NEWS ANALYSIS A proposal to spend $1 million for an artificial turf playing field in Perryville in the county executive’s Fiscal 2018 budget raises questions about costs, safety and policy issues on pushing expenses out of school accounts into county parks liabilities. In other words, is fake grass greener than the real thing? The Perryville project is just the tip of the astroturf, the first in a long-range plan to build artificial turf fields at four other county high schools, under the Parks and Recreation budget instead of the Cecil County Public Schools (CCPS) budget. Overall, the plan would spend over $5 million in the next few years and remove responsibility for the costs and maintenance of school playing fields from CCPS, thus freeing up room in the schools’ budget for other projects. The CCPS budget is often a target of county spending critics, while the parks budget is usually less of a political bullseye. And the decision to calculate the useful life of the artificial turf fields as being from “10 to 12 years” skirts an issue that plagued CCPS budget deliberations before the County Council two years ago when school tennis court repairs were deemed as lasting slightly […]
↧