Darkness on the Edge of Town

Last night was a meeting of the Board of School Estimate - a joint body of representatives from Maplewood, South Orange and the Board of Education - to vote upon the proposed capital budget for the current year. While the total amount being considered was $4,555,753 for a variety of projects, such as roof replacements, mechanical upgrades, sidewalks and parking lots, the one issue that garnered the most attention was the expenditure of $50,000 for lights at the Underhill Field sports complex.

This issue came before the Board of Education 1.5 years ago, when they were planning to spend $100,000 (of the $200,000 total project cost) from the operating budget. For a variety of reasons, the School Board voted against that, but the project never went away. Since that time, I have heard from many residents who live near the property and have concerns that lights on a turf field will negatively impact their quality of life. As we heard last night, the lights are proposed to be in use an average of 5 nights per week during the Fall and Spring.

Although I was inclined to not support the project, once I learned that no effort was made to notice homeowners that live near the property (not to mention the fact that the vote was held during a snowstorm), I felt strongly that the process was flawed and I could not vote for a project that we KNEW the public has concerns about, but were not informed about the meeting. In fact the vote was not even posted on the District website or covered by any of our local media, so unless someone reads the fine print in the legal notices of the newspaper, they would not even have known the vote was taking place.

When a someone buys a home, they have the right to expect a certain quality of life based on the location of the home. If you live next to a train track, you have to expect a certain level of noise. If you live next to a park, you have to expect a certain level of activity in the park. If you live near a football stadium, you have to expect some level of inconvenience due to noise or parking. However, in this case, the residents did NOT have the expectation of games and the associated noise (and light) running into the nighttime hours. A big reason that applications go before a Planning Board is so if dramatic changes are proposed to occur, public hearings are heard, restrictions are imposed and memorialized and everything is documented in an open, transparent and fair way. However, for some unknown reason, we are told that a Board of Education is exempt from this process. That just makes no sense to me.

In this day and age of belt-tightening and cutbacks, spending money on a luxury like field lighting seems inappropriate. To make things worse, to do it without the people most impacted invited to participate in the dialog seems just plain wrong. Unfortunately, my colleagues did not agree and the funding was approved. However, I am proud to have voted "no" on behalf of the residents who couldn't.