Warner Robins mayor defends sports complex location

WARNER ROBINS Mayor Randy Toms on Thursday defended the city’s choice of locations for a $22 million sports complex.

The City Council is considering whether to go forward with building the complex on 65 acres the city owns at the corner of Elberta Road and Houston Road.

Toms discussed the project at the Robins Regional Chamber of Commerce Eggs & Issues breakfast. He said one of the criticisms he has heard about the project is the location.

“Some people don’t like that part of town,” he told an audience of about 150 gathered at the Cary W. Martin Conference Center. “I don’t want to give up on any part of town, and I think if we build a first-class sports complex on the north side of town, it’s going to cause that area to grow.”

The council has a proposal in hand for the design of the complex and may consider whether to move forward at its May 2 meeting.

Thursday’s event was in a question-and-answer format with Chamber President April Bragg.

She asked first about the response to the April 1 tornado that caused damage estimated at nearly $14 million. That includes $4.8 million in damage estimated at Robins Air Force Base.

“I learned we really do work together well in the Middle Georgia area,” Toms said. “Sometimes it looks like things are discombobulated, but when something happens that you really need to get together and work together on, it’s amazing.”

The day after the storm hit, Toms flew over the city in a Georgia State Patrol helicopter, and he said he could see from the air that work was already underway to clean up.

But in the chaos immediately after the storm, which shut down City Hall due to flooding and a power outage, Toms’ firefighter training helped him through it, he said.

“I knew you had to calm down,” he said. “Everything is going crazy. You’ve just got to calm down and handle it and take the advice you are given.”

But thinking like a firefighter isn’t always the way to go into the job of mayor, he noted later.

“Government, by nature, is slow,” he said. “I made a living making quick decisions, but not everything is on fire.”

He discussed efforts to revitalize the area around Commercial Circle as well as Watson Boulevard from Davis Drive to the base. Toms said the city wants to create an area where young airmen at Robins can leave the base and have places to enjoy themselves.

That’s something that has been discussed for a long time, but he is optimistic things will happen.

“I think we are going to see an awful lot of progress in that in the next couple of years,” he said. “I think we have a real good chance of success.”

He also discussed Thursday a recent controversy over the city’s decision to shift $250,000 from the animal shelter to downtown development.

That drew the ire of shelter supporters, but Toms said there was confusion about that money shift. He said it was not special purpose local option sales tax dollars earmarked for the project. In 2009, he said, the city took the money from the gas fund and designated it for the animal shelter to add an additional pod.

But as it turned out, the pod has not been needed, so the council voted to put that money into downtown development instead.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 11:19 AM with the headline "Warner Robins mayor defends sports complex location."