Memorial Day weekend and the official start of summer are here.
Pools open, park use explodes, festivals and outdoor concerts and events fill your summer calendars in communities across Georgia. And on tiny Tybee Island, an idyllic coastal isthmus, past the marshlands and Intracoastal waterways off U.S. Highway 80, near Savannah, Tybeeans are in a fury and a pickle over the turf and lawn of popular Jaycee Park.
On the island’s north end, in the Historic Fort Screven District, the nine-acre park has greenspaces as well as baseball and soccer fields, and potentially, new pickleball courts.
The Tybee Island Recreation Department is managed by the Tybee Island YMCA. Due to heavy use, limited ability to irrigate, desire to reduce water use, and the challenges of growing grass in the island’s sandy soil, the Y decided artificial turf would be the more practical, long-term option.
The front-end installation costs are higher than laying sod or re-planting turf, but the current irrigation and shallow well system also need upgrades if the playing fields were to continue with natural turf and sod.
Jaycee Park has been a popular hangout and youth recreational spot since the 1970s. The playing fields proposed for turf conversion are a combined soccer/ baseball field of 1.5 acres. The turf proposal quickly drew the ire of several urban refugees, retired natives and transplants, and the ever-vocal contingent of Tybee beach buddies and latter-day naturalists.
Natural turf requires regular watering and maintenance, mowing as well as chemical treatments for sand spurs, fire ants, and weeds.
Heavier-duty sports like soccer also place a lot of wear and tear on the field in even a single season, requiring near-constant resodding, reseeding, and repeats of the cycle. Similar concerns, more about the aesthetic, caused the city of Decatur, a decade ago to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, continually resodding and replanting a small natural grass lawn atop the Decatur MARTA Station, and surrounding the Old Decatur Court House, bandstand and square.
After nearly half a dozen years of bare patches, re-exposed red clay, and muddy lawns for outdoor spring and summer events, Decatur finally bit the bullet and installed artificial turf, which no longer resembles the Putt-Putt course green carpeting of the 1970s. Most modern turf includes padding, domed installation to guide drainage – and warranties. Plus, it’s easily cleaned with a hose or pressure washer and lasts for years.
DeKalb County Parks & Recreation has taken note of the choice by its county seat (Decatur), and turf has begun to be the first choice when upgrading and replacing children’s playground surfaces within the current cycle of SPLOST and park bond fund upgrades across the county. A mud-pocked, frequently flooded children’s play area at Medlock Park in central DeKalb is now again crowded with children daily, with nearby picnic pavilions on weekends, alongside multiple baseball diamonds, a batting cage, PATH trail, and a community pool all nearby, and the turf-covered play park appeared best-maintained of the lot.
Yet the tempest on Tybee has a couple of other sticky wickets in the mix. An existing Frisbee golf course, also with natural turf, could be encroached by the fencing for three new pickleball courts, a sport gaining popularity in the beach community.
Overall, park improvement plans also would require the removal of 14 trees.
Tybee residents hug their trees almost as strongly as they cleave to their beaches, dunes, and area sea turtle nests.
The president of the local disk golf club is among those telling the pickleball crowd to instead go to Memorial Park, four miles away.
Now that might sound like a short hop, but all of Tybee Island is 3.19 square miles. I’ll wager the Birkenstock crowd is more vocal and exercised, but there are likely more resident voters among the headcount of parents of the league softball and soccer teams. Most YMCAs that I have encountered know what they are doing and consider the long-term benefits of exercise and fitness in communities, weighing all angles as they deploy limited resources.
Tiny Tybee also is a resort community and has the luxury of a tax base helpfully funded by visitors and tourism, reducing the pain of the higher bite of the initial turf installation costs, field doming, etc.; versus the summertime pleasures of no-see-ums, Georgia fire ants, noxious and invasive weed species and patching/sandy lawns.
Go with the turf, and one less pickleball court.
It’s called compromise.
And there you go, Turf Wars solved. Play ball.