The City of Southaven recently received the Planning and Economic Development Award for Excellence from the Mississippi Municipal League Organization at the annual conference held in July in Biloxi.

One of our city administration’s primary goals during the last four years has been to improve infrastructure in general, but specifically, to improve the condition of our city streets.  We have increased the annual budget allocation and continue to adjust to a long-range plan of touching every city street once every seven years.  In looking for progressive avenues to be as efficient as possible with these allocated dollars, we took the advice of the City’s engineering consultant Civil-Link and Chief Engineer Dan Cordell to hire the GreenbergFarrow Firm in 2015 to complete a City-Wide Pavement Analysis with ongoing technological services to help us manage our street conditions.  This analysis provided us with a street rating for all 1100 streets with the following scale:  Good, Fair, Critical, and Lost.  It also provided us with virtual tour capabilities so that we can actually ride each street and view the actual street conditions from a desktop.  The City prioritizes street funding based on these ratings and traffic volume.

In addition to comprehensive street ratings, this program has incorporated the use of seal coating materials to preserve asphalt conditions.  This practice preserves the life of street surfaces at approximately 38% of the cost of an asphalt overlay.  This program has been in use since 2016 and is allowing the City to be more efficient with the annual budget allocations for street improvement.  Southaven is one of the first governmental entities to use this program in Mississippi, thus garnering recognition with this prestigious award.