Larry's original letter was not published. His original letter was much more interesting. Larry, being the "useful idiot" that I am, I will reprint your original letter. You're welcome, Larry.
To Turf or Not to Turf
By Larry Evans, Mount Lebanon (FYI: I am a Democratic Party Committeemen)
We Leboites should thank our lucky stars that the biggest concerns currently confronting our sleepy little suburb are 1. To coldly cull or just politely neuter our dancing and prancing (into traffic) deer population and 2. To artificially turf a couple perpetually soggy sports fields or stay grassy “green” but rather lean on our kids’ playing time. To keep things in perspective, we should appreciate that we are spared the more acute contentions raging elsewhere around the globe like civil wars, suicide bombings, kidnappings, “honor” stonings and the suing of the leader of the free world for being uppity about trying to actually accomplish something.
Presented to our municipality’s recent Commission meeting was the bringing of birth control to our deary deer breathren plus installing sensor-controlled street crossing technology. This wiz-bang of a caring idea only stops short of extending Obamacare to all of our domestic and wild furry friends…now that’s a move which would, overnight, make this healthcare breakthrough the most popular public policy since the New Deal. Humanely solving the deer problem beats the heck out of letting loose a posse of trigger happy “Pittsburgh Hunters” to lurk behind our backyard fences with bows and arrows, AK 47s and hand grenades. There occurred hardly any argument against this state of the art proposal despite its potentially pricy price tag and possible psychosexual disorientation inflicted on our horny Bambis looking to get duly laid in the wood. But we do what we can because that’s what we do constantly in America, unintended consequences taken care of later. We will not winnie the pooh this proactive action just because it is not 100% safe for neither our deer nor our ever more dear, speeding Beamer populations. It’s called progress, people since it will make our community a happier, more prosperous place for man and beast. Improvements always come with a cost but also a benefit to property values, doncha know. Just check out the spike whence that shiny spaceship of a renovated Mt. Lebo High School is finally unveiled!
To turf or endlessly mow was the larger issue at the meeting – cost and contention wise. The pro-turf people (grateful jocks mostly) were very nice while the anti-turf critics got rather testy. But, at the end of a very long day, turfing was supported by all the youth sports organizations with thousands of member families who put their money ($250 grand) where their mouths were and the project was passed on a 4-1 vote by the Mount Lebanon Commission. Work to install 110,000 square feet of synthetic grass on Cedar Blvd will begin in August, and be done by late fall. Will it be 100% safe since it is made of plastic compounds and has an infill of rubber pellets mimicking soil? – of course not. Nothing is, including grass which requires pesticides and much more maintenance since it is known to inspire mud.
But the vote wasn’t embraced as a great hop, skip and jump forward. A nest of begrudging Republicans led the charge protesting the turfing as too expensive and get this - not green enough for their sensibilities. This out of the mouths of folks who would probably - in a Range Resources minute - sell the fracking rights to Bird Park. Heck, Deer Lakes, you got nothin’ on us!
Confounding my Democratic sensibilities mightily was the fact that our usual GOP obstuctionalists (are there any other kind?) were fortified by an unlikely ally – our neighborly and well meaning environmentalists who while sipping their artificially flavored H2O from plastic water bottles, got all worked up over our Johnnys and Suzies ODing on plastic grass, what with rubber pellets clogging their nostrils and MRSA bacteria attacking their skinned knees. It was a fascinating marriage of convenience of the conservative “don’t spend a cent” right and liberal “why don’t we just have a referendum” left. And there I stood – in the middle of this debate – a space I am not known to inhabit. Before retiring, I have worked both as a labor environmentalist organizer in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley (the notorious Big Chem industrial area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans) and I have also been a salesman of Field Turf synthetic grass all over the East Coast. For the purpose of gaining some more perspective – that La. chemical alley literally reeks of some of the planet’s most dangerous pollution. While on that assignment, I was mentored by both the late irrepressible Studs Terkel and the late great union leader Tony Mazzochi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Worker’s Union who was the guy Karen Silkwood was on the way to meet when her car got run off the road. While on the job in the bayou, I was repeatedly threatened to be fed to the alligators by some fun folks who really do feed people to alligators.
When I returned to Pittsburgh and started coaching my kids from our new Mount Lebanon digs, I managed a few indoor soccer complexes and became a synthetic grass salesman. I fashioned myself on a Johnny Appleseed crusade covering 22 states with the good news of a safer sports alternative to Astroturf’s nylon rugs. I sincerely believed that I was on the good side of a highly regulated industry and syn turf fields have proliferated to the point that today they are the rule rather than the exception. My biggest sale, btw, was to W & J College, - a 235,000 square foot multi-sport complex off of Interstate 70 next to the Washington Wildthings Stadium. At the time it was the largest continuous synthetic field in the world. That field is now over 10 years old and is still in pristine shape and I talked with their Athletic Department folks who would highly recommend it to our Lebo community. At the Commission meeting I suggested to all to venture on down to that field if they wanted to check out their Cedar Blvd field’s future. I even offered to drive but got no takers.
Nonetheless I gotta say that democracy in Leboland is alive and well and downright interesting - much like the challenging advanced courses taught in our blue ribbon school district where there is a 100% PTA participation and 99% college admission rates.
And luckily for me there are no alligators…yet.
Larry Evans
