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Round track decision still stings for some

• Fallout from the closing of a popular round track racing venue continues to escalate.

Carlton Fletcher

ALBANY — Burned by a Dougherty County Commission vote that he says, in effect, forced him to give up on plans to buy the Albany Motor Speedway, businessman Tim Pafford made clear Wednesday his future intentions.

“I ain’t going away,” he said. “I’m going to court.”

Citing findings of a study he conducted on the potential cost to construct a 25-foot berm at the speedway, which commissioners made a condition for allowing vehicles other than Legends cars to race at the track, Pafford said the figure he came up with is a staggering $3.7 million.

“A study I conducted shows this is just impossible to do,” Pafford said. “With a 25-foot-high berm, you would have to have 50 feet of slope on either side of the berm. That would completely submerge our bathrooms and place our race tower 40 percent under dirt.

“Our control booth would have to be moved, and we’d have to take up and move all of the power poles on the property. The Army Corps of Engineers would have to give approval for the structure (commissioners) say we need, and the entire 16 acres of property would need an erosion wall that would take $490,000 worth of concrete, and that doesn’t include labor.”

That, Pafford says, is more than he bargained for when he agreed to buy the track from restaurateur Bill Farnsworth.

“By saying that we had to put this berm up, the commission was just showing their ignorance,” he said. “Did they contact the Corps of Engineers to see if this proposal was feasible? No. Did they contact an architect about design issues? No. This kind of structure would just be a disaster.

“And here’s what really amazes me. They made this decision based on complaints of 10 or 12 people, some of who have a personal vendetta against me. They’re basically imposing a noise ordinance, and Dougherty County does not have a noise ordinance.”

Pafford said he has secured law firms from the Atlanta area to file separate $2 million lawsuits against the county and the Radium Springs Neighborhood Association, which vocally opposed allowing racing to continue at the track, citing noise concerns.

“These folks just may end up retiring me,” Pafford said.

While Pafford was moving forward with legal plans Wednesday, many involved — directly and indirectly — with the track weighed in on the commission’s Monday vote, which called for racing of all vehicles to continue at the track with the provision that the berm be added.

Local businessman Tommy Miles said he wanted to encourage (Farnsworth) to keep the track open.

“As an (African-American) businessman, I was made to jump through a lot of hoops to get my businesses going,” he said. “I want to talk to that gentleman, encourage him to keep the track open. We need to save that track.”

Businessman Bob Brooks, who expressed disappointment in the commission’s decision after Monday’s meeting, said he wanted to clear up statements attributed to him after that meeting.

“When I mentioned events at Doublegate and the fair, my point was not that there was any problem with noise at those events, but that residents in those neighborhoods did not complain about the noise,” Brooks said. “They accept that as part of living in those neighborhoods.”

County Commission Chair Jeff Sinyard, noting that he was disappointed that Pafford had made personal remarks about some of the commissioners in the wake of the vote, said he and the other commissioners tried to come up with a compromise that was best for all parties involved.

“Them closing the track is the last thing we wanted to happen,” Sinyard said. “It would have been easy for us to vote to let things stay as they were, but we made the tough decision.

“Of course, what’s not being said is that when Mr. Pafford ran the track in 1999 and 2000 and again in 2004, he received letters that are a part of open records that told him he was not meeting the requirements of the agreement the track had with the county (to race Legends cars only). If he’d taken care of this issue then, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.”

Businessman James Simon, who owns Southway Crane Services in Albany, is one of the people affected directly by the commission’s vote. A racing fan all his life, Simon’s son Cale (named for race legend Cale Yarbrough), had been racing at the Speedway since he was 13 years old. He said the action taken by the commission did not meet its stated purpose.

“They said they were taking this action because those people in Radium Springs complained about the noise,” he said. “Well, shutting down the (speedway) did not do that. That dragstrip is still out there, and they race three days a week rather than the two at the speedway.

“I’ve tried to support that track with every new owner over the years, and what is sad is that Tim had come up with a plan that was really working. It was just good, clean fun. There are a group of us who are so upset and feel so strongly about this, we’re at a point where we’re thinking about trying to raise money to help pay Tim’s legal costs.”

Meanwhile, the fallout of the track closing has even touched the nearby U.S. 19 Dragway.

“Since y’all ran those stories about the ‘track’ closing, we’ve been getting tons of calls from people who regularly come to the dragway,” Michel Mentzer, who with her husband Charles owns the dragway, said. “Our folks call our place the ‘track,’ so they were concerned that we were closing. We just had one of our most successful events ever.”

The dragway, which has a big event planned for Memorial Day weekend, has events Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Schedules are available at the Web site us19dragway.com.

Pafford, meanwhile, said he can’t understand why one county commissioner advised him to simply move ahead with the purchase of the track and not worry about asking for permission to race vehicles other than Legends cars, only to have their vote essentially force him out of the purchase.

“Commissioner (Jack) Stone (who did not vote to halt the racing or for the “compromise” measure to require the berm, saying both would “kill” the track) and Commissioner (Muarlean) Edwards did what was best for the county, and I applaud them,” Pafford reiterated Wednesday. “I’m being punished for doing what I thought was right.

“I don’t know what motivated the commissioners. I think there might have been racial motives behind Mr. Hayes’ vote. All I know is that I’ll see these folks in court.”

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