evans is to leverage the funds of both Maricopa schools and the city itself to add lights to school baseball fields. This would enable the city to use the school’s lighted fields for youth programs when they are not otherwise occupied by school teams.

There are three schools opening this year in Maricopa, so council members agreed that such an idea may be possible, saving some money while adding well-lit fields suitable for use by Parks and Recreation.

The City Council has planned to meet with the Maricopa Unified School District Governing Board in May to discuss this possibility.