Panel OKs raise for tax assessors, collectors
 
This article also covers raises for 
Harrison County Supervisor's

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

County pay raises advance

By JACK ELLIOTT JR.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACKSON -A host of county officials would get 10 percent raises under legislation headed to the Mississippi Senate.

Sheriffs, supervisors, tax assessors and collectors, and justice court judges are among those who would get raises under the bill approved Tuesday by the Senate Fees and Salaries Committee.

Tuesday was the deadline for committees to act on bills. Hundreds of bills failed to get out of committees.

Sen. Billy Thames, D-Mize, the committee chairman, said lawmakers have looked at many proposals to increase county officials' salaries and settled on the 10 percent package.

"The most important thing to you right now is that you have a vehicle alive," Thames told the crowd of sheriffs and other county officials.

The committee added an option to the bill that the sheriff of Claiborne County be paid an extra $10,000 annually if supervisors agreed. Sen. Rob Smith, D-Jackson, said the county is a major evacuation route from the Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Plant and has more traffic from Alcorn State University.

Thames said he would have preferred a more general amendment that would let supervisors anywhere in the state raise a sheriff's salary if the county had a power plant, a corrections facility or anything else that added to law enforcement duties.

The bill faces an obstacle in the House, where Fees and Salaries Chairman John Reeves, R-Jackson, says he'll consider pay raises only for tax assessors and collectors.

"Supervisors...will not be considered for a pay raise this year," Reeves said.

The bill is Senate Bill 2651.

Column: 'Throw me something, Mister' makes for good parades, bad politics

FRAUD, WASTE, & ABUSE OF YOUR TAX DOLLARS

STEVEN A. McCALEB

Monday, April 30, 2007

EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK 01.26.01

About a week before the latest Harrison County Board of Supervisors meeting, an anonymous caller told The Sun Herald that the supervisors were organizing support for their million-dollar-a-year escrow account that had recently been spotlighted by the newspaper.

The caller said he had overheard a conversation at a local sandwich shop indicating that the supervisors, in essence, had told recipients of the big giveaway that if they wanted to continue to receive funds they needed to "speak up," so the newspaper would hear them.

We set the call aside, assuming the fellow's hearing was suspect, or that he had simply misunderstood the words he had heard. Certainly our supervisors would not engage in such dissembling or gamesmanship.

I was not inclined then, or now, to believe our leaders would do such a thing. Still, it is awfully coincidental, I will admit, that at the very next supervisors meeting their chambers were packed by those aforementioned recipients who our caller said were being organized to do just that.

Indeed, the supervisors said they had not asked anyone to show up and support them on the escrow fund, implying that it was a spontaneous event.

Certainly it is possible this could happen, but it would seem to be something akin to the scene from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in which a group of citizens from all across America had a sudden "urge" to show up at Devils Tower in Wyoming to meet an alien spacecraft.

So there they were Monday, all of these independent individuals who just happened to show up at the same time and place to offer their praises to the supervisors for the good deeds they do with the escrow funds, while criticizing the bad old newspaper for bringing up the subject.

It was a scene from Mardi Gras, and is really a page from the politics of "Throw me something, Mister."

Is it surprising that people and groups want the government to give them something? Is it surprising they will fight to keep that which they have been receiving? The answer is "no" on both counts.

But, in a curious way, Monday's meeting perhaps illustrated the problem better than anything the newspaper had previously reported.

The fact that the supervisors have so much money to spend in a discretionary fashion leads to such demonstrations of felicity and support. Of course the groups represented at the Monday meeting appreciate the funds they receive, and surely some - maybe even most - of the funds are spent on people and things that are worthy.

But what of the dozens of groups that would also like some of those funds, but don't know how to get them? If we're going to give money to all worthy causes, where do we start, and where do we stop?

When you look at the list of expenditures you wonder if there is not one more hungry child or deprived old woman whose needs would be better supported than some of the questionable spending the fund has provided.

An irony in this is that three of the five supervisors are Republicans. Republicans often attack Democrats for their tax-and-spend practices. This fund has that label written all over it.

The supervisors are good men and women all, yet their support for the fund has employed arguments that are not worthy. Supervisor Bobby Eleuterius' justification for buying Mardi Gras beads was one that deserves particular attention.

Mardi Gras has an economic impact of $15 million to $20 million, he said. "We spent about $20,000 on beads last year. Twenty thousand dollars for $20 million sounds like a good trade to me," he said.

It does to me too. But is he claiming that one expenditure is fully responsible for Mardi Gras? If so, perhaps we should invest all of the fund in beads. According to that fuzzy mathematical logic, that $1 million investment would come back as $1 billion.

If Mardi Gras is dependent on $20,000 in county-purchased beads for success, it is probably not a very solid event.

In truth, that $20,000, like the entire $1 million, is about supporting the political fortunes of the people who give the funds away.

The essence of this topic is simple: It's the people's money, not the supervisors'. That $1 million annual fund should be treated like all of the public's money. It should be budgeted, and publicly voted on.

It should not continue as a personal kitty for these five elected officials to be dispersed at their whim.

Stan Tiner is executive editor of The Sun Herald. Contact him by mail at P.O. Box 4567, Biloxi, MS 39535-4567; fax (228) 896-2104; phone (228) 896-2300; or e-mail, tiner@sunherald.com