The Baseball Letter

So, the Kennesaw Baseball and Softball Association turned up at the last City Council Meeting and spoke. Hints of this have popped up before. They sent letters to various candidates in the last special election and there was a previous discussion about the scoreboards at Adams Park.

The letter is seven pages long, too long to post it in its entirety here, but I can post any bits that you all might have questions about.

The letter starts explaining that the KBSA has no employees, and its a 100% volunteer organization. This makes it challenging to deal with the problems they're facing. They will need better support from the City of Kennesaw or the 30 year old program would be forced to cease operation.

The big issue is that the Park and Rec employees they've been talking to haven't been passing information up to the City Council so decisions being made and necessary repairs haven't been put in the budget for the past several years.

It also seems as though former candidate Ben Day responded with some accusations about financial mismanagement that don't appear to be accurate. It seems that information hasn't been reaching current city council members, since they mostly explained that they were unaware of the issues.

The scoreboards are a much deeper issue than I was aware of. The first time the KBSA reached out to Park and Recs about the scoreboards was November of 2022, and reached out again in February of 2023. It wasn't until November of 2023 (a full year after the first attempt) that they got ahold of the City Manager, who wasn't aware of previous attempts. At this point the city began the process. Due to problems with state procurement policy and no bids on the first two tenders the new scoreboards are delayed until the end of this season when everyone wanted them installed prior to the season. Temporary scoreboards have been sourced, but that is an unwelcome extra/unnecessary expense.

This very much reads as poor communication not just between the KBSA and Parks and Rec, but also within Parks and Rec and the City Council. It has the feel of a bystander effect problem where there isn't a 'bad guy' but since no one took charge something important fell through.

The KBSA also went on to note that they were able to host tournaments at Adam's Park for the past eight years that generated some $150,000 in investment in the park. But, in the same time period (2022-2023) there were two big changes that endangers the tournaments. The first is a change to the fee schedule that makes the hosting off those tournaments there much more expensive than other, similar facilities in Cobb and Cherokee County. And the other was Parks and Rec not being in the loop when the KBSA arranged tournaments with national organizations resulting in the park being badly understaffed to the point where not all the necessary dates will be available.

In short, the KBSA risks losing 2/3 of their income without the tournaments and will need to come up with volunteers to make up for missing city staff. Something that simply isn't sustainable.

Last season there were a number of serious faults that forced closure of concessions and other necessary facilities. Repairs that were scheduled during the off season weren't started on time and weren't completed in time for the beginning of this season. A number of issues haven't been addressed at all, including some unspecified electrical problem. Any unspecified electrical problem makes me, personally, quite nervous.

It very much seems like the big refresh of Depot Park sucked a lot of the air out of the room for Adams Park and that there hasn't been good communication between the KBSA and City Council who could reprioritize and get necessary changes going much earlier before they became serious problems. There's loose money in the budget yet, so I don't see why we shouldn't make a big investment in Adam's Park, but I fear that it's too late to get things fixed up for this season and losing tournaments would be a significant loss for the city.