NATCHEZ — The contents of a sealed envelope could determine the future of Adams County’s hazard mitigation electrical generator project.

At 10 a.m. Monday, the Adams County Board of Supervisors will open bids for the hook-up portion of the project.

“Hopefully (the bids) won’t exceed what we are projecting,” Supervisors President Darryl Grennell said. “As long as it comes in around what we are expecting, within what we have budgeted, we need to go ahead and get those generators hooked up.”

The project has the goal of hooking up generators at the county’s three Red Cross emergency shelters, located at Community Chapel Church, Parkway Baptist Church and the Steckler building. The county was able to purchase the generators and be reimbursed for them through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now, however, the county faces a deadline to complete the project by hooking up the generators. If the hook-ups are not completed by March 31, the county will not receive reimbursements for that phase of the project.

The construction phase of the project is expected to take two weeks, and Adams County Civil Defense Director Stan Owens told the supervisors in January that he believed that, even if it had not been completed, if the project was started by the deadline FEMA would still reimburse the county.

Based on previous bids that the board rejected because they considered them to be too costly, the project will cost approximately $200,000 upfront. After reimbursements, however, the county would have spent approximately $25,000. Adams County Civil Defense already has $100,000 in its budget allocated for the project.

“If those bids are higher than we expected, we will need to sit down and figure out what to do to come up with that money,” Grennell said.

The supervisors’ meeting starts at 9 a.m. in the supervisors’ chambers.