Collier School Board Votes to Save Baseball Field

Collier County Public Schools superintendent Leslie Ricciardelli got right to the heart of the matter during the Wednesday, February 5, Collier County School Board meeting regarding the fate of Tyler Beck Memorial Field, the beleaguered baseball field on the Tommie Barfield Elementary campus. Ricciardelli can relate to supporters who showed up in strong numbers at the meeting to fight to save the ball field at TBE.

"As a kid who grew up in Naples,” Ricciardelli said, "the way you feel about Tommie Barfield's field is the way I feel about Cambier Park's fields. So, I fully understand. I spent a lot of hours down in Cambier as a kid, and the thought of that ever going away is terrifying.”

After discussion between the superintendent, school board members, and public input, the school board voted unanimously to invite Marco Island City Council to come back with plans for a new interlocal agreement by March 3, with a three-year agreement with an option for a five-year agreement after that.

For the second time in less than three years the fate of the baseball field, named in honor of Marco Island youth Tyler Beck who was killed while riding his bicycle on January 6, 1995, just six days before his twelfth birthday, is in limbo. The field was named in his honor in April of 1995. Since then the field has suffered from periods of neglect. On three occasions the City of Marco Island has tried to divorce itself from the field that has served the youth of the island for over 40 years. Last September Marco City Council voted unanimously to terminate the interlocal agreements between Collier County Public Schools and the City of Marco Island and between Marco Island Academy and the City of Marco Island. With a throng of supporters attending their February 3 city council meeting, city council, with four new members, decided to send city manager Mike McNees back to CCPS to try to negotiate a new deal. It appears the CCPS board and superintendent are more than willing to cooperate.

"Marco became a city in 1997,” Ricciardelli said, "and as soon as they became a city, the interlocal agreement between Collier County Public Schools transferred from between Collier County Public Schools and the Board of County Commissioners to an interlocal with City of Marco. Honestly, let's go back and remember that on September 23, when they signed this, that was a different city council. At the time, they did not feel that maybe they had the budget. You have pretty much a new city council now. It's a matter of them working on their budget and figuring this out, and then we can move forward.”

Ricciardelli addressed a comment by McNees suggesting the interlocal agreement was an unusual one for CCPS.

"One of the concerns and questions Mike brought up is that it's probably a weird situation, that there's probably no other elementary schools that actually lease out their fields for community use. That's not true. We have interlocal agreements with Collier County, with the City of Naples, with Immokalee, and obviously with the City of Marco, quite frankly. This never would have even come to us had it not come to us by way of the City of Marco, who requested a meeting with me some months ago and said, ‘Listen, we would like to terminate this interlocal.' This is not the first time that was attempted. You may or may not know the history. I'm glad to email it to anybody that wants it, but this started back in 2017 where they were going to terminate the interlocal due to the damage from Hurricane Irma. At the time, CCPS said if you're going to terminate it, then we're just going to make it a multi-purpose field where kids could play soccer or whatever. City of Marco said, ‘No, we would like to keep the field. We would like to keep the interlocal in place.' Great. In 2022 it came up. City of Marco said, 'We're really not interested in keeping the interlocal. People aren't really utilizing it.' They did have all of their information about leases. We said, ‘Okay, fine.' Well, then that changed again. They really drive the conversation. When I had a conversation some six, seven, eight months ago with the city manager he said, ‘Listen, we would like to come back and terminate the interlocal.' It was a ten-year interlocal. It was in place and solid. 

"We said, ‘Sure, we'll terminate the interlocal and we will just make it a multi-purpose field for whoever wants to use it. Anybody can use the multi-purpose field outside of school hours. The city would have still been able to use it. Sometimes, they use those fields for soccer or for other things, which would have been fine too. So, it went to the Marco City Council meeting on September 23 with the statement that it was going to terminate on October 1, 2024. Some things happened for personal reasons, apparently, and it did not come to our board. We should have pushed it forth in November-ish. It didn't happen. That's why we just realized it was an oversight. We were just pushing it through now."

"I want to preface anything I say by saying to you, if you can get a kid off of a screen and get them on a field, in a park, on a court, I am fully in favor of that. I hate not seeing kids outside. If you go back about a year, we had to redo interlocals with the City of Naples because they were so out of date. This particular interlocal does have some pieces in it that are not relevant anymore. The (10 year) interlocal that was done in 2022 assumed that Marco Island Academy was going to be the primary user of the field. Marco Island Academy has chosen not to do that since then, so we need to make some revisions to this interlocal. Honestly, after speaking with Mike McNees yesterday, I made the recommendation to him that I'm going to make to you. I think we let this one go with the understanding that the City of Marco Island is going to come up with their terms. Rewrite the draft. We are always happy to sign those. To me, they should be able to use the field after the school day, on weekends, and holidays.”

School board member Erick Carter said CCPS has a history of cooperation. He would like to see that happen with the City of Marco Island. 

“The county has a bigger budget,” Carter said, "so when the county had control of it, they probably could afford it a lot easier than a small municipality like the city of Marco. I think one thing that makes Collier County very unique is that the municipalities work well together. I intend to keep doing that and moving forward because I think it's important for the people because, after all, the field belongs to the taxpayers of Collier County. We are the stewards of that. I think this board is willing to work with the city. If you guys can come back with something, we'd be happy to try to keep it a field for you all. We definitely want to move forward."

