Aug 4, 2016 4 min read

It’s the kind of story that might lead someone to say, “That makes my blood boil!” or “You’ve got to be kidding me!” With a few expletives thrown in, perhaps.

We’re talking about an article in Thursday’s paper on the deal between Trinity Area School District and the owners of the Washington Wild Things that saw Trinity taxpayers fork over about $280,000 during a five-year period in which the Trinity boys baseball team played its home games at Consol Energy Park in North Franklin Township.

Last year, according to district officials, Trinity paid more than $65,000 to play 14 games on the Wild Things’ ballfield. That works out to about $4,600 per game, and it doesn’t include “incidental” charges, such as paying extra to play under the lights. No word on whether the Wild Things’ ground crew sprinkled the baselines with flakes of 24-karat gold and put Perrier in the water coolers.

But it gets worse. Other high school teams used the same field and, according to sources, were charged just a few hundred dollars per game.

How did this happen? How did Trinity school board members who agreed to this setup five years ago allow this to happen?

To their credit, Trinity’s current leaders came to the conclusion the existing arrangement couldn’t continue. They struck a much better deal to play next year just a stone’s throw away at the Washington & Jefferson College field. Or so they thought. Just last week, W&J advised it was bailing out on the agreement, and sources said Trinity’s attorneys were informed by the college Wild Things ownership threatened that if W&J went forward with the deal, it would no longer be able to use Consol Energy Park’s parking spaces.

Stu Williams, majority owner of the Wild Things, denies that. He also claims the money Trinity paid over the past five years was a simple tax abatement, and the use of the ballfield was just a negotiated “bonus” for the district. Trinity’s director of fiscal services, David Roussos, said that was not the case. He said there were contracts for use of the field.

Where is the truth in all of this murkiness? Who knows?

Williams is certainly not apologetic.

“We try to be as good a neighbor as we can to anybody and everybody in the community,” he said. “Tax abatement is pretty common. If you have a huge asset in your community, the tax abatement is an incentive.”

A huge asset? We don’t disagree the community benefits from having the minor-league team here, but attendance at Wild Things games has dwindled considerably since the early years as the novelty wore off and the team struggled on the field most seasons over the past decade. The movie theater at the mall below Consol Energy Park draws considerably more patrons than Wild Things games over the course of a year. Does that make it a “huge asset” to the township? Frankly, if we were to make a list of the treasures of Washington County, it would be a while before we came to the ballfield in North Franklin.

In the meantime, Trinity officials are scrambling to find somewhere for next year’s baseball team to play its home games. In fact, they may be vagabonds who have no real home games. We hope they can find a place where they can pay a reasonable rental fee and – if the story about the W&J field is true – where the owners of the Wild Things have no influence. We also suggest they make the Wild Things pay all the taxes they owe going forward, without further abatement. It’s time to recoup some of the money a former school board gave away.

In the past couple of years, Trinity has cut back on music teachers and eliminated the librarian’s position at the high school. Now we’re hearing they intend to impose a huge fee increase, from $35 to $200, on students who want to park their cars on a piece of asphalt at the high school. Losing that $280,000 certainly didn’t help a district that clearly has been struggling with its finances.

If you’re a Trinity taxpayer and you’re not angry about all of this, you sure as heck should be.