Closings postpone Field Day, shut federal offices
The effects of the federal government shutdown reached deep into DeSoto and Tate counties on Tuesday with the closing of offices and cancellation of longscheduled programs.
“We’re pretty much closed al- ready,” Darryl Waller, executive director of the Senatobia-based Tate-DeSoto office of the Farm Service Agency, a unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Tuesday morning. “We’re just trying to get everything shut down.”
He said he and his staff expected to lock the doors by noon.
“Then we’ll just go home and wait till we hear something from Washington,” Waller said. “When we get the word, we’ll come on right back.”
In Hernando, Meleiah Tyus, administrator of the DeSoto Soil and Water Conservation District, said the huge Conservation Field Day event — expected to draw 1,125 DeSoto and Tate County fifth-graders on Wednesday and Thursday to Arkabutla Lake — “has been postponed indefinitely.”
Two major players in the annual program, the federal Natural Resources Conservation Agency and the Corps of Engineers, which oversees the lake and Dub Patton Recreation Area where the event was to held, “had to pull out due to the shutdown,” Tyus said.
“We’re hoping we can get it rescheduled,” Tyus said.
“It’s too bad about the hard work all the exhibitors and volunteers have done preparing for Field Day, but where I really feel bad is about the kids. I know they’ll be disappointed.”
Her county-affiliated office shares space with the NRCS at the USDA Service Center on U. S. 51 south of the Hernando square. While federal operations are on hiatus, “I’ll be working from home,” Tyus said.