Boards of Supervisors in Mississippi typically have good insights on what rural areas in the state need. Supervisors have daily interactions with people at the grassroots level — and are often the first to get a call when someone has a problem in their community.
As such, it’s no surprise what the Marion County Board of Supervisors identified this week as one of the key things it needs from the legislature: road and bridge funding.
State funding to counties to fix roads and bridges has been flat since 1987. With inflation greatly driving up the cost of paving a mile of road or replacing a dilapidated bridge, that means in practice there is far less work that can be done than three decades ago.
That equals out to an aging infrastructure throughout the state.
One of the primary purposes of government is to provide a means to get people and goods to get from place to place. Without that, you can’t have a competitive economy.
Yet Mississippi is falling behind in keeping up its infrastructure. And every year that passes, the cost to fix the problems increases as the asphalt crumbles.
Yet the Republican leadership has been tone-deaf to the cries from the state’s business community that we need better roads, instead choosing to listen to out-of-state advocacy groups (“outside agitators,” if you will).
Many leaders from the Mississippi Economic Council, a conservative, pro-business organization, have publicly pushed for several years for raising the gas tax. That includes Joe Sanderson Jr., CEO of Sanderson Farms chicken processor, and Walton Gresham, head of Gresham Petroleum.
When the people who own companies that run hundreds of trucks up and down Mississippi roads ask for a fuel tax increase, which will cost their businesses more to operate, you know it must be a true need.
Also, it’s inherently a fair tax because whoever uses the roads, including non-Mississippians passing through, pay for them through the tax. And a key to any good tax is a clear purpose for how it will be spent.
About a 10-cent to 15-cent per gallon hike in the 18.4-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax is needed just to keep up with maintenance, much less build any new roads. At the pump, that’s a minor annoyance, but nothing that is going to stop anyone from buying gas. What it will do is position Mississippi to be in a strong place when it comes to providing the quality infrastructure that new businesses look for when they’re moving to an area and that existing businesses need to grow.
Mississippians consistently rate economic development as the key thing they want their government to focus on. An informal Facebook poll by The Columbian-Progress this week, for example, showed 60 percent of respondents said the No. 1 issue for the new city administration should be economic development. While those results are admittedly unscientific, they accurately reflect the sentiments you hear from talking to people on the street. President Trump was elected in large part because people believe he can turn around the economy in rural America.
For the past decade or more, especially during the term of former Gov. Haley Barbour, the state leadership has tried to achieve that goal by being a sort of venture capitalist: Giving the public’s money to private industries to attract them to open in the state with hopes that will get paid back in terms of more jobs and tax revenues. The state has a woeful record in that regard. Any true venture capitalist would have gone broke by now if they were as bad at it as state legislators have been.
However, the state has an advantage over private investors: It can compel people to continue feeding it money (it’s called taxation).
Instead of betting on winners and losers in the competitive market, state government should focus on providing an environment where private businesses can thrive on their own.
That’s the truly conservative approach — and legislators should tell that to the outside interest groups fighting a fuel tax in Mississippi when they continue to try and stifle our own business community’s efforts to make our state a better place to live and work.
