Despite a new tax increase aimed at helping pay for tourism-related expenses, the city of Columbus is running out of money.
According to a story by the Associated Press, Columbus could run out of cash by Sept. 30, when the city’s fiscal year 2019 budget ends. With the city likely to spend $14.2 million before the fiscal year ends and only $10.9 million in revenue projected, the debt could add up to $300,000.
This isn’t the first time the city has been in financial trouble.
According to a November 24 story in the Columbus Dispatch, Columbus operated with an $881,000 deficit in fiscal 2018, which ended on September 30.
Since fiscal 2017, the city has run $1.7 million in deficits under the direction of former chief financial officer Milton Rawle. He resigned in February after more than five years in charge of the city’s finances.
Mayor Robert Smith told the AP that it’s not time for city leaders to panic and that he wants a property tax increase to go into effect for the fiscal 2020 budget, which begins on October 1. This would be the second tax increase to hit city residents this year.
The city will also receive a new 2 percent tax on restaurants that was approved by Gov. Phil Bryant earlier this session and goes into effect on Monday.
Another local bill in the legislature would add another 1 percent to the city’s now 9 percent tax on restaurant sales to pay for the second phase of the city’s new $5.5 million Terry Brown Amphitheater.
Passage is unlikely as the legislature’s session is drawing to a close this week.
Columbus isn’t exactly hurting for tax revenue, receiving $26,651,025 in fiscal 2018 alone. That’s more than similarly-sized Starkville ($20,785,798 in 2016), but less than Vicksburg ($31,165,725 in 2017)
Property owners in the city are assessed at a rate of 46.69 mills just to fund the city’s functions. That rate is average among Mississippi cities, with Jonestown in Coahoma County levying the highest rate statewide at 119.94 mills.
Mills are assessed per $1,000 of a property’s determined taxable value and the owner of an average priced home in Columbus ($128,200 according to real estate site Zillow) pays about $1,596 with an annual homestead exemption on the first $7,500 of value.
According to the latest numbers from the Mississippi Department of Revenue, the city received $718,119.46 in sales tax revenue, up $16,499 from this time last year.
Collections for the year so far are up slightly over the same time last year, with the city receiving $6,416,153.72 in sales tax revenue this year so far as compared with $6,421,907.56 last year.
Columbus taxpayers owe $28,550,411 in debt, with the annual debt service payment adding up to $528,868.
Vicksburg’s total debt adds up to $9,876,050, but Starkville taxpayers owe $55,652,465.
I was troubled to read Bill Crawford’s recent op-ed about “dark money.” It’s not honest, it’s not fair, and it’s not transparent. Bill Crawford is lying about House Bill 1205.
HB 1205 does one very simple thing: it allows a nonprofit whose donor list has been leaked by a rogue government official defend itself in state court. The bill changes nothing pertaining to nonprofit donor disclosure or transparency already required by the Secretary of State (lines 17-19). The bill changes nothing pertaining to federal donor disclosure or transparency. (Pro Tip: State law can’t override federal law or federal regulation, including IRS rules.) The bill changes nothing pertaining to Mississippi campaign finance law (lines 73-75). The bill changes nothing pertaining to a political action committee (PAC). None of these things are touched by HB 1205, and anyone who says or implies otherwise is lying.
Crawford’s first big lie is that HB 1205 is about protecting dark money. Crawford doesn’t define dark money, he just asserts that the U.S. Supreme Court allows “501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ corporations to become fronts for dark money.”
A (c)(4) is a nonprofit organization. According to the IRS, there are 29 different types of nonprofit organizations, ranging from (c)(1)s to (c)(29)s. Are all of these nonprofits fronts for dark money? Crawford knows that if he told you your local food pantry was a front for dark money you might not believe him. So, he lies again. He claims that HB 1205 “would prohibit public agencies from requesting donor identities from 501(c)(4) organizations.”
But HB 1205 does not single out (c)(4s) for protection any more than it singles out (c)(3)s or (c)(5)s or (c)(8s) or (c)(11)s. A (c)(5), by the way, is a labor organization. Is Crawford claiming labor unions are fronts for “dark money”? A (c)(8) is a fraternal association. Is Crawford claiming the Masons are a front for “dark money”? A (c)(11) is a teacher’s retirement fund association. Is that a front for “dark money”? The options are endless for a mind wishing to see conspiracy everywhere.
