Young soccer players practice at Cubberley’s turf soccer field in Palo Alto on January 28, 2025. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney.
In spring of this year, Palo Alto hired a consultant (Lloyd Engineering) to help the city evaluate whether and how we should begin to convert our synthetic turf sports fields to grass. We have four such fields — two at Mayfield, one at Cubberley, and one at El Camino Park. There have been significant safety issues with the fields at Mayfield, which are now being replaced. The field filling melted in warm weather, forming hazardous clumps that led to injuries and a lawsuit. City Council members have also expressed concerns about environmental and health issues related to the composition and wear of synthetic turf. With El Camino Park’s field in need of imminent replacement, it was a good time to determine if natural grass can be a better option than plastic.
For $140,000, Palo Alto asked Lloyd Engineering to compare the usability and cost of different types of sports fields, and to recommend in particular what to do with El Camino Park. City Council members had done their homework and clarified in an April meeting what they wanted to learn. Councilmember Keith Reckdahl, for example, asked good questions of staff. In August we received Lloyd Engineering’s draft report, 785 pages in all. I was surprised by how long yet how useless the report was. It failed to answer basic questions, it avoided making clear recommendations, it neglected to provide transparency on its findings (such as they were), and it contained numerous inexplicable omissions.
While the report may be copious and well-written, in a grammatical sense, it falls short as a serious analytical study needed for the staff and council to make an informed decision.
Comment from the Sierra Club
Here are some examples of problems with the report.
Field Capacity
One of the basic questions we need to answer in order to compare plastic and grass fields is how many hours of play we can get on each type of field. We know that grass is often closed when it rains and is generally less durable than plastic. But how much less?
One of the “Key Findings” of the report (pages 11-12) is that “Generally, a synthetic turf field has a carrying capacity that is equivalent to three to four native soil natural grass fields.” This is a general rule of thumb, also cited in Santa Clara County’s report. It’s not clear to me why this was a “key finding”. But that is not the main problem.
A separate “Key Finding” (page 13) states that “If the (El Camino Park) field is converted to natural grass, the City should strongly consider adding six to seven additional native soil natural grass fields to its inventory to accommodate the approximately 4,300 annual hours of displaced use.” So this implies a ratio of 7-8 grass fields to 1 synthetic field, not 3-4. Which is it?
Lloyd Consulting reports that El Camino Park received about 4,300 annual hours of use. That is much higher than the capacity figures they cite for synthetic turf (2,000–3,000 hours). But apparently the figure went unquestioned, leading to the headline claim of 7-8 grass fields to replace this one synthetic field.
In fact, the 4,300 hour figure is incorrect, as astute reader Cynthia Fan pointed out. The data Lloyd includes in their own report adds up to 2,700 hours. When the consultant was asked about this in a September Parks and Rec meeting reviewing the draft report, he acknowledged the mistake and claimed that it came up in their “quality control process” over the last few weeks. But apparently they didn’t think it significant enough to update the report, the slides, or the headline claims presented at the meeting. Parks and Recreation Vice Chair Jeff Greenfield was left pleading with the consultant: “It is important for the community for the report’s findings to be credible.”
It is important for the community for the report’s findings to be credible.
Parks and Recreation Vice Chair Jeff Greenfield
You may be assuming from the numbers here that our grass fields typically get around 570 hours of use (4300/7.5). Indeed, Lloyd states throughout the report that native soil natural grass fields handle 400-600 hours of use per year. And yet the report contains a table (page 84) titled “Monthly and Annual Use Hours Per Field”, which shows Palo Alto’s grass fields getting 1,200, 1,500, 2,000, even 3,000 hours of use per year. The report never refers to this. In fact, in a separate chapter, the report states on page 99 that “Fields with constrained maintenance, as observed in Palo Alto, may not meet even minimum performance expectations”. So are we over-performing or under-performing? And how does that affect the capacity calculations?
The “use hours” numbers in the table on page 84, of course, are wrong. I don’t know who thought they represented usage data. A casual glance at the raw data for one of the grass fields (for example on page 556) shows many 24-hour periods of “use”. No one who scratched the surface of this data would have represented it in this way.
As far as I can tell, Lloyd Engineering made no real attempt to understand how we use our grass fields. In fact, when the consultant was explaining to the Parks and Recreation commissioners how difficult it would be to replace El Camino Park’s synthetic field with grass, he said “If we look at El Camino and you are running potentially 16 hours of program over a weekend, that’s really difficult to accommodate on even a high-performance natural grass field.” Yet somehow we manage to host full weekend events several times a year on our grass fields.
