Features

There’s no room for failure

Forrest County District Five Supervisor, Chris Bowen and Maintenance Supervisor, Curtis Elliot at the new county jail construction site.

Safety First! In Forrest County this is not just a sign on the shop wall or an empty promise. “I told the people when I ran for office, safety would be my number one issue,” said Chris Bowen, Forrest County Board of Supervisors, District Five. “In other words, I’d be working on the bridges prior to working on the culverts, and I’d be working on the culverts and shoulders prior to working on the roads.”

Mississippi 811 is a resource that Bowen and the other supervisors in Forrest County utilize to help them, not only work safely, but help with the promise to keep the people of Forrest County safe. “We can’t maintain our roads and keep them in good condition without a tremendous maintenance program that involves a lot of shaping. Before we do any excavation work, which certainly includes shaping ditches and replacing culverts, we call 811.”

Using Mississippi 811 is one of the easiest decisions that Bowen makes and it doesn’t cut into the county’s budget. County supervisors are called on to accomplish a lot with limited manpower and limited resources. “There’s no room for failure in a county supervisor’s job,” he added. “We all use what we have, in terms of resources and information to the best of our ability and push out a product in the end. It’s not always cut and dried and some decisions are extremely difficult.”

One such decision involved the new county jail, currently under construction just outside of Hattiesburg. When the bids were first requested, fuel prices were high, as was the cost of steel and copper. “When we got the bids, we had to make a tough decision,” Bowen said. “Do we accept them or wait and see if some of the costs would go down?”

It was a gamble, but the Board of Supervisors decided to seek new bids. “It could have gone the other way, but it didn’t. The costs did go down and we saved the county about $2 million. We were also able to lock in on a lower interest rate and saved an additional $2.8 million. That’s a pretty significant savings for the people in Forrest County. Was it a hard decision? Yes it was!”

According to Bowen, “There’re a lot of grey areas in what we do along with a lot of tough questions, but if you don’t ask the tough questions, you’ll never get where you need to be.”

Where does Chris Bowen want to be? “It doesn’t matter where I want to be, but it does matter where I would like community to be. I want the next generation to have access to the same wonderful environment that I was raised in. We have excellent drinking water, some of the best air quality east of the Mississippi, a university here in the county, Camp Shelby, Forrest General Hospital… I’ve been all over the world and there’s no place I’d rather be. We’ve got the best of all worlds and I hope the things I do help keep it that way.”