Probably the shortest community meeting we’ve covered in a long time – barely half an hour (followed by about 20 minutes of folks milling around asking questions and looking at drawings): Monday night at Delridge Community Center, the Parks Department unveiled the tweaked design for the $3 million-plus Delridge Playfield improvements project, funded by last year’s Parks and Green Spaces Levy.

The project’s basics consists mostly of artificial turf, new lights and 25,000 more square feet of field space added to the current 175,500, with additional sports being accommodated: Following up on requests from last month’s meeting, lines will be added for lacrosse, so the field will be striped for baseball, softball, Little League, soccer, women’s lacrosse, men’s lacrosse and Ultimate Frisbee (which now will get two courses on one field rather than spreading them across two, at the request of advocates at the first meeting). Baseball and softball will trade corners between the SW and NE sections of the field; project manager Ted Holden said the field will have four colors of lines (dyed versions of the same Field Turf that’s being used for the entirely of the four-acre site) – besides white, men’s lacrosse will be in yellow, women’s in red, Frisbee in blue, as shown above. (Holden had the meeting’s 10 or so attendees choose between two shades of blue turf; they chose the lighter one.) He also said there would be two 50-foot stretches of fence along the northwest side of the field to keep soccer balls from going down a steep slope – it’ll arch from 10′ to 15′ at the middle of each section:

Holden also said he was glad to report something he said at the last meeting was wrong – the Field Turf is partly recyclable – its crumb rubber goes into “quiet asphalt,” its plastic is melted to make products including windbreaker jackets, etc.

He said the $3.2 million budgeted for the project should cover what needs to be done, but extras such as bleachers would have to be paid for “as money is available.” He expects to send the project out to bid by the end of January, with construction to be done next summer, June through August.

A few final tweaks were suggested at the Monday night meeting – some changes to the Ultimate Frisbee area on the north side of the field, including cone markers, and adding a little more turf to the west side of the site. Holden said those requests will be incorporated into the design, and the final version will be posted online soon; watch the official project page.