Sunflower County’s roads have seen little improvement over the past eight years, according to District 5 Supervisor Gloria Dickerson, and she wants to know how the county can change that.
“Evidently, our four-year road plan is not having any impact,” she said during Monday’s supervisors meeting. “The roads, according to what I can see, are no different than when I started eight years ago.”
Dickerson said her phone has been blowing up the last couple of weeks from constituents complaining about the terrible road conditions, especially in District 5.
“We’ve gotta do something. We can’t keep doing like this over and over again and not making any improvements in our roads,” she said.
Road Manager T.J. Fairley told Dickerson and the board that his crews have been battling the result of the recent flash flooding and the January ice storm.
“We put out over $150,000 worth of gravel since the weather,” Fairley said. “The whole county is putting out gravel.”
Fairley said his crews have been working to improve the gravel roads.
“It’s a lot of water now and you have poor drainage in Mississippi,” he said.
Fairley did suggest that better drainage would help in some of those areas.
County Engineer Ron Cassada concurred, stating that drainage improvements, more ditches and raising roads in low spots would help.
Board Attorney Johnny McWilliams said to the best of his knowledge, there are no drainage districts in some of the areas Dickerson had referred to.
He said some were attempted years ago, but they were not met kindly.
“They wanted the drainage but they didn’t want the land to be taxed for it. That’s a problem,” he said.
