Final farewell to Penny For Your Parks
We’ll lead off with the obituary for Southaven’s “Penny For Your Parks” restaurant tax, which after much back and forth finally went down for the count with the Legislature’s adjournment in Jackson last week.
Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite traveled to the Capitol hoping to resurrect the bid to extend the 1-cent tax on restaurant purchases, overwhelmingly voted down days before the mayor’s trip. Horn Lake Mayor Allen Latimer, hoping to do the same for his city’s special tax on motel stays, spent some time in Jackson as well.
In the end, however, even face-toface lobbying by the leaders of the two cities wasn’t enough to save taxes that became pawns between warring factions of politicians. Everyone can decide for themselves who was being most true to the wishes and needs of their constituents, but there’s no question hard feelings surfaced during the debate.
Musselwhite, no doubt stung by the unexpected rebuke of a tax that helped fund many of his best election year talking points, pulled few punches after the tax extension died. He laid the blame squarely at the feet of recalcitrant members of the DeSoto House delegation. Musselwhite said most representatives he talked to from other areas of the state told him they refused to support extending the special taxes from DeSoto County cities “not only because four of our (DeSoto representatives) have voted ‘no’ to similar bills throughout the state, but more so because of their disrespect to their colleagues and to the legislative process .... ”
Of course, one person’s disrespect for the process is another person’s courageous dissent. State Rep. Ashley Henley of Southaven, one of the legislators targeted by Musselwhite’s remarks, said she wouldn’t be bullied into supporting a stance she thought was counter to what her constituents wanted. It should be noted that Henley could offer fellow legislators no scientific polling data, when asked, to show that a majority of her constituents opposed the tax extension. And Norm Arent ,a candidate for Southaven alderman in the May municipal primary elections, criticized criticism of legislators “for not playing ball with the Jackson Elite.”
Whichever point of view is correct, the bottom line is that Southaven will lose as of the end of the fiscal year June 30 a revenue source that generated $1.9 million last year for park improvements. Most of the money came from people who weren’t Southaven residents and probably didn’t notice the extra penny on their bills if they could afford to eat out.
Now that it’s gone, let’s hope city leaders and those who opposed the tax can work together to find ways to enhance the city’s livability with minimal impact on property taxes. If not, everyone will have to be willing to live with a city that has less to offer.
County-by-county health rankings released last week for all 50 states by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation listed DeSoto as Mississippi’s healthiest county.
Using criteria that included such factors as housing, education, jobs and access to healthy foods, the survey gave DeSoto the state’s top spot, followed by Rankin County in the Jackson suburbs as the second healthiest.
With the criteria used, it really isn’t surprising that DeSoto would fare well. The county has ready access to hospitals on either side of the county, Baptist in Southaven and Methodist in Olive Branch, as well as other medical facilities nearby in Memphis. The county also has a relatively affluent and educated population that can better afford healthy foods than in many sparsely populated rural areas of the state that are farther from proper medical care.
But it would be selling the county short to suggest that its health standing is entirely luck based on geographic and economic convenience. Proactive measures have also played a role. Hernando, in particular, has been all about fitness with its initiatives, including an awardwinning farmer’s market that has made healthier food choices easily available to all.
So a pat on the back to the county for its ranking, while not glossing over the health-related challenges. DeSoto does, after all, lead the state in heroin overdoses – part of a drug scourge that has crept into every corner of the nation, according to the same Robert Wood Johnson Foundation statistics.
Hospital ruling
We earlier mentioned the county’s two hospitals, Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto in Southaven and Methodist Olive Branch Hospital. As noted in the previous item, the two facilities help make DeSoto County a healthier place for all, but it’s also a business situation that can breed competitive challenges.
Such was the case last week when the Mississippi Supreme Court sided with Methodist in a challenge from Baptist over a type of cardiac catheterization procedure that Memphis-based Methodist Healthcare added at its Olive Branch hospital. The court affirmed a lower court decision that the Mississippi Department of Health was correct in allowing Methodist to add the program, despite the hospital’s cross-county competitor saying Methodist didn’t meet the criteria.
From a business standpoint, it isn’t surprising that Baptist would challenge the competing healthcare provider that the Baptist system tried to keep out of the county for years. From a health standpoint, however, I doubt many DeSoto residents think it’s a bad idea to have the procedure available at a second location in the county, one that better meets the insurance needs of some patients.