Hoover council to hold special meeting Monday night to keep Met Complex afloat

The Hoover City Council plans to have a special teleconference and video conference meeting at 5 p.m. tonight.

The primary item on the agenda is to authorize the mayor to send money to Sports Facilities Management, which manages the Hoover Metropolitan Complex, to help the company maintain operations while the facility is shut down due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Councilman Mike Shaw, who is chairman of the advisory committee that oversees the complex, said the idea is to help SFM maintain minimal operations during the shutdown during a time when it is not receiving revenue.

It appears SFM will need at least $200,000 to get through June, and the hope is that events will be able to restart there in July, Shaw said.

It’s a delicate balance, he said. City officials know SFM can’t maintain full staffing levels during the shutdown, but they want to have enough staff still working to be able to ramp back up quickly when it is safe to do so, Shaw said.

“We don’t want the cupboard to be bare in three months,” he said.

The last he had heard, SFM had cut its staffing from about 70 people to a core group of about a dozen, Shaw said.

There also may be some discussion at tonight's meeting about the city's overall plan for dealing with expected drops in revenue.

People who want to attend tonight's meeting via teleconference or video conference can go to hooveralabama.gov/686/Public-Meetings for directions.