About 55 of the city’s 200-acre Fisher Ferry property is useable for recreation, Warren County District 1 Supervisor John Arnold told the committee charged with locating a site and approving a design for a multipurpose sports complex.

Arnold, one of three county representatives on the committee, toured the property on Fisher Ferry Road near St. Michael Catholic Church Jan. 30 with other city and county officials. A real estate agent, he said he returned to the property after the tour with a rangefinder, a device for determining distance and area, “and you’ve got 55.78 (graded and useable) acres. I don’t think you’ll get any more.”

“So anything there outside of that is terrain,” North Ward Alderman Michael Mayfield said. He wanted to survey the property again to see if there is any other useable land on the property. “We need to ride that property on a four-wheeler from one end to the other,” he said.

Arnold has favored private sector involvement in the sporrts complex during talks with other county board members.

“From what I could see, there might be another 8 or 10 acres we can use, but you’ll have to do a lot of grub work on it,” Mayfield said, adding the city can use the property for recreation provided it can get access to the site.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen are reconsidering the property, which was bought in 2003 by the city for $235,000, as a possible site for the sports complex. Earlier attempts to develop it as a sports complex have failed.

Since its purchase in 2003, the Fisher Ferry property has been plagued by problems that eventually led to the previous Board of Mayor and Aldermen writing it off as a potential site. Site work began in January 2009 only to be slowed and halted by delays for wetlands permits, redeveloping plans to avoid wetlands areas along Hatcher Bayou, which runs along the property’s northern boundary and has a history of flooding.

The wetlands problems, coupled with access to the property and the diversion in 2009 of money from a 2007 bond issue from the park to the Washington Street bridge project, eventually forced city officials to end the project.

Mayor George Flaggs Jr. brought up using the property for a sports complex in December, and the board discussed building an access road from either U.S. 61 South to the west or Dana Road to the north. Public Works Director Garnet Van Norman said a recent study by Stantec, the county’s engineering firm of record, of the Dana Road access plan indicated the project would cost $1.8 million.

Flaggs appointed the site and design committee and a feasibility, financing and marketing committee for the sports complex in December after the city’s ad hoc committee on recreation recommended a multipurpose sports complex on 270 acres of land that included baseball and softball fields, 15 soccer fields, 10 tennis courts, basketball and volleyball courts and a multipurpose building with indoor pool.

“What was presented and what we can actually do are two different things,” South Ward Alderman Willis Thompson said. “We may have to scale back. The question is how much can we get out of what we have. I think the next thing is to find out how much acreage we can use out there and decide if we are going to use it or not.”

While agreeing the property can be used for some type of recreation, Mayfield said he wanted to look at other property, adding he wanted to tour the property behind the YMCA, off East Clay Street, which he said was at one time the proposed site for River Region Hospital.

“I believe there’s about 125 acres out there and we need to see what we can do,” he said. “The question is what are you willing to afford. We can’t do everything on the wish list.”

The ad hoc recreation committee was appointed in May by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen to examine the city’s recreation programs and present recommendations to improve the overall program over the next five years. The committee first met on June 5, and began discussions that indicated a move toward a multipurpose recreation complex, marking the third time a recreation complex for the city has been discussed.

Besides the $325,000 purchase price for the Fisher Ferry Road property, the city has spent $2.7 million for preliminary plans, engineering and dirt work. The city has spent $55,343 since August 2012 to replace the concrete in the drainage chutes on the site with riprap and grout under a Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality mandate.

The board in March put the property up for sale for a 90-day period, but there was no interest.