This time around CCPS wants to make sure field maintenance is a key component of the new interlocal agreement. But Ricciardelli doesn’t feel an entity like Marco Island Academy should be responsible for maintaining the field.

“We don't need to have Marco Island Academy in any way be a part of being held responsible for the upkeep of it,” Ricciardelli said. "I just think we rewrite it and bring it up to date. I think this puts it on the Marco City Council to have a draft done. I'm just suggesting to you that we find a way to make it work. The city is going to have to help us rewrite the agreement. I don't even think it's being leased between now and then anyway, according to Mike McNees.”

CCPS school board president Kelly Mason deferred to Marc Rouleau, CCPS’s chief facilities officer, for direction regarding renovation of the field.

"There's a considerable cost to maintaining the field,” Rouleau said. “There's a first cost that someone needs to invest to make it playable. Right now, that field is in terrible condition. I respectfully submit that it's unsafe to play on. Typically what you have to do to get the field back to a condition that it needs to be to make it playable is you have to renovate the field. And field renovation means that you remove the top surface and the sub base. You put a new sub base in with new turf. The irrigation system, I understand, needs to be repaired. Fresh clay needs to be brought in. The warning track needs to be repaired. There's considerable cost to that. A typical baseball field for Collier County Public Schools runs about $70,000 to $100,000 to renovate a field. And what I'm talking about is a cost just to get the field playable. I'm not talking about a FHSAA standard field, which would be, in my opinion, over $100,000 if we went that route. You also have some facilities that need some work. There's a storage shed out there that's in pretty bad shape. I would recommend that be replaced. There's a utility shed with electrical panels in it that needs to be replaced. It's got new netting. We took the netting down to discourage people from using the batting cage. So, the netting is in good shape. The lighting needs to be inspected to make sure that's working, as does the scoreboard. There are no restrooms accessible from that site. And because the lease, or the use of the field, is strictly limited to the baseball field and its associated structures, when you get foul balls and other things that end up on the elementary campus, if it's not made clear in the interlocal agreement, you cannot chase those baseballs onto the elementary campus. I know people would climb fences to try to get those balls, but, you know, that's something that we would have to work out with the City of Marco Island."

School board member Stephanie Lucarelli voiced concern regarding the ongoing maintenance of the field.

“It seems like everybody up here is open to a new lease agreement,” Lucarelli said of the school board. “But I need to make sure everybody understands that our responsibility is first and foremost to the students during the school day at Tommie Barfield Elementary School. That is their area to play for recess and for their PE classes. So, if we are entering into another lease agreement, which I'm more than happy to do, it is really imperative that the agreement is clear about the maintenance standards for that field." 

“There are maintenance requirements for the turf,” Rouleau said. “You have to treat for pests, but you also have to treat for weeds. You have to maintain quality turf, typically using herbicides. And then there's fertilizers that need to be applied to feed the turf. And those are all chemicals. So, it's not desirable to have kids on that immediately after that's applied. So, there's got to be some kind of buffer to protect the kids making contact with that. I'd also like to springboard into sharing that the other things need to be maintained as well, for it to be a quality field. Take a look at the baseball fields at Osceola Elementary School. The county does a fantastic job maintaining them. The clay doesn't have weeds growing in it. It's fresh. The warning track needs to be maintained as well. There's also aerating of the field, which is something that's a common practice. There's proper mowing. It cannot be cut too short or not cut short enough. It has to be cut just right. Typically, this is from the city of Marco Island's staff. They shared with me a couple of years ago that it was costing them about $30,000 to maintain, and that's about right. Today's dollars, it's probably more like $40,000 to do all that spraying and treatment, the care and maintenance of the clay and the warning track and the ground and mowing the grass.”

Access to the field for maintenance has been a bone of contention in the past, according to Marco Island officials. Lucarelli touched on that topic.

“The timing of when they are maintaining the only field that our students have for recess and PE becomes kind of tricky,” Luccarelli said, “if there is any intention of having that maintenance done during the school day. It would need to be done before school hours or after school hours. Of course, after school hours is when it would want to be used. There is a lot involved. As a board we cannot use educational dollars to maintain something that's for community use. So, if we were to take this over and make it into just green space, obviously that's green space that's being used by our students during the course of the school day for their educational purposes. But to maintain it as a baseball field, there's no educational purpose for our students because baseball is not a curriculum for the elementary school. So, all of that needs to be taken into consideration and the use of it during the school day by the public we all understand would not be appropriate. So that's something else the city would have to make sure that you are enforcing. My other concern with this is that the field has been unused and unkept for the last two years, at least. Is that correct?"

"I believe the last time someone's been out there to maintain it,” Rouleau said.

This is one area where the CCPS board is not correctly informed. The Marco Island Academy baseball team used the field during their most successful season in school history in 2024 when they won their conference championship and posted their first winning season. However, the field was not properly maintained. During one night game, two complete banks of lights were malfunctioning, 10 lights total, making much of the right field effectively dark. Players were complaining of not being able to see fly balls hit to deep left field. The scoreboard was also inoperable.

“It hasn't been appropriately maintained,”  Lucarelli said. “I don't want to end up in a situation a couple of years from now where we're again getting back a field that has not been being maintained the way that it's supposed to be."

"Our superintendent and the school board all listen to the public,” Mason concluded. "I think we all want to work together. And I think that's clear today."