Organized sports in Erlanger parks continue to frame revisions to city parks ordinance

BY NATHAN GRANGER | LINK NKY REPORTER

The question of organized sports in Erlanger parks continued to frame discussions of the city’s master parks plan in a meeting last week, where task force members decided to create a universal permitting process for reserving park time for sports practices.

This was the second meeting the task force had undertaken to revise the city’s parks ordinance amid a controversy about the Blessed Sacrament cross country team’s use of Flagship Park to practice.

The revisions presented in the meeting attempted to institute a universal permitting process for reserving the city parks for sports practice generally, but old arguments about the specifics of Blessed Sacrament subsumed much of the broader discussion, and no final decisions on the parks ordinance were made during the meeting.

In the summer of 2022, a city employee informed Blessed Sacrament’s coaching staff that city ordinance prohibited their practices inside the park, even though the team had been using it without incident for about five years.

The previous month’s meeting took place at the public works building, but the task force moved the May meeting to the council chambers to make it more accessible. Members of both sides of the Flagship conflict attended the meeting to observe and comment.

Council member Tyson Hermes presented proposed revisions to the city ordinance, most notably, a new definition for a sports team, which would determine if Blessed Sacrament could use Flagship to practice.

“The athletic team definition was changed to a group of persons recognized as a team by any league,” Hermes said. “That’s a fair definition.”

The proposed revisions also stipulated that “no athletic team shall practice or compete on any field or any Erlanger park without receiving a permit by the city of Erlanger, and no athletic team shall receive a permit in any Erlanger park that does not have the required field or facilities for this specific sport.”

In other words, if a team wanted to practice in the parks, it needed to get a permit from the city, and the park it wanted to use needed to have established facilities for that particular sport.

Hermes gave a presentation at the council caucus meeting on March 21, where he made the case that Blessed Sacrament could practice in Flagship under city ordinance because it didn’t use the park to compete. He contended that Blessed Sacrament was more of an exercise group than a team, meaning it could freely use the park.

Hermes position hadn’t changed, but many at the meeting didn’t find his reasoning convincing.

Even the team’s coach, Joe Niedlander, pointed out that even though Blessed Sacrament wasn’t part of a league, it did compete against other teams in the region.

After some discussion, both interim city administrator Peter Glenn and city attorney Jack Gatlin asserted that establishing a more standardized permitting process would be the best way to come to an equitable solution.

“We have a process, a permitting process and people that are employed here to manage that process, and we understand the concerns of both sides of the situation,” Glenn said.

“I don’t believe that any ordinance or law can be passed perfectly,” Gatlin said. “Like, there’s always the judgment, no different than the police make judgments every day… So, I think the permit process allows city staff to make the judgment as to whether this group or team should be able to use this park. And I think each each park probably has its own parameters.”

No final decision related to the ordinance was made at the meeting.

The next Erlanger Parks Task Force meeting will occur on June 6 at 5:30 p.m.