NATCHEZ — Adams County will soon be a little cleaner thanks to a state grant.

The county recently received a rare grant from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to pay for cleaning up illegal dumps.

The $34,000 will serve to reimburse the county for time, labor and equipment in cleaning up the sites, she said.

“We always have to spend money because people are so awful about throwing things instead of putting them in a dump,” Walker said. “This will go a long way toward cleaning up the county.”

And the money is needed, she said.

“In our county, there are a lot of gullies that have a bunch of trash thrown in them,” Walker said. “You’ll see spots around the county where they’ve dumped chairs, sofas, all types of trash and things. This helps cover our cost of cleaning those up.”

The grant was a competitive one, in which the county competed for the money.

Sylvia Bunch with the county road department wrote the bulk of the grant proposal.

“The (dump) sites are terrible,” Bunch said. “There are eight big sites, and there are always little sites.”

People continuously dump trash into holes and ditches, and the road department has to continuously clean out those dumps.

The road workers sometimes find pretty unpleasant trash, she said.

“In the wintertime, people will dump deer bones and nasty stuff,” Bunch said. “It’s amazing — people have no pride in their county.”

The county provides areas where residents can dump their trash for free, but people continue to litter the county with debris, she said.

But the grant should help with the problem, at least temporarily, she said.

“It’s not total reimbursement, but every penny helps cover the expense,” Bunch said.

Every penny is one less the county has to spend, one less the taxpayers have to spend.

“If you don’t have money to cover the expense, it always relates back to raising taxes,” Bunch said. “People don’t like to pay taxes, so we try to keep the cost down on everything we can. This grant really does help a lot.”

Road Manager Clarence “Curley” Jones said he hopes that once they clean up sites, residents won’t fill them back up again, or find new places to dump trash. It’s a never-ending battle, he said.

“For a short period of time, it’s fine,” Jones said. “We can clean up one, put up a fence and a no dumping sign, and they’ll probably leave that alone. But somewhere else, we’ll find another one.”

But the grant should certainly help cover the majority of labor, fuel, manpower and equipment for a while, he said.

“The grant pays so much for us to go and clean it up,” Jones said. “It’s really nice.”