Rocky Top seeks grant for city ballfield upgrades
Plans are to replace the bleachers at the George Templin Memorial Field in Rocky Top with seating that is accessible to disabled people, using grant money and matching local funds. The Lake City Middle School baseball team plays here. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Councilman Zack Green, who also serves as chairman of the city’s Recreation Committee, said the seating area and other facilities, including restrooms, at the George Templin Memorial Field are in need of upgrades that would make them “ADA-compliant.”
“We haven’t done anything with the bleachers to make them ADA-compliant, and in fact, not much has been done at the ballfield to meet ADA standards,” he said, referring to the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires most public facilities to be made accessible to people with disabilities.
“The bleachers must be torn down and replaced,” he said. “This field gets a lot of use. We have Little League football there, and the [Lake City] Middle School uses it for baseball. There are also some slow-pitch softball leagues that use the field.”
Green was able to get the City Council’s approval at the Feb. 15 meeting to move forward with the grant application of up to $750,000 from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to help pay for the improvements.
The catch, though, Green told The Courier News on Monday, is that these particular state grants require a dollar-for-dollar match from the city, and he’s not sure where the city would be able to find enough money to pay its share.
He said he’s not in favor of raising property taxes to pay for the ballpark upgrades, so “I don’t know where the money is going to come from.”
Mayor Kerry Templin said on Monday that the city most likely would have to finance its part of the upgrades, but that he expects the total cost to be about $200,000 for the bleachers, with the city paying half of that and the rest coming from a grant.
The loan would be paid off using a combination of city sales and property tax receipts and other sources of revenue, including user fees associated with the ballfield. He noted that the city had collected $8,000 in user fees from renting out the Community Center to private groups last year, and that some similar private use of the ballfield could also generate revenue.
Templin said a big expense of replacing the bleachers would be removal of the current seats, which are on the south side of the field.
“I can’t image getting those removed for less than $75,000,” he said.
“It would be awesome to update the restrooms, too,” the mayor said. “The field itself is in awesome shape, and we already have the new LED lights.”
The ballfield also is about to get a new scoreboard, at a cost of about $12,000, and the City Council has already approved a $5,000 city contribution to that expense.
“We’re expecting to get an additional $5,000 from the Anderson County Board of Education, and another contribution from the County Commission,” Green said.
“Neither one of those has yet been approved, but we are expecting to get at least the $5,000 from the schools,” he said. “We have found a scoreboard we can get that would cost us $12,000 installed, and if the money doesn’t come from the county, I believe we could raise it from private donations, if necessary.”
Green noted that the county school system “did come up with $85,000 to replace the lights” at the ballfield.
The city needed to file a notice of intent to apply for the recreation grant by Feb. 22, and that’s what the City Council voted to do during the Feb. 15 meeting, Templin said.
The full grant application will be filed by May.
Besides the ballpark grant, the council also agreed to apply for a grant of $18,000 to pay for trees that would be planted to create a “green space” and canopy around the city’s splash pad, to provide shade.
Included would be an irrigation system for the green space.
That grant would require no city matching funds, Green said.