Oktibbeha County supervisors will meet next week to review bids the county received for OCH Regional Medical Center.
The deadline was Friday to submit bids to purchase or lease the 96-bed, county-owned hospital. Supervisors will meet at 3 p.m. on Sept. 26 to review the bids. Board President Orlando Trainer said that process will likely happen behind closed doors.
“There’s some highly sensitive information those proposals, on both sides,” Trainer said. “There’s some confidentiality agreements we entered into with individuals who submitted those proposals. We need to be very careful in how we proceed going forward.”
Trainer said supervisors could decide to publicly present the proposals’ information after reviewing them at next week’s meeting.
For now, he said he’s not aware how many proposals the county received. Bids were submitted to County Administrator Emily Garrard, who declined to say how many the county received, when asked.
Supervisors began seeking bids for the hospital in May. Bids were originally supposed to be in by July 7. However, the hospital did not meet a June deadline for most of the information supervisors requested for the bids, and the board pushed the proposal deadline.
While next week’s meeting will happen in executive session, District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard said he wants the board to be transparent as it continues through the process of potentially selling the hospital. He said that includes setting meeting times in the evening, when people can attend.
“From the beginning of this process, we all said that we want to make sure this process is as transparent as possible,” Howard said. “… That has been my stance and that’s still my stance.”
Industrial park contracts
In other business, supervisors unanimously approved contracts to move ahead with a nearly 400-acre industrial park near the intersection of Highways 82 and 389.
Golden Triangle LINK CEO Joe Max Higgins and attorney Christ Pace presented the contracts to supervisors.
Supervisors approved four matters: a memorandum of understanding with Atmos Energy to build a new natural gas line to the site; a memorandum of understanding with 4-County for a new substation adjacent to the industrial site; an environmental service agreement with Headwaters, Inc. for environmental work, including cultural artifacts mitigation; and an engineering services agreement with Neel-Schaffer.
District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery asked how long the cultural mitigation process would take, and Higgins said he expects that process to last up to a year.
Higgins said the LINK will soon provide updated information with timetables and costs for the project to Starkville and county leaders as soon as October.
The industrial park’s development slowed after property owners near the planned challenged a rezoning decision by the Starkville Board of Aldermen. The Oktibbeha County Circuit Court affirmed the city’s rezoning order, and the property owners have since appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court. That legal battle could drag out, but city and county leaders moved ahead at a joint city-county meeting in July to approve a combined $14 million bond issuance for the project.
Higgins said the city and county leaders decided to “damn the torpedoes” and move ahead at the joint meeting, and the project continues to progress, even while the legal challenge lingers in the Supreme Court.
“Whenever the city council meeting is over, assuming they approve it, we can say we’ve left the preliminary phase and are now in the implementation phase,” he said.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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