$100,000 Spruce-Up Among Plans to Make Lake More Viable

Jul. 24–As it often has since the county opened its first park there in 1969, Lake Tobesofkee is again at the forefront of discussion for Bibb County commissioners.

About $100,000 in improvements are slated to begin soon and new regulations have been discussed during recent commission meetings. More improvements and a new fee structure might also be on the way as commissioners nudge the lake toward, though likely not to, the break-even point financially.

“We don’t want to make it so expensive that people can’t use it, but we want to have that happy medium,” Bibb County Commission Chairman Charles Bishop said last week. “Recreation is a lot like police protection. A lot of times you can’t make money off it.”

The county hired former commission Chairman Tommy Olmstead earlier this year to market and lobby for the park part-time for $20,000 a year. Since then, with input from Olmstead and lake director Doug Furney, the commission has approved five new “pull-through” camping sites to accommodate large RVs and electricity upgrades for campers at Claystone Park. They also will refurbish the lakefront home that once housed the park’s director and rent the building for meetings and retreats.

Some of the upgrades are scheduled for discussion during the commission’s Tobesofkee committee meeting Tuesday.

Long-term plans, including a new advertising drive, are in the discussion stages. Olmstead said he plans to go back to the state, which will fund half of the current $100,000 construction drive, for more grant money. He and Furney both envision a new welcome center and more parking and bathrooms for Sandy Beach, which hosts most of the lake’s major events, such as Sparks over the Park every July 4.

Eventually, Olmstead said he’d like to see an amphitheater terraced into a steep hill at Sandy Beach, where a water slide ran into the lake in the 1980s.

But all that is well in the future.

“We need to bring Claystone up to be first-class before we move anywhere else,” Olmstead said.

The dam that turned Tobesofkee Creek into Lake Tobesofkee was built beginning in 1963. Officials pitched the lake for soil conservation and flood control, but it was quickly developed by Bibb County for recreational use. The first park, Flintrock, opened in June 1969. It has since closed and there are now three parks: Arrowhead, Claystone and Sandy Beach.

The lake offers beaches, camping, swimming, picnicking, boating and fishing. It gets about 70,000 visitors a year and county taxpayers will subsidize the lake’s about $1.2 million budget this year to the tune of more than $730,000.

That’s not uncommon for public lakes. Of the 38 Georgia state parks with lakes, six of them made money in fiscal year 2004, according to Kim Hatcher, spokeswoman for the parks department. Several of them showed a profit only because vacant positions cut down on expenses, Hatcher said in an e-mail to The Telegraph.

Bishop said that “someday (Tobesofkee) may break even,” but for now he’d just like to see the park edge closer to the goal. And he noted the tax revenues the lake creates. He and Olmstead pegged the taxes paid by lakefront property owners – not including homeowners in subdivisions who might have a lake view or boat ramp access – at $2.5 million a year.

“That more than subsidizes the rest of it,” said Bishop, who lives in one of many subdivisions built around the lake.

“The whole west side of Bibb County is developed because of the lake,” said Furney, who took over as park director last year.

The lake cost about $5 million to build, much of it provided by federal loans and grants. The county still owes about $934,000 on the loans, according to the Bibb finance office, and pays on the debt each year.

Tobesofkee has long been a favorite for area fishermen and is home to largemouth bass, catfish and crappie. Frank Patterson, one of the park’s original rangers and a former assistant director, said he thought the record for a largemouth bass caught at the lake was 11 pounds, 3 ounces, but a 1985 Telegraph article mentions a 12 pound, 8 ounce catch.

And there are no 200-pound catfish in the lake, despite rumors to the contrary, Patterson said.

“We had a 3,000-pound Barracuda that was caught,” Patterson said.

“They had to pull it out with a wrecker. You know, the car. The Barracuda.”

Calls to improve Tobesofkee’s facilities and marketing efforts are nothing new. In the mid-1980s, commissioners were discussing much the same plan they are now: upgrades for the park and an advertising push. Then, as now, The Telegraph quoted campers complaining about the park’s condition, and officials saying they do their best to keep things clean and in good repair.

Furney said he gets routine complaints from campers, mostly about the grass not being cut, trash not being picked up or goose feces littering the beaches. With three parks spread on two sides of the lake and covering more than 600 acres, sometimes it’s a challenge just to keep the grass cut, he said. The park has four full-time maintenance workers, seven rangers (including Furney) and gets help from inmates and teens working part-time during the summer, Furney said.

There has been talk among commissioners about the need to expand Furney’s staff, but so far no funding has been attached. The lake has “kind of been neglected,” Bishop said. But how much more money will be invested, and where it will come from, is “one thing we’re trying to come up with now,” he said.

Longtime campers at the lake have complained lately about maintenance and trash pickups at the park. Furney acknowledges that bathrooms at the park, built in the 1960s, need a serious upgrade.

But for James Stevens, who sat on a bucket at the lake’s marina with his hook in the water last week, Tobesofkee is “one of the best.”

“It’s kept up well,” Stevens said. “Real well. Lot of fish in here.”

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