“I’ve been out here for 45 years,” said Sam Bardwell. “It’s change. People my age don’t like change, and I’m not real crazy about it. I don’t want to fight progress, but I don’t want any dirty industry.”
Bardwell, who lives on Swoope Road in western Lowndes County, is ruminating about the planned Cinco megasite, which will abut his property.
“I’m on the northeast corner of that property they’re talking about,” he said. “My house faces away from the road, so I’ll be facing whatever goes in that corner. I want to make sure there’s checks and balances, that (the Golden Triangle Development LINK) is doing everything the proper way.”
The board of supervisors voted in June to put up half of the $500,000 cost of site assessment work on 1,500 acres of land north of Highway 82 in western Lowndes County with the goal of turning it into a megasite. The Lowndes County Industrial Development Authority also is funding half.
A megasite is a large swath of land, usually more than 1,000 acres, dedicated to industrial developments for several companies to build and operate on. The megasite program is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The Golden Triangle already has four other megasites, which are home to Steel Dynamics, Aluminum Dynamics and Paccar in Lowndes County and Yokohama Tire in Clay County.
The so-called “Cinco” megasite is planned for land north of Highway 82. It encompasses about 1,500 acres bounded by North Frontage Road to the south, Steger Road and Golden Horn Road to the east, Swoope Road to the north and the area across from Paccar and east of the catfish ponds to the west.
Bardwell said he doesn’t want heavy industry coming into his corner of Lowndes County and is afraid of potential pollution — both in the sense of chemicals and the sense of light and noise — if another steel or aluminum mill comes in.
“We live in the country for a reason, and it’s not to be next to this site,” he said.
Bardwell also questioned the necessity of another megasite.
“I think we have a lot of land that’s not being utilized,” Bardwell said. “They’re buying up the countryside because they can.”
Zack Musselwhite lives near the entrance to the Elm Lake community, about a mile east of the proposed megasite. He said he favors development, generally, but understands concerns about location.
“It’ll bring more jobs in, and that’s good,” he said. “It is kind of close to a residential area, but other than that I think it’s a good thing.”
His main concern was increased traffic along North Frontage Road.
“I wouldn’t want (access) to come on Frontage Road by the houses,” he said.
Jay Jourdan, who lives on Steger Road, is concerned but a bit more sanguine about the potential development. He said he doesn’t think many of his neighbors have a problem with development as long as it is “suitable.”
“I think everybody’s preference is that it be a suitable mix for a residential development,” Jourdan said. “Elm Lake and Prairie Waters (subdivisions) have been successful residential areas, and we’d like to see that continue.”
Jourdan said he doesn’t think traffic would be a huge problem, given that part of the proposed megasite was north of the existing Airport Road/Highway 82 interchange.
“I would hope all the traffic would dump off the end of that interchange,” he said. “We get some traffic back and forth that comes out of Clay County onto Taylor-Thurston Road, but it’s not a great deal and it’s not a bother.”
‘We just don’t know’
LINK CEO Joe Max Higgins told The Dispatch Friday morning it is too soon to answer many of the residents’ concerns because planning is still very preliminary.
“We don’t want to be a bad neighbor, obviously,” Higgins said. “We will try to do a buffer (between the site and residences) because, hell, industry doesn’t want to be by you. They don’t want to be in your backyard and you’re just sitting out there grilling.”
Higgins said he has no way to know whether eventual tenants will be “heavy industry.” He said with all four of Cinco’s predecessors, the aim was to land an automotive manufacturer, but that never came to fruition.
“We got the steel mill, and that’s worked out pretty good,” he said. “Then we got Paccar. Again, didn’t turn out too bad. The third was in West Point, and we got Yokohama. I couldn’t have told you from Adam what was going in the fourth.”
Higgins said while he hopes for one big project to take Cinco, it may not work out that way.
“Ten years from now we may decide to split it up into 200- to 300-acre lots and get four or five folks over there instead of one big one,” Higgins said. “We will design it as both a single- and multi-tenant site so we can stand at the door and say, ‘Yes, come in’ or ‘No, don’t come in.’”
Higgins could speak to the pollution concerns, however.
“Again, we don’t know because we don’t know what’s going in there,” Higgins said. “But all of these projects are governed by (the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality). You can pull their permits and see what they’re doing.”
Higgins said the bulk of the traffic would be coming in from the Highway 82 interchange.
“We think we’re going to have to reconfigure that interchange there, and we’ll probably lose a good bit of land (at the megasite) doing it,” Higgins said.
As it stands Airport Road dead-ends at that interchange, with travelers forced to turn onto the frontage road.
Higgins disputed the idea the county doesn’t need more developable land.
“With the aluminum mill, we had 3,000 acres that was in our portfolio that’s gone,” Higgins said. “We’re the 64,000-pound gorilla in economic development, and we find ourselves with just a few hundred acres left to develop (without Cinco).”
Higgins said Lowndes couldn’t afford to slow down its recruiting efforts.
“We could stop and be like Columbus when the city had Baldor and General Tire and Johnson Electric,” Higgins said. “We can stop just like they did. But it didn’t work out too good for Columbus. Those companies hit the end of their useful life and closed, and you’re left with nothing.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 33 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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