Changelog

Put in roughly how much water you used and it works out the monthly bill from Starkville Utilities' published rates. Nearly half the addresses with a Starkville mailing address sit outside the city limits and pay 50% more, so the page asks which you are — and links the tool that tells you from your address.

When the campus roads close, when the pay lots open and when the shuttles start — worked out from the kick-off time the moment Mississippi State announces it. Six home games left this season; most of them have no kick-off time set yet, so the page shows the rules the times come from and fills in the day when the time lands.

Type an address and the page reads the zone straight off FEMA's current map for Oktibbeha County — high-risk, moderate, or outside the mapped areas — and says in plain words what that means for insurance. The page is as careful about what the map does not say. FEMA draws its high-risk line around creeks and rivers: inside the city that is Sand, Hollis, Josey, Glen, Catalpa and Trim Cane. Starkville's other flooding is rain arriving faster than the drains take it, on flat ground, and that is not on the map — every point we checked in the middle of campus comes back as minimal hazard, on ground that heavy storms have put water into. The map itself has been in effect, unchanged, since 17 February 2010. Addresses are looked up in the city's own address list first and the federal geocoder second, which matters here: the national one misses rural roads and private lanes, and outside the city limits is where a flood question is hardest to get answered. Nothing you type is saved.

SMART publishes a departure board for every timetabled route, and we were only reading the opening hours off the front page. So the page said "7 a.m. to 8 p.m." when the honest answer for the Connector, Central and South is once an hour. Each route now carries its own line: how often it comes, its first and last departure, and which stop those times are read from. Starkville East, which was missing from the list entirely, comes every 20 minutes and stops at 6 p.m.; the three MSU campus loops publish no times at all, which the page now says instead of leaving you looking. SMART's own holiday table also lists two closures our list did not have — Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Good Friday. On both of those the page would have told you the buses were running. It also carries the Christmas break: from 23 to 31 December the campus routes do not run and the city routes drop to 8 a.m.–5 p.m., with Christmas Eve ending at 2 p.m. The page now knows all of it and works it out against the day you are reading on.

Which Saturdays the stadium fills, read from Mississippi State's own calendar. Five of this season's seven home games still have no kick-off time, and those get set during the season — so the page reads the calendar rather than carrying a typed-in list, and you can be emailed once when a time is announced. It carries no parking prices or road-closure hours: those are published fresh each season, and a figure we cannot keep true is worse than none.

Of the 30,935 addresses on Starkville's own list, 14,675 sit outside the city limits, and being inside them does not settle who supplies your electricity: 4-County Electric serves more addresses on that list than Starkville Utilities does. Type your address to see which side of the line you are on, which company to call when the power goes out, and your ward and alderman. We could not read 4-County's phone number from their site, so the page says so rather than printing one nobody checked.

Two-thirds of homes here are rented and most tenants are on a first lease. Mississippi gives renters little, and nearly all of it is a deadline — so enter one date and get the date the clock runs out: the 45 days for your deposit, 30 days to end a month-to-month tenancy, 14 days to cure a breach, 30 days for a landlord to fix a defect you reported in writing. The thing worth knowing before anything else: those 45 days only start once you have asked for the deposit back, so put the demand in writing and keep a copy. The page also carries Starkville's own rules, including that your landlord must keep the place below 80°F from April to October and replace broken cooling within 24 hours. It states the law and does the arithmetic; it is not legal advice.

Type your address and the tool tells you whether you're on the GREEN Monday/Thursday collection or the RED Tuesday/Friday one, reading the city's own map. It also carries the set-out window the tickets are written against, which is narrower than most people think: bagged garbage at the kerb no earlier than 5 a.m. on collection day, there by 7 a.m., and taken back in before sunset the same day. Crates and corrals are not allowed. Where the map can't place an address reliably, the tool says so instead of guessing — that's usually a private drive with no city kerbside service at all. Holidays are the one thing it won't compute: the city skips collections rather than shifting them, and announces each closure on its own, so call 662-323-2652.

The town page now opens with a colored-pencil drawing of the Cotton District's columned, balconied streets running under live oaks toward the Mississippi State campus.

Live National Weather Service warnings for Oktibbeha County and the wind right now, with who to call for a power cut inside and outside the city line.

A plain answer to whether SMART is running at this moment, worked from the clock and the holiday calendar. It covers the real catch — no Sunday service, no service on major holidays, the early-evening cut-off, and campus routes that only run during the school year — and links the live map and full timetable. Free to ride.

Starkville now has a town page. Its first tools answer questions residents raised: whether the free SMART bus is running right now, and live severe-weather warnings for the county.