The Mississippi legislature ends its 2018 session as soon as today and Rep. Jeff Smith and Rep. Gary Chism will come home to Columbus.
They can stay home, as far as I am concerned.
Whatever service each has rendered as our representatives in Jackson over the years, their conduct this week has obscured the good. They have ceased to work for the benefit of the people who elected them. Their allegiance lies elsewhere.
In a move that will be remembered as one of the single most devastating events to ever befall our community, Smith and Chism have gutted our tourism industry, defying the wishes of our local governments and tourism and economic development officials in a pig-headed display of ideological obstinance. Their actions will seriously compromise our convention and visitors bureau and the millions of dollars in tourism it helps to create. It will also hurt our hotel and restaurant businesses, which also thrive on tourism.
A little background is required to understand the full impact of what Smith and Chism did this week.
For four months, the county supervisors and city council worked on a joint resolution calling for legislation that would extend the county-wide 2 percent restaurant tax, which expires on June 30. In that resolution, both the county supervisors and city council members unanimously agreed to extend the 2-percent tax to all restaurants in the county. Currently, only those restaurants that collect more than $325,000 annually in food sales are required to apply the 2-percent tax to their sales.
The county, city and CVB had vigorous debates over much of the language in the joint resolution. The only thing they agreed on at every point in those debates was the desire to remove the $325,000 threshold.
That bill, with that specific language, was presented to both Local and Private committees in the House and the Senate. Smith and Chism serve on the House committee. Chuck Younger sits on the Senate committee.
But when the time came for the committees to agree on a single version of the bill, the House — at Smith’s direction and with Chism’s support — put back into place the $325,000 threshold, apparently just because they wanted to.
When the bill went to conference, Smith and Chism were among the three who represented the House in the conference committee. Younger was one of three who represented the Senate. Chism and Smith refused to withdraw the threshold added to the bill while Younger, to his credit, said he would not sign off on a compromise that went against the wishes of his constituents through their duly elected local governments.
It’s a stalemate and barring a miracle today, the bill that funds the CVB and provides funds for the LINK and money for city parks will die.
The aftermath will be hard to calculate. Not only will it mean a loss of over $2 million in annual revenue, money used to promote tourism and economic growth in our community, it will also mean the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism generated by those funds. The ripple affect will spread to businesses large and small.
It is unthinkable.
Why did it come to this? There are two possibilities here. Either Smith and Chism do not recognize the grave consequence of their actions or there is something they value more than the health of their community – ideology.
Although Chism said as recently as December that he would vote for a bill that didn’t include a threshold, by this week both he and Smith were saying that a requirement for all restaurants to collect the 2 percent tax constitutes a new tax and that they are ideologically opposed to new taxes.
It is an argument so transparently stupid they should be embarrassed to make it.
If the cable company found out your neighbor was stealing cable from your feed, it would not shut off your cable and call it a solution. Likewise, the restaurant tax bill sent to the legislature is not a matter of creating a new tax. Rather, it is an effort to equitably apply an existing tax, a tax that has greatly benefited our county and is, by the way, entirely voluntary. No one is required to eat out, after all.
No other restaurant tax in the state, of which there are 80, contains that sort of sales threshold and the reason should be obvious: It makes no sense and serves no purpose. Customers, not businesses, pay the taxes. Collecting that tax does not increase a restaurant’s cost of doing business nor does it negatively impact a business in any other way. Given that, why one restaurant should be required to collect that tax while another restaurant is not, well, that’s something neither Smith nor Chism could explain other than to say that’s how it’s always been done.
For that, Smith and Chism are willing to forfeit of hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism income?
I didn’t think it was possible for just two men to cripple the tourism industry in Lowndes County. Clearly, I underestimated Smith and Chism.
Theirs was a shameful act for which every citizen of Lowndes County will suffer.
They no longer represent our interests.
So come home, Jeff and Gary.
And stay there.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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