STARKVILLE — Oktibbeha County supervisors voted unanimously to authorize County Engineer Clyde Pritchard to draw up plans for the replacement of the Oktibbeha County Lake Dam after a public hearing in the chancery courthouse Monday night.
The decision to either replace the dam or no longer have a county lake has yet to be made, but the board agreed to fund the replacement plans with $250,000 from the county’s $2.2 million allocation from the Office of State Aid Road Construction within the Mississippi Department of Transportation.
The vote came after three hours of debate among the supervisors, who have been divided for weeks over how quickly to proceed with the potential replacement of the dam, and public input overwhelmingly in favor of replacing or eliminating the dam as soon as possible.
District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller initially said Pritchard should not create the plans without guaranteed funding for the $8 million project or without further research on what the taxpayers want to do with the lake. Miller chose to vote with the rest of the supervisors after they did not support her opinion on the issue, she said.
District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard, whose family lives just east of the dam, said he was somewhat surprised by the board’s vote after weeks of opposition.
“On the other hand, I knew it was time,” Howard told The Dispatch. “We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to move forward and come up with some sort of solution.”
The dam showed early signs of breaching in January, and heavy rains brought the water level up to the point that the county almost issued a second breach warning earlier this month. A breach would flood the nearby residential area and force about 250 people in at least 130 households to evacuate.
The county installed pumps in January to lower the water level, and construction crews are on standby to cut off the dam’s primary outlet valve when the pumps lower the water to a certain level.
George Sills, a retired dam engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, asked at the hearing why the county did not cut off the valve sooner.
“They’ve known for years that the dam’s not safe,” Sills said. “In July, I was out there and there was hardly any water in it. Why didn’t they cut the riser off then? Why wait until the alligators are nipping at the boat’s rear end?”
Pritchard will meet with MDEQ and Corps of Engineers representatives on March 2 to discuss the county’s options for what to do with the lake. He has been inspecting the dam daily since he found the mudslide on the east side of the levee on Jan. 14.
“Again, for the public, we’re watching the thing pretty doggone close,” Pritchard said.
‘We’re in an unsafe position’
Lake area resident Laura Hogan had a simple question for the board: “What will it take for you to vote to move forward with this project?”
Hogan was one of several people who said the board should have taken action four years ago, when a Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality inspection confirmed the levee needed repairs and ordered the county to keep the lake from rising above a certain level.
District 1 Supervisor and Board President John Montgomery responded by repeating a point from previous meetings: State Aid road money should not be used to pay for the dam project — contrary to what Howard had suggested more than once — when it is not enough to cover the county’s road projects.
District 5 Supervisor Joe Williams said some unrepaired roads cause accidents, so the safety issue at hand is the same, but his argument did not convince Hogan.
“He’s talking about a road, two or three or four accidents,” Hogan said. “You’ve got 200 homes, and if you’re not willing to give up your money for that, shame on you.”
Bud Harris and Eva Maria White also expressed frustration that the county prioritized road projects over replacing the dam, especially after knowing about the dam’s structural problems for four years.
“We’re in an unsafe position and we don’t like it,” White said. “We don’t like having to go to bed at night with a suitcase down at the side of the bed, trying to figure out if we’re going to have to pick it up and run in the night … and I definitely don’t like being compared to a pothole.”
White and Curtis Burchfield urged each supervisor to contribute his or her share of the State Aid road money to District 3, since Howard said he contributed his share to the ongoing Longview Road project (in District 1) several years ago.
Burchfield called out the disputes between the supervisors, particularly Howard and Miller, that ventured into alleged motives behind past votes instead of potential solutions to the problem at hand.
“Let’s work together instead of politicking and strategizing against each other,” Burchfield said.
Howard pointed out that it is “standard practice” for the board to authorize Pritchard to make plans for a project before securing funding for it, and he took issue with some supervisors’ hesitation to do so for the dam.
“If y’all hadn’t figured it out by now, this project, for whatever reason, has been treated differently,” Howard said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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