Proponents of the incorporation of the Bellevue community have reportedly redrawn the boundaries for the proposed municipality, almost a year after withdrawing their original petition to make Bellevue Lamar County’s fifth city.
Lamar County District 4 Supervisor Phillip Carlisle said although he had no specific details of the redrawing, he was aware of the process and said Bellevue officials are probably close to releasing another petition to get the required signatures for an incorporation effort.
“If and when they do, I’m still going to be a supporter of them, and I’m still going to sign the petition, but that’s about all I know for now,” he said.
In an email to The PineBelt NEWS, resident James T. Williams, who is against incorporation, said officials have redrawn the Bellevue map to exclude certain subdivisions and areas with opposition to the incorporation.
“Apparently they have included areas they feel will support the incorporation, while leaving out the areas of the greatest supporters and donors against incorporation,” the email reads. “That seems to me like ‘stacking the deck.’
“The Concerned Citizens Against the incorporation have worked very hard fighting this battle on a ‘shoe string’ budget, through small donations and lots of man hours. Even though there are less voters opposed to the incorporation by the new map, we will continue our opposition with the same good people who do not want to be incorporated.”
Repeated calls to Bellevue mayor-select John Adcock and his office have gone unreturned, as well as calls to Jackson attorney Chad Mask, who had previously represented the group in favor of incorporation.
The original map for the proposed city consisted of about 15.2 square miles – or 9,699 acres – and included such subdivisions as Canebrake, Bellegrass, Highpoint and Sandstone. The city would include approximately 2,325 residential housing units, 31 retail establishments and five churches.
William Ducker, the Purvis attorney hired by Lamar County residents fighting incorporation, said he has been told the redrawn map contains a much smaller area than was previously proposed, although he has not yet received exact details.
“According to a couple of people I’ve talked to, it’s about 40 percent less area,” he said. “In other words, it’s about 61 or 62 percent of what they were asking for before.”
As part of the incorporation process, officials must file in Lamar County Chancery Court a petition with signatures of at least two-thirds of the qualified electors in the area, which in Bellevue’s case would be approximately 2,500 signatures. The Citizens of Bellevue group supporting incorporation withdrew its original petition in April, saying they wanted to obtain additional signatures and re-file at a later date.
Ducker said in an earlier story that the petition fell about 1,000 signatures short of the number required by law to complete the process. According to an examination by the Citizens Against the Proposed City of Bellevue group, the petition contained 2,184 signatures, about 300 short of the required number.
With another 600 signatures that appeared to be invalid, the petition appeared to fall between 900 and 1,000 signatures short of the required number.
Ducker’s numbers showed 2,508 signatures are needed on the Bellevue petition. “Apparently, they’ve got 1,496 signatures, so they are roughly 1,000 votes short,” he said.
