EDITORIAL/City-county cooperation

It's good to see Madison County and the city of Canton working together to solve a 40-year-old flooding problem.

Canton Mayor William Truly appeared before the Board of Supervisors on Monday to ask for help with the flooding along Batchelor Creek that routinely floods Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Union Street and Dinkins Street.

It's been repetitively happening over the last 40 years and is now becoming more severe," Truly said. "You can see from the pictures of MLK Jr. Drive, you can see the impact on individual lives."

That area floods any time the city receives more than two inches of rain, which had happened twice in the past eight days.

"There's a bridge there with a creek that passes through it," he said. "What happens is it comes to a barrier, and (the water) basically stops. It needs to be channeled out all the way out into the county."

The creek should flow out of the area under King Ranch Road and Interstate 55 and ultimately into the Big Black River west of town.

"If you look at Canton from the top-down, it's basically a basin in that area," Truly said. "The creek should take the water away, but it comes to a wooded area that has grown up over a period of time and made that impossible."

The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to help Canton by allowing the County Engineer to collaborate on the project, although they have not allocate any funding.

"As long as we can handle this in-house, I'm for it," said District 3 Supervisor Gerald Steen.

That's the kind of cooperation to hear about that is good for us all.