A couple of weeks after its split with Columbus, Lowndes County has its parks and recreation department up and running with an office and phones.
“We’ve got our phones set up, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, maybe, but I’m happy about it,” Roger Short, the interim director said Monday. “I’d been running everything off of my cell phone until now.”
The Lowndes County Parks and Recreation office is located at 17 Airline Road, just behind the driver’s license office.
The phone numbers are 662-328-0885 (main number), 662-328-0881 and 662-328-0872.
The office is open from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“We have three people in the office: myself, our administrative assistant Gracie Rowland, and our maintenance supervisor W.C. Bland,” Short said.
Short said most of his attention is devoted to maintaining the county’s five community centers.
“Just maintenance stuff, mainly, keeping them clean and the trash picked up,” Short said. “We are also running the programs that were left over at those centers. We have a Zumba class at New Hope, after school programs at Crawford and Artesia and a senior citizens program at Artesia, Blaylock, Crawford and Plum Grove. And, of course, we’re still responsible for maintaining the soccer complex at Burns Bottom.
“We’re also in charge of renting the community centers, so we’re organizing that,” he added. “We’re getting a lot of calls about rentals.”
Although there are no new programs planned to date, Short said he is eager to hear ideas from county residents.
“Now that we have our office and phones ready, we really want to hear from the community about what they want,” he said.
Planning the future
After ending its inter-local agreement with the city of Columbus for the joint Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority on Oct. 1, the board of supervisors put together a budget for its new parks and recreation department.
“We budgeted just over $700,000 for the parks,” board president Harry Sanders said. “Of that, $250,000 will go the city for their parks, with $50,000 of that going to the Field of Dreams. Another $50,000 will go to Caledonia for its parks department. When Artesia and Crawford put together a parks department, we’ll provide $50,000 for them, too.”
Sanders said the county is still negotiating with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Parks and Fisheries to assume control over portions of Lake Lowndes State Park.
“It’s proven to be kind of complicated,” Sanders said. “There are a lot of restrictions that we’re trying to work through. They made an offer that we turned down. We made a counter-offer and we’re waiting to hear from them on that.”
The county’s primary interest in the property is the ball fields, Sanders said.
“The whole park is 900 acres and it includes the conference center, rental cabins, a horse trail, RV park and the lake itself. That’s a lot to take care of. We don’t know for sure if we want to get into that big of a deal.”
The county will soon take over maintenance at a new playground in New Hope, which was built to fulfill a land-swap with the county’s school district.
There are also plans to build a community center in the Concorde Community in southeast Lowndes County near Nashville Ferry Road.
Sanders said his vision for the parks is to provide funds and assistance for the independent parks and recreation departments in each of the communities.
“You already have that in Caledonia,” Sanders said. “We think that you’ll see it in New Hope and west of the river, too, with Artesia and Crawford.
“I really think our focus should be on kids 12 and younger,” he added. “Once you start building big facilities and having travel teams and tournaments, you get into a lot of things I don’t think the county really has any business running. But that’s just my opinion. I don’t know what the other supervisors think. Right now, that’s something we’ll talk about down the road.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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