"Seeing how much the complex is used every day highlights the value it brings to our community," Mayor Arman Fardanesh said at the dedication ceremony for the One Lake Street Sports Complex in September 2024, a year after the $8.6 million facility opened on the corner of Lake Street and East Crescent Avenue. Residents had already been playing on the fields before the ribbon was even cut. What the ceremony didn't cover, and what most people driving past the turf and the pickleball courts never think to ask, is how the borough decided who gets to use any of it, and in what order.

The answer is written into the municipal code, and it turns a nine-acre public park into something closer to a scheduling system with a clear pecking order.

The Ninety-Minute Clock

Pickleball at One Lake Street runs on a household reservation, not a free-for-all. Borough ordinance caps each household membership at ninety minutes of court time per day. Once that window closes, a group can only keep playing if nobody else is waiting and no other reservation has been made. Courts operate from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, and every player has to book through the borough's own platform after going through a resident verification process, the same one that separates a $75 family membership from a $150 individual fee for a non-resident from elsewhere in New Jersey.

The rules go further than time limits. No skateboards, scooters, bicycles, roller blades, skates, glass bottles, or vaping on the courts. Soft-soled shoes only. And in a detail that surprises a lot of people who assume public courts work like a country club, private lessons are prohibited outright. You cannot hire a coach to run drills on the borough's pickleball courts, no matter how many open slots the calendar shows.

None of this reads like a park. It reads like a booking system built for scarcity, because with four courts serving a recreation footprint that overlaps with 15 pickleball courts across the wider 15-mile radius tracked by the Global Pickleball Network, and roughly 827 registered players in that same radius, scarcity is exactly what the borough is managing.

Three Groups, One Waiting List

The fields work on a stricter hierarchy than the courts. Borough code sorts every applicant into one of three groups, and the groups don't compete on equal footing.

Group 1 covers all Borough recreation and travel programs: Americans Soccer Club, Upper Saddle River elementary school teams, and Northern Highlands Regional High School events. Group 1 requests go straight to the Recreation Director for approval.

Group 2 is Upper Saddle River residents or businesses asking for occasional use when space is open. Group 3 is any other New Jersey resident asking for the same thing. Both of those groups need a resolution from the Mayor and Council before the Recreation Director can issue anything, and the council weighs wear and tear on the field, scheduling conflicts, parking, and whether the request duplicates something the borough already offers.

Games take priority over practice. In-season sports take priority over out-of-season ones. So a resident hoping to reserve a field for a Saturday afternoon gathering isn't just checking whether the calendar is open. They're checking whether their request outranks a youth soccer scrimmage, a lacrosse practice, or a Northern Highlands home game, because under the borough's own priority system, it almost never will.

What Nine Acres Actually Cost

The land itself was purchased for $2 million, offset by a $1.6 million grant from the Bergen County Open Space, Recreation, Floodplain Protection and Historic Preservation Trust Fund. Construction estimates came in at $8.25 million, roughly $2.5 million above what the council had originally bonded for, a jump in cost that then-Mayor Joanne Minichetti cited when she resigned from office. Arman Fardanesh, appointed to fill her seat, later won a Republican primary for a full term by a margin of 293 to 235 votes.

That history matters for anyone trying to understand why the complex still had unfinished pieces well after its 2023 opening. As of a March 2025 borough newsflash, the turf fields and pickleball courts were complete, but scoreboards, the field house, and the press box were still in their final phase, financed in part through the same open space fund covering principal and interest on the project's debt.

The Scoreboard Economy

That same March 2025 posting opened up something most new parks never offer: a chance to put a business name on the scoreboard itself. The borough set advertising rates between $2,000 and $6,000 per year, tied to a ten-year commitment, with inquiries directed to Council President Jon Ditkoff. It's a small detail, but it tells you something about how the borough is paying down a project that ran over budget. The scoreboards aren't just for tracking a soccer match. They're a funding mechanism, built into the same field where a Saturday morning youth game and a decade-long ad contract now share the same piece of aluminum.

One Node in a Bigger System

One Lake Street doesn't operate in isolation. The borough's Recreation Department also maintains Lions Park, Hess Park, Liberty Pond Park, and the fields at Bogert, Reynolds, and Cavallini Schools, and the organizations booking time across all of them read like a full roster of the town's youth sports culture: Americans Soccer Club, which has partnered with the borough since 2023, Highlands Jr. Football and Cheerleading, Highlands Lacrosse Association, and Highlands Hockey Association. A seven-member Recreation Commission plus one council liaison meets the first Wednesday of every month at Borough Hall to sort through the demand across all of it.

Seen from that angle, One Lake Street isn't the town's one showcase park. It's the newest and largest node in a network that was already juggling six other fields long before the turf went in, which is exactly why the Group 1, 2, 3 hierarchy exists. The borough built a bigger facility, but it didn't build its way out of the scheduling problem. It just gave that problem a better field to play on.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this shows up on a walk past the complex. From the sidewalk, it looks like what the ribbon cutting promised: two lighted multipurpose fields, a walking path, a snack stand, off-street parking, and courts that the mayor himself called "outstanding" after playing soccer there the weekend it opened. The rules only surface once you try to book something, and by then you've already learned the real shape of the place: a resident-verified login, a ninety-minute clock, a three-tier waiting list, and a scoreboard that's quietly paying down a construction overrun one ten-year contract at a time.

That's not a complaint about the facility. It's a fairly ordinary way for a small borough to manage a shared resource that cost $8.6 million to build. But it's worth knowing before you show up expecting an open field on a Saturday afternoon.

If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a town like this, down to how its shared spaces are governed, Sheryl Epstein-Romano has spent over a decade on Upper Saddle River's own Zoning Board of Adjustment and knows these civic details the way most agents know square footage. Reach out for a confidential conversation about what it's really like to call this borough home.