City pays $1.45M to clean up after tornado, awaits repayment

MCCOMB, Miss. (AP) — A southwest Mississippi city has paid $1.45 million to clean up from an April 23 tornado and now awaits reimbursement from federal and state disaster agency.

The Enterprise-Journal reports McComb made its final payment to a debris removal contractor and a monitoring company last week.

That’s more than twice the $600,000 McComb paid to clean up from a May 2019 tornado that hit the same parts of town.

The city board borrowed $1.5 million from its capital improvement fund to pay for the cleanup and must repay that money by Sept. 30.

The federal government is supposed to get 75% of the cost back from the federal government and 12.5% back from the state, leaving it to pay about $180,000.