The suggestion seemed to come almost as an afterthought.
During Wednesday’s Lowndes County Board of Supervisors meeting, Roger Short, the county’s park director, presented an update on the progress of repairs and renovations to the Crawford gym, which is being funded by a $350,000 bond appropriation passed by the Legislature in 2018.
Noting the cost estimate for the project is well short of the money available — by about $50,000 — District 4 supervisor Jeff Smith asked if the project could be amended to retrofit the gym as a storm shelter.
Smith was told that the remaining funds would not cover the cost of the alteration.
That idea may have been dismissed, but the issue remains.
The lack of shelters represents a public safety issue. Mississippi averages 21 tornadoes from January through April each year; last year though April the state saw 83.
There is currently only one public storm shelter west of the river, which is in the District 5 road department barn.
We note that for the most part, there are no county public storm shelters east of the river either. The new Caledonia elementary school was built with a storm shelter.
This is an issue the county should consider a priority.
In Starkville, the city spent almost $2 million to build a large shelter, with most of those funds ($1.4 million) coming from a Federal Emergency Management Authority grant.
In Columbus, the city is using a matching grant from the Mississippi Emergency Management Authority to build 11 small storm shelters located near the city’s fire departments. The cost of the shelters is estimated at $6,000 each, with MEMA providing 75 percent of the funds. It will cost the city less than $20,000 to build the 11 shelters.
The idea of such smaller shelters dispersed around the outlying areas seems ideally suited for the smaller communities in the county.
To date, there have been no inquiries into the availability of FEMA or MEMA grants that would defray the expense of those shelters. Might those funds be available? We don’t know. Perhaps we have not because we ask not, as the saying goes.
While it’s uncertain if the balance of the Crawford gym funds could be used for that purpose, the county should pursue every available avenue to provide storm shelters for its residents. Even without grants, the county is in a financial position to address this public safety issue.
It’s worth noting that for the past five years, supervisors have used more than $4 million in hospital trust funds to pay for capital improvements, including building community centers and a new E-911 Center, which was also constructed to serve as a storm shelter.
Supervisors have also earmarked hospital funds for a planned sports complex in the west part of the county.
We offer no criticism of those projects, but we do believe that providing public storm shelters is good use of those trust funds.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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