Vicksburg’s ad hoc recreation committee has gone high-tech with a petition on change.org inviting city and county residents to sign a petition supporting a multi-purpose recreation complex.

Committee chairman Omar Nelson said the website, titled “River Bluff Park at Vicksburg,” was developed “to put more pressure on the (Warren County) Board of Supervisors and the Board of Mayor and Aldermen, and generate support for a sports park.”

He said the site went online Wednesday and had garnered more than 200 signatures by this morning. The website can be accessed through the committee’s recently started Facebook page, “Vicksburg recreation committee.”

The website was first discussed at the committee’s Sept. 4 public meeting at Warren Central High School, and its title — which was not discussed at the meeting — accompanied by a photo of the Mississippi River and the bridges taken from what appears to be near the entrance of Riverfront Park, indicates the committee may have a site in mind. The ostensibly fictional names evokes the Mississippi Bluffs property off Warrenton Road, which was eyed for a proposed casino/golf resort complex in the early 2000s.

Nelson and committee member Linda Fondren tried to meet Wednesday with the Board of Mayor and Aldermen in executive session under an item titled “real estate,” but Mayor George Flaggs Jr. stopped the discussion, saying any discussion about land was premature.

“At this point, land is irrelevant,” Flaggs said. “That’s what caused the last attempt at a sports complex to fail, everybody was talking about buying land. I don’t want to talk about land. All I want is a comprehensive report on recreation in Vicksburg.”

Flaggs said he had not seen the website.

Nelson said the site’s name is not an indication that the committee has a site in mind.

“We’re don’t have a site,” he said, adding “River Bluffs at Vicksburg” was selected “because we wanted to get people’s attention. Vicksburg is on the river and it’s on a bluff. It just seemed like a catchy name. There was no rhyme or reason.”

The committee was appointed in May by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen to examine the city’s recreation programs and present recommendations to improve the overall program over the next five years by Dec. 31.

The committee 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 was no response.

Efforts to remake Halls Ferry 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.

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 and had a hand in bringing a potential tax increase to a vote, opposed the project because there were too many uncertainties with the project. The project died when the chairman of the House Local and Private Committee refused to introduce the bill.