NATCHEZ — The liaison for the YMCA in Natchez said he hopes the planned pool project can go out for bids within two months.

“We are putting together construction plans and getting specifications to start soliciting bids possibly in 30 to 60 days,” said Casey Custer, the YMCA’s point man for the Natchez recreation project. “Hopefully, we will be breaking dirt very soon.”

Custer spoke Wednesday to the Natchez Rotary Club, continuing a push to local residents and government officials to explain how the partnership between the YMCA and the Natchez-Adams County Recreation Commission will work.

While the city and county governments have committed $1.2 million to the construction of the first phase of a recreation complex that will include a pool, two multi-purpose fields and a restroom and shower facility, the YMCA’s role is as a management company, Custer said.

After Wednesday’s presentation, Recreation Commission Chair Tate Hobdy said a final contract has been sent to the YMCA and awaits their signature. Hobdy said he expects the agreement will be finalized soon.

Custer said the management contract will include not only operating and staffing the pool and aquatics program, but also some degree of oversight over neighborhood parks and programs in the city and county, he said.

Under the agreement, the money the YMCA makes through membership dues and other fees will be directed back into the program, Custer said.

“Our goal is to be in the black by at least $1 by the end of the first year,” he said.

As the Natchez liaison, Custer said he would have to answer to the director or the Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan YMCAs of Mississippi and to the Natchez-Adams County Recreation Commission.

The Adams County Board of Supervisors, the Natchez Board of Aldermen and the Natchez-Adams School District’s board of trustees appoint the recreation commission’s members.

Custer’s presentation to the Rotarians included an overview of the proposed phase I of pool and field construction, which has previously been presented to the three boards that appoint the recreation commission.

Getting the pool built and operating is the first priority, Custer said, but other first-year goals include starting some sports programs to use the multi-purpose fields and after-school programs.

Custer said the YMCA has been “made well aware of how the previous pool turned out, but this will be a different process,” and that the new pool’s uses will be “heavily, heavily structured” but will include some time for families to use it.

At its deepest, the pool will be between 7 and 9-feet-deep, which isn’t deep enough to serve as a diving well but is deep enough to train lifeguards, he said.

“We don’t want to bring in lifeguards from Jackson,” he said. “These lifeguards need to come from Natchez.”

Though the plans do not call for the construction of a parking lot, Custer said those who attend events at the pool or fields can park at the FEMA 361 shelter — which is just outside the planned complex — or, in what he characterized as “rare times of overflow parking,” at the nearby Sports Center parking lot.

The possibility of having people park across Seargent S. Prentiss Drive in the Walmart parking lot and then transporting them across the highway to the center with the city’s public transportation system has also been discussed, he said.

“Through all of this, we hope you will be patient with us,” Custer said. “We are technically outsiders, so we will stub our toes along the way, so we ask your patience, and hopefully we will make a difference along the way.”