Bill Crawford’s other big lie is his manipulative attempt to tarnish Gov. Phil Bryant’s reputation as a “longtime champion of transparency and accountability.” This praise seems a longtime in coming, but Crawford is correct that the governor, as well as Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, have been great advocates for transparency. What he fails to acknowledge is that the opponents of HB 1205 are seeking to weaponize transparency – and thus undermine it altogether.
Let’s think through this new kind of transparency Bill Crawford is proposing. It’s not government transparency. It’s a kind of transparency akin to forcing Jews to wear a yellow star. This kind of transparency was used by the state of Alabama in the 1950s to try to force the NAACP to release its membership list. This is not government transparency, it is government targeting. This kind of “transparency” always begins with a big lie and a will to mislead.
Real government transparency looks like the quiet work MCPP has been doing for years. No organization has done more to promote transparency in Mississippi. We were the first to post legislative votes online, leading the legislature to begin doing so. We were the first to post video recordings of the state legislative session. We were the first to post the state budget online. We have also spent thousands of hours and dollars creating the seethespending.org website. For our efforts, we won the 2012 Champion of Good Government Award, presented at an annual meeting of the Mississippi Press Association. Another site we created, seetheschoolspending.org, contains school district spending and rankings covering more than 20 years.
Yet, you’ll find no bigger advocate of donor privacy than MCPP. You see, I believe that while the government has an obligation to open up its checkbook to taxpayers, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to post their checkbooks or credit card statements online for everyone (including employers and employees) to see. But that’s basically what the leftist conspiracy theorists want to do: permanently post donor information, including the amount of any contribution to any nonprofit, on a government website.
I trust Gov. Bryant is going to set the record straight by signing HB 1205 and protecting the right of every individual to support the causes they believe in without fear of discrimination and retaliation. In doing so, he’ll be affirming that Mississippi is still a place – unlike California or New York or Washington State – where we understand the difference between transparency and targeting.
This column appeared in the Mississippi Business Journal on March 26, 2019.
“Would you buy a car without test-driving it?”
So goes the degrading adage warning couples to cohabitate before marriage. Besides insinuating that a wife might want to divorce her husband because he often misses the laundry hamper and occasionally snores, cohabitating just to “test out” marriage is a bad idea.
With recent statistical results from Institute for Family Studies, we can see this isn’t just opinion. The disadvantages to living together before marriage are clear. And this impacts not just the individual or couple, but all taxpayers.
Despite overwhelming evidence that cohabitation leads to statistically significant disparities in levels of commitment, instances of infidelity and conflict, satisfaction, and stability, the majority of American adults believe that cohabitation is a good idea.
In fact, 65 percent of American adults agree that dating couples ought to move in together before marriage. More specifically, 76 percent of millennials are very likely to endorse the move-in compared to 36 percent of the elder generation. While trends show that you’re more likely to support cohabitation if you’re non-religious or liberal in ideology, Christians and conservatives are still in support of it in startling numbers. Liberals are in favor by 86 percent compared to the still high 37 percent of conservatives. Self-professing Christians have the lowest approval rating of cohabitation, but at the alarming, and rather surprising, rate of 40 percent.
We culturally accept that “serious” couples will move in together as a final test of compatibility or as a grand gesture of commitment. Or was that just every romantic comedy I’ve ever seen? In fact, research shows that the most common reason for sharing a home is actually just spending more time together.
Couples should second-guess their decisions to become roommates according to IFS’s findings. Studies controlled for education, relationship duration, and age found that cohabitating couples had lower levels of commitment, higher likelihood of infidelity and conflict, and an increased likelihood of the relationship ending. These results pale in comparison to married individuals reporting greater satisfaction with their overall relationships. They self-describe as “very happy” more often compared to live-in couples. Married couples are much more likely to report themselves in the top groups for satisfaction, commitment, and stability.
