NATCHEZ — Dreams of a free — or nearly free — fire truck for Adams County were doused this week when grant funding went up in smoke.

County Emergency Management Director Robert Bradford Sr. told the Adams County Board of Supervisors Monday he was mistaken when he told them earlier this month the county had secured an $18,000 grant to pay for a truck the county must purchase for the City of Natchez.

Providing a new fire truck is one of a number of stipulations in the county’s 10-year fire protection agreement with the city.

That grant, Bradford said, was actually to pay for equipment and other materials, but not for a truck.

The two other grant applications — each for nearly $300,000 — were not awarded to the county, Bradford said.

“We were hoping to get both of them and that would have been the equivalent of purchasing the truck,” Bradford said. “Now, we have to go back to the drawing board.”

County administrator Joe Murray told the board members the grant funding, which is provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is extremely competitive.

If all the details of the application are not complete, Murray said it likely would not be awarded.

Bradford told the board members he was able to see a few details left out of the original grant application.

“Some information about the amount of calls each station receives was not included, and they needed to know that,” Bradford said. “We just need to go back and make sure we have all those details figured out before we apply again,”

Murray said the grant application process for that funding is continuous and municipalities can apply throughout the year.

Bradford said he believed the next time the organization would award grant monies is December.

“We’re going to go back into the grant-writing phase of it now and make sure we have everything in line,” Bradford said. “We’re going to apply aggressively to accommodate the city and their needs.”

County board attorney Scott Slover said after the meeting the delay in the county purchasing the truck did not violate the 10-year agreement.

“The county has fulfilled its obligations to that agreement, and we expect the city do to the same,” Slover said. “That agreement needs to be enforced so that the people are safe out there.

“We have to acquire a truck as part of the agreement, and again, we’ve asked to get a grant and are looking back into getting that funding.”

City attorney Hyde Carby said he was not aware of any timeline detailing when the county needed to provide a truck to the city.

Natchez Mayor Butch Brown said Tuesday he had not heard of the set back with the grant funding, but said any delay in getting the firetruck puts the city in a difficult position.

“It kind of leaves us in the lurch,” Brown said. “We’ve got to continue providing service to these areas, and it makes it difficult without that truck.”

The firefighting needs of the area, Brown said, grow even greater with the addition of each new industry at the Natchez-Adams County Port.

“We’ve got all this new industry that are depending upon the city to fight the fires and to handle those situations in the county,” Brown said. “We’ve got much more industrial clients for firefighting than we’ve ever had, and we need to the equipment to respond to those potential situations.”

Brown told members of the Natchez Board of Aldermen last week that the truck county officials had originally eyed was sold to someone else.

The company the county was going to purchase the truck from said they had sold the truck and would have to build a new truck, which would likely not be complete until spring.

Brown said he hoped the county would have the grant funding details in order by that time.