The Leechburg Area School Board on Tuesday will present its plan for the Veterans Memorial Stadium renovations to Leechburg Council.

Council members Chuck Pascal, Ruth Bender and Lorrie Bazella attended Wednesday’s school board meeting seeking information on the project.

The borough owns the property where the field and adjoining practice field are located between Veterans Avenue and Wesley Avenue.

The school district has a 99-year lease with the borough to use the property.

A change to that lease may be forthcoming as some school board members advocated building a bigger track suitable for hosting competition track meets.

“Since last winter, things have changed, and there’s been no communication,” Pascal told the school board.

The council members were particularly interested in the impact the artificial turf field would have on flooding problems in the neighborhood. Craig Collins of Axis Architecture, the district’s architect for the project, reviewed what he told the board last month about how the new field will ease runoff problems.

He explained the field will sit on a six-inch layer of gravel and a system of drainage pipes which will make the drainage less severe. Collins said water will not simply hit the surface and skip off as it does now when the field becomes saturated.

He said the system will retain the water during a heavy storm, with some being absorbed into the ground and the rest being released gradually.

However, Pascal pointed out that the amount of water discharged is not being reduced.

School board member Lisa Gregory also expressed some concern about what happens when the water is released.

“The biggest question that I have is, when that water is released, will it break something else?” Gregory said.

“The water is being discharged at about the same point and going down into the pipe running under Veterans Avenue and into the gully,” Collins said. “The big difference is there is a significant reduction in the amount of flow being discharged. It will make considerably less damage than what has occurred.”

“It will be better when the field turf is done than it is now,” he added.

The board agreed to appear, with Collins, before all of council and its engineer Tuesday to address any concerns about the field project.

Initial bids for the stadium project and renovations to the West Leechburg softball field came in at $1.96 million, about $339,000 over the project cost. That prompted the board to reject the first bids and rebid the project in January. Collins said those bids will be coming in Monday and will be opened and read publicly.

In response to board members’ desire for a breakdown of what each part of the project involves, Collins listed them.

He said the West Leechburg field renovations include redoing the infield, replacing some deteriorated steps with concrete ones and extending the backstop. Alternate bids for outfield drainage, infield drainage and installing a crushed brick warning track around the outfield will be received.

As for the stadium, he said the bids included requests for four different types of field turf and a track one-sixth of a mile long. Collins said dirt excavated to install the synthetic field will be retained and spread on the practice field and seeded to give that field a new surface as well. Custom coloring for the turf in the end zones will be received as an alternate bid.

Board member Anthony Shea asked if the track would be long enough for the district to meet requirements for holding interscholastic track meets. Collins said it wouldn’t, but a track one-fifth of a mile long would allow for that. However, if the district would do that it would infringe on neighboring basketball courts installed by the borough.

“There is no possible way, within the parameters of our current lease, that a competition track will fit,” Superintendent Tiffany Nix said.

“If we want to do a fifth of a mile track, I believe we would have to renegotiate a lease with the borough,” board President Neill Brady said.

Pascal said if a lease is renegotiated, the borough may want to include a clause that requires the district to remove the artificial field if the district stops using it in the future, although that may not seem likely in the foreseeable future.

“I want to preserve future councils’ right to do whatever they choose to do with that property,” Pascal said.

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