The effects of poorer relationships don’t just affect the couples involved. They also greatly stunt the healthy development of involved children. According to the Census Bureau, three million children live with unmarried parents in America. By age twelve, 40 percent of children will live in a cohabitating household, usually with a mother and her live-in boyfriend. Four out of 10 children born in the United States are born to unmarried women with the majority (58 percent) born to women living with the child’s father.
Does this imply that all unmarried parents are bad parents?
No, absolutely not. Nearly every parent wants what’s best for their child and would move mountains to get them the best of everything they can. That’s exactly why these findings are so critical to express to Americans, especially in our state of Mississippi, where unwed birth rates are the highest in the nation.
Here are the factual risks for children in unmarried households:
- Single mother families are about five times as likely to experience poverty as married-parent families.
- In 2015, 7.5 percent of married-couple families were in poverty, compared to 36.5 percent of single mother families.
- Boys raised in single-parent households are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, again controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity.
The evidence is clear. Married couples are statistically more content and actualized in their relationships than unmarried couples sharing a home. Once couples bring children into the mix, disparities between married and unmarried couples grow and affect our children more often and with more magnitude.
And this impacts everybody, as taxpayers will be footing the bill for the various welfare programs that support those families in poverty. And despite the best of intentions to help citizens like single mothers, we know, based on years of evidence and analysis, that such programs don’t act as a trampoline for escaping poverty. No, welfare programs actually work as snare nets, trapping single mothers into a life of dependence that discourages working and marriage through perverse incentives and roadblocks from federal mandates.
To avoid such unintended consequences, the “success sequence” remains a good public policy prescription for young people. Graduate from high school. Get a Job. Get married. Have children. Do it in that order, if at all possible.
This column appeared in the Madison County Journal on March 21, 2019.
The Mississippi legislature could be approving as many as nine new tourism taxes this session, extending the effective date of six other existing tourism taxes and increasing a couple of existing tourism taxes.
These taxes start as local bills in the legislature and require an initial referendum by the citizens of the city or the county where the tourism tax is levied on hotels, restaurants or both. If a majority of residents approve, the tax goes into effect as local businesses remit the tax to the Mississippi Department of Revenue, who then sends the revenue back to the local government.
Here are some of the new taxes that have been approved or are being considered by the legislature this session:
Signed by Gov. Phil Bryant
House Bill 325– Columbus and Lowndes County have added a 2 percent tax on restaurants with annual sales in excess of $100,000 that will go into effect on April 1 and expire, unless reauthorized in 2020.
The city will receive $400,000 annually of the tax revenue for parks and recreation and special events, while the county will get $300,000 for the same purposes.
The economic development organization known as the Golden Triangle Development LINK will receive $250,000 annually to fund the promotion of community and economic development in the area. The LINK is classified as a 501(c)(6) by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
LINK gets most of its annual revenues from taxpayer funds, with 73.4 percent of its budget coming from taxpayers in 2017.
LINK Executive Director Joe Max Higgins’ salary has increased from $194,133 in 2011 to $358,534 in 2017. The amount the organization spends on payroll has increased from $194,133, when Higgins was the only paid employee, to $726,034 for a paid staff of six in 2017.
Higgins was made famous nationwide for his appearance on CBS’ 60 Minutes program in 2016.
Senate Bill 2854– The city of Charleston (population 1,958) would levy a 2 percent tax on restaurants and prepared food at convenience stores to promote tourism.
New taxes still in committee
HB 1682– The city of Columbus wants an additional 1 percent tax on restaurants to help fund the operation and maintenance of an amphitheater.
HB 1423– The city of Lexington with 1,523 residents would levy a 2 percent tax on restaurants and prepared food at convenience stores to promote tourism.
HB 1683– The city of Bay St. Louis, with a population of 13,043, wants to impose a 2 percent tax on bars and restaurants to fund tourism and parks and recreation projects in the city.
HB 1726– This would allow the city of Columbia (population 6,037) to authorize a 3 percent tax on hotels and restaurants for parks and recreation and economic development.
HB 1742– The city of Waynesboro (population 4,903) would impose a 1 percent tax on hotels and restaurants for tourism and parks and recreation improvements.
