Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves came to town Wednesday, making several stops to meet with Marion County residents.
Reeves toured the Helanbak factory and observed the process used to manufacture the precision rifles made there. He also taped a segment promoting Mississippi’s upcoming Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday, which runs Aug. 26 through Aug. 28. The holiday is meant to encourage participation in the upcoming hunting season, and enables sportsmen to purchase guns, ammunition and other hunting supplies tax-free.
After meeting with Helanbak officials, Reeves joined more than 100 local business leaders and residents at a reception held at Second Street Bean. Reeves spoke with the crowd and discussed his visit to Columbia.
Mayor Justin McKenzie introduced Reeves to the crowd.
“I’m proud to know that he went to one of our local manufacturers and that he came here to promote the sales tax holiday that is coming up,” he said. “He has been a consistent friend of Columbia and he was one of the first state leaders on the ground here in Columbia following the tornado in 2014. He has been a friend and supporter of the city for quite some time.”
Reeves thanked the mayor and other elected officials, including state Sen. Angela Hill, who was in attendance.
“It was wonderful to see the facility over at Helanbak,” Reeves said. “It so awesome to see a weapon such as that, or anything that has ‘Manufactured in Columbia, Miss.’ on it. What that shows me and what it should say to you is what a great community that you live in. It shows that great business leaders create great businesses here and create jobs for people in Columbia and for Mississippians.”
Reeves, who has served for six years as lieutenant governor, spoke about the state’s bicentennial, which is this year.
“We’re celebrating 200 years with events across the state,” he said. “We have a complicated history in our state, but one of the things I’ve done this year is to quit apologizing and start bragging about the good things going on in Mississippi. We have the lowest unemployment rate in the state’s history. It is about 4.8 percent.”
Reeves also said education was a key to unemployment rates continuing to fall.
“We have 40,000 jobs in Mississippi and we don’t have enough people that have the skill set to fill those jobs,” he said. “There are a lot of different reasons for that and one of the reasons is that we need to improve the quality of our educational system. We need to improve the education level of our citizens. We’ve worked very hard on that for the last six years.”
Reeves said Mississippi was making progress, including increasing graduation rates.
“When I was elected lieutenant governor, the national average for graduation rates was 82 percent,” he said. “In Mississippi, five years ago, it was at 70.5 percent. Today, the most recent statistics show that the national rate is still 82 percent, but in Mississippi, our graduation rate has increased to 80.8 percent. We’re not quite at the national average yet, but our trajectory seems to indicate that we’ll get there in the next year or two and it should continue to improve.”
Reeves touched on many other items in his talk with local leaders and spoke with many individually. He spoke about being cautious with the state budget.
“From a fiscal standpoint, our state is in as good a shape as it has been in the last 30 or 40 years,” he said. “We have more than $300 million in our rainy day fund. We ended the fiscal year with an additional $48 million which will be split between our rainy day fund and our capital expense fund.”
Reeves also spoke about local interests.
“We’ve worked hard on helping Columbia and Marion County,” he said. “Sen. Hill has been pushing the state to return a piece of property here in your community near the airport. We were able to get it back in your hands for economic development purposes. We’re working with communities to do things like that to help spur economic development.”
Pictured Above: Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, center, takes aim with a new Helanbak rifle during his tour of the facility Wednesday, which was led by Helanbak President Kristian Agoglia, left, and Director of Business Development Kevin Buckley. | Photo by Mark Rogers
