We don’t disagree with the city’s decision to create fees for travel baseball and softball leagues that use fields in city parks.

There should be a fee for travel leagues to use baseball and softball fields in the city. When the city built its ball fields the fields were typically used by leagues made up largely of city children whose parents paid city taxes. That isn’t necessarily the case with travel leagues or adult leagues that draw from people who live outside the city. There are costs to the city to operate the fields, and those costs aren’t going down as time goes on. Travel leagues weren’t en vogue when the city’s fees for parks were last updated – but additional use means additional city staff time to get the fields ready for the next teams to use them.

The real problem with approving the change in late April to take effect on May 1 is that some of the leagues that will use the city’s fields have already set their fees for the coming year – and those team fees don’t include a fee for the use of the city’s fields because there hadn’t been a fee before. It would have been different if the city had merely adjusted its fees for travel sports leagues, but this is an entirely new fee that some teams didn’t anticipate when they were handling their off-season business. And, the proposed changes weren’t well communicated with some of the teams before the council’s vote on Monday because the fee was somewhat of a moving target. .

In our view, the fee increase would have been approved either in late 2023 as part of the city budget process or this fall when city officials begin discussing the 2024 budget so that the teams would have had time to adjust their fee schedules accordingly.