A selectman on Tuesday urged a committee that oversees youth sports in New Canaan to operate with total transparency and make good on its original charge to ensure that the private groups overseeing youth football, soccer, field hockey, lacrosse and other sports are contributing equally to the town on a per-player basis to fields maintenance.
Specifically, the Youth Sports Committee in three years has not been able to impose a seasonal $20 per-player fee for the various youth sports groups that would come back to the town for redistribution in fields upkeep, Selectman Beth Jones told the committee at a special meeting.
A key responsibility of the committee is to “try to make it fair between all youth sports groups, that they are all chipping in their fair share, and you were going to make that open to the daylight,” yet after years of sporadic meetings that at times appear not to have been properly posted with the Town Clerk, no hard information to that effect has materialized.
While thanking the committee members for their volunteerism, what’s needed is “more sunshine on all of this,” Jones told Youth Sports Chairman Chris Robustelli and committee member Sally Campbell at the selectmen meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department.
“The more information that is available to anybody that wants to look at it, the better off we all are, because then people don’t think we are hiding anything,” Jones said.
The comments came as the selectmen approved 3-0 a change to the size of the committee, from five to seven members. Conflicting schedules among current members often has prevented the committee from having a quorum and that’s been frustrating, Campbell said. Campbell, who serves as chair of the Park & Recreation Commission, added that it never was made clear what were the requirements in terms of posting meeting notices or taking and filing meeting minutes. A look through the Youth Sports Committee file at the Town Clerk’s office shows a pattern over time of failing to post notices for meetings for which minutes later are filed, meeting minutes filed late and often lacking specific information related to votes, and meetings scheduled with no minutes ever filed.
With the appointment of Tracey Karl to the committee, as well as Garland Allen, Jones said she was hopeful that changes would be made.
The committee for years has discussed the prospect of making mandatory the $20 fee for youth sports organizations that use town playing fields. Though some sports have paid a similar amount voluntarily in the past, the mandatory fee would ensure that the town has funding for basic wear-and-tear maintenance and that the various groups are not getting special treatment—for example, in terms of playing time, its advocates say.
Robustelli said that the town has received checks and data from the youth sports groups but has never made those figures public. Though the $20 fee remains voluntary it is “trending to mandatory,” he said.
Jones responded: “The idea of putting this [committee] together three years ago was to make it fair across the board for all the different youth sports groups, so without even giving us the numbers, if you think it is not appropriate, to say, ‘Yes, this one and that one and that one are doing their fair share and these two aren’t.’ ”
Campbell said she felt it was owed to each group for the committee members to meet them individually and explain that the fee would become mandatory. Robustelli said addressing any concerns from the youth sports groups about the fees coming into the General Fund of the town—as opposed to, say, a special projects fund that pays for sport-specific upgrades on the playing fields—was one of the “major issues” addressed at those meetings.
Campbell said: “We wanted to speak with each group so they knew that we feel 99.9% confident that the funds that will be fees will be built into budgeted expenses, so we felt only fair to talk about it so they know we are not throwing [the money collected] into the General Fund.”
New Canaan Finance Director Dawn Norton said the money coming into the town from the youth sports groups could be directed specifically back to a Fields Fund from the General Fund.
Sounds like the committee in charge of oversight needs oversight. 🙂
Still not seeing the true purpose of the $20 fee. Is it one of control or to truly to fund the annual field maintenance costs? If the latter the fee would seem to fall far short.
Let’s say that the average number of participants in the main youth sports run around 300. That would add up to a meager contribution of $6000 annually per sport. In total the overall “take” would not even come close to being able to fund a major capital project such as “turfing” a field or putting in new lighting. Would these funds still come from private donations or would the town take over the funding of such projects?
In the interest of full disclosure it would be interesting for Youth Sports Committee to explain how recent major projects such as the turfing and lighting of Water Tower Fields came about. How much did they cost and what groups were involved in the funding?