If you are one of the thousands of people who have participated in or attended an event at Masich Place Stadium this spring I am sure that you will agree it is a pretty classy facility. There is a current need for some serious maintenance and upgrading to bring it back into to the point it was at just a few years ago. The name of the stadium is not important here, whether it be Massey, Masich, or as current conditions suggest Messey Place, is not the question. Simply it has a 25-year history as a central venue where tens of thousands have been involved in one way or another in countless different athletic events, fundraising programs, or as a place to relax or to work on your own personal fitness program.
The stadium was built in time for the B.C. Summer Games in 1990 and still is a world-class facility. Originally its price was just over $3 million and I would suggest that figure would be well over
$12 million to replace today. John Backhouse made a positive move when he and the council of the day gave the green light to get the job going in 1988.
Mayor Backhouse commissioned a task force at large and appointed long time athletic and football personality Frank Overand as the chair. I was part of that group and putting our heads together, we offered many helpful suggestions to deliver the facility complete with an eight-lane 400-metre track in time for the opening ceremonies of the 1990 B.C. Summer Games. It was no surprise when Premier Bill Vander Zalm and Mayor Backhouse declared the facility as "world class" and unparalleled in Canada. These claims were repeated countless times by athletes, officials, coaches, and tourists at events such as the pre-Commonwealth event, B.C. Championships and the Legion National Track and Field Championships to name a few.
Why, I must ask, at this point does the civic planning department and parks and recreation want to downgrade the facility with their plan to install an artificial synthetic grass infield which will necessitate the moving of all throwing events to an adjacent field and out of the stadium proper? Their reasoning is fraught with erroneous claims mainly that the installation of an artificial turf will save maintenance cost in the long run, and that it will attract more users, and extend the programs of others. Researching both the positives and negatives of synthetic turf fields leads me to believe the health and injury risks to athletic competitors alone far outweigh the benefits. This does not include the fact that if a synthetic field is once installed and needs replacement, there is no choice but to reinstall another because the plastic once laid over earth, kills every living organism in the subsoil and if you wish to return to natural grass, it would take years of soil remediation. Therefore, once artificial, always artificial.
Artificial turf is simply plastic grass about three inches high propped up with crumb rubber made from ground tires.
Crumb rubber contains leads, arsenic, mercury and other dangerous chemicals worse for your health than chemicals used in natural grass fertilizers. Crumb rubber mounds up when you slide on it, consequently constant raking is required. As well, shoes and clothing get filled with the rubber product and get carried off by athletes and an adjacent stock pile must be kept to replace that which is lost. To top it off, the crumb rubber gets into clothing and ends up in the laundry, and moms just love that! But the fields are quite pretty, if pretty trumps safety and health.
Consequently, planning and parks and recreation feel that if throwing events are moved to one of the three adjacent fields south of the stadium, this would constitute the need to eliminate more than three hundred meters of landscaped, treed and fenced berm that protect the main complex from much of the wind that flows from the south and southeast. This they say will add better vision from the grandstand to see the throwers. This I must say is ridiculous as the throwing area would be far too distant for any spectator in the seating area, plus the throwers are throwing away from the field of vision.
Removing the berm would cause several problems. It would eliminate the bowl-like setting of the stadium; it would constitute the removal of tens of thousands of meters of earth to an offsite location, cause the demise of over 200 beautiful European pine trees and it would, coupled with the artificial turf, eliminate the greenness of the existing stadium. Most importantly, it would eliminate over 2500 overflow seats for major events such as opening and closing ceremonies of the B.C. games; China/Canada women's soccer game: pre-Commonwealth Events and others that drew crowds of 4500 or more spectators. (The bleachers at the Stadium only hold 1800). Aerial views of the stadium at opening ceremonies shows 5,000 to 6,000 people, most taking advantage of the berm seats.
Some would make believe that there is a turf war over the use of the stadium. This is not true and if it is, it has been created by the city planning and parks departments. When the stadium was opened in 1990, one of the major rules was that football not be played on the infield. That rule was put in place because the field was a sand-based field and too fragile for heavy football use. That rule was followed for the first dozen years and the stadium infield remained pristine and beautifully groomed by parks maintenance personnel. Within three years of use by football, parks had to do several hundred thousand dollars of work to restore the infield in 2006.
No further infield rebuilding has been done since then and the field where football has played is a disaster of zero grass growth and major proliferation of noxious weeds. Ironically the areas that are not affected by heavy traffic remain quite lush and green.
Football is long overdue for a stadium of their own. In recent years, there has been talk of such a fixture at Duchess Park, but there are many other excellent sites in our city. Sixty to seventy percent of all football played in Prince George is a well organized high school interior league. Why not develop one of the fields such as PGSS, College Heights, Lakewood or Duchess Park as a permanent football facility and leave our well-used stadium for what it was intended?
There are so many questions left unanswered in the city's recent proposal to downgrade the stadium that it would take more pages of writing and research to inform the taxpayer. Over the history of the stadium, my association with parks has been mainly positive. I do hope that my comments do not fray this but these expressed concerns are legitimate and should be given serious thought. A well researched rebuttal by Bill Masich was emailed to the mayor and council, city planning and city parks and recreation on or about March 30, with no returned reply by any party.
Therefore I am asking the public at large to let their feelings be known with calls to planning and parks and recreation, emails to the mayor and council, letters to the editor or personal contact would be appreciated in you are not in favor of our stadium and beautiful surrounding green space being degraded.
