This week, Montgomery County and the City of Winona pledged their support of a tax increment financing plan (TIF) to assist an $8 million development of a heavy equipment dealer and a semi-truck dealership and service center on the southwest corner of Highway 82 and Interstate 55. The development will bring 163 construction jobs to the area for one year and 15 permanent jobs once construction is completed.
Tax increment financing is a development tool local communities can use to assist developers in bringing business, i.e. jobs, to an area. Plainly spoken, it allows cities and counties to issue bonds to assist developers pay for infrastructure improvements needed for the project. The bonds are paid for by future sales and ad valorem tax revenue generated by the new development.
These infrastructure improvements include street improvements or expansions, water and sewer improvements, parking lot construction, landscaping, and other public use areas of the development.
I applaud county and city leaders for using any and all tools available to bring business to this community. The TIF program not only assists a developing business with construction costs, which is an attractive incentive for prospective businesses, but it also opens up the area for future development with the infrastructure already in place.
As a native of DeSoto County, I have seen the effect the TIF program can have on a community. I watched a two-lane county highway turn into the busiest commercial corridor in the state of Mississippi, thanks to county and city leaders using the resources afforded to them for economic development. When my parents built their home on the outskirts of Southaven in 1987, their subdivision was one of a handful situated just east of the Southaven City Limits on Highway 302, also known as Goodman Road. The two-lane highway leading to my parent’s neighborhood featured a small, family owned convenience store, a garden center, and a large Church of Christ. On the west side of the Southaven City Limits at the intersection of Highway 302 and Highway 51, there was a larger convenience store and a small locally-owned restaurant. This intersection was known to locals as Bullfrog Corner.
The Southaven of my youth was very much like the City of Winona. The main commercial corridor was Stateline Road, and it was home to several fast food restaurants, a small Walmart, two grocery stores, a movie theatre, skating rink, and many small, family-owned businesses and cafes.
The home of one private school and a one-high-school public school system, I spent my teenage years cruising Stateline Road on Friday and Saturday nights, looping from Burger King on the east end of Stateline to the movie theatre on the west end.
In the early 1990s, Highway 302 was expanded to four lanes. A bank was built at the corner of Goodman Road and Airways, and soon after, two fast food restaurants were constructed, both of which drew hordes of customers every day.
During the early to mid-1990s, residential development exploded in DeSoto County, and soon, the City of Southaven annexed a large area to the east of the city, including my parents’ subdivision. Then in around 1998, Walmart constructed a Supercenter on land that was once home of the Gayoso Dairy Farm, and Goodman Road got even busier.
In 1999, the Southaven Board of Aldermen approved a $560,000 TIF plan for the development of the South Lake Centre, a mixed-use development that was to be constructed adjacent to Walmart Supercenter. The commercial strip center would include retail stores and restaurants, and the community celebrated Southaven’s commercial growth.
South Lake Centre was the very first groundbreaking ceremony for a commercial development I covered as a reporter for The Southaven Press. I don’t know if I realized at the time that so much of my future work in reporting the news of DeSoto County would be about commercial and residential development, but as an observer of the one of the fastest growing areas of the nation, that first development seemed to be a catalyst for development of the entire Goodman Road corridor.
In 1990, Southaven’s population was 21,434. Over the next decade, the population increased to 31,755, and today, Southaven’s population is at more than 55,000 and still growing at a rate of nearly 2 percent per year, according to Census data.
According to Southaven Chief Administrative Officer Chris Wilson, the City of Southaven has two TIF plans active today. The Southaven Towne Center mall, an open-air mall consisting of 43 retail stores and restaurants, was built in 2005. The city and county agreed to a 15 year TIF plan for $9.2 million. Silo Square, a large mixed-use development located in the Snowden Grove district of the city, is currently under construction. The city and county agreed to a $5 million TIF plan for that development.
In today’s competitive world of economic development, local leaders have to use what is available to entice prospective businesses to locate to a community.
I’m not saying Winona will or should be the next Southaven with its massive economic and population growth, but the city must grow to ensure the future health of the area. With Winona’s prime location at the intersection of two major highways, the use of the TIF program and other incentive programs is just the thing to make a prospective development into a reality.
Will this new development be a catalyst for future business development? I certainly hope so.
