Miami-Dade was supposed to fix the ball fields. Six years later, a jungle covers the diamonds
A field of greens is all that remains of baseball and softball diamonds at Chapman Field Park that were temporarily closed to replace contaminated soil.
The repair job was supposed to take six months. That was six years ago.
Who’s on first? Looks like an Australian pine, if you can even tell where the infield is. The formerly well-groomed ball fields have turned into a jungle, swallowed by vegetation and trees taller than the light poles. Batting cages are covered with vines. The exhortation “Come play with us!” painted on a scoreboard is obscured by overgrowth.
After six years of inactivity on the three fenced-off diamonds and six years of indecision by the Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department, at least there’s a plan to reclaim the land. But it is not at all what the ball-playing public or nearby residents want. It’s not what they’ve been asking for since 2014. Nor were they told about the fate of two of Chapman Field’s diamonds until a Miami Herald reporter asked.
Field 1 will be remediated with 12 inches of new dirt, refurbished and reopened by August at a cost of $1.28 million, according to county plans for the park located east of Old Cutler Road at Southwest 124th Street between Deering Bay and Gables By the Sea. But Fields 2 and 3 will no longer be used for games or practices. Their bleachers, dugouts, backstops and pitcher’s mounds will be removed. They will be reconfigured into open green space where families can “walk, picnic, explore nature and contemplate” at a cost of $2.1 million, a county parks planner and designer said.
“This is a theft of assets and memories from the baseball and softball communities,” said Ethan Shapiro, coach and father of players who used to be based at Chapman Field and founder of the Save Chapman Field Park campaign. “The county is using the soil remediation project as an opportunity to steal two fields from taxpayers and rip out the recreational purpose of an established, beloved public park.”
The county originally planned to fix all three fields at the 48-year-old park when traces of arsenic were found in the outfield soil in the spring of 2014. But just as the Department of Environmental Resources Management and a Miami Lakes contractor were set to begin the remediation process, an April 10, 2015, email from parks official Colin Henderson, an environmental consultant in the capital programs division, advised them to wait.
“There has been some internal discussions here about the use of the Chapman Field ball field area in that the uses of the fields may change,” Henderson wrote. “Please hold off any work on the [Corrective Action Plan] until [the parks department] decides what the future plans are going to be for the park.”
At subsequent community meetings, the parks department floated the idea of reopening Field 1 and replacing Fields 2 and 3 with open space surrounded by a concrete walkway. A March 2016 email detailed how the contractor’s mission had changed from fixing the fields to “demolition” of two of them, which included digging up lights and fencing and moving them to a county warehouse and scrapping benches, tables, canopies and a barbecue grill.
But park users “revolted against that idea,” said Julie Jeffries, a homeowner who lives adjacent to the park. Nobody knows where the idea came from and it seems to have zero support from people who live near the park.
“The community was upset and objected strongly when they pulled out that proposal,” she said. “At one point they mentioned hosting an art fair and we were totally baffled as to why we need another place for an art fair. Then there were constant postponements of any action so they could conduct more discussions and evaluations even though it was clear what the community desired. They’d give a date for Field 1 reopening and a date for a plan for Fields 2 and 3 and those dates kept falling by the wayside as nothing happened.
“We’ve been at the mercy of the county as to when they will give the park back.”
For next-door neighbor Jeffries, it’s been both infuriating and sad to witness the deterioration of the entire 560-acre park at 13601 Deering Bay Drive, which includes a kayak launch into Biscayne Bay and a large dog park by the mangroves.
“When I bought my house in 2010 I fell in love with the sound of the baseball fields and the cheering and the idea of the community here,” she said. “Unfortunately for us, my kids’ childhoods have passed in the six years these fields have been closed. And I wonder where my tax dollars went.”
The Howard Palmetto Baseball Softball Association was displaced to other parks when Chapman’s fields closed as were other youth leagues, school teams, adult co-ed teams and the International Slow Pitch Softball League, founded by Manuel Ferrero in honor of his brother, a U.S. Army soldier killed in Iraq.
“We travel around the world for tournaments and see fields in third world countries that look better than this,” Ferrero said. “I’m disappointed in Miami-Dade County from the top down who just dropped the ball. It’s a shame. This is our birthplace and a special place to thousands of athletes, families, friends — everyone who stepped foot on Chapman Field. Six years is way too long.”
A recent drive-by rally to resuscitate the fields attracted 100 cars and a dozen elected leaders from Pinecrest, Palmetto Bay and Coral Gables.
“Our government reneged on its promise from 2014 and quietly let these fields rot,” said Shapiro, who lamented how his older daughter stopped playing softball after Chapman closed because the 45-minute drive to Palmetto Bay Park became too much of a time crunch. “What a waste to let it become a much more laborious project. Where’s the accountability to the citizens who want and need these once-pristine fields?”
No final design for Fields 2 and 3 has been presented to the public. Last week, Shapiro requested a meeting with parks department chief Maria Nardi for an update. He has not received a response, but in the meantime, in response to Miami Herald questions, parks official Joe Cornely said those fields would be converted into “a beautiful multipurpose green space” with the goal of establishing “a balance between organized and passive play to allow for greater diversity, inclusion and enjoyment of the outdoors by the entire community.”
The county’s Park and Open Space Master Plan aims for a “balance of spaces” and encourages “access and usage by all residents of and visitors to Miami-Dade County,” said Cornely, assistant director of the Planning, Design and Construction Excellence Division.
Save Chapman supporters are stunned, having rejected the open space concept for years.
“Why is this so ambiguous?” Jeffries said. “The demand at Chapman is for fields. There are plenty of multipurpose open spaces at nearby parks. This one will be smack dab in the middle of mosquito heaven and next to the recycling center where you’ll hear lots of noise. No way is it a quiet spot for contemplation. It won’t be used regularly, especially compared to the use the fields had.”
Jeffries suggested that a parking lot near the entrance could be converted into open green space as there is ample parking at Chapman.
As for why the diamonds weren’t maintained while the county decided what to do with them, Cornely explained that soil contamination precluded work on them so the toxins wouldn’t spread.
Yet areas outside the fenced-off diamonds have been maintained and mowed even though they, too, were marked as contaminated on county surveys.
“If the county is that concerned about soil that you’d actually have to eat loads of to suffer any chance of harm, why did it choose to maintain the areas just up to the edge of the ball fields that were also contaminated?” Shapiro said. “None of it makes any sense.”
The contamination was discovered during sampling of all county parks that began in 2011.
“You would have to have eaten the soil for many years before you would experience any potential health impact,” Samir Elmir, division director for the Miami-Dade Department of Public Health, said of Chapman’s samples in 2014.
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
