Our staff here at the newspaper is excited about the city’s new ordinance allowing food trucks. Often when we’re on deadline we’re pressed to leave to get lunch, and it would be nice to have a spot downtown to grab something quick and bring it back to the office.
Anyone who has traveled to a big city in recent years knows that the food trucks pull up to curbs downtown for lunch. I saw a bunch in Washington when I visited there two summers ago.
It’s one of those millenial trends, I suppose. While I normally try to stay at arms length from anything that my peers in the milennial age group come up with, this is one I’m on board with. Hopefully several vendors will give it a try in downtown Columbia.
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In good economic news, Columbia’s sales tax revenue was up 4 percent in April 2018 against April 2017. The city’s portion is $302,500 this year versus $290,004 last year, according to the state Department of Revenue.
That reflects more than $23 million in sales during March in Columbia. While many local stores have been struggling, Columbia remains a vital economic hub for this county and region, as those large figures illustrate.
The way the sales tax diversion works is that the numbers reported for April are collected by stores in March, sent to the state in April and paid back to cities in May. The state collects the 7 percent sales tax, and then gives the city back 18.5 percent of that.
Sales tax numbers for the fiscal year to date (July 1, 2017, through April 30, 2018) for Columbia are still down 1 percent. Stateside, collection are barely up by 0.36 percent. Mississippi’s economy remains on somewhat shaky ground, but hopefully the upward tick in April will be a sign of things to come.
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Most Mississippi State fans don’t have fond memories of the Sylvester Croom era. The Bulldogs only went 21-38 during his five years there and played some of the worst offensive football conceivable at times, particularly toward the end.
So it was interesting to me that Mike Slive, the former Southeastern Conference commissioner who died last week at 77, credited Croom as one of the key reasons that the SEC has blossomed over the past decade-plus into the dominant force in college football, as well as other sports like baseball, gymnastics and women’s basketball.
The New York Times, in its obituary about Slive, quoted from a 2015 interview where he said an important part of his legacy was State’s decision to hire Croom in 2003 as the SEC’s first black head football coach.
“It was clear it was not only an athletic decision. It impacted the state, the region, and it really helped vault the SEC from a regional to a national conference,” Slive said.
Maybe that will make some Mississippi State fans feel a little better about how things worked out with Croom.
If not, I bet this figure will: Last year the SEC distributed more than $40 million to each of its members, according to the Times. Slive, who served as commissioner from 2002 to 2015, knew as well as anyone how that sports empire was built and understood the symbolic importance of Croom’s hire.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. He may be reached at csmith@columbianprogress.com or (601) 736-2611.
