Nursing Home to be renovated

Part of the Neshoba County Nursing home will be renovated as officials move forward with a $3 million project that has been in the works for nearly four years.

The focus will be on 74 of the nursing home’s 160 resident rooms and one of the nursing stations.

“Basically, it is an HVAC and room renovation project,” said Chief Executive Officer Lee McCall. “We are going to renovate Nursing Station No. 1. It’s one of the older systems in the nursing home that needs replacing.

“Once we do that, we are going to replace all of the HVAC units in the affected rooms, renovate the rooms, put in new flooring. We will paint and freshen the rooms up.”

McCall said other portions of the nursing home have been renovated over the years. The county put the project out for bids a couple of years ago but the bids came back over budget.

“We expect the cost to be around $3.1 million,” McCall said. “When we bid it out before, we had projected the costs at around $1.6 million and it came back at around $2.2 million. With today’s cost of materials, we wish we had gone ahead and done it then.”

McCall said the existing construction was done in 1978 and they have added on.

“When the project came in over budget, we were going to sharpen it up some and rebid it,” McCall said. “Then COVID-19 hit and it delayed it.

“It is at the point where we don’t need to delay anymore. Now that we have gotten some protective measures for COVID in place, like getting residents vaccinated and proper testing, it is time to proceed with the bidding.”

The county has applied for a $600,000 CDBG to help with the costs. The county is also applying for a CAP loan.

“We applied for a CDBG grant during the spring and hope to get some kind of notification in the coming weeks,” McCall said. “Once we receive that notice, we will proceed in bidding the project out. We want to bid it out and hopefully, construction can begin sometime early next year, maybe around February or later in the spring.”