Public Comment

To Mayor Tom Bates;Chair, Berkeley Parks and Recreation Commission;Berkeley City Manager;Berkeley City Attorney

As residents, parents, and sports field users, we request that the City of Berkeley immediately stop outsourcing its responsibilities for public sports fields’ reservations. The City’s longstanding practice, allowing the Association of Sports Field Users (ASFU) to establish and implement Berkeley policy for who gets to use our public spaces, has ceded a government responsibility to a self-interested party, removed public means for governmental accountability, and unfairly restricted recreational opportunities for Berkeley residents.  

The City should establish its own official policy for sports field access and reservations and should expeditiously implement a transparent reservation process under city oversight. City policy should give private groups priority or advanced access only where there is a compelling public interest to do so. 

What’s Wrong with Sports Field Reservations in Berkeley? 

For many years, the City of Berkeley has delegated the process for sports field allocation and scheduling to the ASFU—an organization under the direction of Mr. Doug Fielding. Nominally, ASFU is a non-profit; however, the organization does not maintain a public website. 

ASFU allocates sports field space only twice a year at ad hoc meetings. ASFU invites affiliated and organized sports programs, including non-Berkeley based organizations, to these meetings and negotiates the division of field space amongst those represented. ASFU does not provide general public notices for the meetings of or keep publically accessible minutes. Mr. Fielding acts as the final arbitrator for any conflicts. Outside attendance at these ASFU meetings, no meaningful mechanism allows a Berkeley resident to competitively request or reserve fields. 

ASFU manages sports field reservations without oversight from the City of Berkeley. The City cannot provide any public records of reservation policies and procedures, field users meetings or of the ASFU decision-making process. The City does not have a mechanism to review ASFU decisions. The Department of Parks and Recreation directs public concerns about the sports field reservation process to ASFU for response. 

How does the Current System Harm City Residents? 

The City’s outsourcing of its own responsibilities has created a perpetual monopoly for ASFU and its affiliated groups over sports fields. ASFU field reservation practices harm the interests of Berkeley-based youth and residents in many ways: 

• Berkeley residents unaffiliated with ASFU are functionally locked out of all meaningful or equal access to sports fields. Groups affiliated with the ASFU, from cities and regions throughout Northern California, including for-profit corporations, have maintained “rights” to a Berkeley sports fields indefinitely, preventing Berkeley-based groups and residents from access. According Mr. Doug Fielding, at “the fields are fully booked on weekdays 3:30-11 and 8am-11pm weekends.”
• Members and affiliates of ASFU are given privileged access to public fields. This fact is acknowledged by Mr. Doug Fielding, ASFU president who has written, “There is no question that the system favors people who are already in the system.” Furthermore, groups and individuals associated with ASFU are privately reselling reserved slots.
• Non-Berkeley based organizations have equal standing with Berkeley based organized youth programs on Berkeley city fields. While neighboring cities give their own residents priority in reservations and a preferential fee, ASFU gives Berkeley residents no preferential access on their own fields. Last year, ASFU user groups, at the biannual users groups meeting, voted against giving Berkeley youth programs priority in reservations in their own town.
• Berkeley residents have no means of knowing when a sports field is available.
• Berkeley residents have limited places to play sports in unscheduled and unstructured ways. Groups of adults and teenagers attempting to play sports are being discouraged from using fields and are routinely kicked off fields even when field space is available.

 

How to Make the Process Fair 

 

The City of Berkeley should adopt an official sports field reservations policy and either implement that policy itself or provide close oversight over policy implementation.  

 

We recommend that the reservation policy include the following elements: 

• Priority access to city fields for programs directly serving Berkeley youth and adult players.
• Transparent timeframes and procedures for making advance reservations

• A fair distribution of field space among organized activities (e.g. adult and youth sports programs, organized pickup games) and unstructured community play.
• A mechanism for resolving conflicts two or more competing users request the same space.

• Prohibition on the private resale or trade of field reservations

 

Berkeley can learn from the practices of other cities that have recently implemented transparent and online reservation systems. We believe the system should include 

• Online lookup or calendar to assess field availability
• Means for Berkeley based school and youth groups, adult groups, and residents to reserve fields online in advance
• Means for individuals and groups to access unreserved fields for informal and unstructured sports activities.
• Means for seasonal users to yield individual slots to pickup games and unstructured use, without affecting their seasonal bookings.

 

Berkeley voters are clearly committed to funding parks and recreation, but we expect our fields to be accessible to the public. As Berkeley residents, we have been dismayed to learn that outside groups and individuals are monopolizing public parks and sports fields, taking advantage of Berkeley’s relatively lower field costs while preventing local residents’ meaningful access. We believe few Berkeley citizens would knowingly tolerate the City outsourcing field allocation authority to a private organization without public oversight. 

The city must immediately recommit to the highest standards of transparent governance. Berkeley should terminate its outsourcing relationship with the ASFU and reclaim public parks and sports field oversight for the public good, engaging Berkeley residents in developing a vision for sport field use that reflect and reinforce the vibrancy of our neighborhoods. 

Respectfully, 

Rajiv Bhatia 

Sachu Constantine 

Betsy Cory 

Robert Derham 

Jane Fischberg 

Jeremy Giovannetti 

Johnathan Heller 

John Balmes 

Nate Brownlow 

Mokhtar Paki