The Mesa City Council gave the green light for contractors to begin work on the installation of 10 new sports fields and four youth-sized baseball and softball diamonds at Red Mountain Park at its Feb. 28 meeting.

At the meeting, Council approved a $2.8 million contract with Valley Rain Construction Corp. to kick off site clearing, mass grading and water hook up.

Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities Director Andrea Moore told council members that the fields are not expected to open until spring of 2024, but the city needs to start work now to connect the water supply while a canal is empty and give the natural turf fields ample time to grow in.

The contract is just the first installment of spending. 

City staff estimate the fields will cost another $27.3 million to complete. The plans include parking, LED field lighting and new restroom facilities. Designers included two “flex fields” in the plan, which can be combined to accommodate sports using larger fields, such as lacrosse.

The expanded sports complex adds an impressive amount of play space to the city’s inventory, but it’s not as big as the one the city dreamed of in 2018.

Two questions on the 2018 ballot asked voters to approve a larger 24-field complex at Red Mountain Park, intended to have the capacity to accommodate large tournaments drawing visitors from out of town. The initiative for the larger sports complex – dubbed Mesa Plays – included amenities like stadium seating at select fields and a field house.

Mesa Plays failed, but other bond questions on the same ballot passed, including a $111 million bond for park and cultural enhancements. This bond is providing the funds for the smaller-scale sports complex the city is now building.

In council’s study session on the project, Councilmember David Luna reiterated that the new fields and diamonds planned for Red Mountain Park are separate from the project voters rejected in 2018.

“I did want to remind viewers that this is not Mesa Plays,” he said. “There’s some disinformation out there that this is Mesa Plays, that we’re spending more money than was bonded for. That is incorrect information. We are only using voter-approved dollars.”

Moore said the new sports fields at Red Mountain are needed to meet high demand for space from athletic teams.

“We have a huge number of hours of field requests that we cannot meet every week, so it adds up,” she said. “That is why the 2018 bond package focused on adding sports fields …  in order to try to continue to meet more of that need.”

During a virtual public meeting about the new fields last year, participants aired concerns about the intensity and timing of lights during night games. A city staff member at the time said the lights would be off by 10 p.m., and the parks department would install LED lights that focus illumination on the playing space, with less bleed to surrounding areas than earlier light designs.

The Red Mountain sports expansion area is mostly undeveloped desert, but disc golfers, walkers and horseback riders currently use this portion of the park. 

The new fields will take up about a third of the 90-acre swath of undeveloped desert at Red Mountain, but Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities staff told council the department is planning to make accommodations so these activities can continue after the expansion of the fields.

One of the biggest conflicts with existing uses is with the park’s two disc golf courses, which have significant overlap with the sports expansion area. City staff said the parks department is working with the Mesa Disc Golf Club to relocate and redesign holes so the park can keep two 18-hole courses. 

Staff and council members noted the popularity of the park’s disc golf courses during the study session.

Rob Hart, president of the Mesa Disc Golf Club, told the Mesa Tribune that users of the UDisc app threw 2,494 rounds at Red Mountain Park in 2021. In 2020, the app recorded almost 5,000 plays.

 These figures capture only a portion of total plays, he said, since not all players use the app.

The disc golf course on the north side of the park will be the most impacted by the creation of the sports fields. Hart said this course currently features many long-distance “pro-style” holes. Course steward and professional disc golfer Pete Ulibarri has helped redesign it to fit into a smaller space, with shorter holes requiring precision throws.

For Hart, there’s no love lost from the relocation of holes. He said when volunteers helped build the courses several years ago, “the city told us upfront the desert was earmarked for something else.”

“The city of Mesa has been really pro disc golf,” he said. 

Before approving the initial phase of work, council members noted the popularity of horseback riding routes in the undeveloped desert. Moore said the Parks Department will reroute one of the equestrian paths to take it out of the way of the new fields, but these will still be available.

The equestrian route is “still there, and still designed in a way that the disc golfers are not throwing their discs toward the horses,” she said. “That’s how that all works together.”