Wednesday, December 17, 2025–10:40 a.m.
-David Crowder, WRGA News-
It’s an issue that has been discussed for a few years now—whether the City of Rome should split with Floyd County to some degree on parks and recreation.
Early this year, Rome Mayor Craig McDaniel asked Commissioners Jamie Doss, Mark Cochran, and Wayne Robinson to study the issue.
The special committee met a few times during the course of the year, and according to Doss, determined that the City of Rome does not need to get into the recreation programming business.
“We’ve got some great partners in the Boys & Girls Club, the YMCA, and there are others that do a fantastic job, but where we saw an opportunity is with our parks,” he said.
Doss added that parks are very important to the city, not only the neighborhood parks, but the community parks.
“We just opened a new community park at Banty Jones,” he said. “It is a fantastic community park. There is always a crowd at Ridgeferry Park. Quite frankly, it’s overused, but the proximity to our downtown, and with all of the other activities—the tennis center, these new developments, the reverse osmosis facility, and the police department—that is a critical community park.”
Commissioner Bill Collins believes the economically challenged areas of the city have a lack of recreational facilities for sports like basketball and baseball.
“Already, our young folks are having to travel to Garden Lakes to play basketball, and they go to city schools,” he said. “I went to a basketball game that my granddaughter played in, and we had to go all the way to Armuchee. We have to wait long hours and stay out there on school nights. We don’t have a single anything having to do with recreation for our young African-American, our poor whites, or whatever in challenged areas in our city.”
Doss said he could not yet give specifics, but the study committee discussed some grand ideas that could really improve the quality of life in the City of Rome, which could be presented to the commission next year.
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