After nearly 10 years of cooperation and a slow, but steady effort to de-politicize the community’s recreation efforts, city and county leaders took a step backward Tuesday and insisted on sticking their collective finger in the pie again.

Formed in 2008 with the signing of an inter-local agreement, the Natchez-Adams County Recreation Commission was on track to do something rarely done in Natchez — get city and county government leaders to relinquish control and set political agendas aside.

The commission had managed to get both city and county governments to commit their individual recreation funds to the commission and also to agree to construct a swimming pool and multipurpose fields.

The fields have been built; the pool has been planned and construction bids gathered.

Both projects have had cost overruns that appear to have been caused by disconnects between those providing estimates and the actual costs of construction. That’s a problem, but the solution isn’t to simply rework the structure already in place.

The solution is to explore the causes of the cost estimate overruns, address and re-bid the project. City, county and recreation commission leaders could do that together without reworking everything in place already.

Instead the elected officials believe they can magically get the costs of the pool down by re-bidding it themselves.

One of their plans appears troubling. In Tuesday’s meeting they discussed having the owner of Magnolia Bluffs Casino work to “leverage” his own spending with construction companies on another project to potentially lower the bids on the Natchez pool.

That doesn’t pass the smell test to us and would seem to run counter to public bid laws.

The plans in place were working. Having more hands — and the attached political agendas — in the process is not helpful, but may be hurtful.

We urge city and county leaders to reconsider their actions and choose to work with the recreation board in its existing format to get the pool project moving again.