A disappointing football season led to Mississippi State changing horses at head coach. Starkville opens Cornerstone Park while grappling with how to hang onto federal grant money for Highway 182 improvements. Amazon announced it will soon have a presence at NorthStar Industrial Park.
Oktibbeha County saw its share of wins, losses, progress and obstacles in 2023.
Here are some of the year’s top stories.
A topsy-turvy year for MSU athletics
The year began with a new Mississippi State athletic director inheriting a first-year head football coach.
It ended with the new athletic director hiring a new head football coach on the heels of a disappointing 2023 season.
Zac Selmon became AD in January, replacing John Cohen, who left for the same position at Auburn. Selmon previously served as a deputy athletic director at the University of Oklahoma.
Meanwhile Zach Arnett, who was vaulted from defensive coordinator to head coach in December 2022 after the sudden death of legendary coach Mike Leach, posted a 4-6 start. Selmon fired Arnett 10 games into the season, after a 51-10 loss to Texas A&M. Two weeks later, MSU hired Jeff Lebby, who served the previous two seasons as Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator, to lead the football program.
Cornerstone Park opens
After more than three years of waiting and $23 million in construction, Starkville opened Cornerstone Park in October.
The 12-field baseball/softball complex will serve as home to city recreational leagues during spring and summer, and it will be used on weekends to host tournaments, mostly for travel ball organizations. A 1.3-mile walking track at the park offers public access during specific hours.
Voters in 2019 approved a 1% addition to the tourism sales tax to fund park improvements, including Cornerstone’s construction, which began off Highway 25 in west Starkville in summer 2020. Supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by weather delays, delayed completion by more than a year.
Cornerstone is the largest of $40 million in planned improvements for the parks system over the next five or so years, others of which are complete or underway.
Amazon is coming to town
A long year of work at NorthStar Industrial Park culminated with the late November announcement that Amazon planned to locate a “Last Mile” facility in a speculative building there.
The facility will serve as the last stopping point for packages before drivers deliver them to customers’ doorsteps. It will create 90 to 120 jobs, including a handful of full-time supervisory positions but mostly part-time drivers. Golden Triangle Development LINK CEO Joe Max Higgins said the facility should be operational some time in 2024.
Amazon becomes the second tenant at NorthStar, joining Garan Manufacturing. A 100,000 square foot pad for a second spec building is complete with clearing and grubbing work at the 384-acre site continuing next spring, which will accommodate future development.
Highway 182, Main Street work
Starkville grabbed about a mile of state highway in 2023, while large swaths of downtown streets got a little bumpier from water and sewer improvements.
Aldermen voted in November to take over maintenance of a stretch of Highway 182 from Old West Point Road to just past Long Street. It requested ownership from the Mississippi Department of Transportation to better accommodate a revitalization plan for the corridor, which is supported by a $12.6 million Federal Highway Administration grant.
The project aims to reduce the road to two lanes divided by landscaped medians and add pedestrian/bike lanes to flank each side of the street, among other things.
City ownership allows it to install water, sewer and drainage infrastructure underneath the roadway, whereas MDOT guidelines require such infrastructure to be installed in the right-of-way outside the road. Aldermen in August rejected bids that followed MDOT guidelines but priced the project at about $42 million. Between the federal grant, American Rescue Plan Act funds and city match set aside for the project, the city has only a little more than $25 million on hand.
The highway grant requires substantial completion by mid-2025 and full completion a year later, and the city has commissioned a new design meant to meet those timelines. Even if the larger project never comes to fruition, the city has promised to complete the $10.2 in ARPA projects that will improve drainage in the corridor.
Downtown, the city began a $2.5 million project in May to replace aging and undersized water and sewer lines. The project will support an upcoming Main Street redesign that will increase pedestrian accessibility.
New county officials elected
New faces won their way into county office, as incumbents for sheriff, tax assessor/collector and two supervisor positions decided not to run for reelection.
Shank Phelps, who was serving as District 1 constable, will start the new year as sheriff, replacing three-term incumbent Steve Gladney. JoHelen Walker beat District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery in the tax assessor/collector’s race. She will replace Allen Morgan.
On the board of supervisors, Ben Carver, Starkville’s Ward 1 alderman, will replace Montgomery in District 1, surviving a crowded Republican primary and runoff before cruising to a general election victory in November. Pattie Little won the Republican primary in District 4 and will replace two-term incumbent Bricklee Miller.
Tax hike funds city pay raises
The board of aldermen in September approved more than $1 million in raises for Starkville employees.
The city used a Stennis Institute of Government salary study as the basis of the raises, which covered 270 employees but particularly emphasized paying market value for department head and high-skill positions, such as engineers. It raised the city’s payroll by roughly 7%.
About $540,000 of the raises would come from the city’s general fund, prompting the board of aldermen to approve a 1.87-mill increase for the next fiscal year to generate enough new property tax revenue to cover them.
Another $510,000 for utilities, sanitation and municipal airport employees comes from enterprise revenue generated by ratepayers.
OCH privatizes ambulance service
The county owned OCH Regional Medical Center transitioned its ambulance service to private hands in July, a move that EMTs and county supervisors said “blindsided” them.
OCH’s board of trustees voted in May to partner with Global Medical Response, which now runs the ambulance service through its MedStat subsidiary. MedStat leadership said it gave all of the OCH ambulance service’s 21 employees the opportunity to stay on.
Hospital CEO Jim Jackson credited the change to lowered demand for its ambulance services over the past five years, especially after the city started using Pafford Ambulance Service in 2019.
The ambulance service takes roughly $1.4 million to operate and loses about $400,000 a year. Jackson said after the subsidies the hospital receives from the county and Mississippi State University, the service still operates $100,000 to $140,000 in the red annually.
New firm, with federal backing, begins lake dam study
WSP USA Environmental and Infrastructure became the third engineering firm since 2020 to begin planning the future for the Oktibbeha County Lake Dam. However, its involvement comes with federal backing.
The Mississippi Soil and Water Conservation Commission tapped WSP to lead the lake project, which will include a study, which is underway, followed by design and construction. A federal Natural Resources Conservation Service grant will fund those three stages, but the county will have to pay for any right-of-way acquisition the project requires.
Project Manager Scott Taylor said during a public hearing in December the ongoing study would look at both fixing at decommissioning the lake and would recommend the best option to the board of supervisors. That process could take about a year, while the entire project could take about five years, he said.
The county drained the lake in January 2020 after County Engineer Clyde Pritchard deemed it in imminent danger of breaching. Pritchard later presented a design for an $8 million dam repair. Later, the county contracted with Mississippi Engineering Group, which estimated it would take $15 to $17 million to repair it. While MSEG charged the county $524,000 for its services on the dam from 2021-2023, it did not get the contract from MSWCC to continue, and Taylor indicated WSP would use only a small portion of MSEG’s work.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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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 40 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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