It’s not as splashy as an ice bucket challenge, but Mayor George Flaggs Jr. has accepted what he saw Tuesday as a call to action from Warren County on the issue of recreation.

“I accept their challenge,” Flaggs said by phone minutes after a report published in The Vicksburg Post outlined county supervisors’ displeasure with not having a member of the county’s parks and recreation commission on the city’s ad hoc recreation committee.

Flaggs said he would favor up to three more people being on the 11-member committee tasked with gauging public sentiment on the topic “as long as they’re willing to recommend and appoint them.”

Any formal resolution on the county’s part to recommend anyone be named to the committee would come at the county board’s next meeting on Sept. 15, at the earliest.

This morning, Flaggs said he’s amenable to adding up to five more people on the committee if each county supervisor wants to appoint someone. A letter to that effect was being hand-delivered to the county board today, he said.

In May, the city board appointed the ad hoc group with a broadly defined mission of improving recreation outlets for youth sports. The panel’s makeup includes business people, prep sports coaches and other professionals. No members of the Warren County Parks and Recreation Committee are on it. The five-member panel oversees operations of county-owned Clear Creek golf course in Bovina, which also hosts youth soccer and baseball.

The five-member parks and rec commission is chaired by L.T. Walker, with Dale McDuff, Alvin Taylor, Joe Loviza and Lloyd Clark rounding out the panel’s membership. Terms run concurrent with that of the Board of Supervisors.

In March, the city board had passed a resolution requesting the county’s participation on the topic. Mayor George Flaggs Jr. and Board President Bill Lauderdale met a few weeks later about combining city and county recreation entities. When an 11-member committee was appointed two months later, building a sports complex became front and center. Consolidation talk has all but ceased.

On Monday, supervisors took issue with comments from the general public over the county’s participation in developing a sports complex. Financing, expected to be an issue if there’s no private money in any eventual complex development, would be delicate on any single governing body due to distinct revenue sources between cities and counties.

The youth athletic community has urged action for years to replace the adequate but aging city-run Halls Ferry Park, completed in the early 1990s.

Efforts in 2007-08 to remake the park into a $25 million sportsplex fell apart when the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality frowned on the project’s suitability because, as known throughout the process, part of the park was built on what was once the city’s landfill. Separate pieces of land in south Warren County totaling 145 acres owned by the Aquila Group, which had proposed to build and manage the fields and sports facilities, went to tax sale Aug. 26.

The committee has said the ideal size is 200 acres, much like the area off Fisher Ferry Road near St. Michael Catholic Church the city bought 11 years ago to develop as such. No location has been identified in the course of two public hearings organized by the ad hoc committee.

Work to develop the Fisher Ferry tract stopped in 2009 over concerns about access and long-term feasibility since part of it is in a flood plain.