About $400,000 of a $2 million reserve fund held by the Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners was spent during the Mississippi River Flood of 2011, and landowners along the mainline river levee in northwest Warren County will see a tax increase beginning next year to make it up.

Approved unanimously by the flood protection district’s seven-member board July 11, the move hikes ad valorem taxes by .24 of a mill for flood protection in the district’s six-county jurisdiction. In Warren County, the increase affects the 500 or so property owners in levee-protected areas west of the Eagle Lake community.

It translates into a jump of $2.40 on a tax bill for a property valued at $100,000.

Peter Nimrod, the district’s chief engineer, said flood-related spending involved expensive equipment rentals and use of aging or defective machinery — particularly in the district’s support of last-minute work of the Corps of Engineers to shore up sand boils at Buck Chute in the weeks preceding the river’s historic crest May 19 at 57.1 feet, 14.1 feet above flood stage.

“We spent at least that much and the final tally hasn’t come in,” Nimrod said, pinpointing two new trackers and a skid-steer loader the district owns as likely sources for the extra revenue. “We need to build up the emergency money.”

“The trackers weren’t really that old, they were just kind of like lemons,” Nimrod said.

Corps officials have said a 1,700-foot berm outfitted with 30 relief wells at Buck Chute is funded and could begin in the fall. Another section of levee at Lake Albemarle is to be raised and reinforced where 300 feet slid away during the flood. About 4 miles of levee underneath protective sheeting laid on the Yazoo Backwater Levee will be resodded and the sheeting eventually removed.

Nimrod said the district rented a skid-steer to carry gravel and dirt for a ring levee around seepage at Buck Chute, the southernmost tip of a 163-mile expanse of mainline levee maintained by the district that stretches north to Bolivar County.

“It’s a handy little machine,” he said.

Costs to repair sections of Eagle Lake Shore Road damaged during the flood, mainly by heavy equipment trucks and not floodwater, totaled $489,880 on an estimate by ABMB Engineers. Most damaged is a 2.25-mile stretch in between sections resurfaced since 2008. The two-lane highway is on a list of roads eligible for state funding via the Mississippi Department of Transportation Office of State Aid Road Construction. The designation does not bind boards of supervisors to wait on state money to tackle a road project. However, recent board administrations have kept “state aid” spruce-ups on the back burner until enough state subsidies are available.

Full discussions begin Wednesday on funding requests from seven county departments under the Board of Supervisors purview, state agencies subsidized by the county and other entities.