Loss of soccer field to baseball leads to complaint

Jones Park is a sprawling jewel, perhaps the last place to expect a charge of discrimination over how City Hall invests in its recreational venues.

On a nice day last week, the southwest park's regulation soccer field was packed with players, young adult to middle-age and mostly Latino. Beyond the field was what had been the park's second large soccer field, now being converted into a baseball field.

There's the rub.

“They are taking city property that belongs to the public and not to baseball enthusiasts,” said Marcelino Hivento, a longtime Cedar Rapidian of Bolivian descent. “That's where it becomes controversial. It's discrimination of sports. It's discrimination against Latinos.”

Hivento - the director of the Latin America Museum and Cultural Center, which is part concept and part reality - said the two large Jones Park soccer fields (there's also a small area) were the prime “inner-city” soccer fields used by the local Latino community, which numbers about 300 families, he said.

The Tuma soccer complex on the far north edge of the city is too far away, he said.

Hivento believes Julie Sina, the city's parks and recreation director, should have steered those who want more baseball fields to some other location, a position he shared with the City Council earlier this month.

“If they know those are the only soccer fields that Latinos use, they could have said, ‘We can't put it there. People of Latin American culture use that one,' ” he said.

Sina said she can't fault Hivento for his passion for soccer, but he's wrong when he suggests that she is discriminating against Latinos or against soccer.

“I don't care if you're purple,” Sina said. “(Alleging discrimination) is not a fair assessment. We do a lot with many, many people.”

In recent years, the greatest number of requests for additional facilities has come from the local baseball community, Sina said, and the baseball community brought their own money to the city to help support its case. Money doesn't mean everything, but it can mean something, she said.

The new $150,000 baseball field in Jones Park is funded by a $75,000 Baseball Tomorrow grant from Major League Baseball; $50,000 in local funds from the Cedar Rapids Kernels, the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation and others; and $25,000 worth of in-kind services, like grading from the city.

The new baseball field, she said, will bring the total number of ball diamonds in Jones Park to three and will create a mini-complex of fields that will allow for more tournaments and more youth programs.

Hivento, 59, came to Cedar Rapids in 1976 and spent some years coaching soccer here. He said the local Latino community includes people from Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and other nations, and most play soccer, not baseball.

Baseball, routinely called “America's pastime,” is popular in several Latin American spots, too.

“Soccer is in every country of the world,” Hivento said. “Besides, soccer is a good sport; it gives good flexibility to the body and mind. Baseball is boring to me. You just sit in one place.”

Homer Screws, men's and women's soccer coach at Coe College and women's soccer coach at Kennedy High School, said the city needs soccer and baseball fields. He sometimes takes his players to Robins because of a lack of practice soccer fields in Cedar Rapids, he said.

Sina is asking soccer players to hang in there.

The pace of buyouts and demolitions of flood-wrecked homes in the Time Check Neighborhood is picking up now. The flood-prone blocks along the Cedar River will be turned into a greenway.

Sina said the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is paying most of the cost of the greenway buyouts, doesn't permit permanent structures to be erected there. That means no baseball fences, dugouts or backstops.

Instead, the city plans to convert the riverfront area into fields for soccer, rugby, kite-flying and other uses.

“By the end of 2011, if all the pieces work together, we'll have soccer fields ready for play,” Sina said. “… I'm here to make the community better and not to take away from anybody. We're planning for the future, and we're going to end up with much better than before.”