The New Iberia City Council voted to name Richard Romero as the new director of the Louisiana PepperPlex on Tuesday, the first step in the $3 million revitalization project planned for the New Iberia sports complex.

Romero, who has spent the past year in charge of Broussard’s three parks, including the newly added St. Julien Sports Complex, said that his first order of business is to start spending the money that has already been allocated to the project.

“The first thing is to get it built, to spend that money that (Mayor) Freddie (DeCourt) has, which is $3 million,” he said. “Hopefully, that’ll be just the start and we can generate some interest and funding to get more money because these parks are easy to get built but then you have operations and maintenance and that never ends. It only gets more and more costly, so down the road there will need to be some funding source, and I believe the tenth district is going to help with that.”

Romero hasn’t officially met with any of the board members for either the park itself or the leagues that play there, but is coming into the job with an understanding of what the PepperPlex has been able to do in the past.

“I’ve had conversations with a few of (the board members) but that was before they knew that I would be taking over as director,” he explained. “I haven’t had a lot of discussions with them, but we’ve all heard about the PepperPlex and what it’s done and not done in the past. I’m trying to go in with a fresh set of eyes.”

With both baseball and soccer currently in their spring seasons, the project will have to wait until the seasons wrap up in June to begin any work.

“The group that has it now will finish out their season that they are in now and then we will close it down and start the renovation,” he said. “That’s greatly helpful for us, and we’re appreciative of that.”

Romero said that despite his connection to the new St. Julien Park, the PepperPlex project will be focused more on providing recreational sports opportunities for New Iberia’s kids.

“St. Julien was a $36 million project, and for this one we’re talking about renovating with $3 million, so it won’t look anything like that,” he said. “I know that it has become a standard, as has Youngsville (Sports Complex), and I see a lot of New Iberia people at both places. I know people are traveling to play in these nice facilities, but my goal is to improve the local youth rec opportunities.”

Construction timelines are notoriously hard to pin down even in the best of times, something Romero said may impact the completion of the park. He added that his plan is to focus on the playing fields first and shoot for an optimistic timeline of Spring 2023 for sports to return to the park.

“I’d like to think that by next season, the park will be built, but with construction and all of that it probably won’t happen like we want it to,” he said. “I haven’t met with the architects yet, but the first order of business will be the fields and to get them up and running as soon as possible. We can do some other work around that if we get the fields set up first. We haven’t put the sequence in order yet, and while I like to think that we will have some control over the sequence of the operation, with the economy and shipping and everything else, there’s no guarantees on any of that. The lead times on some of these projects are a big unknown.”