The recent report on Mississippi’s “brain drain” from State Auditor Shad White reinforces why this entire state has an interest in fostering a healthy, prosperous and safe capital city.
Without an attractive urban center, all of Mississippi will suffer because many of its young adults are not going to stay once they finish college. When they settle in other states, they take with them their earnings potential and reduce the pool from which employers can hire. This, in turn, hampers economic development and crimps tax collections, including those that the Legislature shares with local schools and local governments.
Nashville and Birmingham have become huge magnets for recent college graduates from Mississippi. That’s because these cities provide not just job opportunities but the social life young adults desire. Mississippi has only one such urban center, Jackson, and even with all of its problems, it remains by far the state’s top draw to that demographic.
Of the graduates who stay in Mississippi, 30% live and work in Hinds County, according to the auditor’s report. The next closest county is Harrison County on the Gulf Coast, but even there the draw is just one-fifth the power of Jackson’s.
That draw would be even stronger if Jackson did not have so many problems, such as high crime rates, bumpy streets and leaky water systems, and low-rated public schools.
“We have to figure out how to fix our capital city,” White said, “because it is going to be the biggest magnet for keeping talented, college-educated workers here in the state.”
One way to fix it is to recognize that Jackson’s tax base, which has declined due to white flight to the suburbs, is not going to be enough to put a serious dent in some of these problems. It’s going to require a significant state investment, too, which is only fair given that all those state government buildings in Jackson, which are there to serve the entire state, are exempt from paying property taxes.
The Legislature, though, has been historically reluctant to do anything extra for Jackson because the vast majority of lawmakers represent areas of the state outside of Hinds County. Such a provincial perspective was obvious again this year when the Legislature rejected a proposal that would have given Jackson $42 million extra in coronavirus relief funds — a fraction of what the project will ultimately take — to help repair or replace its broken or severely compromised water and sewer pipes.
Jackson, it is true, has suffered from some incompetence and mismanagement in caring for its infrastructure, but starving the capital city won’t fix those issues. It will only compound them.
If Mississippi is going to compete with its neighbors, such as Tennessee and Alabama, it needs an urban center on par with Nashville and Birmingham. The Legislature must recognize that and invest state resources accordingly.
