Lowndes County supervisors are looking to change how the city is allowed to use the Roger Short Soccer Complex.
For one, the city may have to start paying.
During the board’s regular meeting Monday, supervisors voted to rescind the current facilities use agreement with the city with the intention of creating a new one. Board President Trip Hairston said the county plans to work with the city on the new agreement.
“Our intent is fully to work with the city and create a new agreement that we can all agree to,” Hairston told The Dispatch after the meeting. “… (It’s) not intended to create a food fight here with the city by any means. It’s just one of those things. From time to time, you have to tweak those agreements.”
The agreement came about in 2017 after the interlocal Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority disbanded, splitting the city and county’s recreation departments. Lowndes County, which funded the construction of the $4.23 million soccer complex, kept the facility in the split.
Under the agreement, the county allowed the city to use the complex free of charge with some stipulations, like being required to handle concessions when using the facility. The agreement was minimally tweaked in 2019, Hairston said, though it still didn’t require the city to pay for using the complex.
As for whether the new agreement will require fees from the city, Hairston said it’s undecided.
“We haven’t decided whether or not it needs to be one of those that the city would have to pay for the use of it,” he said. “We know that back then, in 2019, it was not on the table, and it may not be on the table again.”
County Administrator Jay Fisher said the new agreement will make changes that reflect how the facility is used today rather than how it was used in 2017 or 2019.
Concessions at the complex, for example, are no longer run by the county. Instead it’s outsourced to a concessionaire who is responsible for concessions at all events the county holds at the complex. So the new agreement, Fisher said, would remove that the city be responsible for concessions at its events.
“The agreement was written so that we could try to accommodate (the city) having a soccer program, and a lot of the things that were happening at that time have changed,” Fisher told The Dispatch on Tuesday. “There are just some changes that need to be made in there to reflect the way that soccer is being done down there.”
Fisher said over the next month or so, the city and county’s respective recreation directors will negotiate the new agreement. He expects there will be at least some discussions about whether or not the city will be required to pay a fee for using the facility. The city currently doesn’t pay upkeep fees either, Fisher said.
“The county now pays in excess of $150,000 a year to maintain that facility, and it’s not generating any income, and the use of it has expanded,” he said. “It used to just be soccer. Now we’re doing ultimate frisbee, and we’re doing lots of other things down there too. So we need to kind of reflect those too.
“We have other outside people that use this soccer facility at a charge. That may be appropriate for them. It may not,” Fisher added.
Columbus Recreation Director Greg Lewis said he doesn’t foresee any issues coming about during the negotiations. His main concern, he said, is to ensure the city can continue using the facility for games and tournaments.
“We have our annual tournament that we host down there, and then we would hope we will be using it for any Mississippi Soccer Association tournaments that we get,” Lewis said. “We want to be able to use the facilities for our recreational games and for tournaments that we pursue.”
Hairston said the new agreement will be better designed to ensure there’s no favoritism on the county’s part in regards to who uses the soccer complex.
“The whole intent is not to give any certain organizations or certain tournaments or any one party over the next,” Hairston said. “And so the city, just like anybody else who uses the soccer fields, would need to be a good stewards of those fields and a good steward of the other organizations that are wanting to use the property too.”
A previous version of this story incorrectly described Lowndes County’s soccer program. We apologize for the error.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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