Jackson Approves EMA Facility Construction

A new facility for Jackson County’s EMA Department now in the works after Jackson County Commission approval.

The EMA facility will be built on a property just behind the Jackson County Utility District in Gainesboro. EMA Public Information Officer Derek Woolbright said the EMA Department has never had a facility.

“We’ve also used some spare room that the county solid waste has in a building and the county highway department has in a building,” Woolbright said. “So we’ve just kind of for lack of a better term beg borrowed and stole to be able to keep our equipment inside.”

Woolbright said the regional health office was giving the county grant funding to build the facility as it would also serve as a mass vaccination site for the county. Woolbright said out of the properties owned the property behind the Jackson County Utility District was the best fit.

Woolbright said the new facility will help store equipment such as generators and road blockage signs. Woolbright said the facility will make day-to-day operations much smoother.

“This will give us an opportunity to have those things and the vehicles that belong to EMA all stored inside and readily available for when we need to access those.”

Woolbright said now was an ideal time to build a facility as funding was available.

“This is something that has been proposed from the EMA side of things for quite some time here and there,” Woolbright said. “There wasn’t funding to do it. We were approached by the regional health office and this was an opportunity that they were able to help us with so we decided it was a good time to take it to the county commission.”

Woolbright said a timeline on when the project would begin is still unknown.