Warren County supervisors will wait with the rest of the public on what an ad hoc committee on recreation recommends to Vicksburg officials by year’s end.

It’s a wait-and-see scenario that apparently won’t involve any extra members to the committee’s membership.

Two weeks ago, Mayor George Flaggs Jr. took exception to comments supervisors made in reference to criticism about the county’s participation in forming a plan for recreation in the city and county. The first-term mayor sent supervisors a letter offering to accept nominations to add five more people to the 11-member panel named by the city in May.

On Monday, the board took the offer lightly.

“All we did was ask a question,” District 5 Supervisor Richard George said. “Who’s on the committee?”

Upon its creation, the committee started out on a broadly-defined mission of improving recreation outlets for youth sports. The group has a Dec. 31 deadline to recommend to the city board any changes to the city’s overall program. The group’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.

In March, the city board had passed a resolution requesting the county’s participation on the topic. Flaggs 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.

The focus of three public meetings held since the committee’s formation has been recreation in general, with no on-the-record mention of a specific site or financing for a complex.

Last week, a petition popped up on the website change.org that was styled “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.” The author was the vaguely named “Vicksburg recreation committee”, though the panel’s chair, attorney Omar Nelson, has taken credit for its creation and its title, “River Bluff Park at Vicksburg.” The petition had garnered 265 supporters late Monday.

Lauderdale and others on the board critiqued the validity of the petition, citing the ability of anyone, anywhere to sign a petition on the site, which counts 70 million users in 196 countries.

“You could be in Egypt somewhere (to post a response),” Lauderdale said. “It’s a cool idea to do it, if it was set up where you could tell their addresses.”

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 the 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.

Lauderdale, who has served the most terms of any current supervisor, added a previous attempt to partner on a sports complex in the 1990s and early 2000s ended with other plans on the part of the city.

“Our engineers had worked on it,” he said. “Then, the city administration said it was going to keep the (Vicksburg Municipal) airport open. That’s where it was going to be.”