So, for how many hours are we using our synthetic fields? Our grass fields? We have no idea from this report. Yet that is a pretty relevant question when we are looking to make a decision.
Field Cost
It is also of fundamental interest to know what the different types of fields cost to install and maintain and, in the case of El Camino Park, to convert (from plastic to grass). A “Key Finding” (page 12) of this report is that synthetic fields cost $79/hour when fully programmed, while natural grass costs $179 to $203. Those are very precise numbers! But what do they represent? A “20 Year Life Cycle Cost Model” table on page 99 shows the high-level elements of the cost, but there is no detailed breakdown.
I wondered, for example, what does “fully programmed” mean? The authors don’t seem to know how many hours our fields are being used. But we can back-calculate from that chart and maintenance figures on page 98 that they are assuming 2,223 hours for plastic fields and 481 for the grass, a 4.6:1 ratio. Why aren’t they using a 3.5 ratio, consistent with their 3-4 claim? Or even better, why aren’t they using data from our own fields? Similarly, they assume a 10-year life for a plastic field when the report generally says 8-10 years, which matches with our experience. So why not use a nine-year life span?
The cost values they use are also not justified. They cite a renovation cost for synthetic turf of $1,400,000. But we are paying more than that for Mayfield. Does their figure reflect the higher cost of the fields they recommend, the ones that claim to be more environmentally friendly? They provide no detail, so we don’t know. The maintenance figures they use are also questionable. The report cites an annual maintenance cost for synthetic turf of $6,000. We know from page 725 that includes daily cleanup, weekly cleanup, monthly grooming, etc. (1) Maintenance of $6,000/year comes out to $25 per weekday. How can that cover anything more than the daily cleanup?
Further, they point out that the maintenance figure for synthetic turf doesn’t include replenishing infill, a process that is more frequent and expensive for the “natural” infills they recommend over more traditional toxic rubber pellets. Where is this cost? The chart provides no answers. What about the additional cost of converting a synthetic field to a grass field, as we would need to do at El Camino Park? There is no mention of that anywhere in this 750+ page report, though it was explicitly requested.
So, what are the relative costs of synthetic and grass fields? And what would be our incremental cost in converting El Camino to grass vs staying the course on synthetic? We have no idea from this report.
Grass Field Optimization
One thing we wanted to learn from these consultants is what our best option might be for replacing the synthetic field at El Camino Park with grass. How might we construct a high-capacity grass field that balances cost and usability and works well in our climate? The report dutifully describes several types of grass fields, but makes no attempt to recommend one for us. In their “Key Finding” for El Camino Park (page 13), they note that the field has reached the end of its life. (Yes, that is why we commissioned this report.) Then they helpfully point out that it will need to be resurfaced with synthetic or converted to grass. Yes, this report is that painful to read. But what is the best grass option to compare with synthetic turf?
Even if we continue to use a plastic field at El Camino Park, we manage many grass fields elsewhere. You might expect the report to give us tips on getting more out of the grass fields in order to reduce our reliance on synthetic turf. There are many newer techniques for managing these fields for better capacity, but there is no in-depth discussion in this report. (2) The “Key Finding” when it comes to maintenance (page 13) is that we have a “reasonable approach” but we will need to make “ongoing adjustments … where appropriate”. Is that type of guidance worth $140,000?
When it comes to comparing grass and synthetic turf fields, we have a great use-case where these fields are right next to each other at Cubberley. But mysteriously Cubberley, one of our largest and busiest soccer complexes, is entirely missing from the consultant’s writeup, including the 20-page Chapter 10 that provides an overview of many of our parks and fields. (To be fair, I am not at all clear on what the point of that chapter is, other than to give a local sheen to the report. It does not even say what size the different sports fields are.)
Finally, the report suggests that grass fields are no better for our health and the environment than synthetic, devoting more pages to describing the “harms” of grass fields than to those of plastic fields (pages 101 to 126). The consultants do this with full knowledge that Palo Alto uses few if any of the problematic herbicides and pesticides they reference. While the consultants lavish hopeful praise on new synthetic turf technologies, they provide no mention of modern grass field management techniques.
It could well be that synthetic fields have their place in Palo Alto. (I will talk about that in my next blog post.) But this sloppy and lazy “analysis” does nothing to confirm or deny that.
