Stopping Floodlights at Jeb Stuart Park, Using Fairfax County School System Funds for Its Most Urgent Needs, and Protecting the School Systems Revenue Base

We the undersigned residents of Mason District in Fairfax County do hereby submit this petition in conjunction with the Draft Master Plan Amendment for the JEB Stuart Park.

The undersigned are aware that the Fairfax County budget deficit is over $600 million and the school systems share of the deficit is $180 million. To deal with it, the schools must lay off employees and increase class size. In the midst of its financial crisis, the school system is proposing to spend $150,000 to $200,000 to install floodlights on the girls softball field in JEB Stuart Park. It has been pressured to do this to lower its risk of being sued under Title IX. It proposes to mount floodlights on 4 to 6 seventy-foot towers at the East end of JEB Stuart Park. They will rise 140 feet above the level of Lake Barcroft. The stated purpose is to shift the time of the softball teams eight home games by one hour (from 5-7 pm to 6-8 pm).

The undersigned consider this to be a misallocation of scarce school funds under current circumstances. We recognize that it is driven by the pressure of potential Title IX litigation. We urge that interest groups refrain from applying such pressure to the school system during this financial crisis so that it can use these funds to retain faculty, maintain class size, and otherwise apply them where they are most needed. If such pressure is not withdrawn, the undersigned urge the school system to schedule JEB Stuart boys baseball games one hour earlier and refrain from using their lights. We understand that this would remove the basis for asserting a violation of Title IX and allow the school system to apply these funds to meet its most urgent needs.

The undersigned are aware that the Fairfax Park Authority has stated that the county has no money to invest in JEB Stuart Park, other than the school system money to be used to install floodlights for the softball field. We believe that such spending would misallocate scarce county resources. When money becomes available for JEB Stuart Park, we urge the county to apply it first to the parks most pressing needs. These needs include restoring the play area adjacent to the fenced softball field which now consists of weeds, raw dirt, and eroding gullies, and is no longer suitable for recreation or sports. They also include rescuing the hardwood forest that borders the fields, which is being overwhelmed by non-native vines and is rapidly dying off.

The undersigned believe that of all the parks in the county system, JEB Stuart is the least appropriate for installing floodlights. About a dozen homes look directly onto the park with little or nothing to separate them from the seventy-foot metal light towers that are proposed. When the surrounding forest drops its leaves, racks of floodlights would be visible from about two dozen more homes on Mansfield Drive, Beachway Drive, and Edgewater. If, as expected, this visual blight lowers the property values of the homes bordering the park by 10 percent, and the other nearby homes by 5 percent, $1,000,000 will have been permanently lost to Fairfax Countys tax base. We urge the school system to explore strategies that will not permanently undermine the countys and the school systems revenue base in this manner.

Thank you.