Turf Tops Grass After Field Repair Debate

Synthetic turf prevailed over goose poop-laden grass — as high school athletes won not a football or soccer game but a civic debate against environmental advocates concerning the harms and benefits of replacing Wilbur Cross’s chronically muddy sports area with a field of plastic fibers.

That debate took place on Dec. 15 over Zoom during the latest meeting of the City Plan Commission, the body charged with reviewing a site plan put forward by the city to renovate the Wilbur Cross Athletic Complex in upper East Rock. 

That project will mean upgrading athletic field lighting, rebuilding the current running track, and digging up a sports field to replace dirt and grass with synthetic turf. Read more about that sports complex overhaul here and here.

A lengthy public hearing preceded and informed two votes taken by the commission on the topic. 

Over the course of more than two hours, commissioners heard myriad arguments listed both in favor of and against the installation of synthetic turf at the Wilbur Cross athletic complex, an area that serves both students as well as the general public.

Students and their coaches called the current grass field an embarrassment; the reason that games are rarely hosted at the large New Haven public high school; an impediment to consistent practices; an inequity standing between Cross and other local high schools; and a constant source of injury.

Environmentalists urged that turf causes enduring pollution; displaces and hurts local flora and fauna; and endangers athletes more so than grass if not properly maintained.

The spark for the debate was Environmental Advisory Council Chair Laura Cahn’s filing of a petition to intervene prior to the meeting. That required the City Plan Commission to deliberate on whether turf could cause significant harm to the environment and New Haven city government should seek an alternative to its installation, as Cahn maintained. The commission also took a final vote in support of the site plan itself.

Intervening petitions are legal interruptions in land use decision making laid out by the Connection Environmental Protection Act, which provides an opportunity for individuals or organizations to oppose applications that they believe ​“if granted will involve or would permit conduct which is reasonably likely to have the effect of unreasonably polluting, impairing or destroying the public trust in the air, water and other natural resources in the State of Connecticut.”

“It makes me so distressed,” Cahn said last Thursday of the expansion of turf across the city’s schools and universities. ​“What we are doing is covering acres and acres and acres of soil with plastic. We are suffocating the earth.”

While Cahn positioned herself as a volunteer committed to doing her environmental homework, Wilbur Cross High School football team captain Giovanni Melendez stepped in to represent ​“those athletes that want to do college sports, to play at the next level,” that train relentlessly in hopes of flourishing futures. 

He said that a lack of maintenance of the grass he and his team practice on — as well as a tendency for birds to congregate and dispose of their own personal waste on that same grass — means ​“the field’s just wet and it’s gross” and it’s dangerous for those running on what was consistently described as uneven, slippery mud.

As Cahn and a few other meeting attendees spoke of the potential environmental damages posed by turf, Melendez, his peers, several coaches and a slew of Wilbur Cross parents highlighted the harms and inequities that inadequate sports facilities created for students. ​“I’m trying to get somewhere with football,” Melendez asserted. ​“I can’t do that if I keep getting hurt.”

“Are we gonna be hurting our young people physically? Are we going to be hurting the environment?” Kathy Fay, another member of the Environmental Advisory Council, questioned. ​“It’s not just about tomorrow, or the next game,” she said, but about the long-term implications of student health and success as well as environmental wellness.

"A Long-Term Harm I Don't Think We Can Afford"

So is synthetic turf the ​“little black plastic bits that come out when you kick your feet on it, if you know what I’m talking about?” City Plan Commissioner Joshua Van Hoesen asked to kick off the conversation.

“Sure,” City Engineer Giovanni Zinn responded. ​“My understanding is that these fields do typically have an infill that has both a sand or rubber or other cushioning component.”

Zinn said the city is waiting to receive its basic permissions before pinpointing a specific product to create the turf. He said the idea is to implement a synthetic turf field similar to Hillhouse’s Bowen Field while building a drainage system featuring a layer of stone beneath the turf, the installation of a tree root barrier, and a newly leveled and reconstructed track that would together work to prevent flooding on the field or the drifting of synthetic polymers into the nearby Mill River. 

