Carmel Unified School District releases a new plan for Carmel High’s stadium project.

Carmel is in the middle of a sports battle – not team against team, but a question of whether Carmel Unified School District can proceed with plans to upgrade the stadium at Carmel High School. The plans include adding new lights to host evening games, which school administrators argue will increase the sense of spirit among students. Neighbors are seeking to preserve the dark sky and existing nightscape.

The process has been years in the works. CUSD updated its facilities master plan in 2019, then began working on the stadium project about a year later. The district released a draft environmental impact report on Aug. 10, 2021. During public outreach, residents raised concerns about issues including light pollution, parking, noise and traffic.

Superintendent Ted Knight says those community concerns prompted school officials to rethink the scope of the project. “We slowed down and decided to redo the EIR with a larger scope,” he says.

That led to a new draft EIR, a 394-page document released on Aug. 25. The new version keeps the 70 – to 80-foot-high stadium lights, but adds additional parking, changes existing lights to dark sky-certified lights and implements a traffic management plan to minimize the impact of street parking in the surrounding neighborhood.

Beyond the athletic field itself, CUSD is considering its academic schedule. Assembly Bill 328 required later start times of 8:30am for high schools as of July 1, but CUSD continues starting at 7:45am to accommodate after-school athletics without lights.

The new draft EIR shows five alternatives that include different variables, such as the start time of the school day or moving practices and games to other places, like Pacific Grove High and Monterey Peninsula College, or building a new stadium at Carmel Middle School. If the project doesn’t move forward, some sports would not continue at Carmel High.

Knight says not all the alternatives in the draft are feasible. Upgrading the stadium, as proposed, would cost about $2.5 million, while building a new one at Carmel Middle School would be tenfold more. “We know our community would not support a bond measure, and we simply don’t have the money to build,” Knight says.

One concern from neighbors is the district renting out the facility as a venue for other uses. Knight says they would include a policy to not rent it out.

For Charles Wahle, a retired marine ecologist who has lived near the high school for 22 years, this revised draft EIR is a step in the right direction, but he worries about the traffic management plan in practice. “It’s built in a lot of assumptions about how something will work,” he says.

Wahle expects neighbors to keep pushing back if the lights stay: “Those lights, in [CUSD’s] own words, will create a significant impact on our viewshed and our experience of nature in our homes and our neighborhoods.”

Knight says the district is working to find common ground but emphasizes: “My job is really to do what’s in the best interest of students, and do that in the most responsible way.”

If the project moves forward, staff would bring a recommendation and final EIR to the board in November. Construction would start as early as June of 2023.