The city is looking for state and federal help to tear down the former Sanderson Plumbing Products Plant of Tuffy Lane and maybe build a disaster shelter in its place.
Columbus council members approved the final draft of its resolution for legislative funding priorities during its regular meeting Tuesday at the Municipal Complex. The council’s top priority from the state is a $1 million request to renovate and better equip the forensics lab, while the top federal priority is a $20 million request for a watershed study and subsequent improvement projects through the Water Resource Development Act.
The Sanderson Plumbing demolition joins a $2 million request to build a Northeast Mississippi Area Crime Center as secondary priorities for state funding. A $5 million request to build the disaster shelter is listed as the city’s secondary federal funding priority.
Sanderson Plumbing, a toilet seat manufacturer, closed after filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2013. Mississippi Development Authority owns the 30-acre site, which includes a 36,000 square-foot building. Jammie Garrett, Columbus’ chief operations officer, said the city is requesting the legislature provide MDA with $1 million to remediate the site.
“There’s vagrancy. There’s also stagnant water, environmental concerns,” Garrett said. “There’s also illicit activity … because it’s in such disrepair, it opens the door to things like that.”
Garrett noted a hole had even been cut in the gate at the site at some point and all the copper stolen, and the body of a missing woman was found at the site in November.
As for the disaster shelter, Garrett said the city needs a centralized location that can hold large numbers of people. The city has partnered with several organizations to host a warming shelter at the Columbus Housing Authority’s MLK Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on dangerously cold nights through the end of the month, but Garrett said a devastating winter storm could have created need that would easily have overwhelmed that facility.
“The city suffered from the (February) 2019 tornado, and we don’t have a place for people to shelter large enough within the city if we were to encounter another disaster like that,” she said. “Even with us having a warming shelter, if we had more citizens that were affected (by Winter Storm Fern), where we currently are we couldn’t house it.”
The council has no concrete plans on where it would build a disaster shelter, but Garrett hinted at two legislative priorities potentially working hand-in-hand.
“We were thinking about if one particular area gets demolished, cleaned up and remediated, it could possibly go there,” she said.
Other business:
In other business, the council:
■ approved a planned unit development for three small homes at 115 Waverly Road behind Waffle House (Ward 3 Councilman Rusty Greene is the developer and recused himself from the discussion and vote);
■ appointed local convenience store owner Ghulam Fani to the Columbus Redevelopment Authority, filling a seat left vacant by the late Brenda Lathan;
■ approved temporarily closing parts of Pine Avenue and Walnut Street to mitigate illegal dumping along the route; and
■ suspended a police officer for two days and a garage employee for one day, each without pay, for separate at-fault accidents in city vehicles, following recommendations from the city’s accident review board.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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