Cahn, however, claimed the negative impacts of turf are bigger than stormwater management. The general disintegration of ​“geotextiles and synthetic turf fibers” into ​“smaller and smaller pieces,” she said, would mean the irreversible pollution — including the distribution of potentially harmful chemicals present in perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Plus, putting in turf would mean removing at least a foot of topsoil, which she said would abolish ​“the earth’s filtering system… depriv[ing] nature of the ability to eliminate polluting toxins from the air and water.” 

Turfs also require ​“detergents, pesticides and water for maintenance,” she added, while stealing wildlife’s ​“favorite food, native insect larvae” and simultaneously robbing ​“migrating birds of natural resting space.”

Not to mention, Cahn said, ​“If I were kayaking by” Wilbur Cross via the Mill River, ​“I would not want to see green plastic.”

Gabriela De La Tierra, whose son runs track at Wilbur Cross, agreed with Cahn. She added that the National Football League is looking to convert its turf fields into grass given new research suggesting turf is more likely to injure athletes due to a lack of adequate cushioning. ​“I can understand that when [turf] is first put in, and it’s shiny and new, and there are no maintenance issues in the first three to five years, that it could be appealing,” she said. ​“But the long-term harm does not outweigh the initial benefit because it still won’t be maintained,” she stated.

And, she concluded, supporting Cahn’s points concerning pollution and loss of natural resources, ​“Given the climate crisis that we’re in, it’s a long-term harm that I don’t think we can afford.”

A host of other attendees, however, offered another narrative about the positive potentials of turf. 

"Such A Poorly Maintained, Unsafe Field"

“I would be thrilled to have a beautiful grass field. I would. I mean, that would be awesome,” Wilbur Cross senior and student athlete Elias Theodore responded. He said, his personal research and experience has led him to believe that more maintenance is required for grass fields than turf. 

The turf at Hillhouse High School has had few issues following its installation more than six years ago, he reported, while the fields at Wilbur Cross are constantly muddy and covered in geese feces. So, he asked, if grass fields were to remain, ​“where is the guarantee, where is the assurance they will be taken care of properly?”

High schooler Matteo Festa concurred. ​“It’s very embarrassing to play on such a poorly maintained and unsafe field,” he said, while schools like Xavier, Hillhouse, and high schools across West Haven, East Haven, North Haven, and Hamden, among others, boast full turf fields. He described their asset as Wilbur Cross students’ disadvantage — a fundamental inequity that hurts students before they even turn 18.

“Comparisons to the NFL fields are outlandish,” Wilbur Cross Junior Adam Sharqawe pitched in. ​“They have the best materials in the world. They have the best grass in the world.”

At Cross, high schoolers often have to find their own transportation to Bowen and other fields to practice, or find time to run drills in a gym that he claimed leaks water on the regular, or choose to slide around in the mud outside their own school.

He recalled one day that his mom picked him up from practice: ​“The entire inside of the car was covered with plastic wrap, so I wouldn’t dirty the car, that’s how bad it was,” he said.

Beyond a dirty car, Sharqawe and others argued that the lack of dependable space to play means lost training, lost pride, and lost opportunities — such as the possibility of an athletic scholarship to college.

East Rock Alder Anna Festa, whose children attend Cross, added that she finds Wilbur Cross’ athletic resources to be humiliating for parents and city representatives as well. While attending a recent practice with her two student athletes, she said she ​“wanted to crawl into a hole… because we just don’t maintain the grass as we should be maintaining.”

“It’s not equitable,” said parent Ashley Stockton, who is also a teacher at Wexler-Grant. ​“It’s been six years since Bowen was completed, and nothing has been done to Wilbur Cross.” She said the athletes at Wilbur Cross ​“work really hard. They’re committed. They do everything they’re supposed to do. They’re training right. They’re eating right. They’re going to the weight room. They’re doing everything they’re supposed to do,” she said, ​“when they can’t even practice!” 

