Why this matters
National City says it faces staffing challenges for maintaining its handful of parks, including Las Palmas, home to the city’s only official Little League.
A Little League can only be as great as its park.
But for decades, coaches who help operate National City’s only official Little League say their facilities at Las Palmas Park have been neglected, from poorly maintained restrooms to unfilled dirt holes and flooded baseball fields.
They say in some cases, the city has left their concerns unaddressed. In other cases, the league has taken matters into their own hands, tackling maintenance issues with a team of parents and other volunteers.
“Neither of the two fields they have at Las Palmas Park has ever been a decent playing field,” said Brian Clapper, who coached in the league for four decades. “For some reason, I guess Little League is not their priority.”
Clapper, now a director for nine leagues in Chula Vista, said he believes the park’s conditions contribute to lower league participation in National City.
“I think the field and the maintenance and taking care of the fields has a lot to do with these kids playing ball,” he said. “And I would love to see National City put a little more effort into keeping the fields nice and doing them right for the kids.”
Daniel Perez, the league’s president for the past two years and a member of National City’s Parks, Recreation and Senior Citizens Advisory Committee, said he has had to frequently advocate for repairs. At least two children have been injured tripping on gopher holes, he said, yet the city hadn’t fixed them two years after he made the request.
Under city policy, all leagues must take on some of the responsibility of maintaining the fields they use, a city official said. As a nonprofit, the Little League is not required to pay for the permit, though it does pay the city for keeping the lights on while it uses fields at night.
From the Documenters
This story came in part from notes taken by Carlos Moyeda, a San Diego Documenter, at a National City Parks, Recreation and Senior Citizens Advisory Committee meeting earlier this year. The Documenters program trains and pays community members to document what happens at public meetings. Read the note here.
Perez said their volunteers, which include contractors and others with construction experience, leverage their skills to provide much-needed fixes. When the city has brought them an infield dirt mix, he said they are ultimately asked to be the ones to disperse it. Perez said he also once brought his own pumps to drain flooding from the field.
“It’s just mind-blowing,” he said. “They’re asking for volunteers to do the work for them, and these are the city’s fields.”
Then there are the bathrooms. Perez called them “disgusting,” and said that last season the women’s bathroom was without running water for months. Clapper described them as being in “horrendously poor” condition.
The bathrooms are now being renovated as part of a multimillion-dollar capital project at the park. But the Little League board members say they didn’t know about the renovations — and that the bathrooms would be closed as a result — until the day before their Easter Egg Hunt event. Their regular season is still ongoing.
“It meets the regular government stereotype where nobody talks to each other and they do it on their time, not the community’s time,” said Benjamin Luke, vice president of the league.
But staffing is limited, with even supervisors pitching in to maintain the city’s parks. Despite staffing challenges, they do the best they can, said Victor Uribe, the city’s parks superintendent.
“There’s money being put into Las Palmas,” Uribe said. “Maybe it’s not as fast as people would like. It is a process, and it’s being done.”
The last time Las Palmas received any upgrades was close to 10 years ago, when the city installed new lighting. But now the park is slated to receive renovations to its pool and bathrooms over the next five years under a $3.2 million project.
Construction of the bathrooms is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Type of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
