Hingham could be seeing a few new turf fields and increased investment in the town’s public athletic fields and courts after a new study highlighted ways to increase their accessibility and utility.
“Tonight is the first time we’re going to be talking about this, it certainly won’t be the last,” said Chair of the Board of Selectmen Mary Power.
On Tuesday, the Board of Selectmen, Recreation Department and School Committee heard an initial report on the Hingham Athletics Fields and Outdoor Courts Study, an independent study conducted this year to take stock of the town’s athletic facilities and recommend potential improvements. Last year, Town Meeting approved $60,000 in Community Preservation Funds to conduct the study.
The town controls more than 68 acres of athletic fields, different elements of which are under the jurisdiction of three different groups: the Board of Selectmen, the School Department and the Recreation Department.
Along with analyzing the fields themselves, the study including meetings with 15 stakeholders like youth teams that regularly use the field, and a public opinion survey that garnered more than 500 responses, said Cass Chroust from the engineering group Weston & Sampson.
All told, the town has 37 natural grass fields and one turf field, 31 tennis courts, 11 basketball courts and one hockey court. The fields are in use for about 14,600 hours of total use, putting most of them at or above their recommended number of hours of usage per year.
The town faces a shortage of multi-use fields, in part because sub-par maintenance and drainage sometimes renders grass fields unusable, according to the report. The town also has a surplus of tennis courts and no pickleball courts, despite the latter being “among the fastest-growing sports in the country,” according to Chroust.
Additionally, groups hoping to reserve fields have three different entities to deal with. Scheduling for fields controlled by the selectmen and Recreation Department is handled by Recreation, and School Department handles its own fields and Lynch Field has a separate scheduling apparatus because of its unique lease agreement.
The study is recommending that the town centralize permitting, scheduling and maintenance for its fields and courts, increase funding and staff for maintenance and make some serious capital investments in those areas.
The study is not recommending the town acquire any land it does not already own. Instead, it includes suggestions for how to better utilize the existing facilities.
This includes a recommendation for one or two new turf multi-use fields, possibly at the Carson Complex on space that is currently natural grass. This could relieve pressure on existing grass fields, Chroust said.
Fields across town could also see other improvements, like new dugouts and backstops, new lights and changes to bleachers and parking lots to add ADA accessibility.
At an estimated $4.26 million, the changes at Carson Complex would be one of the big-ticket items on the town’s to-do list, if it moves forward with some or all of the proposed improvements. The study also proposed a new turf field and other improvements at Hingham High School at an estimated cost of $4.24 million. Relatively smaller projects could run from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to initial estimates.
Ray Estes, a member of the working group overseeing the study, stressed these numbers are not set in stone and that none of the projects are definite.
“These are order of magnitude costs,” he said. “They are not based on any specific design.”
Chroust said the town could explore selling private naming rights for fields and grants from groups like the U.S. Soccer Foundation to help with costs.
In a response from School Committee chair Kerry Ni about how potential spending on field improvements would relate to town-wide austerity measures brought on by COVID-19, Power said the study was a big-picture view, not a short-term plan.
“As we think about next steps, it’s not just how do we move forward this year, but also how do we integrate it into the Master Plan,” she said.
Follow Audrey Cooney on Twitter at @Audrey__Cooney.
