A volley of snowstorms this winter hit the Herricks High School tennis courts particularly hard, leaving large cracks more than an inch-and-a-half thick in some places.
At its meeting Thursday, the Herricks Board of Education approved an emergency allocation to repair the courts, which Superintendent John Bierwirth said pose a potential health hazard to students and requires immediate action to fix.
The resolution allows Herricks to use transfer up to $77,480 from its unappropriated fund balance to repair and resurface the courts. The fund balance, which can hold up to 4 percent of a school district’s budget and acts as cash on hand, is well funded and nearly filled, Bierwirth said.
“It has been for the last year,” he said. “We try to keep it that way.”
The district’s tennis courts were already several years past their life expectancy, according to Bierwirth, and their age, combined with the harsh snows this winter, led to deep cracks in the surface.
“They look somewhat like tennis courts in the South Bronx, but that’s probably doing the South Bronx a disservice,” he said.
He said the courts have “something like 2,200 linear feet of cracks,” and would disrupt games and could cause players to trip.
“When you’re playing tennis, you’re not looking at the ground. You’re looking at the ball and your opponent. [It’s like] why they tell people don’t walk and text,” Bierwirth said. “If you’re concentrating on the screen of your iPhone, you’re not looking at the sidewalk, and tennis players are not going to be out there concentrating on whether they’re going to trip on the lip of one of the cracks.”
The resurfacing, which will be performed by Amityville-based LandTek, comes with a two-year warranty and an expected three-to-four year life expectancy, he said.
“What it’s going to do is fill in the cracks and put a mesh over them and then resurface that, so that’s much longer lasting than just filling it in,” he said.
The short-term alternative, Bierwirth said, would be to fill in the cracks without the resurfacing, which would require more frequent maintenance.
“If we filled it in, we’d have to do it certainly once per year, and probably twice, at a cost of about $12,500,” he said. “When you’re filling in a driveway, you don’t care if it’s rough or not. When you’re doing a tennis court, you have to do it so it could come out smoothly.”
The courts, which were built in the late 1980s, will likely need to be entirely replaced within the next several years, Bierwirth said, at an estimated cost of between $200,000 and $300,000.
“What we’re going to recommend tonight is a short-term fix which will buy the district time to plan for complete brand new courts,” Bierwirth said at the board meeting. “[The courts] have a lifetime of about 18 years. It’s been 25, 26 years.”
Board of Education President James Gounaris said the district would look to replace the courts sooner rather than later.
“Let’s fix it in the next couple years,” he said at the board meeting.
Reach reporter James Galloway by e-mail at jgalloway@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x204. Also follow us on Twitter @theislandnow and Facebook at facebook.com/theislandnow.
