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During the Troup County Board of Commissioners work session on Tuesday morning, the county discussed a plan to hopefully improve safety issues at Callaway Stadium.

Emergency Management Director Zac Steele gave the commissioners an update on safety improvements after multiple incidents at Callaway Stadium including high-profile ones at the LaGrange-Troup football game and Callaway High’s graduation.

“We hosted a meeting last Thursday, of all the prominent people, every public safety, down to the operations director, the superintendent, everybody. Everybody’s working towards a common goal of this project,” Steele said. “I think it’s probably taken the sort of pandemonium event like we saw last November, to bring everybody to the table to say, ‘Alright, hey, what if?’”

One of the biggest changes will be shutting down Dallis Street in front of the stadium from Panther Way to Elm Street during football games. Tailgating also will not be allowed on county or LaGrange College property.

Steele said they got the idea to close the road in front of the stadium after traveling with Troup High to a playoff game against Spaulding High School in Griffin, Georgia.

“Their stadium has a very similar setup to ours with one side of the roadway down there. One of the things they did is they shut the entire road off down the side of the stadium,” Steele said.

Steele said that Andrew Calhoun, the new county-wide Director of Athletics and Safety, and LaGrange Police Chief Garrett Fiveash signed off on the idea. The change will potentially eliminate the threat of drive-by shootings into the stadium.

“We saw this down there. We think this will work,” Steele said.

The section of roadway will be closed off 30 minutes before games and reopened 30 minutes after games.

Steele said they are also working to get an extra ambulance at the games.

“They have the ambulance at these games, but they’re committed for Georgia High School Association, just for the football players. So we’re working with the school system to pay a couple of off-duty EMT firemen, the same way they do law enforcement to make sure we have them there,” Steele said.

County Manager Eric Mosley said that they have also made a lot of improvements to lighting, not only on the field but also in the parking lots.

“It’s very well lit,” Mosley said. “We’ve improved lighting around the ticket booths as well. We found some darker areas when you’re leaving the facilities, and we want to brighten those areas up.”