Our Community Benefits – We ALL Win!

25 October 2011 • no comments • News

Our Community Benefits – We ALL Win!
San Rafael and Marin County residents benefit from building an indoor recreation building and new sports fields in San Rafael. This project will increase our community’s quality of life creating a healthier community, physically and economically. This facility will be a resource for residents of all ages-seniors parents and kids. Our city will benefit from new jobs and local sales tax revenues. Here are just a few of the community wide benefits this project brings to San Rafael and Marin County.

Creating a Healthier Community

Physical Fitness / Obesity Epidemic
The high statistics on the growing obesity in America and California are staggering. In California, a study in 2001 by the California Department of Health Statistics found that only 43.2% of all Californians were at a healthy weight and most children are having a difficult time meeting the very minimal standards for physical fitness. Only 25% of 5th graders, 29% of seventh graders and 27% of ninth graders were able to pass these tests. Our schools are cutting back on PE classes; after-school fitness programs barely exist and many parks are unsafe for kids to go to by themselves.

Childhood obesity is already at an alarming rate and is only getting worse. Kids from ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours per day using electronic entertainment in a typical day such as TV, videogames, cell phones, computers and movies. Only 1/3 of high school students get the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity a day (www.letsmove.org). Kids not only need more exercise but they also need role models in seeing their parents participate in exercise.

The San Rafael Sports Complex addresses these very concerns of health and fitness for our young children, teenagers and adults, and provides recreation opportunities for the entire family. Recreation facilities are a big part of keeping a community healthy, vibrant and a desirable place to live, and this facility will be a positive influence for the citizens of San Rafael and all of Marin.

Increasing Local Business in San Rafael
Tourism & Tax Dollars
The San Rafael Sports Complex will be a community asset to the City of San Rafael and will generate sales tax for the City and increase the pool of local jobs, especially jobs for teenagers and young adults. In addition, local restaurants in the North San Rafael area should see an increase in business from all the new families visiting the area, particularly on weekends.

A Higher Quality of Life
Marin County residents deserve a high quality of life. Providing good quality parks and recreation facilities is one way local government enhances the quality of life for its residents. For soccer alone, there are over 6,000 Marin youth playing on 500+ teams and another 4,000 adults on 300+ teams – ALL fighting for less than 50 fields in the entire county. When you also add in lacrosse, basketball, rugby and other sports, it’s no wonder we have such a field shortage and that many of the fields we do have are so overused, poorly maintained and dangerous to play on.

Both the San Rafael and Marin County General Plans recognize the importance of this issue and have called for the creation of additional cost-effective all-weather fields and indoor recreational facilities to combat these existing shortages and problems.

The following are policies from the San Rafael General Plan. The San Rafael Sports Complex is the exact kind of project San Rafael’s General Plan calls for and will greatly assist the city in meeting its goals:

PR-4. Provide opportunities for recreational activities for boys and girls, teens, and adults through the creation of additional facilities such as fields for active sports.
PR-4a. All Weather Fields: Provide cost-effective all-weather fields to optimize year round use of community sports facilities.
PR-13. Commercial Recreation. Encourage private sector development of commercial recreational facilities open to the general public.

PR-14. Amateur Multi-Sport Athletic Fields. Strive for the development of publicly or privately funded, large multi-sport athletic field clusters to address the needs of the community.
Creating More Community Connectivity & Positive Role Models

Organized sports like soccer, lacrosse, basketball and rugby aren’t just about exercise for adults and kids of all ages; they are a positive outlet for community activity and togetherness. For adults, it’s about coming together to do something positive, including exercise and enjoying their friends and family time. For kids, organized sports not only provide a positive outlet for exercise, but team sports teach kids a lot about life. Kids learn about teamwork, competition, challenging themselves and how to handle success and defeat.

Both adults and kids need these facilities and outlets to provide a variety of activities so there is something for everyone. Stress and boredom play a large role in teenage and young adolescent drinking, drug use and bad behavior, and this facility will help to reduce all of those negative traits.

The facts are that when communities do not provide enough entertainment and recreational opportunities for their citizens, they suffer negative consequences. Our community is very concerned about having healthy and fun social facilities that help to combat childhood obesity, diabetes, crime, drugs and gang activity.

This facility is such a positive step for the community in terms of providing a healthy, fun, social and physical outlet for our kids and adults, getting our young adolescents off the street and into healthy programs, helping to reduce childhood obesity and the potential for reducing drug use and crime as the former San Rafael chief of police had previously testified to in our design review hearing.

The San Rafael Sport Complex will allow many different sports groups year round access to indoor and outdoor facilities as well as many great programs, classes and activities.

Meeting the Needs of Seniors & Neighborhood Organizations
The indoor facility will have numerous meeting rooms that will be available to senior groups and local neighborhood organizations at no charge. This project will greatly assist in providing more space in the community for our seniors to have recreational opportunities. Special interest classes for seniors such as dance classes, yoga and other activities can be organized to keep our senior population active and healthy.