Ahern Field will stay a natural grass area rather than be given artificial turf that is best for sports, Cambridge city manager Yi-An Huang said in a Wednesday memo that reflects an essentially unprecedented turnaround in planning.
“After careful consideration of community input, City Council feedback and the project’s overall goals, we have decided not to install a synthetic turf field or the athletic lighting,” Huang said. “We will move forward with reconstructing the natural grass field, including improvements to drainage and irrigation that will enhance field quality and usability.”
Money committed to lighting Ahern Fields for games as part of a park restoration capital budget can be used to support lighting at Danehy Park to expand playable hours on those existing synthetic turf fields, Huang said.
The decision came two days after a council meeting that saw frustration from city councillors as well as neighbors about a decision that was made without them – something staff has not been coy about: At a council meeting April 13 and again Monday, staff made it clear that the call to shift to turf at Ahern Field was made long ago. “When we were at City Council for the appropriation for the budget hearing last year, we talked about Ahern Field being a turf field. Staff went into the process with the community trying to be very clear that that is a decision that was already made,” deputy city manager Katherine Watkins said Monday.
Huang defended the decision to councillors while admitting that in terms of public process, “there could be a lot improved.”
Pop-up events run by the city last summer drew largely negative comments about turf, according to a timeline offered by the advocacy group Friends of Ahern, but a March 11 design open house included a plan with a field of artificial turf anyway. Discontent led to dueling petition drives, with a petition to “save” the grass field drawing more than 2,080 names. A petition to “Support Revitalization of Ahern Field including Synthetic Turf” drew 398 signatures as of Wednesday.
“This is an incredibly hard conversation,” Huang said, noting that communities that have had long, fractious debates about turf, including in neighboring Arlington, “have wound up where we are” – in converting to turf for the sake of youth sports.
Everybody given the choice would choose a grass field, Huang said, but “the idea that we can maintain them [for sports] is not real. We have to rest them at the time they’re in most demand.”
A grass field has average annual maintenance costs of $36,000 without water, which can range between 300,000 gallons to more than 1 million gallons annually, Watkins said. The annual cost of maintaining a synthetic turf field is about $5,000 per year.
There was a logistical benefit to moving forward with the work at Ahern now instead of engaging in a full public process, staff said a year ago, because the neighboring Kennedy-Longfellow School is closed for renovations toward a future reuse.
Not just about sports
Ahern Field takes up 2.6 acres at 259 Charles St., just behind the former school at 158 Spring St. The campus is expected to reopen this year with improvements and a new purpose, and the field was proposed to get improvements to match: new lighting, renovated basketball and hockey/pickleball courts, seating and gathering spaces. The field previously offered outdoor recreational space including basketball courts, a softball field, street hockey and a playground with water play, the according to a city guide.
“City staff believed that a synthetic turf field could help support the various users of the field and address growing demand for recreational space by supporting more consistent, all-weather use,” Huang said.
Members of the public, though, argued that it was not just about sports and not just about money. For many, Ahern Field and its grass is a key public amenity, used for everything from picnics to stargazing and walks – uses for which artificial turf is not only unnatural, but hostile, because the turf gets much hotter than grass.
The lack of process, even if it made sense to city staff, upset many of the 50 public speakers Monday as well as city councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler.
“I am frustrated at how we’ve gotten to this point, and I do think we could have had these conversations more than a year ago before the budget allocation was even proposed,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said, “Not when we’re just a few weeks before things being implemented.”
Huang said it was important to acknowledge “that every design choice involves tradeoffs.” He continued:
While the improvements will enhance the field and provide improved drainage and irrigation, a natural grass surface will continue to have limitations on the amount and intensity of use it can accommodate compared to an all-weather field. We will continue working with the neighborhood, the school community, and our youth sports partners to manage and program the space. And the lighting at Danehy will provide additional bookable time for youth sports on those existing turf fields.
Turnaround is “Rare”
The memo explaining the turnaround at Ahern Field was greeted by surprise Wednesday.
“It is rare, and it took a lot of pressure,” said Rhonda Massie, who lives near the field. Despite a fraught family history with sports play there – “I can’t tell you how many times a ball would come smashing through my grandmother’s window,” she said – she has supported the idea of East Cambridge having game facilities that would avoid the need to travel to Danehy Park. She is also a supporter of the grass field.
To see the city response to public outcry like this took her by surprise. “One of the reasons I stopped going to the planning team meetings was because I thought that we would never, ever have anything that the city didn’t want.” Pointing to 40 Thorndike, a controversial 20-story building with offices and retail that remains unused since its opening in October 2024, she said of the turf decision: “Yes, I’m really happy that it has happened now, but sometimes I think that the city should pay more attention to the people who live in the neighborhoods.”
“I will feel some satisfaction when I walk by and there is nice grass on the field. I will not believe anything until I actually see it,” Massie said. “I’ve lived here too long.”
A voicemail was left Wednesday with Andrew Farrar, a Cambridge Youth Soccer advocate who created the proturf petition, but it was not immediately returned.
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