Jonesboro’s mayor says clearing out the city’s ditches will be a full time job. The Jonesboro City Council has approved the purchase of a Caterpillar excavator and hiring two employees to the city’s street department. Harold Perrin tells KASU news the new equipment and manpower will be clearing out and maintaining the more than 60 miles of ditches in the city that are blamed for historic flooding that occurred in May. He says it was deemed to be more cost effective to do it this way than to bring in an outside contractor to do the work “one-time”.
“When we put out our bids, they came back a little high and we decided that it might be better for us to do it ourselves,” said Perrin.
He says two smaller excavators are in ditches now trying to clear out the ditches. He says when the larger excavator comes in next month, it will stay in the ditches permanently. Perrin gives an update on the work that is going on currently.
“These two excavators have been in ditches ever since the flood and we are not going to pull them out.”
Perrin says excavator cost the city almost $347,000 with the two positions costing just over 58-thousand-dollars. The city will open bids July 20th for stabilization of the city’s drainage. Perrin says a meeting will occur July 21st with the drainage districts in the region.
“I plan to sit down with all of those people in the drainage districts and look at the future. I will tell them what we are doing and I want to know what they are doing. I want to make sure that we can handle this situation.”
Perrin says he wants to have the ditches in town cleared out by the middle of October. That is when the next rainy season starts. While the city has been concentrating on 60 miles of ditches, he says there are hundreds of miles of ditches in Jonesboro that need to be addressed, and he said the costs for doing that would be high.
“We have 300 miles of ditches in the city. The Army Corps of Engineers has conducted an initial study of the first phase of what we need to do about drainage and that estimate is over $100 million. We may have to look at citizens paying a drainage district fee. A lot of those were abolished years ago, but that may be something we look at soon.”
Perrin also says a city-wide meeting will take place next month that will explain the importance of everyone in Jonesboro purchasing flood insurance.
“A lot of the people who lost so much in the floods didn’t have flood insurance. All of Jonesboro is in a flood plain and it is important for people to look at flood insurance and why it is needed.”
Jonesboro Mayor Harold Perrin.
