Their push couldn’t have come at a more convenient time for county Department of Parks Director Dave Holland, who had been sitting on $125,000 in Midcoast development mitigation fees designated for play-field renovations.
“I got together with a group of parents at El Granada Elementary at the beginning of September, and they wanted to get volunteers together to work out a plan,” he said. “Amy Broome came back to me on Nov. 11 and said ‘I think I got it worked out for $90,000.’”
 On Monday afternoon workers smooth a layer of topsoil over the fields at El Granada Elementary School that will be re-sodded for students to play soccer and baseball, among other sports and activities. |
Collaborating with county parks and the Cabrillo Unified School District, Broome and a handful of elementary school parents outlined a mission for a speedy reconstruction of the popular community field. Several of the parents Broome contacted had attended El Granada Elementary themselves, Broome said, and, conveniently, are contractors. The circumstances were “too good to be true,” she said.
“The stars aligned and everyone I called said ‘yes,’ to be available,” Broome said.
From filing the paperwork to scraping old grass and rolling new sod, the new field was laid out in less than three months.
“It was amazing how quickly we were able to get this done,” Holland said.
The project began in early September and is slated to be complete by Friday, though the field won’t be open for use until sometime in January after the new sod has set.
The grass field at Farallone View Elementary School is next to be spruced up.
“That’s a much more complicated project because it’s on a slant and it’s a bigger field,” Holland said. “We’ll be meeting a week from now to start looking at that process. If we could work everything out it would be nice to get it done by this time next fall. That would be fast. We’ll see how the discussions go.”
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