VALLEY GRANDE — A state licensure board for professional engineers has fined Valley Grande Mayor Tom Lee for offering or providing engineering services without a license.

The decision was handed down Jan. 31.

Rick Huett, investigator for the Alabama Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, said Lee was fined $500 and ordered to pay another $235.63 for the cost of the investigation.

Lee also agreed not to offer or provide engineering services in the future, Huett said.

Lee said his appearance before the licensure board was “pretty involved.”

A Valley Grande resident, Lee Peake, filed complaints with the state fire marshal, the state Building Commission, the state Board of Architects and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, complaining the mayor provided or offered to provide engineering services relative to the baseball fields at the City of Valley Grande Sports Complex.

Nothing came of the complaints until the architecture board referred its complaint to the engineering licensure board in September. Peake followed up with a complaint in October, Lee said.

Peake said he filed the complaint because Lee drew the plans for the baseball fields without holding an engineer’s license.

“He’s trying to cut corners,” Peake said. “I know a little about the rules of ADEM (Alabama Department of Environmental Management) and bids and how projects are supposed to be bid.”

Peake said he is not opposed to the sportsplex.

“But I don’t live next to it,” he said. “I wouldn’t want it to be across the street.”

The mayor said he explained to the engineering licensure board he had taken some drawings of ball fields taken from the Internet, downloaded them, overlaid them on a map of the city property, placed some dimensions for slopes at the edges for the ball fields to fit and presented them to the council, which included the drawing on its request for proposals to bid.

“A landscape architect is also eligible to do what I can do,” Lee said.

The licensure board heard Lee, but was not moved, so the mayor agreed to sign a consent order, “rather than fight it,” he said.

“It seems a little unfair,” the mayor said, adding the toughest board in the state — ADEM — took no punitive action.

Lee said some had opposed the ball fields, and some residents want to “keep Valley Grande as it is.”

Several residents of Valley Grande have complained about the ball fields — the construction noise and money being spent on the project. Some of those residents, like Tammy Troha, voiced her displeasure to the Times-Journal in December, not with the parks themselves, but the timing of the project.

“I don’t think I have a big issue with the baseball fields,” Troha said then. “I think it is the timing of the baseball fields. We should have had other things in place before we got the baseball fields. I brought up public safety and we have, in Dallas County, a great complex that we spent $1 million or however much it was. We need public security. We have this highway here that people are flying up and down. We need safety.”

The ballfields are nearly finished. Lee said the only work remaining is putting in the fences and laying down the sod.