Commissioner’s Corner

Clarion Top News

Tuesday, 04 February 2025 10:08

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Jackson County Commission Chairman Bill Nance for a recap of 2024 and a look ahead for 2025.

Nance began, “We finished 2024 with completing paving of 30.4 miles of county roads. 14.4 miles of those roads were what we call local roads, or those roads off the major minor collectors that get you to your mailbox into your house. So, we were able to get a number of those roads, in segments, paved this year. Also, we were able to get 16 miles of our major minor collectors paved. These are the high volume roads that we have across the county, and really, they’re the backbone of our roads that get you to our state roads.

We were able to rehab County Road 145 bridge, and we also replaced the County Road 32 bridge. Now, we still need to get some paving done on the approaches to both of those bridges. We’re waiting on the paving season to get that done. It was great to be able to fix those bridges that we were starting to see some degradation in the structure of those bridges, and we were having to really watch those them to make sure they were not degrading to the point that we would have to have changed the load limits on those bridges.

Another big project we have been working on this past year was rebuilding the two slope failures on County Road 38. County Road 38 is referenced by most folks as the Langston Gap from Langston up to the Macedonia area in Section. We had two major slopes that failed there, and so rather than just grading and paving over those, we took the approach where we were going try and just completely redesigned and rebuild those, so that’s what we have done. Once we get the paving done and the guardrails up, we’ll be ready to re-open County Road 38 to traffic again.

Also, as soon as weather permits, we will start work on preparing and paving an additional 9.8 miles of County roads. These roads will include County Road 98, County Road 475, County Road 220, County Road 133, County Road 326, Genell Street, Iris Lane, County Road 54, County Road 322, County Road 103 and Parnell Circle. We will also be doing bridge work on County Road 18, County Road 356, County Road 48 and County Road 30 in the coming months.”

Nance continued, “Another project for this coming year, since we have now been given approval from FEMA, will be County Road 93. This road, from Bryant down to Long Island, has been closed for quite some time. A complete redesign of this road has been done, and there are three slopes on that road that have to be repaired.

And a last note on roads: we are working with the Federal Department of Transportation on a grant agreement. Once we get that agreement signed, we will be able to let our citizens know the roads. The grant will provide good amount of funding for us to be able to do some additional paving.

The next area I would like to talk about is solid waste. A number of programs were funded by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Agency last year in our communities and along our roadways. So, I’d like to give you a little data of what we were able to accomplish with that. We cleaned up four sites, and we were able to clean out 29.79 tons of debris, which includes large items like couches and refrigerators and tires and other kinds of debris that have been dumped over the years at those sites. During community clean-ups 47.12 tons of debris was collected.

We were also able to remove 4,115 tires from roadways across the county. These programs are continuing this year, and ADEM has agreed to again provide grant funding for these programs.
I’d like to really just take the time to give a lot of thank yous regarding the snow event we had earlier this month. First of all, I want to say thanks to our public works department and all of the members of public works, as they put in a lot of work over that period of time. They started pre-treating our major minor collectors and mountain side roads 48 hours before the expected snow. That pre-treatment really did a very good job allowing us to be able to handle the snow. After the snow started, public works started the process of snow removal from the roads. The state called us the afternoon before and asked us to help with the snow removal on our Alabama state roads in Jackson County. Public Works assisted in supporting the Alabama Department of Transportation with clean up on many of the roadways.

Thank you to Sheriff’s Department. They were out in full force across the county, helping with traffic incidents that occurred and looking after the safety and welfare of our citizens.
Our Emergency Management Agency employees lived in their offices for four consecutive days.

I would also really like to thank our Rosalie and Scottsboro/Jackson County Rescue Squads. During this weather event, we still have residents in Jackson County on dialysis who needed to get their treatments, and with their help, 22 patients were still able to receive their needed treatments during this event.”