At his Monday presser, Mayor Grover Robinson said he has been in discussion with Interim County Administrator Wes Moreno and county staff about the long-awaited Hollice T. Williams Park to be built under the I-110 overpass.
According to mayor, the county prefers building out the project in one step and not breaking it up into several phases.
“So it means the city is going to be is going to be responsible for the skate park,” said Mayor Robinson. “There’s about $700,000 or so that we need to put into it to finish up the skate park and the bathrooms to that area.”
He plans to bring the funding request to the Pensacola City Council in August. The mayor hesitated on giving a completion date for the skate park, but he hopes to have it finished before he leaves office in November 2022.
Jon Shell, founder of Upward Intuition, has been pushing for the city’s first skate park since 2015. Â He and the local skate community raised funds to enlist California-based Spohn Ranch, which built the ramp skateboarding legend Tony Hawk pulled the first 900 on, to draw plans for the park.
In December 2018, the Pensacola City Council members decided to assume responsibility for the park and fund the project.
Mayor Robinson also mentioned the need to redo the tennis courts at Roger Scott, which he estimated would cost $2.6 million. He hopes the county will help fund have the cost.
“It’s been over 50 years since those hardcourts have been repaired,” he said. “They’ve been topped over, but they haven’t been milled replaced with new stuff.”
The mayor said he has asked the county to assist so that city and county residents would pay the same rate to use the new courts.
Roger Scott Tennis Center: Good luck asking the county for $1.6 million for tennis courts in the city run by the city. The recent county budget workshop sounded brutal. I don’t recall anything in next year’s county budget about tennis courts so even if the BOCC won the lottery it’s hard to see how anything approved might get done until 2023. If the county did have money for tennis courts, the smarter move for them would be to build their own tennis centers outside of the city. Only about 15% of county residents live in the city. According to the city’s proposed FY2022 budget, the City Council had previously approved $1 million to resurface the tennis courts at Roger Scott. The project was supposed to be completed this fiscal year so by the end of this September. I presume that won’t happen. Who decided that the project suddenly will now cost $2.6 million? Maybe a better idea would be for the City Council to rethink its priorities and amend the Local Option Sales Tax budget to instead construct a tennis center on the west side of the city that is open to the public at no cost. How about a new city tennis center as part of the Baptist Hospital area make-over? How about some tennis courts at Legion Field? The Roger Scott Tennis Center is run like a private club. A one-year family tennis club membership is $1151.67. Anyone know where the people live who have a tennis club membership and how it breaks out by race too? Do Grover Robinson (Cordova Park) and/or Robert Bender (Cordova Place) belong to the tennis club? If so, they should abstain from being involved in any actions that would benefit them. Another idea would be for the tennis center to increase its rates and create a maintenance fund so that when repairs to include resurfacing are needed there is already money in the bank.