Maps to be created by the city between now and year’s end of what a recreation complex might look like could feature backdrops along Fisher Ferry Road after all.

In an update Monday on multiple topics with the Warren County Board of Supervisors, Mayor George Flaggs Jr. mentioned the 200-acre expanse of brush off Fisher Ferry Road that’s been in and out of the running for a sports complex since purchased in 2003.

Flaggs said any knocks on its feasibility, which have included drainage and visibility issues, are outweighed by cost. Also, two additional committees on finance and site selection must be created after an 11-member ad hoc panel finishes a final report to the city by Dec. 11. The report is to outline upgrades to the city’s recreation programs over the next five years.

“A small committee of about five people in the community who know finance — not us — can give some recommendation and tell us how to fund it,” Flaggs told county supervisors. “Then select a committee to look at sites and everything. But, like I said before, the first sites you ought to look at are the sites you own.”

In 2003, the city purchased the tract behind St. Michael Catholic Church for $325,000. Six years later, plans were ditched after multiple issues with drainage and access came up. Planning, engineering and dirt work costs totaled $2.7 million in the interim. Another $55,343 has been spent since 2012 to replace concrete drainage chutes with riprap and grout, under a Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality mandate.

In March, the property was put up for sale for 90 days. The city got no response.

Flaggs on Monday revived Fisher Ferry as an option, but addressed visibility exclusively in terms of the property’s usefulness for development.

“I’ve been to several sports complexes you couldn’t see from the highway,” Flaggs said.

Committee members have said they’ve visited and/or met with officials with recreation facilities in Clinton, Ridgeland, Madison, Brandon and Vidalia, La. to add insight to the final report.

Supervisors were receptive to Flaggs’ and South Ward Alderman Willis Thompson’s personal approach, though neither specified how panels on finance and site selection would be appointed. Flaggs had offered to expand the ad hoc committee to include members of the Warren County Parks and Recreation Commission after criticism was voiced about a lack of involvement on the county’s part in initial public meetings on the subject. The offer went unrealized.

Thompson didn’t address the site directly, but talked up the need keep costs down and achieve a level of efficiency in the community’s youth sports offerings.

“We have facilities that, with a little TLC, we could bring up,” Thompson said. “We don’t need to duplicate things we already have, like the tennis courts (at Halls Ferry Park).”

District 1 Supervisor John Arnold told both men the ad hoc committee needs to steer clear of assuming in public the county was to participate in the panel’s final report.

“They kind of skipped over into that,” Arnold said. “To me, they need to leave that alone.”

Committee members’ efforts this year are the third major move in the past decade for a sports complex in Vicksburg.

Efforts in 2007-08 to convert Halls Ferry Park into a $25 million sportsplex fell apart when the site couldn’t pass environmental muster. Part of the park was built on what was once a city landfill. The city sued its hired consultant on the project and, so far, has recovered $8,909 of the $250,000 paid to the firm.

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 due to lack of specifics, one of them being a site. The project died when the chairman of the House Local and Private Committee refused to introduce the bill.