Though Columbus and Lowndes County have separate parks and recreation departments, the two will cooperate to obtain a combined parks master plan.

Both county supervisors and the city council unanimously voted in their respective meetings Tuesday to pursue $150,000 from a United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development Grant. If they receive funding, the county and city would split the roughly $9,250 in administrative costs.

City Engineer Kevin Stafford pitched the idea to both boards.

Both entities have parks projects in progress. Construction is underway for a $12 million Lowndes County sports complex west of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway on North Frontage Road off of Highway 82. The first phase includes eight baseball/softball fields, as well as a playground and multi-purpose building.

The city is planning to add four new youth baseball fields at Propst Park, completing a planned five-field “wheel” that started with the construction of the Field of Dreams. The city will rebid work on the new fields later this year after the original bids came in too high. The city has $1.6 million on hand for the project through tourism tax collections, from which the city adds $400,000 annually.

“The city wants to look at their parks holistically,” Stafford said during Tuesday morning’s board of supervisors meeting. “It will look at your facilities and decide what you have, what you don’t have and where it serves you best. It will recommend you may need a track at this place, and another might need a baseball field or the whole county may need an aquatic center.”

Stafford said working together to generate a joint master plan would pick the “low-hanging fruit” as far as recreation needs. The project will generate a feasibility study for recreation, and stakeholder meetings at community centers will be planned to get community input on needs.

“(The study) will also look at your economy and demographics and what your facilities currently have but also what they don’t have,” he said. “The master plan will include not only what you should have, but where it should be. That’ll give you a little backbone as far as justifying expenditures in the community.”

The study will also include a piece that looks at operations and maintenance, he said.

“That’s something the city is very interested in,” he said. “A lot of people do capital improvement on the front end but forget about the maintenance on the back end.”

The grant is 100 percent, with no match required, Stafford said. The only cost will be the grant-writing itself.

“You can request up to $500,000, but they do like the smaller requests,” he said. “For one community we’ve done $100,000 in the past, but with both city and county we think we can go a little bit higher. We’ll determine that amount during the grant-writing process, but right now we’re thinking around $150,000.”

District 4 Supervisor Jeff Smith said he supported the idea.

“I am totally for this,” he said. “This is something we needed yesterday, but better late than never.”

County Administrator Jay Fisher said he thought it would be helpful.

“The portion that would be most beneficial is getting the (operations and maintenance) costs for the sports complex,” he said. “We have some ideas, but we don’t really know. They’ll be able to tell us what the year-to-year costs are for staffing, electricity, water, those kinds of things.”

Fisher said the study would help avoid duplication of services at area parks.

“One of the key things is while we run separate entities at this point we don’t want to duplicate services if we can help it,” he said. “We already know there are disparities, for example the usage fees between the city and county community centers are out of whack.”

The city and county used to jointly fund the Columbus Lowndes Recreation Authority, which managed recreation countywide. The supervisors pulled out of the CLRA in 2017, and the city and county have managed their own recreation departments since then.

At the council meeting, Ward 2 Councilman Joseph Mickens asked Stafford about whether the county and city programs would continue to be separate.

“I’m hearing about realignment with the county,” Mickens said. “Did that conversation come up?”

“It has not come up in my realm,” Stafford said.

“That’s what I’m hearing,” Mickens said.

“I haven’t heard that one,” Stafford said. “That will not be part of this study.”

Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.