Renovating four baseball fields at Hyde Park was the original plan but there ended up being enough left in the budget to improve five. 

St. Joseph City Manager Bruce Woody said the original scope of the project was to replace the lighting, do additional grading and replace the fencing around the facilities. 

“Because we did quite a bit of this work in house using city staff and we were as frugal as we could with the dollars that within the original $1.5 million budget for the project we actually got five fields completed instead of four,” Woody said. 

St. Joseph Parks, Recreation & Civic Facilities Assistant Director Jeff Atkins said in renovating the four fields, they needed a large amount of dirt. 

“Our engineers got down there looking around and did a little survey and they determined that there was enough dirt on field five that also needed work that there was enough dirt there that we could take from the field to do most of the other four field project, so by including the fifth field, it actually saved us money.” 

Atkins said also the price for replacing the lighting for five fields ended up being cheaper than the estimate for four fields. Atkins said they hope to finish renovations in late April or early May and have everything ready to go for games.   

“I’m just excited for the availability of tournament level fields for our kids to play on, our leagues that are here local,” Atkins said. “Then of course bringing the tournaments in on the weekends and things like that is just an opportunity to show off our community and show off our complex to teams from out of the city limits and with that comes mom and dad and aunts and uncles… they spend money while they’re here so it should provide quite an economic boost for the community as well.”