Business View Civil and Municipal | March 2021

24 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL MARCH 2021 do most of the education. The last one we had in the summer of 2019 we offered 67 different sessions they could choose to attend. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve developed webinars to replace the in-person conferences. We’ve now done several of those for training. It’s a new world for us, we had talked about going virtual before but COVID kind of pushed us to move forward in that regard.” BVM: Are there a lot of common issues among Mississippi municipalities? Veazey: “Yes, obviously, the bigger the city, the bigger an issue can be. But all the municipalities have been dealing with some of the same concerns, especially during COVID. They are public bodies, so one of the first things we helped them with was figuring out how to keep their meetings open to the public in the midst of a pandemic. That’s been a challenge. Many of them have had to do video conferencing to allow members that were quarantining to call in to the meeting, as well as managing social distancing to the public that were coming to meetings. “We’ve also had some federal funding that was appropriated by our legislature for municipalities to help with the impact of COVID. They had to look at expenses that weren’t budgeted. PPE and additional public safety expenses, enforcing emergency orders – even the smallest towns have had to deal with that. Mississippi is very rural, we only have about 15 cities over 20,000. Our largest city, Jackson, is about 165,000. The bigger cities have had more revenue loss because of COVID. Sales tax is a big driver, so larger cities saw significant lost revenue when retail shut down. Ironically, some of the small towns saw an increase in sales tax because people were sheltering at home and spending money locally at the mom and pop stores. It’s been a weird dynamic, some of the really small towns have had record sales tax revenue through the pandemic. that would work. There are electives with that level too, for 40 hours in total. “The last level is Professional Development where we teach how to talk to the media, public speaking, management issues, HR issues, labor issues. That’s another 40 hours. Once a member completes all three levels, they’ll have had at least 140 hours of education. They pay to come to one of our conferences and that’s where they