Editor’s note: Lynn Spruill is the second term mayor of Starkville. This piece is part of an ongoing Mississippi Today Ideas series showcasing perspectives of mayors across the state.

Starkville was founded in 1835 and Mississippi State University was founded as a land grant college in 1878. We have virtually come of age together. Our goal is to be a place where people want to live, work, play and learn.

Like our good friends to the north and south, as college towns we enjoy the cyclical fortune of having much of our community geared to the excitement of youth, learning, sports, and the rise and fall of population driven by the regular beat of each semester. I would venture to say that of the three, Starkville has the distinction of being even more impacted by Mississippi State’s ebb and flow than our counterparts because of our somewhat less diverse business population.

With that seasonal influx of students, comes the challenge of expanding our services to reflect that increased population without breaking the fiscal bank. This means being prepared for those events that bring not just the students but the alumni and visitors to our doorstep. Every city department rises to that challenge through their own respective techniques of excellent planning and execution.

The city of Starkville has one of Mississippi’s few nationally and state accredited police departments. That accreditation keeps our police force on the cutting edge of both the use of technology and the current norms for interaction with our residents, students and visitors.

Policing is one of the most critical and fundamental requirements of a city. For a city that sees large influxes of visitors throughout the year, having an innovative police department is even more crucial.

One of the ways that we have managed that challenge and have pledged to continue to manage it is the heavy use of security cameras throughout our community. This force multiplier gives us great and lasting budgetary advantages over the ever-escalating cost of personnel and vehicles. The Board of Aldermen has adopted the recommendations of the police chief to invest in security cameras and the operations center that oversees the cameras so that our forces can be deployed quickly and efficiently to areas that become hotspots.

Our fire department is rated a 3. Only Biloxi and Gulfport have better class ratings with ratings of 2. The cities of Hattiesburg, Southaven, Columbus and Jackson are the only other 3 rated fire departments in the state.

That rating is important as it creates an understanding in the community for the businesses and the residents that we are capable of protecting with the highest order of first responders. The rating is a testament to the training equipment, personnel and water service capabilities that the city has invested in over the past 10 years. The challenge of training and equipment and pay remains a constant and must be evaluated every budget year.

The infrastructure that lies underground is one of the greatest challenges of any older municipality. Each city in Mississippi that is over 100 years old is facing the same issues of how to replace aging water, sewer and storm water lines.

In 2018 the city developed plans to replace an entire neighborhood’s water and sewer lines. We were spending an excessive amount of manpower hours on repairs in this neighborhood. This was eroding the public trust in our city services. The best and most efficient way to address this was to totally replace the water and sewer lines. We have not had a maintenance call in that neighborhood since the replacements. We have since completed two other neighborhoods and the plan is to evaluate each remaining neighborhood based on the data and begin those remedial efforts in a methodical method as we are able to afford them.

Fresh asphalt overlays are always a politician’s best friend, but they are budget busters if you have multiple miles of roads to address. Starkville recently enlisted a company called Civil Link to assess all our streets and provide us with a status of the streets on a scale of 1 to 10.

The goal is to bring all our streets up to a minimum of a 5 and keep them there. The options for extending the life of our streets include various cost-effective treatments. These treatments extend the life of the streets and, in some cases, cost one-third of what the traditional mill and overlay costs.

Our parks are the other aspect of what makes a city a place where people want to live. We have pledged to invest over $40 million in new and updated parks in the coming three years. Starkville has a 2% food and beverage tax that allows us to both pay for and pledge toward bonds for updating our older parks and constructing new ones. We conducted a master planning effort in 2016 and set about implementing it in 2017. Our success has been a testament to the participation of our community in helping us address their needs and desires.

Listening and understanding, communicating and acting are what is expected of any local government.

I believe that Starkville is succeeding because we are making positive things happen and not simply letting things happen to us. We are always looking for new ways to improve on our basic obligations of public safety and the provision of services.

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