More pickleball courts are coming to Oxford; however, they won’t be at the old Hayakawa building on Industrial Park Road.

During a recessed meeting on Wednesday, the Oxford Board of Aldermen voted to move ahead with looking into creating a pickleball facility at Stone Park instead.

According to Mark Levy, director of special projects for the city of Oxford, the cost to renovate the Hayakawa building for pickleball courts was about $3.5 million, and that would only be for the area of the building where the courts would be, which is about 60 percent of the building. He said the entire HVAC system also needed to be replaced, and even after renovations, the ceiling would be too low to allow the building to be used for certified pickleball tournaments.

Levy told the Board he felt the city could build a new pickleball facility with about 16 courts at Stone Park, in the area currently occupied by the old softball field, for about the same $3.5 million; however, the courts would be tournament-ready, which then brings folks to Oxford and allows some return on the city’s investment through tax dollars.

Mayor Robyn Tannehill said that while the city first considered putting the courts in the Hayakawa building, it was a short-term plan.

“We budgeted $1 million for the renovations,” she said. “And we felt if we could have the courts here for five years’ use out of it before we re-purposed the building, we felt that was a good investment. Then we found out it’s going to take a million just on the HVAC.”

The board agreed to allocate funds to begin the process for the courts and have an engineer review the space at the park and do a preliminary design for the courts, bathrooms, parking and other possible amenities.