At its Tuesday meeting, the Bend-La Pine School Board heard three options for repairing Summit High Schools athletic field so sinkholes will not open up in the future.

Each solution will cover the entire field, to prevent hollows from opening up anywhere in the 18-acre expanse, Facilities Director Paul H. Eggleston said in an earlier interview.

The existing holes will be patched in the meantime, he said.

The board approved a study of the field earlier this year, after torrential December rain opened depressions in the ground. The sinkholes tore up the track and forced spring sports teams to practice elsewhere.

Football and soccer should be able to proceed on the undisturbed portions of the field this fall, Eggleston told board members at the meeting.

The field lies atop an old pumice mine. Wet weather causes the pumice to settle, creating hollows in the ground above. Following a battery of tests, including borings, radar imaging and soil sampling from large test holes, engineers put together a report that outlined three possible solutions, Eggleston said.

One option involves excavating the entire field down to the bedrock and then refilling the field gradually, in layers. Machines will compress each successive layer with water and rollers to ensure maximum compaction, Eggleston said. This approach would likely cost between $9 million and $12 million.

The second option involves bringing in a crane to drop a large steel weight from a specified height onto the field in different spots, and filling the resulting holes. Eggleston said the method, which has proven successful elsewhere, would probably cost from $5.5 million to $7 million.

The final option calls for a machine equipped with a stinger, or long tube that simultaneously injects water into the ground and vibrates to make the ground settle. The stinger would be used in a grid pattern to cover the entire field. Eggleston said this option would likely cost between $9 million and $12 million.

Each total includes roughly $2 million to $5 million in expenses that will be incurred regardless of the approach, he said.

In order to do any of these compaction projects, we have to remove all the electrical equipment, all the grandstands, all the dugouts, all the irrigation, he said.

Fill dirt will need to be trucked in to raise the level of the field back to near-normal after the compaction project, and everything that was removed must be reinstalled.

Eggleston said he will speak to contractors about noise and weather issues related to each fix.

Board member Scott Reynolds said that he wanted to make sure the noise and dust raised by any fix doesnt disrupt classes.

(Im) concerned about the impact on students in general not just the ones on the track field, he said, but the ones in the math class.

In other business, before the board meeting, the budget committee voted Tuesday night to approve funding levels for the 2006-2007 budget.

The committee, which includes seven lay members along with the school board, voted 11-2 to forward the nearly $158 million budget to a public hearing before the school board.

Board members Brian Gatley and Nori Juba voted against approval.

Juba said he felt uncomfortable approving a budget only to make modifications after the fact. Funding for district programs will be hashed out in greater detail during the public hearing, scheduled for May 23.

Gatley said he was frustrated the budget wasnt clear about where money would go.

Can (the public) look in on this process and understand what are priorities are? he said, adding that the board has identified priorities in meetings but there is not anything specific on paper.