Almost every Mayflower School District patron who voted in Tuesday’s special election said yes to new athletic facilities.
Superintendent John Gray said the vote was 151 for and 17 against extending the 15.5 debt-service millage for another 13 years to fund a $5 million project, which includes a new field house, the installation of synthetic turf on the football field and resurfacing the track.
“That’s about 90 percent of the voters. We’re really excited about it,” Gray said. “Now we need to plan. The next step is to sell the bonds and get the money. We hope to have that by the end of April.”
After the bonds are sold, which should bring $5.65 million, the next phase will be to get the architectural plans ready for bids, he said.
“We’ve let our athletic facilities slide,” Gray said in an earlier interview.
The field house and track were built in the 1970s, he said, and the track is “very, very, very worn.”
He said the field-house project will include home seating, stadium restrooms, Eagle and visitor locker rooms, a weight room, a training room, coaches’ offices, a resurfaced track and new turf. Construction is estimated to take a year.
The field-house project is estimated to cost $3.5 million, and the turf and track improvements another $1 million, Gray said. Architects are Jackson Brown Palculict
Architects of Little Rock. Parking improvements are estimated to cost another $500,000.
“Our plan is to take out the visitors’ bleachers and put in a two-story field house, and on the roof will be home bleachers over there.”
The visitors’ bleachers will be on the existing home side, where old concrete bleachers are now.
Pat Raney, school board president, said he wasn’t sure what to expect from the election.
“It’s always tough to gauge that, because in this day and age, you can see a lot of things out there in social media, ‘Hey, yes,’ and ‘Hey, no.’ Our goal was to get the message out there that what we were trying to do was get the latest, greatest facilities for the students of our district.
“We feel like this was a tremendous amount of voters who turned out, because special elections are hard to get people out for to cast that vote. We’re tickled to death.”
Raney said the artificial turf will be the first part of the project that is undertaken.
“We’re going to start with the football field, so our hopes are we won’t miss a beat” and have it completed for the first game of the season, he said.
Other sports and activities will benefit from the artificial turf, too, Raney said.
He said the school’s baseball team had to practice at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway after recent heavy rains, and the team could have used the football field if there had been turf. He also said the band will be able to host events when the artificial turf is installed.
The plan is for the track upgrade to be done last, Raney said. “We don’t want to tear it up during all this other stuff.”
Gray and Raney said the community will benefit by using the workout equipment in the field house during certain hours.
The superintendent also said the project will be an economic-development boost for the city because the improvements could attract people to move into the district.
Gray said this is the first millage election the district has had since he was hired in 2007, and most voters understood that the district was not asking for an increase in the millage.
“We’ve tried to do everything we can here without adding to the millage,” Gray said. “We’ve done a lot of renovations; we’ve done it all without asking the voters for more money. We did the agri facility. We did the softball/baseball indoor batting facility, put the new wing on our middle school. Then we did renovations to our buildings. …”
“… We need to thank the voters for supporting our kids. We really appreciate their support and thank the voters for doing this,” Gray said.
Raney agreed.
“This is a tremendous day for us, and we’re excited; we’re tremendously excited,” Raney said. “I’d like to give a great big thank you to all our voters on behalf of our students and staff.
“It sounds big, but it is going to be huge for our community.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.