AI Workslop
Lloyd Engineering’s 750+ page report is filled with mistakes, broken references, inconsistencies, vague assurances, and generic information. It is distinctly biased in places, it lacks transparency in others, and it has inexplicable gaps. I was quite frustrated reading it, as were many of the people who submitted comments to Parks and Rec. One especially dedicated reader provided a detailed 55-point list of problems with the report. (3)
Some time in the midst of this frustration, I came across an article in the Harvard Business Review titled “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ is Destroying Productivity”. It described my exact experience with this report: “While some employees are using (AI) to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”
The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work.
A resident presciently warned City Council about this possibility at the April meeting to approve the contract. Helene Grossman urged the city not to issue the contract. “The bulk of what this contract covers can be done using AI-based deep research. I previously submitted to the city a comprehensive deep research report that covers many of the contract’s key areas, including safety, environmental impact, and detailed lifecycle cost comparisons between synthetic and natural turf…. Since then, I’ve run another deep research study that fills in the remaining areas, such as site-specific product comparisons, El Camino Park recommendations, and replicable frameworks. I’d be happy to share this detailed report with staff, as well as provide additional research or deep dive into any other areas of interest.. This can be done in a manner of minutes…. There’s no justification for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on work that can now be done at zero cost using AI. Moreover, it should be a general policy that council should not approve consulting contracts unless staff has already used AI resources. And those contracts should only cover human-centered, on the ground work that AI is unable to do.”
Councilmember Pat Burt also expressed reservations about the contract. “What we see a lot is consultants who are reselling much of their work repeatedly and charging each client as if they were generating it from scratch.” In fact, while the dozen or so speakers at that meeting disagreed significantly on whether we should move forward with grass or synthetic fields, nearly all of them urged the city not to spend $140,000 on this consultant.
What we see a lot is consultants who are reselling much of their work repeatedly and charging each client as if they were generating it from scratch.
City Councilmember Pat Burt
Unfortunately, these warnings were on the mark. Our $140,000 bought us a massive nothingburger of a report that is wasting a lot of peoples’ time and does little if anything to address the fundamental questions we have about field selection. City staff has got to create clear guidelines for consultants about what kind of information we are paying for and what we expect to see in reports. We cannot afford to keep repeating this mistake.
I’d love to hear about your experiences with AI workslop and any suggestions you have for the city on how to avoid paying for it. City Council will be discussing best practices for managing consulting services on October 22, so now is a good time to discuss this. In the next blog post I will talk about the substance of the issue, namely whether we should be building grass or synthetic sports fields, so save your comments on that one until next time…
Notes
0. An initial version of this blog post cited a cost of $160,000 for the report. The city negotiated it down to $140,000 following City Council’s review of the contract.
1. One of the minor but very frustrating things about this report is that over 500 pages of it have no index whatsoever. For those of you who are interested, here is the index that I came up with.
187: Survey responses
237: Field use data
238: Cubberley Synthetic Turf CY2024
260: Cubberley Synthetic Turf 10/24-4/25
266: El Camino Synthetic Turf 10/24-4/25
279: El Camino Synthetic Turf CY2024
314: Mayfield North 10/24-4/25
325: Mayfield Synthetic Turf Fields CY2024
395: Grass Fields Report 1 (Cubberley)
460: Grass Fields Report 2 (Eleanor Pardee – Mitchell Park, including Greer)
526: Grass Fields Report 3 (PAUSD)
627: Grass Fields Report 4 (Peers – Seale)
655: PFAS evaluation for Palo Alto
658: Santa Clara County information on fields
707: Palo Alto Weekly article from 1/2025
713: GMax test for El Camino Park
718: Field maintenance procedures in Palo Alto
726: Mayfield synthetic field funding
728: Cubberley synthetic field funding
732: El Camino Park synthetic field funding
734: Santa Clara County ordinance
783: PFAS test for Palo Alto
2. Page 14 of the report suggests that we might completely re-sod and re-level our highest use fields every 1-2 years. That is a pretty extreme level of maintenance, and it’s not clear what the cost would be. I would have expected an in-depth discussion of natural grass maintenance with use cases, and some information about relative costs and maintenance schedules for some options suitable for our climate.
3. That comment is unfortunately not in the public record as it was included in an attachment and for some reason we do not see attachments in public comment. But you can find it here along with a few other public comments.
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