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By Dave Boyce
Almanac Staff Writer

The Ford Field baseball diamond at Alpine Road and Westridge Drive in Portola Valley is not famous for its shade trees.

Trees would appear along the first and third base lines and behind the outfield if renovations presented to the Town Council on Oct. 28 were to actually occur, but it's a field of dreams for the time being. The tight budget has no money for such a project. Maybe there's enough to complete the study.

Under the plan, which reflects three community workshops, the trees would shade new "social space," including picnic tables, bleachers and a grassy knoll behind left field. The batting cage and pitcher warm-up area would be smaller, and there would be permanent bathrooms and a snack shack. The field would be rotated a few degrees to the east, in part to improve the bank of Los Trancos Creek.

The socializing spaces could attract people without a baseball connection, resident Virginia Bacon noted; she suggested that the word "Park" be added to Ford Field. Council members Steve Toben and Maryann Moise Derwin agreed.

The parking lot would lose up to five spaces. The improvements, former mayor Bill Lane noted, could raise the field's profile as a tournament venue, and the resulting tangles of visitor traffic. One solution: assign someone to manage traffic, replied presentation author Peter Callander of San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm Callander Associates.

None of this is likely to happen anytime soon. The town had $255,000 allotted for this project in the 2008-09 budget, but the state reneged on $200,000 of that and for the current budget year, there is no funding available, Town Manager Angela Howard said in an interview.

The study itself cost $16,000, which was paid for with a grant from the Association of Bay Area Governments.

Little League representatives expressed concern to the council that rotating the field could create problems for batters having to face pitchers with the sun behind them. In such cases, umpires are required to call the game, they said.

The council may allow Ms. Howard to tap into a $10,000 reserve to figure out the sun's path for the field's orientation, but only if residents vote to renew the 4.5 percent utility user tax on Nov. 3, which they did.

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