Madison County Commissioners discuss opioid remediation grant, Pope School project

MADISON COUNTY, Tenn. — The Madison County Commissioners met Tuesday morning to discuss various topics.

One of the main items on the agenda was the opioid remediation grant. Local nonprofits applied for a portion of this money. There was just under $1 million dollars that the county could allocate.

Chairman of the Commission, Mike Taylor, told us about where this money comes from.

“Well this is part of the opioid lawsuit that was filed nationwide,” Taylor said. “When Tennessee gets the money in, they distribute it out to the local counties. We take that lump sum of money we get from the State of Tennessee for the lawsuits, and then its distributed out to the nonprofits.”

There were 12 nonprofits who applied that were chosen for a portion of the money. Each one was given just under 67% of what they requested.

Superintendent for the Jackson-Madison County School System, Dr. Marlon King, requested an amount of $60,000 for the the Pope School project. Taylor explained this more.

“We voted on $60,000 for an engineering study for the school system to review what the traffic is going to look like for around the new Pope,” said Taylor.

We also caught up with Madison County Mayor AJ Massey as he gave us an update on negotiations with the City of Jackson regarding the roads near the new Pope School.

“A part of what we agreed on is that we’d like to wait till after the school opens and is in operation for a few months, so that everybody gets used to the new normal and new location,” Mayor Massey said. “Then preform another traffic study at that point, with not just guessing or models, but actual data.”

Mayor Massey says this new traffic study could come back showing that more needs to be done, but he currently believes that it will end up being less.

Massey said determining who is going to pay for the off-site improvements has still not been decided yet.

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