Rocky Top wins $566K grant for new bleachers, park up
Rocky Top has won a $566,000 recreation grant from the state of Tennessee to help pay for new bleachers, concessions stand, press box and restroom upgrades at the city-owned ballfield next to the Community Center, among other park projects.
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-complaint, 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 for up to $750,000 from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to help pay for the improvements.
The $566,000 award was announced in August, and will come from TDEC’s Local Parks and Recreation Fund.
Rocky Top was among four area cities to receive grants from the fund, for a total of $1.27 million.
Other recipients were Norris ($375,000), Harriman ($300,000), and Oliver Springs ($29,000).
The money was included in the state’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget approved by the General Assembly.
The catch, though, Green told The Courier News last week, is that these particular state grants require a dollar-for-dollar match from the city, and he’s not sure where the city will 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 earlier 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 the 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 has a new scoreboard, which was installed this summer.
It cost about $12,000, and the City Council approved a $5,000 city contribution to that expense. The rest came from other sources, including the Anderson County Board of Education and Anderson County Commission, Green said.
Green said the grant will help pay for new aluminum bleachers, the press box, restrooms, and a second concession stand.
“We’re still trying to decide the number of seats we will need,” he said last week. “As for the new concession stand, Little League football built the existing concession stand at the end zone, and they operate it. But we’re wanting to have our own concession stand.
“Do we need a new bathroom? That would be amazing,” he said.
Besides the ballpark grant, the council also has applied for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield grant to pay for trees that would be planted to create a “green space” park and canopy around the city’s splash pad, to provide shade. Included would be an irrigation system.
That grant would require no city matching funds, Green said.