Coastal Commission Rejects UC Santa Barbara’s Request for Artificial Turf at Baseball Stadium

The fate of UCSB’s spring training and baseball season remains very much up in the air since the California Coastal Commission last week resoundingly rejected the campus’s application to replace the natural turf at Caesar Uyesaka Stadium with a more durable and convenient synthetic substitute. 

Responding to an appeal filed by the Sierra Club of California, the Coastal Commission voted 10-0 with one abstention — by Santa Barbara’s representative on the commission, Meagan Harmon — to require natural turf. Commission staff cited unanswered concerns raised by the Sierra Club about the migration of micro-plastics from the field of play into the marine environment. 

Initially, UCSB’s request was seen as such a slam dunk that it had first been placed on the consent agenda for the commission’s meeting in September. The Sierra Club’s appeal changed that, and at last week’s meeting, Coastal Commission staff and members alike took UCSB representatives to task for failing to address their concerns. The tone and tenor of the exchanges back and forth at times got prickly and hot. The commissioners expressed frustration that UCSB representatives had not adequately addressed their concerns. 

For Harmon, Santa Barbara City Councilmember as well as commissioner, it was an uncomfortable meeting. Harmon would ultimately abstain after expressing her own concern about conjuring a makeshift solution from the dais that had not been first scientifically vetted by commission staff. 

The undeniable reliability and durability of synthetic turf find themselves at odds with mounting scientific concerns about the damage micro-plastics can inflict on the marine environment. UCSB had scraped the natural soil off the baseball field months ago. With spring training starting in January, the campus will be hard-pressed to resod the Caesar Uyesaka field. 

Because the field has significant permeability issues and the team plays during Santa Barbara’s rainy season, natural turf has posed serious problems. City College’s baseball teams play at the natural sod field at Pershing Park in downtown Santa Barbara, the same field that the Santa Barbara Foresters — Santa Barbara’s semi-pro team — now play on after UCSB canceled their play at the Uyesaka field several years ago because of the UCSB field’s limited capacity to absorb wear and tear.