A partnership at a crossroads
For more than two decades the Redwood Empire Baseball League has been a fixture on the high school diamonds of Santa Rosa, leasing fields at three local campuses and pumping roughly $106,000 into annual leases while also contributing $82,000 in donations to the baseball programs. League volunteers — many of them parents, grandparents or former district employees — spend countless hours maintaining the grounds, turning each season into a community‑driven effort.
The fragile arrangement is now being tested by a new district policy that would require the league to foot the bill for portable bathroom facilities on campus. League president Rick Cantor was recently denied a permit for Santa Rosa’s campus after the district cited safety concerns, and the league estimates that meeting the new requirement would cost about $3,600 — a sum that exceeds the modest budget it has earmarked for such expenses.
District officials defend the measure, pointing to policy 1330, which allows the school board to exclude certain facilities from nonschool use for safety or security reasons. A spokesperson for Santa Rosa City Schools, Patrick Gannon, emphasized that portable toilets have never been officially permitted on campus and that any prior use was done without authorization.
The school board is slated to discuss the facility‑usage policy at its upcoming bimonthly public meeting. If the policy is adopted as written, the league has signaled it will withdraw from the partnership, a move that would end a two‑decade collaboration and raise questions about the future of other community‑run programs that rely on school assets.
Beyond the financial calculus, the dispute has sparked a broader conversation about trust and access. League members argue that the district’s stance undermines a shared sense of stewardship, while district officials contend that the new rules are meant to protect health standards. The outcome will likely reverberate through other local youth sports initiatives that depend on similar arrangements.