Damakant Jayshi

The Wausau Parks and Recreation Committee on Monday approved a lease agreement between the city and sports entities to host women’s college-level softball competition at Athletic Park beginning 2025.

The agreement, if approved by the Wausau City Council, would pave the way to host summer softball. The 10-year lease agreement is between the City of Wausau, Wausau College Softball LLC, Central Wisconsin Sports & Entertainment LLC and Northwoods League Softball, Inc. The lease comes into effect Jan. 1, 2025. The local sports organizations are associated with the Wausau Woodchucks.

Parks Director Jamie Polley told the committee that the lease agreement will allow Woodchucks’ owner Mark MacDonald to hold further conversations with Northwoods League and also put in motion the plan to install AstroTurf on the infield of the Athletic Park.

The City Council has already approved installing artificial turf for that purpose. The turf is a requirement to accommodate field use by softball in addition to baseball, Polley wrote in her memo to the Parks and Recreation Committee.

Alder Carol Lukens said that while she was very supportive of bringing a women’s softball team to Wausau, she was very concerned about the toxic contaminants, like PFAS, that are associated with artificial turf. She asked if other alternatives were available and whether the approval could be postponed until then. She and others had raised concern about AstroTurf at the committee meeting in December 2022 too.

MacDonald said if approval is not granted now, they will not be able to bring the league in by the summer of 2025. On PFAS, the Woodchucks’ owner said that almost everything has PFAS these days, and said the artificial turf they are planning to install is a quality one.

Polley said the issue before them was the lease agreement and not the installation of the AstroTurf, which has already been approved by the committee and the council. When the discussion on PFAS continued, Alder Lou Larson called a question to end the debate.

However, Alder Tom Kilian said the discussion about artificial turf was germane to the discussion since it specifically contains a provision about it in the lease agreement.

City Attorney Anne Jacobson, who was asked to clarify whether the discussion was relevant, agreed with Kilian’s stance.

The measure passed 4-1, with Alders Dawn Herbst, Lukens, Larson and Sarah Watson voting in favor and Kilian voting against it.