Council Faces Tempest Over Mesquite Sports Complex Issue

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

The Mesquite City Council faced an angry crowd during public comment at a meeting held on Tuesday evening, March 28. An agenda item regarding use of the Mesquite Sports and Events Complex had been the subject of heated discussion on local social media channels throughout the week before the meeting. In an unorthodox move, Mayor Al Litman began public discussion on that item at the very beginning of the meeting, and blended it with the meeting’s customary opening public comment period.

“There has been some misunderstanding regarding an agenda item dealing with the Sports Complex,” Litman said before opening up for public comment. “Let me just say that it (Sports Complex) is not going to be shut down, nor was it ever discussed. There has been no discussion about limiting its use. There were a number of malicious posts on social media regarding this. Those are rumors. They are not factual. But this is Mesquite and rumors run wild.”

Litman said that much of the issue had been surrounding a single event recently brought to town by Pylon Football organization. Sun City residents who live close to the Sports Complex had made complaints about noise and activities at the Pylon event that were allegedly against the city code for that facility.

Litman said that the city had since met with Pylon leaders, discussed all of these issues and resolved them with a new agreement. The terms of the agreement were printed on a handout that was made available to attendees of last week’s meeting.

The handout contained an extensive list of expectations being made of the Pylon event. A parking plan was being required as well as security personnel to enforce the plan. Tight restrictions were placed upon music at the facility including a complete ban on “bass” and on songs with “explicit lyrics;” and music could only be played from 8 am until 8 pm on event days. A security team was required to keep people off of the desert slopes around the facility and away from the fence lines of adjacent Sun City homes. Fireworks were also banned from the event. The city agreed to provide a dumpster and trash cans for the event, but Pylon would have to take care of cleanup. If extra cleanup was required, an additional fee would be charged by the city. Four Mesquite Police Department officers were also required to be present during the event.

“Pylon has another event planned in April,” Litman said. “We have had a discussion with them and they will comply completely with this agreement or there will be no more Pylon Football events in Mesquite.”

Sun City residents were, for the most part, satisfied with these conditions. Bill Krasner, who said he lives “200 feet from ground zero,” remarked that he had come to the meeting ready to make a strongly-worded complaint about the problem. Instead he was pleased with this outcome.
“I read this and thought: ‘This is everything I fought for and complained about,’” he said to the council. “Thank you!”

But residents in other parts of the city saw the special agreement with Pylon as unfair, and a way that the council was showing undue preference to Sun City residents.

Art Pereida said that he resides near the Mesquite Recreation Center field where community events are held often. He said that the park was there when he moved in and he expected to have such events there regularly. The same is true of the Sports Complex, he said.

“This singling out of the Sports Complex is a double standard,” Pereida said. “We have all kinds of noisy events over here in my neighborhood. But it is a park. We need to give the youth an opportunity to express themselves. This is just favoritism towards Sun City.”

Mesquite resident Terry Ogden said that he was a coordinator for a youth soccer league that comes from Utah to play at the Sports Complex. He felt that singling out one event with new rules and conditions was a “slippery slope.”

“If this list of conditions had gone out to include all events, then I would say ‘Well done’,” Ogden said. “But this went out under cover and it targeted just one event. When you target one group, that is called discrimination. It is not just a slippery slope, it is a cliff!”

During council comments, Councilman Brian Wursten expressed concern on the same score. He said that if rules at the Sports Complex needed to be changed, they should be changed for all events.
“I think this needs to be done the right way,” Wursten said. “I think it needs to come to the council and we can work out the changes in the open. It needs to be for everyone.”

City Attorney Brian Pack advised that the city staff does have the authority to address conditions at a single event if needed. “It really doesn’t have to come to council,” he said. “But it certainly could, and if you want to make a broader policy through an ordinance it could be done. But the city manager, through the authority given to him, can address individual situations through the department heads.”
City Manager Peter Jankowski stated that there had been no complaints about any other events except for Pylon. Thus, the city staff had moved forward to resolve the problem.

“We have the authority to make limitations on specific events,” he said. “We sat down with them and worked with them on this. We have an agreement with them on it. We don’t want them to go away. We want this event back. But the concerns have affected certain neighborhoods as well as city resources and assets.”

Wursten responded that the item had become a big enough issue among the public that it should have been addressed in public with the full council.

Councilman Wes Boger said that he had sat in on the meetings with Pylon leadership and had found the organization quite accommodating.

“I want to thank Joshua with Pylon,” Boger said. “He found out that there were issues with the event and came out yesterday on an airplane to talk about them. He was the one to suggest most of these items. He was very cooperative and willing to keep the event in Mesquite.”

Paul Wanlass expressed frustration that only two of the city council members (Boger and Councilwoman Patti Gallo) had been brought in to negotiate the conditions with Pylon. He insisted that the other council members should have at least been apprised of the situation.

“I think that it is an injustice that three of us up here on the council were never even told that this was even a possibility or that it would happen tonight!” Wanlass said, holding up the printed agreement. “None of us knew until we got here tonight. That is ridiculous!”

“You owe me and Brian (Wursten) and Karen (Fielding) more respect than to put us in this situation,” Wanlass said addressing Jankowski.

Councilwoman Patti Gallo, who also was involved in the negotiation, said that the conversation with Pylon had not been set up to cause controversy. Rather it was simply to solve an issue with one event, she said.

“The whole goal was to see what we could do to make everyone happy,” Gallo said. “Then all these comments were made on social media and I couldn’t believe how crazy it went. All of this fighting and bickering for such a wonderful town was so unnecessary. We really just wanted to make sure that, if Pylon was agreeable, it wouldn’t even have to be an issue.”

In the end, Wursten made a motion to agendize the matter for action before the council which would create rules and guidelines at the Sports Complex for all users. The motion was passed with a 4-1 vote. Boger was the only dissenting vote.