Council approves soccer fields

Washington area soccer teams will finally have a place to call home after the city council endorsed a plan Wednesday to convert 9.5 acres of farmland into temporary soccer fields. The fields will be on the northwest edge of the city?s 90-acre plot of land, just off 18

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Street, that it purchased from the Washington School District in 2010. The council voted 5-0 to support the plan. Councilors Fred Stark, Bob Shepherd, Karen Wilson-Johnson, Russ Zieglowsky and Mike Roth voted yes, while Merle Hagie was absent.

The FFA, which agreed in February to rent the 90 acres for three years, will be compensated through a land swap which will involve farmland that the city owns on the south side of town near Elm Grove Cemetery. The motion did not indicate how many acres the city would lease, simply that the number would be such as to produce a comparable yield to the 9.5 acres on the north edge of town.

The 9.5 acres would contain a grass parking lot and several sizes of fields for various age levels. The plan that the Washington Park Board presented to the council calls for two adult soccer fields. A single adult field could be converted into two under-10 fields. The plan also calls for two under-12 fields. Each under-12 field could accommodate two under-8 fields. There would be a concessions stand and restrooms on the north side of the property near 18

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street.

Sid Ryan, president of the Washington Area Soccer Club, spoke at the meeting in support of the soccer fields. In an interview Thursday, Ryan said he was pleased the council came to a compromise but that it would have been nice to get a few more acres of green space for other activities such as football, softball, baseball, model rockets, kites, etc.

Ryan said that the neat thing about soccer fields is that they can be rotated 90 degrees when the grass gets too worn in particular areas. He said his hope is to seed the soccer fields next spring and tread lightly on them the first year.

?We may have one home game on them,? he said. ?We?re going to be careful how much we use the fields because we want the grass to establish a good root base. Nobody?s going to use it until mid-fall, and we?ll see how well it has grown by then.?

Ryan said that the land in the northwest corner of the city?s property is ideal for soccer because it is next to a paved road and it is fairly level.

?Had we gone south, we would have had to move some dirt, and our club didn?t have that much money to do that,? he said.

At Wednesday?s meeting, Shepherd asked if there were some way the soccer fields could be placed on land near Elm Grove Cemetery. He said that the city has a three-year lease with the FFA on the 90 acres, whereas it has the acres south of town custom farmed.

Mayor Sandra Johnson said, ?I would like to remind everyone that we did not buy the 90 acres to farm for profit.?

Roth said the issue was not that the city would lose money from fewer acres in cultivation but that the FFA would lose money.

?This is the FFA?s classroom,? Roth said. ?I have concerns about taking a piece here or a piece there. Now we might have a few more acres taken out for a water tower. All of a sudden we?re up to taking out 15 acres.?

Zieglowsky said it was important that the council make a decision at the meeting because both the soccer club and the FFA needed to know the fate of the 90 acres. He said he supported the soccer fields at the north edge of town because there are so few places for kids to play soccer in town.

?It?s a wonder there is any grass left at Lincoln,? he said. ?The bottom line is we need soccer fields because kids need something to do in this town. You should have gone there in September when four youth sports teams were trying to practice at Lincoln. The worms didn?t stand a chance.?

Zeus Knupp, who helps the FFA harvest the 90 acres, said farming nine acres south of town was hardly worth moving the farm equipment there. He asked the council if there was any way for the FFA to rent more than nine acres from the city. Johnson said the council had not yet talked about what would happen to the roughly 60 acres of farmland it owns south of town, but that the city had been charging the custom rate for that land.