T-L Photo/GAGE VOTA St. Clairsville Recreation Director Eric Gay announces that phase two of the Jr. Sports Complex project is soon to be completed.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Recreation Director Eric Gay informed St. Clairsville City Council on Monday that Phase 2 of the Jr. Sports Complex will be completed on schedule.

Gay said that with the second phase, he made sure the project would be completed by July 28. He said if the project is not completed by then that ForeverLawn will be hit with a financial penalty.

“We did put some guarantees in this contract, and if they don’t hit those goals, there are penalties on their end financially. So we can keep them on a little better schedule this year than we did last time,” Gay said.

The first phase of work began last October and brought artificial turf to the upper two fields with lights at the Jr. Sports Complex. It experienced major delays due to the winter weather but was completed earlier this year.

When Phase 2 began in June, Gay was confident that it would go according to plan due to not having to deal with the harsh winter weather.

Prior to beginning the second phase, the Parks and Recreation Department received a $210,767.50 federal Land and Water Conservation grant, which was made possible through the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the National Parks Service and was a 50/50 grant.

In 2023, the Parks and Recreation Department applied for the grant that ended up being $994,000 in full but was broken into two phases. Gay received the first installment of the grant last October, which was $289,232.50.

“Randy Melot (the city’s maintenance supervisor) is going to do some work out there, starting a little bit earlier so that we can stay on track. There’s some really good topsoil and dirt out there that he’s going to move around to the other fields to make those ones even better. He’s going to start on that as soon as this week is over,” Gay said. “But again, thanks for the support, and there’s a lot of really good things coming up for us.”

He then informed council that June was an incredibly busy month for the Recreation Department.

“June was a busy month. We played 277 basketball games in 24 days over the month of June. We had teams from Newark all the way to Parkersburg, West Virginia. Word is spreading about the good things we’re doing. I just want to give kudos to my assistant Rocco Ballog, he did a really, really good job with all of that in June, that’s a lot of games to handle,” Gay said.

Councilwoman Terra Butler then spoke about how she wants it to be known that if residents see a larger electric bill this month, it is not due to rates increasing but due to the usage of power to combat the heatwave the Ohio Valley has been experiencing.

Butler added that she looked into American Electric Power’s rates, and they average 20 cents a kilowatt-hour while the city averages 16 cents, meaning that the city’s rate is still 4 cents cheaper than AEP.

Service Director Scott Harvey announced that the St. Clairsville Bike Trail project is ahead of schedule. He also said that when the project is completed next June, the Ohio Department of Transportation will be doing a complete resurfacing of the bike trail using grant funding.

He said that the resurfacing was originally part of the bike trail project, but it ended up getting scratched due to not having the funds. But the city applied for another grant through ODOT and received $370,000.

He added that the city will still have to pay roughly $16,000 for engineering for the project.