Swarthmore College, the town’s largest landowner and most active developer, frequently relies on the Borough’s Planning Commission and Council to approve its development projects. However, zoning code amendments to allow a proposed development on Cunningham Fields are attracting an unusual amount of public attention and controversy, drawing multi-hour public comment sessions and a resident oppositional campaign. For the college, the development is a crucial athletic facilities upgrade. For some residents, it is a dangerous, polluting nuisance.
The Cunningham Fields redevelopment plan includes a natural grass field, two turf fields, and twelve tennis courts. In response to community opposition, the college removed lights from the proposal for two of the fields, relocated the remaining lighted field from nearby houses on College Avenue to be closer to the train tracks, and added trees, according to Athletics Director Brad Koch and Associate Vice President for Facilities Andy Feick. Koch and Feick also said in a statement to The Phoenix that they added a plan for a “state-of-the-art” sound system for Cunningham to restrict sound amplification at the park’s perimeter, and agreed to limit the hours during which speakers could be used. The same sound system will be brought to Clothier Field to address resident noise concerns. Additionally, taller and updated lightposts will reduce light spillover. Feick and Koch said the process of seeking Planning Commission approval is likely to result in additional modifications.
However, before the full development plan can even be officially proposed, zoning code requirements must change. The Cunningham plot falls under the Institutional B category, which includes schools, churches, and fields. The college is hoping to change the code to allow development to come closer to the border of the Cunningham lot, allow accessory structures such as bleachers and scoreboards, and loosen the language around hardscape proportions (which includes turf). The Planning Commission does not have the power to change the zoning code and can only submit a recommendation to the Borough Council to do so. Even if the amendments are made, the more detailed proposal may still be denied.
Fight For The Fields formed in an attempt to block the development and prerequisite amendment change. The group comes as the latest of many opposition attempts by resident groups to town developments, such as the construction of the Swarthmore Inn, the roundabout at Rutgers Ave and Chester, and the condominiums at 110 Park.
Planning Commission Chair James Levine was drawn to his role in 2017 by the intricacies and public debate aspects of the zoning code. At the time, the debate was over Nick’s House, a home for cancer patients receiving treatment in Philadelphia and their families. When the Borough Council approved a Fair Housing Act accommodation for the house, eighteen residents appealed the decision, arguing it would have a negative impact on the community due to traffic and unfamiliar temporary residents.
Before the struggle over Cunningham Fields, the Planning Commission was already looking to clarify the zoning code under a comprehensive plan. In Swarthmore, the zoning code carries strong importance and a history of controversy. Last year, debates erupted over a multi-family development and restrictions on business types in the Ville. Levine said the process is as efficient as it can be.
“Everybody has opinions and everybody wants to have their voices heard. A lot of the opinions are duplicative,” he said. “If we were to take a different approach, say, to have our meetings be more of a roundtable discussion with commission members and the public, I think the outcome would largely be the same.”
The college argues that the current turf field and tennis courts are inadequate for club, intramural, and varsity teams’ practices and competitions. According to information provided by Koch and Feick, the average rosters for field hockey and men’s soccer grew from eighteen to 23 and from 24 to 28 players, respectively. Clothier Field is currently the school’s only turf field. Additionally, the college says its existing twelve outdoor tennis courts – the six at Cunningham Fields and six at Faulkner Courts – are inadequate for competition due to poor surface drainage and narrow spacing. At the January Planning Committee meeting, the college pledged that lights and sound would be used for roughly eight night games a year, rather than continuously, and that the school is unlikely to host a larger tournament.
Swarthmore Recreation Association (SRA), which organizes youth and adult athletic programs, also sees the fields as a crucial upgrade. SRA reached a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the college in mid-February that certified its ability to use Cunningham for programming. Some public commentators had doubted that SRA would be granted access, given their current limited use of Clothier Field. The MOU, however, will allow SRA to use Cunningham Fields at no cost with “priority scheduling.” The new fields will be crucial because other Swarthmore borough fields are in poor condition, according to SRA President Bridget Mead. She said the other fields can be like playing in a “dust bowl,” and at times, are unsafe. Developing Cunningham Fields into two turf and one natural-grass field will make it even more beneficial to SRA, Mead said.
