Members of Wheeling (W.V.) City Council said they have received several complaints this year by representatives of local baseball organizations upset over a new banner policy issued by the Parks and Recreation Department for 2024.
As reported by The Intelligencer, councilman Ty Thorngate, who has served as a youth baseball coach, said a number of associations received letters from the Parks and Rec Department in early January. While uniform rules and regulations regarding sponsored banners at fields throughout the city were not the source of complaints, a new fee schedule was. The policy not only raises the price for banners but also indicates that a cut of the money would go back to the city.
“The Parks and Rec Department created this policy to allow our youth sports associations to seek and sell sponsorship space on athletic fields as a means of fundraising,” the letter read.
According to Eric Ayers of The Intelligencer, banner requirements outlined a specific size and material for the banners, as well as content restrictions on the advertisements (no tobacco products). These are standard regulations that should be in place, Thorngate indicated, noting that the city recently dedicated a big chunk of its federal pandemic relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act toward renovating ball fields throughout the city.
At the end of 2022, the city council agreed to allocate more than $1 million toward upgrades to Wheeling’s recreation facilities, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements at ball fields.
“I think with the upgrades that we allocated through ARPA funds, it all makes sense that we want to have clean fields, organized fields and everything looking uniform,” Thorngate said. “The issues kind of come from Part 2 here with pricing. Some of the organizations that I’ve talked to said that they charge anywhere between $100 to $150 a year for banners. The Parks and Rec Department is requiring that they move that up to a $300 one-year commitment and $250 a year for a two-year commitment, with 20 percent of those fees raised going to the city.
“That’s kind of where myself and some of these baseball organizations do have issues. I think it’s important to note that we’re talking about some nonprofits that run on shoestring budgets to begin with.”
Because of the popularity of travel baseball, this new fee would be taking away money from organizations that need these funds to cover other costs, Thorngate said.
“During my time coaching my son’s team, I would say that most of the field work that was done was done by parents or by volunteers within the organization,” he added, suggesting that the city keep the regulations about the banners in place but revisit the implementation of the new fee schedule. Thorngate said representatives of the affected associations should be brought to the table to provide input on pricing that everyone would deem to be fair.
“Taking 20 percent from organizations that are already bootstrapped and struggling to get by doesn’t make any sense, especially when we just allocated so much ARPA money toward that,” he said.
Wheeling city manager Robert Herron indicated that the new policy was set up with good intentions by the Parks and Rec Department, Ayers reported.
Herron indicated that the actual price increase was intended to be absorbed by the sponsors, not the baseball associations. He noted that the organizations would receive 80 percent of the fees generated by the banners. Under the new fee schedule, the organizations would actually be getting more money for each sponsored banner, while the city would collect a percentage that would go into a new maintenance fund to help with continued upkeep at each field.
“Eighty percent of $300 is more than 100% of $100 or $150,” he said.
