Today, 18 years after the first discussions of building a soccer complex in Columbus started, 13 years after the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors voted to secure the site for the facility at Burns Bottom and 10 years after the park opened, it’s easy to think that the project had the enthusiastic support of the entire community.
After all, the Columbus Soccer Complex is considered an unqualified success, a facility that complements the downtown area and provides much-needed recreation opportunities to our citizens. Today, It’s hard to imagine a better location for the complex.
But in the months leading up to the supervisors’ decision to move ahead with plans for the facility at Burns Bottom in 2009, the plan was not without its critics.
More than a few Letters to the Editor expressed reservations. A June 17, 2009 letter succinctly characterized those doubts: “Building a sports complex in Burns Bottom is an awful idea.”
The Dispatch had its doubts, too, as expressed in an editorial the day after supervisors voted to begin acquiring the land at Burns Bottom:
“It is disappointing, though not surprising that the Lowndes Supervisors are charging ahead with the Burns Bottom site for a soccer complex….
Never mind that the area floods regularly (four times in the past six months).
Never mind that development of the site will require extensive wetlands mitigation.
Never mind that the siting of sports fields adjacent to a historic downtown inhibits chances of further growth in that direction and is a spectacularly bad example of city planning.”
I offer this trip down memory lane as a disclaimer for my present attitude about the new Lowndes County Sportsplex. At their Monday meeting, the supervisors voted 3-2 to award a $12.3 million contract to begin work on what is essentially a baseball/softball park on 89 acres of land purchased by the county in 2018.
To borrow from that letter writer from 13 years ago, my view is that building a baseball complex west of the Tombigbee is an awful idea.
For the sake of the community, I hope that I will someday have to eat crow, but I’ve had a bad feeling about this project even before it started and my pessimism has only grown since then.
Like solving a math problem, if you make one miscalculation early in the process, you’re never going to arrive at the right answer.
In 2017, the supervisors made a decision to opt out of its joint parks and recreation partnership with the city of Columbus and form its own parks and recreation department. That decision obligated the county to secure its own facilities. In 2018, the county purchased land on North Frontage Road in the western part of the county for that facility, but from the start, there was a noticeable lack of enthusiasm and momentum for the project. There was hardly a mention of the project for the next three years.
Last year, when the supervisors finally got around the subject, they considered plans that ranged from $14 million to $28 million, but have settled on a less ambitious plan, one that revolves almost entirely around baseball/softball. There is room for other facilities on the property that could be added later, but for the foreseeable future, it’s pretty much baseball/softball only.
What we will now have is a facility that will lie dormant for six months out of year — perhaps longer — located in an unpopulated area and geared to recreation devoted almost exclusively to a small sliver of county residents.
A different plan might have created synergy with other recreational facilities in Columbus, Caledonia and New Hope. Instead, it’s a duplication, a wasted opportunity and a product of uninspired thinking.
On any pretty day, a visit to the Columbus Soccer Complex will show residents using the facility, whether its pick-up games of soccer, people out for walks around the perimeter sidewalk and moving back and forth to the Riverwalk or using the playground facility. Its proximity to residential areas and downtown draw visitors, as does its proximity to The Hitching Lot Farmers Market.
These are advantages the county’s “sportplex” (note the singular description), located off the beaten path in a sparsely-populated area will not enjoy.
The first error was the county’s decision to run its own parks and recreation system.
Everything since, including the sportsplex plans, only serve to compound that error.
It’s an awful idea.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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