STARKVILLE — Mario Tate isn’t sure how he’s voting Thursday in Starkville’s special election.
The city is holding a referendum on a 1-percent increase to its restaurant and hotel/motel sales taxes to fund park improvements, including a new tournament-ready facility at Cornerstone Park. In order to pass, the tax needs at least 60-percent voter approval.
The new park — a $20 million-plus endeavor — would be situated southwest of the Highway 12 and Highway 25 junction in west Starkville. Cornerstone Park will focus on baseball and softball, with eight to 10 fields planned.
While city officials have championed the tax, saying a new tournament-ready facility will bring more visitors to Starkville and help stimulate the economy, many voters — even those in favor of the tax — say they’d like to see the city invest more in existing parks.
Tate has played softball at Starkville’s Sportsplex — a complex of baseball, softball and soccer fields off Lynn Lane — for more than 10 years and has a daughter who also plays at the park. He said he can see the benefits the new facility might bring, but he wonders what the new park’s construction would mean for the rest of Starkville’s parks.
“What’s wrong with this park?” he said of the Sportsplex Thursday evening, gesturing to a nearby dugout and practice field where children were playing softball. “I think it’s big enough.”
Tate said he’d like to see more improvements, especially in restrooms, at McKee Park, which is across Lynn Lane from the Sportsplex and includes baseball fields, basketball courts and a large play area. If such improvements are included in the plan, he said, he’s more likely to vote yes on Thursday.
“I think they probably need more improvements over there,” Tate said. “It’s a mess over there because it’s the oldest park.”
Likewise, Willie Gray, a mother of four children who all play different sports at the Sportsplex, is leaning toward supporting the tax, though she admits to not knowing much about it. She hopes to see improvements at the Sportsplex, such as covered benches — “Covered seating would be nice, keep us out of the sun” — and water fountains she could rely on to work all the time (sometimes they don’t, she said).
But not all voters are as confident.
“My child won’t benefit (from the new facility) because they’re only using that (the Cornerstone Complex) for tournaments,” said a woman who indicated she would vote against the tax but didn’t want to identified.
Clyde Williams said he knows he’s going to vote on Thursday — he just has to decide which way. However, Williams said he’s concerned about the long-term use the city will get from the park, if it’s built.
He said the Sportsplex, after it was first built, once hosted lots of tournaments. But he believes the tournament use dropped off after a few years.
“I’d rather them focus on these fields (at the Sportsplex),” Williams said. “We used to have tournaments here … every weekend.”
He fears the same fate for Cornerstone, if it’s built — the first year bringing many tournaments before events start dwindling.
City response
Mayor Lynn Spruill said that, while tournament hosting is an important aspect for Cornerstone Park and a big goal for the city, the new park will be open for any children to play recreationally.
Starkville Parks and Recreation Director Gerry Logan said the city isn’t just going to use the new 1-percent tax revenue for Cornerstone Park. He said the parks department has a three-year capital projects plan to address needs at other parks.
“It’s not just about sports fields,” he said. “It’s about adding other recreational amenities that benefit citizens. We hope to see things like a wheelchair-accessible playground in McKee Park. Folks have asked about a skate park in town and that’s something we’re at least considering.
“Renovating, updating all our facilities — it’s on the table,” he added. “We’re trying to tackle it piece by piece to get a lot of those things done.”
The city has projected the new tax to bring in about $1.2 million per year. A portion of that will repay the bond issue for Cornerstone, while the remainder, as well as $850,000 from the Parks’ share (40 percent) of the existing 2-percent restaurant and hotel/motel sales tax, will fund capital improvements at other parks over three years.
Spruill said the fields and facilities Starkville has may have been fine for the time they were built. However, she said, the standards have changed in the years since. As other communities moved ahead with better facilities, Starkville lags behind with what it has. The fields at the Sportsplex, she said, were developed in the 1990s, and a multi-purpose building — now called the Travis Outlaw Center — was completed in 2009.
“The reasons those tournaments dropped off is because we were not taking care of our fields,” Spruill said. “This is why we are struggling mightily to bring them back up to standard.”
In the past two years, Starkville Parks and Recreation has made a concerted effort to bring in more tournaments — Logan said there are more than 30 scheduled for this year, compared to 20 in 2018.
The city has made efforts to bring the parks up to standard since taking it as a city department from the formerly autonomous Starkville Parks Commission in 2015 — for example, Spruill said there’s been work to improve drainage at the Sportsplex’s soccer fields, and the city has been working to replace outdated playgrounds at its parks.
She added that the city will make every effort to ensure that Cornerstone Park is well used and maintained, saying she thought it would be “almost criminal” not to care for the park after such a massive outlay of public funds.
However, she said in doing so, the city won’t take its eye off of caring for the parks it already has.
“You’ve got to take a holistic approach to any massive effort like this,” she said. “We can’t simply say ‘OK, we’re gonna build Cornerstone and we’re just gonna let the rest of it ride along.’ We can’t do that.”
Aldermen have already discussed, in the event Cornerstone Park is built, hiring a private firm to manage it.
‘I have seen the impact’
Jason King, who said his children have played travel soccer for years, said he plans to vote in favor of the tax. Playing at high-quality facilities in other communities, King said, has highlighted the work Starkville needs to do.
He said he feels that’s especially important to draw people to a rural town, which is at a natural disadvantage against metropolitan areas like Jackson or Birmingham.
King pointed to Oxford’s FNC Park, which opened in 2009 and has a mix of baseball, softball and soccer fields, as an example of a high-quality facility.
“I have seen the impact it has in other cities,” he said. “Oxford has, arguably, the nicest facility in the state. Quality teams in soccer and baseball want to go where the nice fields are. When there’s a tournament in Oxford, it’s hard to find somewhere to stay because the hotels are all sold out.”
King said he feels the parks department has done a good job, especially recently, in stepping up on maintenance for Starkville’s existing fields. However, he said there’s a noticeable difference between Starkville and some of its competitor cities.
“It’s not that these fields aren’t nice — they are,” he said. “But when you’ve seen the next level, this is really ordinary.”
Bryan O’Neil said his family doesn’t play soccer now but did a few years ago. He also plans to vote for the tax, and doesn’t view the additional percent to prepared food costs as much of a burden.
He added that he thinks it’s helpful that people who come into town for events will help to pay the tax, rather than it just being on Starkville residents, as it would be if it were a property tax. Moreover, he said likes knowing up front what the tax will be used for.
“So many times, you pay taxes and don’t know what they’re going to,” O’Neil said. “With this, we know exactly what it’s going to.”
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