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Scott Walker knows his Fairfield Little League Girls Softball league can't settle for a triple if it wants to win approval for a new field. Despite already receiving support from the Parks and Recreation Department, the Board of Finance and the Board of Selectmen, the league needs one final town governing body to approve the plan and it has proved to be the toughest to crack in the past: the Representative Town Meeting.
Last year the RTM declined to grant funding to the field request. "We've been down this road before," said Walker, a league official. He added that the league has not asked for any money, but simply a place of their own. It is the Parks and Recreation Department's plan to build at Hoyden's Lane, according to Walker.
On Monday night, the RTM will meet at the Board of Education Building (501 Kings Highway East) at 7:30 p.m. to decide the fate of the field, which would be located on a parcel of land owned by the town at 520 Hoyden's Lane in the Greenfield Hills section. The RTM will have to vote on two resolutions, first to move the administration of the property to the Parks and Recreation Department instead of the Conservation Committee and, second, to approve $350,000 to build the field and infrastructure.
In a combined vote of the five committees of the RTM last week, the softball field funding was defeated 16-25-5, although RTM members may change their votes on Monday night.
Residents and town officials have expressed opinions on both sides of the fence. Sherri Steeneck, a member of the Board of Selectmen, said at a meeting that if the field is not approved, she will return to the town bodies leading a movement to have one of the boys little league fields turned into a softball field. Yvonne Zeisler, who lives on Hoyden's Lane, agreed that the girls deserve a field, just not at this property. "Give them a field more centrally located and one that does not require major land excavating, regrading and drainage," Zeisler said in an email. "There is no clear demonstrated need to destroy a unique open space that once you have changed can never be replaced."
Tiffany DeMartin does not want to see the money spent on a field as the education budget is slashed, "it is offensive for those of us whose children attend classes in trailers and hallways because our school budgets have been gutted," she said in an email.
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