The Lodi School District’s athletic field on Highway 60 near the elementary school has been closed since a look into malfunctioning field lights revealed that light posts are no longer considered to be structurally sound and pose a liability until they can be removed.

The Lodi School District’s athletic field on Highway 60 near the elementary school has been closed since a look into malfunctioning field lights revealed that light posts are no longer considered to be structurally sound and pose a liability until they can be removed.

At the Sept. 12 board of education meeting Lodi District Administrator Vince Breunig explained a series of events at the end of the previous week that could have huge ramifications in budgeting and sports programming.

At the district’s football field near the Elementary School, off Highway 60, some of the field lights had gone out. This led to a request for a company to see about the lights. The company, according to Breunig, responded that first there would need to be assurances that the light poles were structurally safe. An engineer was brought in to inspect the light poles, with the answer that they were not, and would need to be replaced in the next five years. This led to a conversation about liability with the school’s insurer, and then a decision between late Thursday night on the 8th and Friday morning of the 9th to have the field closed until the light poles could be removed.

Board member Scott Bilse asked what would happen for Tuesday night youth football games, usually two games, of 7th graders and 8th graders, starting at 5 p.m., and ending after dark.

“We’re going to have to work with youth football on that,” said Breunig. “So we’re going to have to look at whether we can even host, depending on if our field is free–if there isn’t a soccer game going on, we can play on the stadium field.”

Assuming that there would be approval by the board, Breunig said that initial thought has been to allow youth football to use the stadium field whenever there was not a conflict with one of the Lodi school sports, waiving the stadium fee. Although youth football is not a program of the school district, Breunig and board members agreed to attempt to accommodate them with a playing space as much as possible in the current situation.

“If we move them anywhere else, dominoes are going to fall,” said Breunig of the tight arrangement of sports schedules and playing spaces, “so if they can use the stadium field, we’re going to use the stadium field…and the kids will love it.”

A challenge in scheduling and orienting sports practices and games around the community, according to Breunig, is that as a feature of the city of Lodi’s geography is that the land that isn’t chronically wet, tends to be on a hill.

Among the questions that come with the issue, Breunig explained, is once the lights are brought down, would the district want to replace them or leave the field for daytime use only? Also, if the lights were replaced, they could be put in a different orientation or widened for use with more activities.

“The light poles set the footprint and that footprint had been set for over 50 years,” said Breunig. “And now do we look at changing that, or putting lights somewhere else? We’re putting a new track in and we can put lights in there and make that a field that youth can use.”

Looking at the situation as optimistically as possible, albeit “this is not good news,” Breunig told the board that as they had already been looking at reviewing the district’s green space, “that would add another opportunity to look at our green space through a different lens.”

The district has since put out a request for at least three proposals to remove the field lights with at least two bids received so far.

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