Park Board approves replacing recently built scoreboards for new ballfields

Less than a month after officially opening the new Cameron Community Park at Old Somerville, the Cameron Park Board approved spending $15,000 to replace its current multi-use scoreboards.

The move hopes to resolve an online uproar with residents demanding a baseball/softball specific scoreboard for the recently opened $6.7 million park. 

“The idea would be to use the old ones at the soccer fields. That was on the to-do, long-term (plan) anyway - to add scoreboards onto the soccer fields. It’s just the cost of installation,” Cameron parks Board President Matt Arndt said. 

In May, Cameron R-1 School District Athletic Department Co-Director Kristy McIntosh announced plans to relocate the Class 3 District 16 Tournament from Cameron to Lathrop after the fields did not meet the standards to host a high school postseason game. Before the cancellation, city officials and Cameron citizens expressed concerns with the fields having visible creases in the outfields where sections of sod did not fuse together, a playing surface compared concrete and required an additional layer of surface just to host the district tournament, as well as several other concerns expressed on social media.   

“As far as importance, I would put down the (new) playing surface before the scoreboards. Getting the surface fixed should be top priority,” said Christy Seibert, while sitting in on her final meeting as a member of the park board.

Cameron Parks Superintendent Steve Garr felt the funds required to replace the boards could have gone to a better cause.

“When we first brought the scoreboards to the old facility, how many times did those scoreboards sit and not get used? That’s the real question. Ninety percent of the time, I would go to a lot of baseball games and the scoreboards were never used,” Garr said. “... If we didn’t go out right now and ask parents to run the scoreboards every time, and half of them don’t even do it, then they would not be run at all. But there are certain people in this community that want to make this some huge issue. What you have in front of you are more expensive scoreboards, that do have balls, strikes and outs, that will sit there and won’t operate because we don’t have the volunteers to do it? I just hope they’re used every single night.”