The first step to addressing the state’s infrastructure crisis could be repealing the 2016 tax cut bill, according to District 29 Sen. David Blount.
Blount spoke recently to the Metro Jackson Lions Club, where he discussed the state’s road and bridge needs.
The three-term senator said the state has an estimated $6.6 billion on infrastructure needs, but instead of addressing those needs, in 2016, Republican leaders passed a major tax cut.
The tax cut will cost the state $6.6 billion in revenue over the next two decades, funds that Blount believes would be better spent fixing roads and bridges.
“We ought to repeal the tax cut and put everything on the table in terms of revenue,” he said. “To me, that’s where we start.”
The tax cuts were passed by the Republican-controlled House and Senate during the 2016 session and will take affect beginning in budget year 2019.
In the first year, the tax cuts will cost the state’s general fund approximately $33.6 million, an amount that will be increased to $92 million in fiscal year 2020, and $150 million the year after.
From fiscal year 2028 and 2038, the tax cuts will cost the state an estimated $417 million a year, he said.
“If you go to the Mississippi Economic Council’s Web site and read their report on what it will cost to fix infrastructure in the state, it will be $6.6 billion,” he said. “It’s the exact same amount of money.”
Blount further criticized the tax cuts, saying that most of the cuts are going to corporations, not individuals, and that the state shouldn’t be instituting tax cuts when revenues are dropping.
“The state is not growing. Mississippi is losing population,” he said.
The senator also pointed to declining sales tax revenues, citing the increase in online sales, as well as declining diversions to cities.
Municipalities in the state receive 18.5 percent of the total sales tax dollars generated within their respective city limits.
Smaller towns have lost revenues as more people visit regional shopping centers, rather than smaller mom and pop stores.
Cities like Jackson have lost out, as well, with the exodus of major businesses like Academy Sports, Sam’s Club, Barnes and Noble and the like.
“Jackson has lost a lot of its retail. City infrastructure is crumbling,” he said.
“We need to have another historic generational infrastructure plan for interstate highways, county roads and bridges and city streets,” he said.
He said the 300-page “Building Roads, Improving Development and Growing the Economy, or BRIDGE Act, was not that game-changing legislation.
Instead of providing additional money for roads and bridges, the bill actually took funding away from the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT).
Provisions called for the state to cut $25 million a year for the next five years and setting aside those funds in a special “transportation” account controlled by the governor.
The bill passed the Senate but failed to make it out of the House.
Said Blount, “It (was) a shell game, plain and simple.”
(photo) David Blount with Lions Harold McDonald and Harold Mayer
