Habersham County has been hearing a lot about tennis and pickleball these last two months after several months of peace.
The reason for the consternation has been the revelation of the county’s plan to eliminate two of the tennis courts at the Ruby Fulbright Aquatic Center and replace them with permanent pickleball courts.
The county set out to construct a new pickleball complex that would leave the tennis courts as they are, but they found the cost for that was potentially prohibitive, coming in around at least $250,000.
County officials were getting the advice that more and more public recreation departments were resurfacing tennis courts instead of building new pickleball courts from the ground up, and so, the project turned in that direction.
The only problem is, nobody in the public knew it. To be clear, nothing illegal was done. Projects happen behind the scenes all the time with governmental bodies, and they do not all finish as they begin.
But in this case, when the county plans to take away a recreational amenity that taxpayers have already paid for, it should have been brought back to the public eye when the entire scope of the project was changed.
Tennis players came to the February meeting and declared that no one told them they would be losing two courts. They came again Monday night and said the same, with one gentleman declaring “46,000 people can’t come to every one of these meetings.”
That is 100 percent true, which is one of the biggest reasons we do attend all of them. However, tennis and pickleball were not mentioned in those meetings over the last few months, so the thousands who did not attend did not miss much.
Instead, the county quietly went about the business of taking bids for resurfacing of the courts rather than building the complex.
The money talked in the end, and the county wanted to stay under $100,000 for this project. Commissioner Dustin Mealor suggested that there were $53,000 in unbudgeted funds available to help bolster the overall pool, and the commissioners tabled the issue for one more month to see if they could find a solution that appeased all parties.
If the county is at $153,000, can they get another $100,000 or so from somewhere? The dreaded “We will have to raise your taxes to do this” came up Monday and none of the tennis players failed to return serve. Let’s be realistic, our taxes already went up this year, and they could go up again when we find out that paying for a new jail and the hospital debt will not be as easy as passing a Roads and Bridges SPLOST.
The citizens are asking the commissioners they elected to give them something for their money, and perhaps they should listen.