Crescenta Valley baseball one vote away from new portable locker room
A portable locker room for the Crescenta Valley High School baseball team is inching closer to becoming a reality and could be voted upon as early as next week.
Stephen Dickinson, Glendale Unified’s chief business and financial officer, said Tuesday he will bring an action item regarding a portable bungalow before the school board during its next meeting on Monday.
The new locker room is part of a renovation project at Stengel Field, the home facility for Crescenta Valley High, Glendale Community College and various city youth leagues.
The portable building will be converted into a new locker room for Crescenta Valley High, with potentially some space left over for a refreshment stand.
Dickinson presented a proposal for the project during a board meeting on Oct. 16.
He estimated the cost to be between $150,000 and $205,000, with money coming first from the district’s capital outlay fund and then from the General Fund, if needed.
Board member Jennifer Freemon suggested during the Oct. 16 meeting that the district could save money by moving an existing bungalow to the site.
One bungalow under consideration is near Crescenta Valley High’s Osborne Field, which several athletic teams use as a meeting room.
That portable unit will need to be moved anyway to make way for a new sports-medicine modular building.
“We may use that one, but there are a couple of other ones in the district that I’m still checking on with our facilities department,” Dickinson said Tuesday. “We’re undecided on which one we would use.”
The use of an existing bungalow is expected to cut the project’s cost between $30,000 and $40,000 since district will not need to purchase a new portable with a price tag of $50,000.
The rest of the cost is broken down into the set up of ramps and steps, site work, city fees and permits, architectural and engineering fees and a contingency budget of $15,000.
Reusing a portable building also eliminates the hassle of trying to sell a used bungalow, which the district offers for $1 to anyone willing to haul it away.
The bungalow would be placed parallel to home plate, behind a set of bleachers.
Although Stengel Field is owned by the city of Glendale, the district and city have a memorandum of understanding that gives Glendale Unified the ability to install portables along with first rights in terms of scheduling games.
Should district officials vote for a portable building on Monday, Dickinson gave a timeline of about six to nine months for completion of the locker room, which almost certainly would be too late for the 2018-19 season.
“I’m glad to see us getting there,” Freemon said during the board meeting on Oct. 16. “I know the baseball team will be a little disappointed still that it’s not going to happen in time for this year’s baseball season. At least, we’re actually having the discussion.”
A curveball on the talks came from board president Greg Krikorian, who said he wants to talk about the future of the sports facility more than about temporary fixes.
He said he envisions turning Stengel Field into a stadium that Crescenta Valley, Glendale and Hoover high schools could all use, along with Glendale Community College.
“I’m telling my board members that we should start thinking even bigger,” he said. “Stengel is pretty centrally located. As a matter of fact, GHS is even closer than CV to that.”
He added, “We [could] really build a stadium and do it right and then maybe we partner with GCC and build a knock-out stadium.”
