Informing the Auckland City Council Artificial Turf Policy Review.

Prepared for Auckland City Council by Longdill and Associates.

Auckland City Council

2006

Auckland City Council

enquiry@aucklandcity.govt.nz

Auckland City provides 61 sports parks incorporating a mix of soil based and sand carpeted fields. Sand carpeted fields provide drainage improvements and are able to sustain a larger number of playing hours when compared with soil fields. Sand fields usually provide better, smoother playing surfaces thus reducing the likelihood of injuries caused by uneven surfaces and improving playing quality.

In recent years a number of the more poorly performing soil based fields have been converted to sand to provide more playing hours and better playing surfaces. Despite this move regional sports organisations and sports clubs have been vocal in their concern over the adequacy of the supply of sports fields in the city.

A major supply and demand study undertaken in 2004 identified there were significant supply pressures, particularly for training. Hard data from the RACS park booking system substantiated the anecdotal information provided by the codes and clubs and confirmed that there was a current supply gap, particularly in parts of the city. Given that the city’s population is projected to grow between 29% and 45% by 2021 the pressure and unmet demand for sports fields will escalate as more people wish to use existing surfaces.

The Supply and Demand Study recommended a multi pronged approach to ensure that adequate playing surfaces are available to meet the demand in the foreseeable future. Whilst purchase of new parks land is one avenue to be investigated this is necessarily limited by the fact that the city is well developed and large tracts of undeveloped land are both expensive and hard to find, particularly in the areas of the city facing most pressure.

One of the key solutions is to maximise the use of current facilities. Having playing surfaces that can withstand continual use during the hours available to sports teams to train and play and ensuring the support facilities such as lights, change rooms etc are available are some of the ways that fields can be used to their potential. Whilst there are still a number of soil based fields that could be converted to sand fields the incremental benefit in hours of use is likely to be smaller given that the fields left for conversion now tend to be the ‘better’ soil fields. The Supply and Demand study recommended that consideration be given to moving to the use of some artificial surfaces particularly for training.

The Council is now considering the part that artificial surfaces could play in maximising the use of sports parks. Although Council has supported the provision of artificial surfaces on non Council owned lands (eg hockey turfs) there has been no provision on publicly owned land.

Keywords:

Facilities, Turf, Artificial surfaces, Auckland, Sportsfield, Parks, Playing surface, Field

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Feasibility study

Auckland

Facilities, Outdoor Recreation, Sport

Clubs, Community, Outdoors, Schools

Accomodation and facilities, Artificial Surfaces, Facilities (outdoor), Parks - urban, Playgrounds, Sportsvilles/Multisport centres

Barriers, Benefits, Financing / funding, Impacts - economic, Impacts - environmental, Impacts- social, Performance, Planning

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November 10, 2011

June 29, 2012