Board Of Ed Blesses $8 Million Tennis, Turf, & Parking Fix
- Philip Thibodeau
- Sep 29
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 1
The September 25th meeting of the Board of Education opened with a soaring performance of the US national anthem by the Southington High School Chamber Singers that had some audience members on the verge of tears.
Following that opening, a short ceremony was held to honor Kimberly Padroff, a fourth-grade teacher at Hatton School who has been chosen Southington’s Teacher of the Year. She was presented with her award by Board Chair Colleen Clark and State Representatives Donna Veach and Christopher Poulos:
Athletic Director Bob McKee then came forward to describe an agreement the school system had reached with high-school sports streaming network NFHS. As part of this agreement, NFHS has installed fixed cameras that overlook the football field and the high school gym. The cameras turn on in the late afternoon and automatically broadcast whatever sport happens to be playing there; they remain off during the school day so that gym classes are not filmed. The installation and maintenance of the cameras comes at no cost to the district; NFHS makes its money from viewer subscriptions. Plans are now in the works to add cameras to the baseball and softball fields.
Perhaps the biggest news of the evening came later when the Board contemplated a proposed redesign of the high school athletic complex.
There are three problems the redesign is intended to solve.
The first is the desperate condition of the high school’s seven tennis courts. Cracks in their aging asphalt foundation have grown so wide and so deep that no amount of patching can restore the integrity of their surface:
The second problem is that for many years the number of cars parking at the high school has exceeded the number of parking spaces. As a result, drivers, most of them students, park on side streets, especially Mandel Drive and Annelise Drive. Residents there must contend with litter and visibility problems, in addition to a twice-a-day traffic crunch. On morning of Monday, September 29th, for example, there were five street-parked cars on Mandel, and another thirteen on Annelise:
The third problem involves the condition of the turf in the main stadium and in the field just to its west. The synthetic turf in the stadium is now thirteen years old, and although it is still in fair condition, it is approaching the end of its expected lifetime. The field west of the stadium is also in fair shape, but with grass that is thin in spots and compacted soil that becomes muddy when it rains:
For help addressing these issues, Southington reached out to FieldTurf, a Montreal-based firm that has completed more than 25,000 turf-related projects all over the world. The company was asked to sketch out a reworking of the athletic field area that would include new tennis courts, additional parking, and artificial turf installation.
At Thursday night's meeting Andrew Dyjak and Christopher Hulk unveiled their company’s proposed solution.
First, the old tennis courts would be demolished, the site regraded, and new courts built. These would be made from post-tension concrete, a material incorporating compressed steel bars that is extremely resistant to cracking. To highlight its durability, Hulk pointed to its 50-year warranty, contrasting it with the one-year warranty that is standard for asphalt surfaces. The projected cost for the courts, $1,500,000-$1,650,000, would include fencing and landscaping; for an additional $300,000-$400,000, a lighting system could also be installed.
The new courts would be situated along Pleasant Street in an arrangement that would leave room for a linear parking lot to wrap around them. The lot would start at a new curb-cut and feed into the parking area that currently adjoins the vocational agriculture building. It would feature 150 spaces as well as sidewalks, plantings, and a stormwater management area. By making more spaces available to students and staff, it would solve the problem of parking on residential streets, provided that the number of commuter cars remains roughly the same.
The total cost for the parking system was estimated at $1,575,000-$1,750,000.
Third, the grass field west of the stadium would be replaced with a synthetic turf field. This installation was the most expensive component in the entire proposal, coming in at $2,050,000–$2,325,000. Lighting and stands for spectators would cost an additional $550,000-$700,000. The artificial surface would have an expected lifetime of about a decade. The plan also called for replacing the existing synthetic turf in the stadium field; this, plus the addition of ball netting, was projected to cost $750,000-$850,000.
The price tag for the whole project is large. One slide from the presentation combined the subtotals from the three main elements with a contingency fee of $275,000-$475,000 to yield an overall cost of $7,000,000-$8,150,000 - a sum greater than the Southington Fire Department’s current annual operating budget of $6.5 million.
Acknowledging the size of the proposal, School Superintendent Steve Madancy stated outright, “I am not going to go ask Town Council for eight million dollars.” Instead he stressed that this was a “proof of concept” study, designed to show how the problems could be addressed and provide a ballpark estimate of the costs. He pointed out that several elements in the proposal were optional and that work on them could be completed in stages, with the tennis courts and the parking lot coming first.
In the question period that followed, Board members primarily expressed concern about congestion caused by drivers making left turns into or out of the new lot. Sean Carson asked the design team to look more closely at the issue and advise whether the traffic flow in the lot should be one-way instead of two-way.
On the whole, though, Board members were encouraged by the prospect of finding solutions to several long-standing problems and spoke of the proposal in positive terms. All six Republicans and all three Democrats on the Board voted to approve it. It will now head to the Board of Finance and the Town Council for further consideration.
