What’s Cooking In The County
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DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
I’ll have to hand it to ole Gaylon Gray — he got me good Monday morning.
The supervisors’ meeting was just getting started when Gray leaned over and asked, where everybody in the room could hear, “Can you cook?”
I thought a second and said, “Well, I do a little grilling.”
He grinned. “Well, you sure are a good pot stirrer.”
I can’t argue with him on that one. And I guess it might be time to ease off the unit-versus-beat system debate I’ve been writing about — unless somebody else wants to research on it.
Truth is, I get both sides. As District 4 Supervisor Eddie Harris said, switching to a unit system would completely change the job description. A supervisor’s hands-on role would shrink, and in many ways it would turn into a part-time job. That’s not exactly what these guys signed up for.
We’ve got a hard-working bunch of supervisors who take pride in their work and the county roads that fall under their care. Take Beat 4, for instance. Eddie inherited a district that had decades of neglect — there is no other way to put it. For him, not being able to work directly on the roads would be a deal-breaker. The man doesn’t need the job; he’s already retired from the Extension Service and only draws part of his supervisor salary because of state retirement rules. He’s doing it because he cares about his home county.
I truly believe Yalobusha County’s supervisors stack up with the best anywhere in Mississippi.
The whole unit-versus-beat question is just food for thought. It’s healthy for people to talk about how government can work better, and it may be that county government in a rural county works better under the Beat System. But if you found out the county could save money by going to a unit system — money that could go straight into paving or gravel — would you be for it?
Speaking of roads, you’ll see elsewhere in the paper a story about a county worker who was hurt Friday trimming limbs along a right-of-way. That story brought to mind a piece of equipment the county bought last year — the Sky Trim.
It’s a 2008 model, sometimes called a “giraffe.” Imagine a skidder with a long arm and a big circular saw blade that can slice through limbs from the safety of the cab. You see them used for power line rights-of-way cutting regularly and the county got a good deal on this piece of equipment. It cost $25,500 — used — and not long after, the county bought a chipper (for the limbs) to go with it, which cost even more (I couldn’t find how much in my notes).
The plan was simple enough: share the cost among all five beats and hire an operator. Each beat would pay its share based on how much the machine worked in their area. That was in July, 2024. More than a year later, the Sky Trim is still sitting at the Multi-Purpose Building, collecting dust.
I get it — good equipment operators aren’t easy to find. But you have to wonder if the beat system makes these kinds of things harder. Somebody has to keep up with which beat the machine is working in, how many hours it’s logged, and who owes what.
Just saying…
