Officials defend Hoover Ridge

By Jane DeGeorge
Eagle Reporter
Published: September 24, 2008

Close to a million dollars for 11 athletic fields that, at the moment, lack grass?

Madison County officials discussed the cost, size and current status of the county’s Hoover Ridge athletic fields project, which has received criticism in recent months.

“I know a lot of people in the community are a little bit frustrated because we’ve spent quite a bit of money and we still don’t have something that’s ready to use,” County Administrator Lisa Kelley said Tuesday evening. “But…you can’t grow suitable turf overnight.”

Kelley and Madison County Facilities and Maintenance Department Director Ross Shifflett spoke to a crowd of about 20 people at the Sept. 23 meeting of the Madison County Lions Club. The majority of the meeting’s attendees were members of either the local club or an area chapter, although one non-affiliated citizen attended due to interest in the athletic fields project.

Officials recently completed the second round of seeding on the newly constructed fields set on the county-owned property adjacent to Madison Primary School.

“It looks as if we hit the weather at a very fortunate time…we have very high hopes for the turf grass for the surface of the fields over the course of the next year or so,” Kelley said.

One baseball field and one multi-purpose field should be ready by Spring 2009, she said. The additional fields will likely be ready later that fall or Spring 2010.

The board of supervisors initially contracted Chantilly-based William A. Hazel Inc. in late 2007 to construct the fields for $772,000, “which, believe or not, was an extremely good price given the market and the slowdown in construction activity,” Kelley said at Tuesday’s meeting.

The board later approved a total of about $77,000 in additional funds toward the project due to some “unexpected contingencies,” including hitting some rock in the ground during construction and installing additional corrugated pipes and culverts due to some of the original topography, which was taken from aerials, being a little bit off, officials said earlier this year.

Following the completion of the fields’ construction in March, the county initially seeded the fields, which resulted in little grass growth due to the land’s hardness and a lack of rain, officials have previously said.

Shifflett said that the $70,000 the board of supervisors has set aside in its current budget should cover the work officials have planned for the property during the current fiscal year. This work includes growing grass on the fields, stabilizing the area to prevent erosion and putting up some fences around one of the baseball fields, he said.

“The unexpected isn’t exactly covered…but we shouldn’t be coming back to the board to ask for any additional money,” he told the group.

But that doesn’t mean additional money won’t go toward the Hoover Ridge property in the future, which officials hope to eventually develop further.

Shifflett gave the group a brief history of the project to develop the property, which the county purchased for $800,000 in 2002, according to an Eagle story from the time.

The supervisors cited a need for multi-purpose recreational fields in the county as one the reasons for the purchase of the land (formerly known as the Clore property), the story states. The county had been using soccer fields on land formerly home to the Wrangler plant (where MWP Supply Inc. is now located) until the plant closed and the property was sold in early 2002, Shifflett said.

Following the purchase, a few soccer fields were constructed on the Hoover Ridge property for under $40,000 to address the county’s immediate needs, the facilities and maintenance director said.

Later, a committee was established to come up with additional plans of how to use the county-owned site. With the help of a group of Virginia Tech instructors and students, a “master plan” of potential future projects was developed including creating additional fields, a community recreation center, an amphitheater and a 10-foot-wide unpaved walking and cycling path.

Each year, officials plan to consider setting aside money in the budget for any new projects on the property as well as funds to maintain what has already been constructed, the county administrator said.

“There’s just so much potential here, it doesn’t all have to be done at once and particularly in these economic times it’s not contemplated that all of these things are going to be achieved in the immediate future,” she said.

Despite the few fields initially being constructed on the Hoover Ridge property, the county is still facing a field shortage, officials have said.

With about 1,000 Madison County children using the county’s existing fields each year, the Hoover Ridge committee decided that five additional baseball fields and several new multi-purpose fields would sufficiently serve the county’s needs and provide for future growth, according to Shifflett.

“The areas we have now, they’re used seven days a week. We have a very active group of youngsters and the amount of use is tremendous,” he said at the meeting.

Some have questioned why the county pursued constructing a large number of fields in one location rather than creating fields in different areas of the county, the facilities and maintenance director said.

During past committee meetings, the Hoover Ridge group decided it would be easier for parents with multiple children who play different sports if the fields were created in one location near the county’s schools, whose teams will also likely use the fields, according to Shifflett.

Down the road, when different types of recreational areas are developed on the property, such as the proposed walking trails, parents would be able to participate in other activities while their children practice on the athletic fields, Shifflett added.

At the meeting, officials also addressed concerns about the entrance to the area, parking and how traffic to the fields will affect nearby Madison Primary School.

Shifflett said that the traffic to the fields would not affect travel directly by the primary school, although the entrance is off of the same road that leads to the school. (The gravel road used as the entrance to the Hoover Ridge fields is on the left before the entrance to the primary school.)

The county administrator also added that officials haven’t ruled out possibly charging outside groups for using the fields once they are complete.

“Longer term it’d be nice to have facilities that would attract people into the county for say a softball tournament or something. We’d get some revenue in from the tournament but also to have people here shopping while they’re here,” she said.