Wheeling Councilman Jerry Sklavounakis, City Manager Robert Herron, Mayor Glenn Elliott, Vice Mayor Chad Thalman, Councilman Ty Thorngate and Councilman Dave Palmer attend the final city council meeting of the 2023 calendar year Tuesday night. (Photo by Eric Ayres)

WHEELING – Members of Wheeling City Council said they were hit with several complaints at the beginning of the year by representatives of local baseball organizations who were upset over a new banner policy issued by the Parks and Recreation Department for 2024.

Councilman Ty Thorngate, who has served as a coach for youth baseball, said a number of associations received letters from the Parks and Rec Department just after the first week of the year. While uniform rules and regulations regarding sponsored banners at fields throughout the city were not the source of complaints, a new fee schedule had organizations calling foul, as the policy was not only set to raise the price for banners but was also indicating that a cut of the money would go back to the city.

“Last week, I received a couple of phone calls and emails from some of our local baseball organizations,” Thorngate said. “They were regarding a policy that was sent out by our Parks and Rec Department on Jan. 8 regarding an updated banner policy. ”

Two upcoming changes were highlighted in the new policy, Thorngate said.

“The Parks and Rec Department created this policy to allow our youth sports associations to seek and sell sponsorship space on athletic fields as a means of fundraising,” the letter read.

Banner requirements outlined a specific size and material for the banners, as well as content restrictions on the advertisements (no tobacco products). These are standard regulations that should be in place, Thorngate indicated, noting that the city recently dedicated a big chunk of its federal pandemic relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act toward renovating ball fields throughout the city.

At the end of 2022, city council agreed to allocate more than $1 million toward upgrades to Wheeling’s recreation facilities, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements at ball fields in town.

“I think with the upgrades that we allocated through ARPA funds, it all makes sense that we want to have clean fields, organized fields and everything looking uniform,” Thorngate said. “The issues kind of come from Part 2 here with pricing. Some of the organizations that I’ve talked to said that they charge anywhere between $100 to $150 a year for banners. The Parks and Rec Department is requiring that they move that up to a $300 one-year commitment and $250 a year for a two-year commitment, with 20% of those fees raised going to the city.

“That’s kind of where myself and some of these baseball organizations do have issues. I think it’s important to note that we’re talking about some nonprofits that run on shoestring budgets to begin with.”

Because of the popularity of travel baseball, this new fee would be taking away money from organizations that need these funds to cover other costs, Thorngate said.

“During my time coaching my son’s team, I would say that most of the field work that was done was done by parents or by volunteers within the organization,” he added, suggesting that the city keep the regulations about the banners in place but revisit the implementation of the new fee schedule. Thorngate said representatives of the affected associations should be brought to the table to provide input on pricing that everyone would deem to be fair.

“Taking 20% from organizations that are already bootstrapped and struggling to get by doesn’t make any sense, especially when we just allocated so much ARPA money toward that,” he said.

“I absolutely agree,” said Councilman Ben Seidler. “We shouldn’t be touching that money.”

Vice Mayor Chad Thalman asked that Wheeling Parks and Recreation Department Director Rochelle Berry work with representatives of local baseball associations to come to a solution.

“It seems like they were caught off guard when they received this letter,” Thalman said. “I know as a member of council, I had no idea this was taking place.”

Councilman Jerry Sklavounakis said he was also taken by surprise when he was bombarded with phone calls from baseball and softball association representatives.

“We at city council did not have any formal notice of this, so we were just as surprised as the baseball associations,” Sklavounakis said.

Wheeling City Manager Robert Herron indicated that the new policy was set up with good intentions by the Parks and Rec Department.

“In talking with the parks and recreation director, it’s my understanding that this was communicated with the various organizations,” Herron said. “The goal here was to actually have a unified banner policy at the fields. We have had some complaints about the banners in the baseball fields. So the goal was to try to unify that and to have one set price.”

Herron indicated that the actual price increase was intended to be absorbed by the sponsors, not the baseball associations. He noted that the organizations would receive 80% of the fees generated by the banners. Under the new fee schedule, the organizations would actually be getting more money for each sponsored banner, while the city would collect a percentage that would go into a new maintenance fund to help with continued upkeep at each field.

“Eighty percent of $300 is more than 100% of $100 or $150,” he said, comparing the old pricing schedule compared to that of the new policy. “The 20% was going to be set aside specifically for each individual field that raised the banner money to have a long-term maintenance pool of money going forward that could build over time for those fields for things that they may want — like dugout improvements, fence improvements, etc. So I will talk to the recreation director and relay these concerns to her.”