“SRA is a community organization so we’re well aware of the concerns that have been raised in opposition. Obviously we think those concerns deserve thoughtful consideration,” Mead said. “From the perspective of the critical issue that we are facing in having a shortage of space and adequate field space, we look at the Cunningham Field renovation as a benefit to SRA.”
Kathryn Riley ’10, associate professor of chemistry and assistant softball coach at Swarthmore, said the field conditions have not improved much since she was a student-athlete. Riley, who has worked to detect low concentrations of microplastics in solutions mimicking environmental samples, sits on the college’s Athletics and Well-Being Committee and sees the administration’s approach as thoughtfully weighing the positive and negative impacts of turf development. She advised the college to switch from crumb-rubber turf infill to natural material, based on her readings of studies identifying crumb rubber as the primary source of pollutants and carcinogenic chemicals. In a conversation with The Phoenix, Riley said the college put together a plan with the most sustainable materials available.
However, some residents argue that the turf development’s impact on the borough’s health would be irreversible and catastrophic, especially if the turf contained PFAS. Exposure to PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” has been linked to cancers, decreased fertility, and other diseases. Residents also expressed concern in public comments and flyers that runoff from turf could enter nearby Crum Creek and affect wildlife. Barbara Drebing Kauffman, a borough resident involved in the oppositional campaign, believes the turf fields will inevitably be ripped out in 2027 when the next Swarthmore College president begins their term, or if turf is outlawed in Pennsylvania. Other states, including Vermont in 2024 and New York in 2022, prohibited the installation of turf containing added PFAS. World Cup stadiums are installing temporary natural grass fields this year to meet a FIFA turf ban.
“Why Swarthmore College wants to go down in history as polluting the Crum Creek watershed in a permanent and chronic way, I have no idea,” Drebing Kauffman said. “They will have to take the banner headlines of ‘sustainable’ down off of the fencing at the college. They will have to remove it from their mission statement. They will have to take it all out because it’s false advertising, and people buy bonds based on it, and it won’t be possible.”
While the infill for the planned turf is natural, the plastic used for the grass blades contains chemicals and has a high probability of releasing nanoplastics with wear and tear. At the February Planning Commission Meeting, residents expressed concern over possible water filtration system failures, and Drebing Kauffman argued that turf watering would raise water bills in the borough. Other residents in public comments expressed concern over surface water pooling or possible flooding, given that turf is classified as impervious by the EPA. Feick said at a Planning Commission meeting that the current natural grass requires more water than the turf would, and that water used for the fields comes from a separate well than borough residential water anyway.
When Clothier Field was redone in 2012, borough opposition led to rules governing light use, according to Joan Urban, a Swarthmore resident also involved in the Cunningham opposition. However, Urban and Drebing Kauffman say those lights are rarely turned off, which leads them to doubt that future rules will be followed at Cunningham. Drebing Kauffman also said the college is not transparent about how much Cunningham Fields is currently used for summer camps.
“There has been a radical break of communication between the college and the borough residents, which was never there in the past,” Drebing Kauffman said. “It’s been extremely frustrating and really has destroyed the credibility of the college.”
Riley sees the borough residents and the college as “missing each other” in information sharing. She said the three-minute-per-resident public comment structure is flawed, and wishes the college and borough could sit for a longer period and agree on which studies are relevant to the Cunningham Fields project. Riley said the focus on the turf’s chemical pollutants ignores how many of those same pollutants are ubiquitous in everyday life, including clothing, car tires, and nonstick pans.
“The college has an idea of what the impact of the project will be from an environmental standpoint and a traffic standpoint. And then people in town also have ideas of what that will look like. They’re not actually lining up,” Riley said.
