Santa Rosa Junior College, Elsie Allen High Schoolamong venues with possibly defective FieldTurf

Seven artificial turf fields in Sonoma County are among more than 1,000 nationwide sold by the country’s leading maker of turf even after its executives knew they were deteriorating faster than expected.

An investigation by NJ Advance Media found FieldTurf executives knew their Duraspine artificial fields might not live up to promises, but they didn’t warn consumers or alert them once problems surfaced.

Duraspine fields were installed in Sonoma County at Rancho Cotate and Elsie Allen high schools, Petaluma’s Lucchesi Park, Schopflin Park and at Santa Rosa Junior College, according to the report.

Santa Rosa United youth soccer leagues play on two Duraspine fields installed in August 2007 at Schopflin Park on Old Redwood Highway across from Cardinal Newman High School.

Those fields are prematurely failing, said club president Peter Colbert.

“In the last at least five years, conservatively, we’ve been having issues with the turf,” he said. “It’s just not wearing like they promoted it. They promised a 10-year life. Within five to six years we started to see major wear.”

Colbert said they have maintained it properly and refilled the crumb rubber topping and “fluffed” it up to keep it from becoming too compacted. FieldTurf representatives have patched the field under warranty, he said, but have resisted replacing it.

“It’s just failing, you can tell,” Colbert said. “The way it lays down, the way the turf is wearing, it’s not what we were promised with this particular product. We’re pretty disappointed.”

Given what the New Jersey investigation found, Colbert said his club may pursue the matter more vociferously.

Other local Duraspine fields installed are:

Rancho Cotate High School in Rohnert Park, installed in November 2007;

Elsie Allen High School in Santa Rosa, installed in November 2008;

SRJC on Mendocino Avenue, installed in March 2009;

And two at Lucchesi Park in Petaluma, installed in 2009.

FieldTurf said the Duraspine turf it began selling in 2005 was revolutionary for its “unmatched durability” and that it would last a decade or more. But records obtained by NJ Advance Media show that in as little as one year, key FieldTurf executives became aware the turf was cracking, splitting and breaking apart well before it should, and long before its customers had been promised.

FieldTurf sold 1,428 of the fields in the United States, to customers ranging from small towns to NFL teams, for an estimated $570 million from 2005 until the Duraspine was discontinued in 2012, the report found. Most of the fields, which cost between $300,000 to more than $500,000, were paid for with tax dollars and installed at schools and public parks.

FieldTurf, a Montreal-based division of publicly traded French flooring maker Tarkett, said it never misled or defrauded customers and called the claims “completely false.”

Despite several internal email discussions about their overstated sales pitches, which were reviewed by the news organization, executives never changed their marketing campaign for those fields.

Company officials said in a statement that most Duraspine customers have never been told about the problem or how to identify signs that their field might be prematurely failing. The officials said the problem was better handled on a case-by-case basis.

None of the Sonoma County fields has been replaced.

Colbert said SR United leaders have never been advised that there might be a larger problem with the Duraspine product.

Petaluma officials have said they have no complaints about their two Lucchesi fields, which see activity on average 360 days a year. The two fields at the community park are replacements for the original turf fields installed in 2000, which were well-worn by the time they were removed.

The city also contracted with FieldTurf to install three multi-use artificial surface fields at the city’s newest outdoor recreational area, East Washington Park. The new fields were constructed in late 2014 and early 2015.

The other local fields - at Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park high schools and the JC - also see extensive use by football and soccer squads.

JC athletic director Matt Markovich said he hadn’t heard any complaints about the Bear Cubs’ field.

Games and practices continue on the other fields, apparently without significant problems, including Cardinal Newman’s NCS Division IV championship victory against St. Bernard’s at Rancho Cotate High on Saturday.

Windsor High School’s field was temporarily shut down in August at the beginning of this year’s high school sports season when it was determined the crumb-rubber topping on the turf had deteriorated to an unsafe level.

Windsor’s field was installed by a different company, MondoTurf, in 2009. It was still under warranty. District officials fought to have the topping replaced quickly and their field was deemed playable by Oct. 8.

According to the New Jersey report, FieldTurf officials said the problem with Duraspine has not affected the “significant majority” of fields, and that most failures came in places where intense ultraviolet radiation caused the product to break down after a few years - like in California and Texas.

FieldTurf concedes nearly one of every five U.S. Duraspine fields has been replaced under warranty - sometimes with Duraspine fields and sometimes with a new kind of turf. The true number of afflicted fields could be far higher, however, because many customers - like those on the SR United board - hadn’t been notified, and the company does not proactively monitor Duraspine fields for the problem.

Only after customer complaints spiked in 2009 and 2010 did FieldTurf conduct an internal investigation and pin the problem on its supplier, a division of Netherlands-based Royal TenCate, according to a federal lawsuit.

FieldTurf claimed TenCate altered the chemical formulation of the fiber, making it more susceptible to the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. TenCate denied the allegations, and the two settled the suit in 2014 for an undisclosed sum of money. Neither party admitted wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, public schools and towns across the United States have had to replace their expensive turf fields far sooner than expected and often much earlier than promised.

In Oklahoma, the superintendent of the Skiatook Public School District said it took three years to get FieldTurf to agree to replace its $300,000 field - and only after it threatened legal action. In Wisconsin, Middleton- Cross Plains School District officials said they complained about their field in 2014, and FieldTurf reps told them there was no known issue with premature failure of Duraspine.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

You can reach Lori A. Carter at 707-521-5470 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @loriacarter.