Though sidelined in the last budget cycle, the Highlands soccer field project is gaining renewed attention as Macon County school board members and commissioners discussed the project in a liaison meeting on April 7.
School board members Hillary Wilkes, Jim Breedlove and Deidre Breeden attended with commissioner liaisons Josh Young and Gary Shields. County Manager Warren Cabe and superintendent Josh Lynch attended as well as Macon County Schools finance officer Laney Ledford and Macon County Finance Officer Lindsay Leopard. Commissioner John Shearl also attended the meeting as an unofficial participant.
During the Board of Education’s last discussion about the soccer field in July, representatives of Astroturf said they were uncertain of what the full cost of the project would be after seeing signs of groundwater and that there would need to be a design period to figure out what work would need to be done below the surface.
Laying the turf, independent of the work needed below the surface, would cost between $640,000 and $700,000, Cabe said.
Wilkes started the discussion Wednesday saying the school system had received a lump sum at the beginning of the last school year that could have been used to pay for the cost of the $60,000-$75,000 design period, but critical needs at school facilities devoured the funds.
“My question is, how can we find a solution that everyone is comfortable with?” Wilkes said. “My goal for this particular budget cycle is to identify a phase one first step with a long-term strategy that we’re all hopeful for to solve this problem, and then fund that phase one first step this cycle as its own project. We have been spinning our wheels … we’ve been fact finding and I feel like we’ve done our due diligence.”
She said building the field at Highlands School appeared to have significant community support as of the school board’s last meeting.
“We have already had a significant injury game one this year,” Wilkes said. “We’ve had to delay and we did lose a home field advantage for a state playoff game that we had to go to Brevard and play due to the conditions of the field. And we consistently can’t practice the girls … they’ve only been able to recently begin practicing on that field because it’s frozen.”
She said the school was lucky to have had a dry fall last year but there have been significant ongoing issues with its current soccer field.
Shearl said, “High school baseball has gone away, high school softball has gone away … the true athletics in Highlands is soccer. We’ve always said Highlands soccer is Franklin football. So it is very important that we have a place for these kids to play.”
He suggested building a field at Zachary Park, where the county owns enough of the surrounding property to make it easier to develop a field. While some of the surrounding field is not owned by the county, Shearl said it is owned by members of the Zachary family who may be receptive to changes that could allow the district to build a regulation-sized field for students. Overall, he was confident the benefits of building the field at Highlands School would not outweigh the cost of draining the wetland underneath it.
“In my mind there’s no better place in the world for that soccer field to be than Zachary Park. It’s going to be an easy fix,” Shearl said. “Yes, it’s going to be an inconvenience that you’re going to have to bus the kids from Highlands School out there. They can certainly use the field behind the school for practice or if it’s dry.”
Young said, “I have a little background in soil mitigation. You could spend $600,000 on the turf and spend $2.5 million for subsurface. We just don’t know … what I’d like to see is an actual regulation size field with a regulation size track somewhere in Highlands, something nice.”
He said he believes Highlands deserves a quality track and field, but that building the field at Highlands School would not accomplish that goal and it would not be a regulation-sized field.
“I know it’s not the best place for Highlanders at Zachary Park, but … I think it revitalizes that park,” Young said. “If you were to spend $1 million, $1.5 million, you could have a perfect track out there and you could have community events and benefits. You guys don’t really have that complex right now.”
Young said he would be open to the school system budgeting for a neutral party to assess both the Zachary Park and Highlands School locations and give advice on which would be best for a field.
Breedlove said the school board would put out a request for proposals at its April 27 meeting to contract a qualified member of the community to “look at both sites and look at the viability and come back to us and say “based on what we’ve looked at this is what we see as far as the best viability, the best option for the community.”
- Shelby Powell
reporter@thefranklinpress.com