Another concern amongst residents is traffic from visitors to the fields. According to the college’s parking engineer, who spoke at the January Planning Commission meeting, 30 parking spots are designated for the space. Drebing Kauffman said this number is “ridiculous” given the roughly 250 planned spectator seats across all four fields. She said that coach buses for athletic competitions park in the neighborhood and block driveways, and that President Val Smith has not responded when residents send photos. Still, Riley thinks these hypothetical scenarios are not realistic. For example, Riley said she heard a resident raise alarm to a hypothetical case in which alumni weekend, prom, and game day traffic would all occur at once, even though the athletic season would necessarily have ended a few weeks earlier.
Borough Resident Robin Schaufler became interested in the Cunningham Fields opposition after she read about the persistence and danger of nanoplastics after her training with the Sierra Club. She is concerned about the potential of nanoplastics — small particles accidentally released by disintegration — to accumulate in organs and enter the brain. A February 2025 study, mentioned in flyers handed out by residents at Planning Commission meetings, found that the human brain may contain microplastics equivalent to the weight of a plastic spoon — about 7 grams — and that average microplastic concentration had increased by 50% from 2016 to 2024.
Susan Wright, a Swarthmore Borough resident involved in the opposition to the plan, is concerned that turf fields will heat up enough to cause blisters for children. A study found that synthetic turf had higher surface temperatures, but temperatures varied by infill type and material.
“When the SRA people say, ‘Oh, we’d like our little kids to be playing on this field,’ they would probably be playing in the summer and they could be playing on fields that are that hot,” Wright said. “If they fall when they play, because they’re not in hazmat suits, they get a second-degree burn.”
Wright questioned whether the college or the borough will be able to test the turf’s PFAS levels. Schaufler also doubted the college’s ability to accurately test itself as opposed to a potential third party, describing it as the “fox guarding the hen house.”
While Swarthmore College is compliant with Title IX, which requires equal athletic opportunities regardless of gender, a new turf would mean field hockey players could stop taking buses to other schools for some practices and could schedule evening practices like other field sports. According to the college, flat, low-friction, short-pile turf (proposed for Cunningham) is most suitable for field hockey. “In our current environment, our field hockey team does not compete on a surface that accommodates the nuances of that sport, such as pace of play, flick shots (FH term for shooting), dribbling, passing, etc,” Feick and Koch said. “The same cannot be said regarding our other field sports: soccer and lacrosse.”
Drebing Kauffman is hoping the Planning Commission and Borough Council will “listen to the people that pay the bills.” She is concerned that home prices will fall if the plan is completed due to light and sound from the development.
“If [student-athletes] wanted fake turf, they could have gone to another college,” Drebing Kauffman said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to put toxic plastic turf in our town for these students who are only here for a few years. This will give us a permanent pollution problem. Pleasing students who are unhappy is not our job. Students don’t buy houses, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t make the borough run.”
Riley said she was discouraged by a similar comment at a Planning Commission meeting that focused on how students are here temporarily, arguing it dismissed the positive impact of the college on the town, including students’ patronage of local businesses and tutoring services. She also said the turf and tennis courts will provide recreation opportunities for borough residents.
The college did not decide to develop Cunningham Field lightly and without years of planning, Levine said. He also said that while the college met with neighbors, there will always be people who feel they were not heard in the process despite “extensive opportunity.”
“Our job as planning commission is to make recommendations to the council and to look at things holistically,” Levine said. “[To see] the borough as a whole, not necessarily what one landowner wants to do with their plants or their property, or what a few of your neighbours don’t want to see happen with the property.”
At the February Planning Commission meeting, commissioners questioned the impact of changing the entire Institutional B code, rather than creating a new ordinance for projects like Cunningham. The general consensus was that the text amendment process was flawed and not suited for a project on the scale of Cunningham. The Planning Commission will next hear an alternative zoning adjustment from resident Alison Manaker at the public meeting on March 11 at 7 p.m. in the Town Meeting Center, and plans to make a recommendation in a couple of months. Manaker’s suggestions include creating a separate zoning category for Swarthmore College fields and shutting off lights at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. for practice and games.
“This to us is like Robert Moses trying to put a highway through Washington Square Park, completely oblivious to the neighborhood and the history around it,” Drebing Kauffman said. “[It is] unbelievable that Swarthmore College would make the same mistake.”
