County to cover $50k in pool costs from 2016 per agreement with city

Published 12:01 am Thursday, June 21, 2018

 

NATCHEZ — City and county officials resolved questions over payments for Natchez’s new community pool after the county agreed to cover $50,000 of costs in question.

Payment of approximately $53,000 in contractor and architectural fees was put on hold last week when some Natchez aldermen wanted to ensure they would be overpaying their share toward the pool.

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On Wednesday, Adams County Board of Supervisors President Calvin Butler said the county would pay $50,000 for past expenses. The payments in question occurred in 2016, when the city injected a total of $100,000 for pool expenses. City Clerk Megan Edmonds said those initial payments went toward pool costs, which the city and county are supposed to split evenly.

Two years later, the county is willing to pay half of that expense.

“If that one payment is in question, we’re willing to pay our half,” Butler said. “I spoke to (County Administrator) Joe (Murray), and he said that we’ll take care of our half.”

For the sake of simplicity, the county could pay the vendors the approximately $53,000 owed to them, and the city can in turn pay the county $3,000, board of supervisors attorney Scott Slover said.

Slover added that this is not a case of poor budgeting or mismanagement of funds, but rather just retroactively making sure each side is contributing evenly to the pot.

“Back when these documents were done, when this money was done, because they wanted to do it in a quick fashion, it really didn’t get recorded the way it (should have been),” Slover said. “This is about everyone paying their fair share. It wasn’t about bad budgeting or anything like that.”

A few weeks back, the city paid an invoice of approximately $80,000 for contractor costs regarding the aquatics center, which put the city approximately $29,000 over what they had budgeted. Officials eventually used funds from the city’s community development fund to cover the additional costs.