Mike Evans: lets pause to fully consider trade-offs

Letter, Mike Evans

Dear Members of the Mount Greylock Regional School District School Committee,

I am writing today about the turf installation project at Mount Greylock Regional High School.

I write as a community member with two children who are a few years away from starting at MGRHS.  I have concerns about the environmental impacts of this decision as well as the potential health impacts for my kids and for the many current and future MGRHS students and their peers from other schools who will utilize the field during practices, games, and PE classes.  That being said, I am still trying to learn more about the various playing field options and the related life-cycle impacts.

However, I write to you today not to attempt to persuade you in one way or another, but instead to inquire about the process that you have undertaken to settle on this decision.  While I imagine that the artificial turf would increase the amount of time that those fields could be utilized, I know that there are a number of other important criteria about which you have deliberated as you weighed this playing field against the other options.

Through my work at the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives at Williams College, the campus sustainability office, I understand that these decisions are never easy.  There are always trade-offs that need to be considered and often environmental and health impacts, project costs, material availability, and ongoing maintenance demands, which are all equally important, but competing priorities.  With all the community input that you have received in the last month with information on both sides, if you still have questions or reservations about the artificial turf, I urge you to pause the timeline of the project in order to fully consider all the trade-offs of this artificial surface versus an organic, natural grass field and to ensure transparency in the process. 

I was not around when the decisions about the college’s playing field at the Weston Athletic complex were being made and therefore cannot speak to those discussions and deliberations.  However, there are people in the Williams community who can speak from personal experience about short-term impacts of the field including about: 1) the maintenance of the surface, 2) the impact of the pellets on players’ experience, 3) the impacts of the pellets on both stormwater runoff and on cleaning players’ uniforms and practice gear.  I’m happy to help reach out to those people and connect you all should you choose to do further research. Beyond that, with the additional studies that have been published since the installation of that surface, I would suggest that both a thorough literature review and an environmental life cycle costing assessment be conducted - if they haven’t already been - to better understand the long-term human and environmental health impacts before installation of any surface, 

In closing, if this work has already been done, I respectfully ask that those analyses be shared with the community.  And if they haven’t, I urge you to do so as well as to get feedback from all the stakeholders and to increase outreach and communications around this decision so that the community is behind your decision and fully in-the-know about the trade-offs that you considered.  

Thanks.

Sincerely, Mike Evans