Tax extensions signed by the governor
HB 653– The city of Baldwyn had a 2 percent tax that expired on July 1. Despite notification from the Mississippi Department of Revenue, city businesses continued to collect the tax and have collected $11,983 from it so far this year. This bill will not only reauthorize the tax for the next three years starting on July 1, it will allow the city to receive the tax revenue collected by the DOR when the tax had expired.
New taxes or extensions awaiting the governor’s signature
SB 3074 would extend the repeal date of Pascagoula’s 3 percent tax on hotels — which expired in 2017 — to 2023 and would allow the city to retroactively collect the tax levied after the authorizing law expired.
SB 2185– The town of Carrollton (population 178) would impose a 2 percent tax on restaurants.
SB 2853– The city of Saltillo, with a population of 4,987, wants to levy a 2 percent tax on hotels and restaurants to pay for tourism enhancements, economic development and parks and recreation.
SB 2896– The city of North Carrollton wants a 2 percent tax on restaurants.
SB 2988 would increase Flowood’s tourism tax on restaurants from 2 percent to 3 percent and extend it until 2029.
Tax extensions still in committee
HB 1565 would add 1 percent to Starkville’s existing hotel and restaurant tax to pay for the construction of sports tournament and recreational facilities and extend the repeal date.
HB 1706 would extend the repeal date on the Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau and its supporting 1 percent tax on hotels and restaurants. The bill would also change the requirements for the bureau’s governing board. The original billwould’ve added 1 percent to Jackson’s existing levy.
SB 3086 would reenact the 3 percent hotel and restaurant tax in the city of Amory until 2023.
A bill that would protect the personal privacy of individuals who donate to nonprofit charities awaits the signature of Gov. Phil Bryant this week.
Authored by Rep. Jerry Turner and championed by Rep. Mark Baker, HB 1205 allows a nonprofit organization to defend itself in court if a rogue government agency or employee releases the nonprofit’s confidential donor lists.
“The enemies of free speech and free association are making our political environment toxic by seeking to silence and intimidate anyone who disagrees with them,” said Dr. Jameson Taylor, vice president for policy with MCPP. “In Montana, the governor is going after businesses who donate to trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In California, then-AG Kamala Harris made it a priority to obtain the donor lists of conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity. At the federal level, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat-majority House have passed H.R. 1, which would destroy donor privacy and politicize the federal contracting process.
“Unfortunately, these tactics are not new. They were used by government officials in the 1950s in an effort to destroy the NAACP. They are being used today to bully and harass donors who give to nonprofit organizations.”
Statewide polling shows 81 percent of Mississippi voters support legislation that would protect the personal information of individuals who donate to the causes and charities of their choice. HB 1205 would do that by making it a crime for the government to release the personal information of any person who gives to an entity organized under Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code.
The tax code recognizes 29 different “c” groups, all of which are nonprofits. These include: charitable nonprofits, like churches and domestic violence shelters; trade and agricultural associations; labor unions; and veterans’ groups.
“The people of Mississippi support donor privacy because we realize, perhaps more than most, how necessary it is to protect the right of everyone, regardless of race, creed or political affiliation, to support the causes they individually believe in without fear of discrimination and retaliation,” said Dr. Taylor.
See statewide polling results here.
The Mississippi legislature’s session is winding down, with only a few bills left on the calendars for both chambers.
The next deadline for general legislation is March 28, the final day to concur on amendments from the other chamber on general bills.
Here is what’s happening with some of the more interesting bills at this point in the session:
Still alive
Senate Concurrent Resolution 596 would make Mississippi the 15th state to call for a Convention of the States authorized under Article V of the U.S. Constitution. The measure passed the Senate Thursday and will be headed to the House, where passage is likely.
For a Convention of the States to occur, 34 state legislatures would have to pass similar resolutions. All of the states surrounding Mississippi have passed Article V resolutions.
House Bill 1352 is sponsored by state Rep. Jason White (R-West) and is known as the Criminal Justice Reform Act. The bill would clear obstacles for the formerly incarcerated to find work, prevents driver’s license suspensions for controlled substance violations and unpaid legal fees and fines and updates drug court laws to allow for additional types of what are known as problem solving courts.
