Morgan and Scott Counties are creating plans to mitigate natural disaster damage by improving infrastructure and creating plans of action.
These counties are working together because they send help to each other whenever a natural disaster happens and it saves costs so both counties can fund more mitigation.
Phil McCarty, the director of the Jacksonville-Morgan County Office of Emergency Management, said the reason they were able to start the planning process was because of a federal grant. He said the counties do not have enough funding to work on planning for the future.
“It's really easy to get stuck in, this just happened, so we have to mitigate this, but realistically you're not looking at the holistic approach and where can we utilize limited funding the best,” McCarty said.
He said not everything will be funded in the planning phase and it will be up to the local governments to decide the budget.
“I think it's important to remember that this is a planning process. This is not an automatic funding process,” McCarty said. “It takes time. It takes engineering. It takes even more planning, this is step one.”
He said the final plan will be uploaded to the EMA and Morgan County website.
There will be a public meeting in the Jacksonville Municipal Building at 2 p.m. on Nov. 18th with two more being expected.
