Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 74F. Winds light and variable..

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 74F. Winds light and variable.

The Carthage Park Authority met Wednesday.

The Carthage Park Authority met Wednesday.

A dramatic rise in mowing costs has Carthage city officials and several youth sports organizations trying to figure how they will keep the playing fields at the Carthage Sports Complex maintained.

The city met with representatives from the Carthage Baseball Association, the Carthage Softball Association and the Carthage Soccer Association at a packed Park Authority meeting on Wednesday.

At issue was lawn care maintenance. Now-retired Carthage Parks Supervisor Tommy Cox has previously been mowing the playing fields for years, with the sports associations paying Cox roughly $5,000 a year to do so.

But as City Manager Steve Williams explained Wednesday, Cox was doing the mowing on his own with his own equipment. Legally, the city is bound by a contract with all three associations that says the city is responsible for upkeep of everything at the sports complex except the playing fields — and that the associations are responsible for the fields.

Williams noted the city also pays utilities and water for the park, spending about $100,000 a year in upkeep. They also expanded the soccer parking lot last year, to the tune of about $100,000 in total.

The current contract has been in place and been re-signed annually for the past 20 years.

“Everybody here is here because it was out there that city is not taking care of (the park),” Williams said. “We’re doing 100 percent of what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years. So y’all are taking what y’all are responsible for and trying to put it on the city.”

Representatives from each of the associations provided rough estimates of what it would cost for them to go out and hire someone to mow all of the playing fields throughout the year, which added up to about $40,000.

That amount is currently note feasible for the groups, they said, and they are reluctant to raise fees because that will mean fewer kids who can participate. The softball association is the only one able to hold tournaments, but even those do not bring in a lot of money for the association because they’re paying for someone to come in and run that.

“The other issue is having somebody available to mow it when it’s able to be mowed,” Josh Blissett, with the Carthage Soccer Association, said. “You know, you get in the springtime when it’s raining. And today they’re supposed to mow it comes down for So are they able to make it back and mow it for for Saturday’s games or are we playing in, you know, ankle deep grass?”

Park Authority board member Don Clinton said that when his kids were playing sports with the associations, the dads volunteered to mow the fields on their own time.

“It was pretty much left up to the associations to have some some daddy (go) out there to mow probably once a week.”

City Commissioner Tate Barber, who serves on the Park Authority board, called the old agreement a good deal.

“He was doing it for 1/10 of the price,” Barber said.

Barber and the rest of the parks board asked the associations to bid out the mowing project and bring back hard numbers so they could look at potential solutions. They also mentioned going to Panola County, which currently pays about $10,000 a year, and seeing if that could be raised since about 70 percent of the kids playing at the park don’t live inside the city.

“Personally, I would like to see some real numbers on mowing out there, if we combined our efforts,” Barber said. “I mean, it’s one thing to say, we’re for you to go out and just get softball for you to go out and get soccer and you go out and get baseball, but bigger jobs, per mowing, might get a little lower (result). Do we agree with that?”

Williams agreed, saying it’s up to the associations and city commissioners to agree on a plan.

“The city commissioners are ones that approve that contract. I have to live with whatever it says,” he said. “If they come back and they say Steve I want you to mow every field every day, I’m gonna make that happen. But what it says right now is we don’t mow the fields. And so I can’t just go out and go against any contract ...I have to abide by the contract. But I’m not sitting there arguing with you that we should or shouldn’t do it. I’m just telling you what the contract is right now.”

Meredith Shamburger oversees newspapers in Carthage, KIlgore and Marshall. A Carthage native, she has been with M.Roberts Media since 2016. Before joining the staff, she served as a reporter with the Dallas Morning News.

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