The bill is headed to a conference committee to forge a compromise between the differences between the original and the altered version that passed the Senate.
House Bill 1205 would prohibit state agencies from requesting or releasing donor information on charitable groups organized under section 501 of federal tax law. The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Jerry Turner (R-Baldwyn), was amended in the Senate to include all organizations covered section 501 of federal tax law and the House has concurred with the changes.
The last step is Gov. Phil Bryant’s signature.
SB 2781, known as Mississippi Fresh Start Act, is sponsored by state Sen. John Polk (R-Hattiesburg). This bill would eliminate the practice of “good character” or “moral turpitude” clauses from occupational licensing regulations, which prohibit ex-felons from receiving an occupational license and starting a new post-incarceration career.
The bill was amended with a strike-all that made it identical to the original House bill. It has been returned to the Senate for concurrence. If the Senate doesn’t agree with the changes, a conference committee will try to come up with a compromise acceptable to both.
SB 2901, known as the Landowner Protection Act, would exempt property owners and their employees from civil liability if a third party injures someone else on their property.
The bill is sponsored by state Sen. Josh Harkins (R-Flowood). The Senate declined to accept the House’s changes to the bill, so the differences will have to be settled in a conference committee.
SB 2603 would reauthorize motion picture and television production incentives for out-of-state firms that expired in 2017. Unlike the previous incentives, both bills would cap them at $10 million.
The bill sponsored by state Sen. Joey Fillingane (R-Sumrall). The bill has been returned to the Senate for concurrence.
HB 1612 would authorize municipalities to create special improvement assessment districts that would be authorized to levy up to 6 mills of property tax (the amount per $1,000 of assessed value of the property) to fund parks, sidewalks, streets, planting, lighting, fountains, security enhancements and even private security services. The tax would require the approval of 60 percent of property owners in the district.
The bill is sponsored by state Rep. Mark Baker (R-Brandon). The Senate amended the bill so it only applies to Jackson (cities with a population of 150,000 or more) and the House concurred with the changes.
It awaits the governor’s signature.
HB 1204 would allow a municipality or county to execute the winning bid in a sealed bidding process if a judge hasn’t ruled on a protection request for bids within 90 days.
The bill is sponsored by state Rep. Turner and is on the governor’s desk waiting for a signature.
Wading through Mississippi’s morass of regulations would take 13 weeks to absorb its 9.3 million words and 117,558 restrictions.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy commends Governor Phil Bryant for capping off a lifetime of pro-life public service by signing the Fetal Heartbeat bill today.
The “Heartbeat bill” allows abortion until the point at which a baby’s heartbeat is detected – about the middle of the first trimester.
“A majority (58 percent) of Mississippi voters believe abortion should only be permitted to save the life of the mother. Eighty-four percent of voters believe abortion should be limited after the first three months of pregnancy,” said Dr. Jameson Taylor, vice president for policy at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. “This polling was done well before lawmakers in New York radicalized the abortion debate by making abortion available to a woman on demand any time during her entire pregnancy. Only 8 percent of Mississippi voters support such a policy.”
“The Heartbeat bill is popular because everyone knows a heartbeat is a sign of life,” continued Dr. Taylor. “Intellectual and scientific honesty demands a reconsideration of Roe, a 50-year-old decision based on old science. 3-D and 4-D ultrasounds are showing women that their unborn child is alive. At six weeks, the child has a beating heart. Soon after, it can sense light, move, hear and taste. Whatever you want to call it, this living thing has the ‘form’ of a human person, as the Supreme Court recognized in the Gonzales decision.” Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) upheld a partial-birth abortion ban, even in cases of pre-viability.
The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood) reports that “the risk of death associated with abortion increases with the length of pregnancy.” The risk of the mother dying as a result of an abortion increases more than 2,100 percent between 8-weeks and 18-weeks of pregnancy. Maternal mortality increases by 38 percent with every week after 8-weeks gestation.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the states have “legitimate interests from the outset of pregnancy in protecting the health of women” (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 847 (1992)). Further, the Supreme Court has long recognized that the states have an “important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life,” Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 162 (1973), and specifically that “the State has an interest in protecting the life of the unborn” Casey (1992).