Storm Lake council weighs future of aging ballfields, maintenance costs

Storm Lake leaders are now weighing a costly question that reaches beyond parks maintenance: whether West Ninth Street Field and Memorial Field are still worth saving, or whether the city should accept a smaller baseball footprint and let the rest fade.

At the May 6 council discussion, Joe Kucera said the Storm Lake baseball board unanimously ruled West Ninth Street Field unsafe and unplayable because of feral-cat sanitation hazards. He also said Memorial Field has not hosted baseball for about three years, putting two familiar youth-sports sites in doubt at the same time.

The ownership and maintenance picture is tangled. Dan Gaffney said St. Mary’s Schools only mows Memorial Field and remains under a five-year sharing agreement that lets St. Mary’s players join the Storm Lake Community School District team. That leaves council members asking whether Storm Lake Community Education should put money into a field that St. Mary’s may still control under a lease.

The cat problem has been building for months. On June 20, 2025, Kucera told the council he had personally picked up 13 piles of cat feces just to stripe the West Ninth Park field, said the smell had become unmanageable after rain, and warned that youth sports might no longer be safe there. Storm Lake’s code includes Title VIII, Chapter 8-4, on cats, and allows population-control programs for stray or feral animals, a sign the city has already had to build policy around the issue.

The money question is hard to ignore. In 2022, the Storm Lake Community School District rejected the only bid for baseball-field turf replacement after Woodruff Construction came in at nearly $823,000, almost double the district’s $412,000 estimate. That earlier shock gives a sense of how expensive major baseball-field repairs can become if the city decides West Ninth or Memorial should be restored rather than retired.

Storm Lake’s Parks Division already maintains more than 100 acres of parks and open spaces, including sports fields, so these are not isolated amenities. West Ninth still appears in city park listings with a baseball diamond, which makes the present debate more than a cleanup issue; it is a decision about repair, repurpose or decline. The council directed staff to investigate options for both fields, leaving the next step tied to cost, control and whether families will still have usable ballfields on Storm Lake’s west side.