COLUMBUS — Columbus-Lowndes Development Link officials will continue this week to distribute options to landowners on the peripheral of a site designated for a soccer complex in the Burns Bottom area of Columbus.
All 15 property owners in a core group of land needed to locate the soccer complex in Burns Bottom earlier agreed to sell their property for its appraised value and officials have been negotiating with peripheral property owners whose land is not essential to locating the complex in the area.
Link CEO Joe Higgins Saturday reported property owners in the “upper northwest corner” of the site probably will not sell their property, but “it looks like the majority of the landowners in the block near the southeast area” of the site are in agreement to sell their property.
Lowndes County Board of Supervisors President and District 1 Supervisor Harry Sanders said only three families, with less than six acres on the “northwest fringe” of the site, “have indicated they don”t want to sell.”
The land not likely to be sold totals about the size of a city block on the north side of the Hitching Lot Farmers Market.
“They”re very small lots,” Sanders said.
“I think everybody else has indicated they will (sell),” he added.
Construction on the soccer complex, which has been likened to a downtown park, could begin as early as the summer, Sanders reported, noting Dispatch Publisher Birney Imes earlier agreed to pay for the services of a landscape architect, whose work must be completed, before work begins.
Sanders reported the shortest property option is for six months and the supervisors have until the end of May to make a decision on whether the county will purchase the property.
“The land is controlled in order to build (the soccer complex),” he said Saturday. “We”ve just got to decide what we”re going to put there and when we”re going to do it.”
The City Council earlier voted to donate 14.9 acres of city-owned property and provide water and sewer infrastructure already in place, as well as in-kind services, for the soccer complex, which is to be located on 70 acres in the Burns Bottom area.
The total appraisal for the 70-acre Burns Bottom properties came to about $288,000.
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