Supervisors discuss striping for county roads, Long Creek Reservoir dam

Published 4:48 pm Thursday, January 29, 2026

Several more roads in Lauderdale County are up to receive striping and reflectors as county supervisors are expected to vote Monday to award a striping package.

At a work session Thursday, Road Manager Rush Mayatt said most of the roads included in the package were recently paved and need to have the yellow and white road markings put down. Roads on the list include Newton Martin Road, Chip Pickering Road, Lauderdale Road, Springhill Road, Lizelia Road and Luther Walker Road.

“These are all part of the recently paved use tax approved roads,” he said. “Lizelia is the exception.”

County supervisors had a portion of Lizelia Road repaved more than a year ago after replacing two bridges with box culverts, Mayatt said, but the work at the time did not include striping.

The total cost of the striping package is estimated at $256,460.74. How soon the work will be complete is uncertain, Mayatt said, as several roads on the list are still in the process of being paved. How quickly paving is completed will depend heavily on weather, he said.

Also on Thursday, Lauderdale County supervisors revisited a years-long effort to repair the Long Creek Reservoir Dam. Owned by the city of Meridian, problems with the dam were first raised by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2008.

The city in 2014 breached the dam and drained a large portion of the reservoir until a solution could be found. Efforts to repair the dam and restore the reservoir have been underway since.

Richmond Alexander, with Engineering Plus, which acts as county engineer, told supervisors a design to fix the dam had been completed and a permit issued by MDEQ in 2023.

At some point along the way, Waggoner Engineering came on board, and focus shifted toward a program under the National Resource Conservation Service to facilitate the work. With different requirements needed to meet the NRCS regulations, the MDEQ plan was effectively abandoned, he said.

“The process is a lot longer. NRCS requirements are different from DEQ requirements, so this became null and void basically going the route,” he said.

Lauderdale County supervisors received $300,000 in state funding to assist with the dam project, but a deadline to use that funding or lose it is rapidly approaching. As that deadline approaches, supervisors are exploring what it would take to pivot back to the MDEQ plan to get the project underway.

Alexander said it would be up to MDEQ whether or not to honor the permit it issued before, but there wouldn’t be a lot of work to do to update the already completed designs with any changes the state agency wants to make.

“We’re talking about a matter of weeks,” he said.

While getting the project ready for bid may not take long, it will cost substantially more than what elected officials had previously been told, Alexander said. The estimated cost of the project in 2016 was around $700,000, but today that cost has ballooned to around $1.5 million.

Supervisor Josh Todd said it’s not just a matter of losing the $300,000 now but not using the money could hurt the county’s chances of getting other funding in the future.

County Administrator Chris Lafferty said supervisors will need to see what their contract with Waggoner says to know if heading in another direction is feasible. At the same time, county officials will meet with city leaders to decide how best to move forward. The city also has some funding available for the dam repairs that could be pooled with the county money.