Everett Dickson discusses road conditions leading to his home on Redhawk Road in the Beechwood Mobile Home Park Monday.(The Vicksburg Post/MELANIE DUNCAN)

[04/23/02]Until just a few years ago, Everett Dickson and his neighbors had just a short drive on a paved city road to get to town. Today, without having moved, just to reach the nearest through street, East Clay, they have to drive nearly a mile, partly on a gravel, county road.

Dickson, a retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photographer, said he and his wife, Mary, have lived on what is now called Redhawk Road in the Beechwood Mobile Home Park for 20 years. When they first moved there, the road in front of their neatly kept mobile home was called Maxwell Drive and extended south from Clay Street as a paved road until it met Dusty Road, a county-owned road. Just a couple of years ago, when work began on the new William Kendrick Purks YMCA, Maxwell Drive was cut off from Clay Street leaving the residents of the privately owned and maintained Redhawk Drive with Dusty Road and then Berryman Road as the only route to Clay Street. Instead of having a drive of just a little more than a quarter of a mile to Clay Street, now it’s nearly a mile.

“Look how dirty my truck is,” Dickson said, pointing to the red pickup parked beside his mobile home. “And it just beats it to death.”

Because of where the city limits runs, Dickson and 10 or 11 neighboring mobile homes are inside the city limits of Vicksburg. The remainder of the mobile homes are in the county.

District 1 Supervisor David McDonald is the supervisor representing the district where Redhawk Road is located. He’s aware of the situation and expects a resolution eventually.

The residents of the area, whether in the city or in the county, get water from Culkin Water District and have sewage treated in a lagoon. Trash and garbage collection is a Waste Management collection bin at Dusty Road.

Dickson said at one time, the City of Vicksburg collected the garbage and trash, but something happened and Jerry Beard, the owner of Redhawk Road and the mobile home lots, arranged for the bin.

Dickson said his main complaint is not the lack of city services, even though he and other residents pay mobile home taxes and motor vehicle taxes to the city and county. His main complaint is the fact Dusty Road is gravel.

A side issue is police and fire protection. For units of the Vicksburg Police Department or the Vicksburg Fire Department to reach Dickson and the other city residents of Redhawk Road, they would have to travel from the city, to the county and back into the city.

“The police department, I don’t know what they’d do if they had to come out here, and the fire trucks, I don’t know what they’d do if they had to come out here,” he said.

Dickson said his wife has been to the last three mayors and to county officials about their problem.

“She wrote the county. She wrote the city. All we get is the runaround,” he said.

Beard agreed with the events that led to cutting Redhawk Road off from Clay Street.

“They wanted to level the land for the YMCA and all the property owners got together and said OK. So they cut it off,” Beard said, adding that access to Clay Street is still available.

“That’s the problem. We can’t get the county to pave Dusty Road,” he said.

Paved or not, Dusty Road serves the city and county residents of Redhawk Road and the other residents of Beard’s Beechwood Mobile Home Park.

McDonald said he and the other supervisors are working on criteria on which to base a list of the county’s 176 miles of gravel road so they can do the most needy first.

He said he’s not sure what all the criteria will be.

“I’m sure one of the criteria will be to pave through roads first because they serve more people,” McDonald said, warning that Dusty Road is a dead end and may have a lower priority.

He said the county should soon be completing several high-cost projects, such as the jail roof, and may have more of the money Warren County gets from local gaming taxes to spend on roads.