C&M Bush Hogging awarded bid for power line clearing

Bids were read for the clearing of 537.16 miles of power lines of vegetation at the Dec. 5 meeting of the Holly Springs Board of Aldermen.

C&M Bush Hogging out of Oxford, which has been trimming the rights-of-way under the Holly Springs Utility Department lines, and Power Pros LLC each submitted bids for one, two or three years.

Board attorney John Keith Perry read the bids as follows:

C&M Bush Hogging
$1,040,000, year one
$1,040,000, year two
$1,040,000 year three
Total: $3,120,000, three years

Power Pros Power Line Solution
$1,220,868, year one
$1,424,346, year two
$1,424,346, year three
Total: $4,069,560, three years.
The total hours came to 2,080.

IMS Engineers, which solicited the bids, recommended the bid be awarded to C&M Bush Hogging.

“What’s your pleasure?” asked Mayor Sharon Gipson.

Ward 1 alderman Bernita Fountain made a motion to accept the bid of C&M Bush Hogging for up to $3,120,000 for three years.

Ward 4 alderman Patricia Merriweather asked when the work would begin.

Gipson said, “for this week or as soon as possible.”

Ward 2 alderman Andre Jones expressed concern as to how the right-of-way clearing will be paid for.

“I know we have $500,000 coming from the state,” he said. “Year one is $1,040,000, so how will we be able to fund with our current financial situation at the utility department?”

“I definitely understand your concern,” Gipson said. “We don’t foresee it as an issue. We are having fewer outages which means revenue will be more.”

Fountain joined Jones in his concern about financing the project.

“I’m feeling the same way,” she said. “If we don’t have the money to pay, they wouldn’t work. They have had fewer outages and I am attributing that to the cutting of the rightof-way.”

“Are they cutting now?” asked Merriweather.

“Yes, they have been going to major problem areas Roberts Chapel Road and other places due to vegetation concerns,” Gipson said.

Fountain made a motion to approve the first year of clearing, but her motion failed for a lack of a second.

“But we don’t have a financial situation at the utility department,” Gipson said. “I definitely appreciate your concerns.”

Gipson said she’s asked for a line of credit...so we can take care of these items.

“Right-of-way is a no brainer,” she said. “They’ve been doing an excellent job. We’re not going to put anything on here we can’t pay for. The politicking has to stop.”

Shipp asked how much longer the current contract with C&M Bush Hogging has.

Gipson said she does not know.

“He’s been with us a while,” she said, saying C&M is not doing the cleaning in a full way. “We are not going to put the city in a hole (financially). But we are going to be in a hole if we don’t get this approved tonight. It’s something we really have to do or we will be having the same issues we had prior.”

“We had outages on Roberts Chapel Road. We had outages at Ashland. We had outages and we allowed the money not to exceed. So they have been doing a job,” Fountain said. “I am not saying we have had no outages. We’ve had fewer outages and I am attributing that to the cutting of the right-of-way. So the money we allowed has not run out?”

“No,” said Gipson. “All right, we will go down (the agenda) and pretty soon we won’t have right-of-way services because the other will be exhausted.

“Trust and believe we didn’t have a lot on the agenda tonight. We are not going to put anything on here that we can’t pay for and that is just the bottom line.

“This is a major thing. We are getting close to the winter months. This is a necessity. Trust and believe that there are funds or that we make sure there are sources there for them.”

(The $500,000 Jones alluded to was an appropriation the state of Mississippi awarded to the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide an assessment of the electric department and money for vegetation management in the electric department’s service boundaries.