“What we’re doing right now is denying our kids access to equitable facilities. And I hope none of us feel okay about that,” she said.

“It’s just unfair to our kids that they’re dealing with this,” Coach John Acquavita jumped in. ​“It’s awful out there… I’ve blown the whistle and had to tell them to slow down,” he said, ​“so no one slides and tears a groin or rips a knee. It’s like ice skating!”

“When I first got to Cross I wanted to know the coach, I wanted to join the team,” Wilbur Cross football captain Giovanni Melendez remembered. ​“But my first week there, all I did it was just keep tripping and blowing my ankle.”

"What On Earth Were We Thinking?"

“I know that the kids believe firmly that the turf is better. But they are mistaken,” Cahn said in a closing argument of sorts. ​“I believe that in 30, 40, 50 years from now we will look back at this and think — what on earth were we thinking?”

As the commission set into debate the site plan and synthetics among themselves, Commissioner and Westville Alder Adam Marchand narrowed the conversation, saying that the question was not merely whether pollution was a possibility, but whether the athletics overhaul would ​“unreasonably” pollute, impair or destroy public trust in air, water and other natural resources.

There were two concerns he had on that front, he reflected. His primary concern, he said, was whether run off from a synthetic field that could reach significantly higher temperatures than grass could lead to polluted run-off and/or disproportionately hot water in the adjacent creek. That might disrupt the Mill River’s natural ecosystem. ​“We know that warmer water has a deleterious effect on the water’s capacity to carry oxygen and other things,” he reasoned.

Zinn once again repeated that the key issue was storm water management. Not only was the specific heat capacity of water ​“really one of its best attributes,” he said, but the system of infiltration — including underlying stone and the leveled track and surrounding trees — he has planned for the field should provide an opportunity for the water to cool down and leave behind its plastic pollutants before reaching the river.

Ultimately, Marchand said, ​“I don’t think the case has been made” that the turf would create ​“unreasonable pollution.” Neither scientific evidence, he said, nor practical evidence from local fields such as Bowen, which is similarly near to a body of water, Beaver Pond, have suggested that turfs would ​“destroy the planet” as Cahn had suggested.

“It does truly pain me, because just by our presence and our wanting to live reasonably comfortable lives, you know we have displaced natural resources,” Commission Chair Leslie Radcliffe said, ​“but the way that we go about mitigating the amount of displacement, and how we can give back is important.”

Commissioner Joshua Van Hoesen, meanwhile, joined the commissioners in voting against Cahn’s petition and voting in favor of the site plan. He also recommended the city find a way to track migration of turf plastics into the water to create their own data for future reference. 

“It’s interesting that it was the environmental advocates who asked for the public hearing,” Marchand continued, ​“but it was mostly supporters of the projects who came out. But it’s understandable, given the passion that the the parents and the students and the faculty and the staff have — you may know, I’m a soccer dad as well.” 

For the record, he added that while grass fields ​“theoretically are better,” they ​“take a huge amount of work and a huge amount of resources” to turn into playable surfaces. Just as it wasn’t reasonable to say that a high school turf could be held responsible for significant environmental destruction, he said, the city could not be ​“reasonably expected” to closely groom all of the public schools’ grass fields to be comparable to turf (though, his fellow commissioner Radcliffe noted, better maintenance across all of New Haven’s parks should be expected following the hefty testimony about syringes and glass discarded on grass fields across New Haven).

“Of course,” he clarified, ​“it is our job to make sure that all the site plan and inland wetland review boxes are ticked and our city staff feel some additional pressure more than they already impose upon themselves to make sure that we minimize any negative impact that could happen in the selection of the surface, in the choosing of the subcontractors and in the execution of the project.”

“And so I think we can trust our city engineer to be paying a close attention to that — because I know that he really cares about these issues like we do.”