Claremont does not treat its young athletes equally, and you can see it on the fields. The boys' baseball program plays at a complex that opened in 2018. It's fully fenced, it has lights on multiple fields, the gates lock, and the program hosts tournaments without ever pulling a permit. The girls' fastpitch softball program is split between two parks, and neither one is properly equipped. Not a single softball field in the city has both lights and a fence. One of the parks is capped at four paid permits on Sundays each year and is banned from ever adding lights, and that ban is written right into city ordinance.

We all pay the same taxes, and our daughters deserve the same investment.

California's Fair Play in Community Sports Act (AB 2404, Government Code section 53080) prohibits cities from discriminating by gender in how they run youth sports and how they hand out access to public fields, lights, and facilities. Under that law, girls' programs are supposed to receive facilities equal in quality to what the boys' programs get.

We are not asking to share or take over the baseball complex. Softball fields aren't even the same size. We are asking the city to fix the inequity by:

• Repealing Ordinance 11.08. It caps our girls' field access and bans their lights by law. Until it's gone, nothing else can move forward.
• Commit to a real timeline for giving girls' softball a complex equal to what other programs already have: correctly sized fields, lights, fencing, secured and maintained grounds, and the same access and permit rules everyone else gets.

We, the undersigned residents and supporters of Claremont, ask the City Council to repeal Ordinance 11.08 and act now to give our girls equal facilities.