Soccer club deal a no go
by Kristen Milton
Staff Writer
Soccer clubs representing roughly 20,000 players have reneged on a deal to enter mediation with the operators of the Maryland SoccerPlex in Boyds, effectively benching two retired county judges hired to help the sides come to terms.
‘‘Mediation is not the solution now. It may never be the solution,” Montgomery Soccer Inc. president Leon Reed wrote in an Oct. 19 letter to officials with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in response to the announcement that the former Circuit Court judges had been selected to mediate.
Six soccer clubs, including the 15,000-member MSI, were late in committing to play their fall seasons at the SoccerPlex as expected, citing climbing fees and newly restricted participation in decision making. After several false starts, County Council members helped broker a deal last month in which the clubs returned to the SoccerPlex for some of their fall games and were to enter a mediation process with the foundation aimed at hammering out a deal for the spring season by Nov. 15.
The Oct. 19 letter, written on behalf of all six clubs — MSI, Damascus Soccer Club, Bethesda Soccer Club, Potomac Soccer Association, Seneca Soccer Association and Washington International Soccer League — just days before mediation was supposed to begin, derails that plan.
‘‘We’re disappointed and we’re kind of bewildered,” said Trish Heffelfinger, executive director of the Maryland Soccer Foundation. She did not receive a copy of the letter, but learned of it on Thursday. ‘‘My thought was what does this mean? Now what do we do?”
Heffelfinger said the conflict has already cost the SoccerPlex $200,000 to $250,000 in revenue from fall games and tournaments. Even when the clubs began to play, they did not return with their full complement of games, she said. The excess capacity has not been filled by the occasional private school or make-up game.
‘‘It’s very significant,” she said.
Such shortfalls at the already struggling public⁄private partnership will undoubtedly be discussed Monday when the council’s Planning, Housing and Economic Development Committee receives a SoccerPlex briefing.
Committee Chairman Steven A. Silverman (D-At large) of Silver Spring said commission staff will give a presentation on the business plan and debts of the facility on Monday but the discussion would not involve options for remedies and could not take the place of mediation between the parties.
‘‘Our job is to figure out whether we agree that the SoccerPlex is being run in an efficient, cost-effective manner,” Silverman said Monday. ‘‘The governance issues, the management issues, those are the purview of the foundation.”
Bill Hurley, president of 1,500-member Damascus Soccer Club, said the clubs have come to realize that the county government is the only avenue for dealing with the issues and mediation would be an extended process with little, if any, return.
In addition to the six clubs involved, two other clubs in the county signed agreements with the SoccerPlex at the beginning of the fall season; they are the Catholic Youth Organization and the Seneca Sports Association.
‘‘My opinion is the county needs to step up to the plate and get the work done,” Hurley said Monday. That work might include lease changes allowing more games at the SoccerPlex, extending county maintenance to the site and reviewing the business plan, he said.
County officials ‘‘are the only people who can get in to evaluate what changes need to be made; the only people who can provide the services; ...the only ones who can provide debt-relief.”
Trudye Morgan Johnson, executive director of Park and Planning, who once attempted mediation on this standoff herself, said she announced the selection of the judges with confidence about two weeks ago and is surprised by the latest development.
In order to meet the Nov. 15 deadline, five mediation dates were proposed with the first on Tuesday. The November deadline was chosen, both sides said in September, to allow enough time to make other accommodations for the spring season if an agreement could not be reached.
In his letter last week, Reed said mediation should not begin until a thorough examination of SoccerPlex issues by the county has been completed. Such a review was promised when players returned to the SoccerPlex fields earlier this season, he said.
‘‘As far as we are concerned, little if any progress has been made on these issues,” Reed wrote.
However, County Councilman Michael J. Knapp (D-Dist. 2) of Germantown said due to timing constraints, the county’s investigation was always to have taken place concurrent with mediation
‘‘There was always this parallel approach because there was only this six- or seven-week [window], so there was no time to deal with it sequentially,” he said Thursday.
Reed’s letter is ‘‘amazingly inconsistent with the discussions I was a part of,” Knapp said.
Hurley said his club could find other places to play and serve its players indefinitely without the 19 premiere SoccerPlex fields, and has no urgency to reach accord with the foundation.
‘‘I have no due dates,” he said. ‘‘I knew in June I could do without the SoccerPlex so whether it’s November or June or two years from now makes no difference to me.”
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