The Lincoln County Board of Supervisors voted to officially close Keystone Park to the public at its Monday board meeting.

Chancery clerk Tillmon Bishop brought the subject to the attention of the board when he proposed the question, “What are we going to do about Keystone Park?”

Bishop said he had received numerous calls of people asking to practice on the fields. The park is on Industrial Park Road.

“The board has not addressed this and I’ve had calls on it,” Bishop said. “I know this is not something you guys are directly responsible for, but it’s regarding Keystone Fields. They’ve grown up. They look really terrible and I’ve had people calling me and asking me, ‘Can we practice on it?’ My only response to them is our board has not addressed that yet. I think the board needs to address that property.”

Bishop explained the board had someone cutting the grass around the building, but did not have anyone tending to the actual fields.

District 4 Supervisor Eddie Brown proposed the board post “no trespassing” signs around the field and close it to the public for liability reasons.

“There’s holes out there where stuff has been pulled up,” Brown said. “We’re really running a dangerous deal out there. We need to put up ‘no trespassing’ signs. If somebody gets hurt, we don’t want to get sued.”

District 5 Supervisor Doug Falvey proposed the board perform some basic cleanup and maintenance tasks on the fields.

“Eventually, we’re going to have to clean it up, so why are we going to put it off?” Falvey asked. “We know we’re not going to use it and I don’t see just leaving it there and letting it fall when it gets ready to fall. To me, we should get it taken care of it now. It’s just a liability that we’re going to have to deal with sooner or later. It’s got to be cleaned up.”

The other supervisors were hesitant to spend the money on maintenance and cleanup, believing that Keystone would be sold soon.

The county’s hope has been to sell the land Keystone Fields sits on to a company that would join the industrial park and produce jobs in Lincoln County, Bishop said.

“The issue is you don’t know when that is going to be,” Bishop said. “To say that a company — whoever we’re talking about — is going to clean it up is not accurate. We’ve been talking to a particular company for three years. I don’t think we can depend on them to clean up anything. It’s going to have to be ownership, if it’s going to be done.”

In an effort to make the fields more pleasing to the eye from the road, the supervisors agreed to have Keystone Park bush hogged every few weeks.

National Dairy Month

County extension agent Rebecca Bates and several dairymen attended the board meeting to thank the board for its support of National Dairy Month.

“This is a tradition we started many years ago,” Bates said. We usually feed y’all breakfast on this morning, but we decided to do things a little bit different this year.”

Bates invited each member of the board to the National Dairy Month luncheon, before asking the supervisors to step outside where a dairy cow awaited them in front of the courthouse.

District 2 Supervisor Bobby Watts signed a resolution on the back of the dairy cow declaring June National Dairy Month in Lincoln County.

On Friday, the Farmers Market will also celebrate National Dairy Month. Free chocolate milk and ice cream will be given away and several baby calves will make an appearance in Railroad Park. Farm Bureau will return with their hamburgers for sale as well as free grilled sweet corn.

“The Southeastern Dairy Industry Association along with the Lincoln County Dairymen will attend Dairy Day,” Bates said. “It is going to be fabulous.”

Dairy Day will also include a dairy cook-off at the Brookhaven-Lincoln County Chamber of Commerce. Bates said there will be two divisions, youth for ages 7 to 17 and adult for 18 and up, and three categories — appetizer, main dish and dessert.