MISSOULA — The owner of the Paddleheads baseball team has dropped their request for artificial turf in Ogren Field, and some are hoping it stays that way.
On Thursday, Jeremy Drake of the nonprofit MT Plastic Free was surprised to receive an email from Dale Bickell, City of Missoula Chief Administrative Officer, saying that Big Sky Professional Baseball had withdrawn its request for artificial turf in Ogren Field.
Drake had just sent Bickell an email asking if he and representatives of an anti-plastic coalition could meet with Bickell and Marina Yoshioka, the new Missoula Parks and Recreation director, regarding the artificial turf proposal. The coalition includes MT Plastic Free, Families for a Livable Climate, Climate Smart, Grow Safe Non-Toxic Missoula, Home ReSource and 350 Montana.
Even though the request has been withdrawn, the coalition still wants to meet with city managers to start developing a policy in case the request is renewed or another venue makes a similar request.
“We want to continue to pursue a policy with the city. Most city council members would probably agree that they probably need a policy on this. It would be ideal to have some clarity about where the city stands before this comes up again,” Drake said. “There are a lot of city policies and plans that have been developed with a lot of community input that have a lot of great guidance in them. Someone needs to look at those and figure out whether there’s space for artificial turf. I don’t think so, but we have to have the conversation.”
In his email, Bickell said he and Yoshioka would be happy to meet with the coalition, but “with the urgency of a pending decision withdrawn, I’d like to propose this meeting occur later in March to better accommodate schedules.”
During a December city council committee meeting, Matt Ellis, president of Big Sky Professional Baseball, pitched the idea of installing artificial turf and said his organization would pay for the added cost of the artificial turf. The city of Missoula owns the field and was offering to install new natural grass at a cost of roughly $1.6 million.
But members of the coalition and other citizens objected to the installation of artificial turf, saying it violates some city policies of zero waste and climate action resiliency. And with the ball field being right next to the Clark Fork River, they said artificial turf would increase the likelihood that more microplastics and dangerous chemicals such as PFAS would end up in the river.
The coalition held an open house in mid-January to bring attention to the environmental and health issues posed by artificial turf. Three members of the city council - Justin Ponton, Sean McCoy and Kristen Jordan - attended the open house and said the public deserved more input on the issue since the field is city property.
Ellis said during the December meeting that they were planning on getting one more season out of the current field. Then they’d have had to start working on the field this fall to be ready for the spring. Since there’s still time, Drake didn’t know why Big Sky Professional Baseball withdrew the request now.
“I left a message for Matt Ellis — maybe he’ll give me a call back and we’ll learn what happened,” Drake said.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.
