By August, the county will have a new playground near the New Hope Community Center, a project that probably would never have materialized were it not for dispute between the county at the state.
During their regular board meeting Wednesday, supervisors unanimously approved a proposal from interim Lowndes County Recreation Manager Roger Short to purchase and install playground equipment in the infield area of the county’s walking track south of the New Hope Community Center.
Short’s proposal called for $17,192 to buy and install playground equipment, along with up to $25,000 for park benches and trees.
“The playground will be 35-by-52 feet, which will accommodate 48 to 50 kids at any one time,” Short told supervisors. “All the equipment meets all the national safety standards and is (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessible.”
Short said delivery and set-up generally takes six to eight weeks.
“I’d say the playground should be ready for use around the first of August,” he said.
The playground is the result of an agreement between the county and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks to settle a dispute involving the New Hope High School baseball field.
The field, built on county land and funded through a MDWFP grant, was judged to be in violation of a provision in the grant that stipulated any project built with grant funds must be a public facility. The high school balked at making its field available to the public, however.
“This is something the parks people had been warning us about for three or four years,” Board President Harry Sanders said. “Finally, they told us that if we didn’t work this out, we wouldn’t be eligible for any grant money in the future.”
Sanders said since state law prohibited the county simply giving the school the land, a land-swap was arranged, with the county trading its land at the baseball field in exchange for three acres of land near the community center. The new playground is the county’s agreement to comply with MDWFP rules that said the county had to build a public facility to meet the stipulations in the original grant agreement.
The playground will not be built on that land, however.
“The land we got in the swap is not regular acreage,” Sanders said. “It wraps around the land we already on at the community center to the east and south of the track. For now, that will be green space, but having the land does allow us to expand if we need to.”
The board used Short’s appearance before the board to lay some groundwork for the transition from its partnership with the Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority to its own Lowndes County Recreation Department.
The board approved a proposal to advertise for bids for grass cutting/maintenance at all county-owned parks and community centers.
“Right now, we’re still under the contract with the CLRA,” Short said. “What this allows us to do is have the contract signed and ready when we our contract with the CLRA expires on Oct. 1.”
The county also voted to approve the transfer to county jurisdiction of three roads within the Columbus Soccer Complex downtown, which will be under county management beginning on Oct. 1.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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