Rocky Top seeks $975K park grant
First-responders honored for saving life
Rocky Top first-responders involved in saving a life during a call June 29 were honored at Thursday’s City Council meeting. They are, from left: Anthony Braden, fire chief; firefighters Zach Kennedy, Daniel Seiber and Brandon Smith; police officers Nick Marcum and Dustin Henderson; and firefighter Matt Bell. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
During its meeting last Thursday, the city’s Recreation Committee discussed and approved the grant application, then passed the information on to the City Council during the regular council meeting that followed.
The grant money would be used to build a playground in conjunction with the splash pad, which is right behind the post office.
Grants are available for up to $975,000, but Mayor Kerry Templin said the city hopes to get maybe “a quarter of that. That would be awesome.”
The city also is continuing planning for installation of new bleachers and a press box for the George Templin Memorial Field, which will be paid for in part by a grant the city is getting from the Tennessee Office of Outdoor Recreation.
Although the city was approved for a grant of up to $566,000, Templin said the total project cost would be about $500,000, of which half would be from the grant, and the rest financed by the city, probably through a U.S. Department of Agriculture low-interest loan.
State officials handed a symbolic grant check to Rocky Top leaders late last year, but because the grant requires a dollar-for-dollar match from the city, some of the planned upgrades have been dropped or reduced in scope.
New restrooms for the ballpark have been cut out of the plans, mainly because of “flood-plain issues” that would have made them more expensive than the city expected, the mayor said.
Besides the new bleachers, with about 400 seats, and the press box, the city also will use part of the grant to rebuild a walking trail around the park, and install a new chain-link fence around the athletic field.
City Manager Mike Ellis has said the seating area and other facilities, including restrooms, at the ballfield need upgrades that would make them compliant with standards mandated by the federal Americans With Disabilities Act.
“We haven’t done anything with the bleachers to make them ADA-compliant, and in fact, not much has been done at the ballfield to meet ADA standards,” then-city Councilman Zack Green said last year, right after the grant was announced.
Green was chairman of the city’s Recreation Committee, as well. He left the council in December 2024 after choosing not to run again in the November election.
The act requires most public facilities, as well as private facilities open to the public, to be made accessible to people with disabilities.
“The bleachers must be torn down and replaced,” Green said earlier. “This field gets a lot of use. We have Little League baseball there, and the [Lake City] Middle School uses it for football. There are also some slow-pitch softball leagues that use the field.”
Green was able to get the City Council’s approval at its Feb. 15, 2024, meeting to move forward with the grant application for up to $750,000 from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to help pay for the improvements.
The $566,000 award was announced last August, and came from TDEC’s Local Parks and Recreation Fund. Rocky Top was among four area cities to receive grants from the fund, for a total of $1.27 million.
Templin said the city has two years to use the grant before it expires.
“It would be awesome to update the restrooms, too,” the mayor said. “The field itself is in awesome shape, and we already have the new LED lights.”
The ballfield already has a new scoreboard, installed last year, which cost about $12,000, and the City Council approved a $5,000 city contribution to that expense. The rest came from other sources, including the Anderson County Board of Education and Anderson County Commission.
The city last year unsuccessfully applied for a much smaller Blue Cross/Blue Shield grant to pay for trees that would be planted to create a “green space” and canopy around the city’s splash pad, to provide shade. Included would have been an irrigation system.
In other council business last Thursday evening:
• Awards were presented to several city firefighters and police officers for conducting life-saving cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on a man on Hill Street during an emergency callout on June 29.
• Council members heard from the Recreation Committee that several local churches have joined to set up a Halloween “trunk-or-treat” event.
It will be held from 6-8 p.m. Oct. 31 at the George Templin Memorial Field.
Green, the former councilman, presented the plan to the Recreation Committee for its approval at its Thursday meeting.
He told The Courier News that he and Jackie Byrge, children’s director at Rocky Top’s Main Street Baptist Church, planned the event, and were able to recruit several churches to participate.
Green is youth pastor at First Baptist Church in Andersonville.
“People are welcome to come to participate in the trunk-or-treat, but they must register at City Hall and set up before 5:30 p.m.,” Green said. “That’s for the safety of the kids who will be walking around during the event.”
• The council appointed Eddie Taylor to one of the city’s two seats on the Anderson County Library Board.
The other Rocky Top member is Tina Daniels.
