Taconic High School Athletic Fields Eye Upgrades, Needs Funding

The City of Pittsfield is set to see a brand new school when Taconic's upgraded facility makes it's debut in the 2018-2019 school year. With a brand new, state of the art building, the athletics fields are in desperate need of repairs to match. The Pittsfield Parks Department agrees, and are looking into upgrades for the football, soccer and baseball fields, as well at the track.

According to iBerkshires.com, Parks Commissioner Anthony DeMartino says projects will needed to be completed little by little, for funding reasons. The first tasks on the long list, would be to repair and re-stripe the track, replace fencing around the track area along with the baseball and soccer fields, and install a new backstop and dugouts at the baseball field. Those projects alone would come to a little over $200,000, but the list of improvements is quite lengthy, with a total for all needed upgrades eyeballed at around $2 million. So now the question is, where does this money come from.

Hopefully, helping in the funding will be the Community Preservation Act, approved by voters in November of 2016, which places an additional surcharge on tax bills for specific purposes. That total is partly matched by the state's Community Preservation Trust Fund, however there are many other projects vying for the limited amount of CPA funds.