BOC once again has split vote on Victor Lord Park expansion funding

For a third straight meeting Tuesday, the Barrow County Board of Commissioners failed to take action on the county manager’s recommendation to spend an additional $500,000 on the voter-approved Victor Lord Park expansion project, remaining at a 3-3 stalemate.
Per its procedures, the board once again took up a motion made at its last meeting by Billy Parks to deny county manager Mike Renshaw’s recommendation that $500,000 be added to cover a significant portion of the engineering, architectural design and project management costs associated with the 2018 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) project and allow more of the sales tax collections to go directly toward park upgrades, which include multi-purpose, synthetic-turf athletic fields and other possible amenities such as a tennis complex, splash pad, dog park, walking trail and additional baseball field parking as funds become available.
The additional $500,000 would come from two sources — $352,000 from excess amphitheater/cultural arts center funds from the county’s SPLOST 2005 collections and $148,000 from re-allocated Fiscal Year 2019 capital improvement plan leisure services funds for projects that county officials have said could be deferred.
Parks was once again joined in support of his motion to deny the recommendation by commissioners Ben Hendrix and Isaiah Berry. Chairman Pat Graham and commissioners Joe Goodman and Bill Brown remained in favor of the recommendation. Parks’ motion will carry over again to the board’s next meeting on Dec. 11, its final meeting of the year.
See more in the Nov. 28 edition of the Barrow News-Journal.