Warren County Emergency Management Director L.W. &#8220Bump” Callaway survived another challenge to his job Monday after receiving help from an unlikely ally.

At the end of regular business on the meeting agenda, District 3 Supervisor Charles Selmon offered three hastily constructed motions, the last of which would have swept aside the five-year director and former Warren County coroner in favor of the office’s director of planning, Gwen Coleman.

Seconded by District 2 Supervisor William Banks, the move would have reassigned Callaway to the duties of the permit officer, following the impending retirement of Sid Neal, the current permit officer.

After Banks’ second, District 4 Supervisor and board president Carl Flanders quickly questioned the wording and logic of Selmon’s intentions.

Specifically, he was asked what the salary of the position would be and what the job descriptions would be in such an arrangement of the emergency management and permits office, county functions that are combined under the current organizational structure.

&#8220I favor reconstruction of emergency management, but this result, without any homework and prior communication being done, would not be favorable,” Flanders said.

In November, Flanders proposed relieving Callaway of those duties and putting the county’s response to events such as natural disasters or industrial accidents under E-911 Director Geoffrey Greetham. That motion died without a second on the county board and fell flat with the E-911 Commission.

District 1 Supervisor David McDonald and District 5 Supervisor Richard George, who both have always favored the department’s current organizational arrangement, also voted no.

Banks, who along with Selmon had a brief but terse exchange with Flanders following the meeting over his opposition, said later he based his support for the move on a lack of communication on disaster planning between Callaway and the full board of supervisors.

&#8220We’re coming up on hurricane season, and he hasn’t gotten back to the board,” Banks said.

The move would have complicated another effort by the county in enforcing the county’s subdivision ordinance, with the board approving advertising for a new permit officer with the added job function of enforcing the ordinance. Earlier in the meeting, they did so by a 4-1 vote, with Selmon dissenting.

Selmon backed up the notion by repeating his position that permitting and inspections should be a department separate from emergency management.

&#8220Those two positions combine emergency management and permits,” Selmon said.

Selmon’s first motion was approved unanimously, allowing board attorney Paul Winfield to explore the cost of a partnership with Channel 17 to televise county meetings – the local-access station was tapped last week to televise Vicksburg Warren School District meetings. The regular county meetings were unplugged in February when the county declined to kick in $20,000 to the city to help finance operations of TV23.

The other, an attempt to hold a meeting to explain deadlines involved with the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan, died without a second.

In other business, the board: