Heidelberg Township taxpayers are upset as the local ball field, built with their taxes, is mainly used by out-of-town travel team Raiders; only 6 of 27 players are local.
The township ball field, the one local taxes paid for and local volunteers keep up, has turned into the main home field for a travel baseball team called the Raiders.
The problem is that almost none of the kids on that team actually live in Heidelberg Township.
At the most recent supervisors meeting, the Raiders coach stood up to defend the arrangement.
Instead of calming anyone down, he ended up proving exactly what the residents have been complaining about all along.
He admitted that out of 27 players on the team, only 6 come from Spring Grove, and hardly any are actual Heidelberg Township residents.
Everyone in the room heard it straight from his mouth: the township field is being used mostly by kids who don’t live here and don’t pay taxes here, and don’t even go to school here.
He also let slip that the Raiders cannot get field time in other nearby townships because those places save their fields for their own local recreation teams first.
Most people nodded when they heard that, because that is exactly the way it is supposed to work everywhere else.
For some reason, though, Heidelberg Township keeps rolling out the red carpet for this one outside team while local kids and the township’s own recreation program get whatever scraps of time are left over.
When one resident started asking questions and pointing these things out online, the coach called him “disgruntled” and even claimed the man was posting pictures of children, which was not true at all.
The resident had simply linked to the team’s own public website that already showed the roster and photos.
Calling someone names instead of answering the real question is an old trick, but it is not working this time.
More and more taxpayers are speaking up and saying the same thing that they pay some of the highest property taxes in Lebanon County, and now the supervisors want to raise them again.
Hence, they have every right to ask why our field is being handed over to a team that is 90% from somewhere else.
Nobody said the Raiders kids are bad or that they should not get to play baseball. Everyone agrees kids should play, but the issue is simple fairness.
They believe a township field built with township money ought to belong first to the children who live in the township and to the recreation league that serves those children.
