Residents continued their call for a city/county multipurpose recreation complex, and the city’s ad hoc recreation committee chairman suggested it be governed by a seven-member commission.

“We’re hearing the same response for everybody we talk to,” committee chairman Omar Nelson said Thursday. “The predominant opinion we’re getting is everyone wants a sports complex and they want the county to participate in developing a recreation complex.”

Nelson and four other members of the 11-member committee met with about 25 people Thursday night at Warren Central High School for the second of three public hearings to get residents’ ideas and comments on Vicksburg’s recreation programs and a possible multipurpose recreation complex for the city. The next hearing is Sept. 18 at 5:30 p.m. at WCHS.

“A sports complex in Vicksburg is a catalyst for Vicksburg to advance,” said Rick Daughtry with the Vicksburg Girls Softball Association.

Daughtry said Vicksburg has good attractions like the National Military Park, “but we have to have something else to put Vicksburg on the map.”

With its location at the intersection of two major highways, Interstate 20 and U.S. 61, he said, Vicksburg is in a prime location to attract people if it has the right facilities.

“If we don’t get it quick, it’ll be pushed to the back burner, because someone else in the area will expand and they’ll leave us behind,” he said.

County resident Lee Autry, who has a son who plays tournament baseball, said the exodus is already starting.

“We’re losing kids to Jackson because we don’t have the facilities,” she said. “The kids want to play in Jackson because they have the facilities like indoor batting cages.”

She said residents need to push the Warren County Board of Supervisors to get them involved with developing the sports complex.

“We need to get them to participate,” she said. “There are a couple of them who are on board, but the others don’t care. We need to work on them.”

“The supervisors represent us. We’re county residents, too,” said Marilyn Terry, who lives in Vicksburg. “It’s not ‘us against them’ (city versus county), it’s the supervisors.”

Regardless of whether the county participates in the project, Nelson suggested the complex should be governed by a seven-member commission with the authority to hire a recreation director, tournament director and sign a contract with an outside company to maintain the complex.

“This is something we’re (the committee) going to discuss,” he said. “This commission would hire a recreation director to make sure the facilities are available to everyone, a tournament director to get the teams to come here, and hire a company with experience in maintaining sports complexes to come in and maintain the facility.”

Currently, Vicksburg’s recreation department has a seven-member maintenance staff to handle the city’s 25 neighborhood parks plus its baseball and softball facilities. Hiring an outside company for the complex, Nelson said, would take the pressure of the recreation department to handle the complex’s maintenance as well as the other parks.

Other topics discussed during the hearting included:

• Nelson said the omplex would include an enclosed multi-purpose facility to handle events such as basketball, volleyball and gymnastics, and provide classrooms for other programs, such as arts and crafts, for people who are not athletically inclined.

He said city officials needed to ensure that the facilities and activities are available to all residents, especially children, at little or no charge.

“We have to be sure that if you pay taxes in Vicksburg, then you should be able to use the sports complex and afford to use it,” he said.

His comments were in response to questions from Terry, who was concerned that some children who are unable to afford fees to participate in sports like baseball or softball may not have a chance to use the facility.

• Nelson also said the committee was looking at possible sites for the proposed complex, adding the ideal property size is 200 acres. He would not identify any location, however.

The committee was appointed by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen in May. It first met on June 5 and began discussions that indicated a move toward a multipurpose recreation complex, marking the third time a recreation complex for the city has been discussed.

In 2003, the city bought the 200-acre Fisher Ferry Road property near St. Michael Catholic Church for a sports complex for $325,000. The project was abandoned in 2009 after an additional $2.7 million had been spent for preliminary plans, engineering and dirt work. The city has spent $55,343 since August 2012 to replace the concrete in the drainage chutes on the site with riprap and grout under a Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality mandate.

The board in March put the property up for sale for a 90-day period, but there were no takers.

Former mayor Paul Winfield in 2012 promoted an estimated $20 million sports complex funded by a half-cent sales tax. Flaggs, who was a state legislator at the time, opposed the project because he said there were too many uncertainties with it. The project died when the chairman of the House Local and Private Committee refused to introduce the bill.