NATCHEZ — The Adams County Board of Supervisors is working on a plan to refinance a $2.4-million road bond in order to shrink the size of the notes they pay on it each year.

The bond was taken out last year to fund a road overlay program, and Supervisors President Darryl Grennell said the board did not have time to refinance the bond before its October payment of $525,000 came due.

“It was always the intention of the board to take that $2.4 million and extend it (over time),” Grennell said. “We were a little late doing it last year, and that is why we had to make the payment.”

Because that note came due early in the fiscal year — the county fiscal year starts in September — the board had to borrow money until tax receipts started coming in in January, County Administrator Joe Murray said.

The loan to make ends meet through the end of calendar year 2011 was for a total of $1.2 million.

While the bond may not have been the only factor, the more than half million dollar payment it required certainly didn’t help, Murray said.

“Hopefully this year, letting us refinance and restructure (the bond) and carry the due date until March — and hopefully we will be a lot better off this year better at the end of the (current) fiscal year — and come this October we won’t have to borrow any money,” he said.

The board will receive bids for the refinancing from lenders at its Aug. 6 meeting.

The plan to refinance the bond, Grennell said, will be to refinance it for seven or eight years. How long that period will be will ultimately depend on the bids the board receives, he said.

Likewise, the board can’t yet know what the payments on the refinanced note will look like until the bids are reviewed.

“The payments will be lower than $500,000; they will be a couple hundred thousand dollars lower than we are paying, but we won’t know exactly — or what the interest will be — until the bids come in,” Grennell said.

The board begins its budgeting process for the next fiscal year in August, and Grennell said receiving the bids for the refinancing will help in the planning for the coming year.