Encourage your electeds, in LGUSD and beyond, to stop unnecessarily externalizing the costs of artificial turf.
As apparent from the financials in the district presentation, artificial turf will cost the district at least a million dollars more than natural grass.
While that's already a jaw-dropping amount of money, it does not even reflect the full true costs of artificial turf products. This often goes unacknowledged because true costs are not reflected on financial expense records.
There are costs to artificial turf that neither the district nor the community will pay with cash from their pockets. These are called "externalized costs".
These costs include the costs to environmental and public health and extend beyond LGUSD campuses. These costs are incurred and effect real people along the entire length of this product's lifecycle, from the toxic pollution that comes from harvesting of natural resources, through manufacture, through degradation over years of exposure to the elements and foot traffic, and finally through disposal.
How can we justify forcing these costs on other people and places simply so we can become a consumer of this unnecessary convenience product?
Schools, as not-for-profit institutions, need to stop externalizing the costs of the not-for-profit business that they do.
Los Gatos community, this is part of the reason LGUSD's proposal to install artificial turf should be of concern to you even if you don't work at or have kids at one of the affected schools.
For an easy-to-digest primer on "externalized costs", check out the excellent and compelling video below.
The concept of "externalized costs" is not an esoteric concept. They even teach this concept to LGUSD's Fisher Middle School students! My son watched this video in class last year.