Business View Civil and Municipal | March 2021

25 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL MARCH 2021 MI SS I SS I PP I MUNI C I PAL LEAGUE “When it comes to storms and weather-related issues, our role is helping them facilitate the federal assistance that comes through FEMA and navigate that process. Interestingly, our current MML President is the Mayor of Gulfport, so he is very familiar with this – the Gulf coast in 2005 was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. And in the midst of the pandemic they’ve also had to deal with the impact of several major storms this year. Some flooding and wind damage. We also have a very active tornado season in Mississippi.” BVM: How do you communicate with the membership? Veazey: “We’re always working on improving the ways we communicate. We have a quarterly magazine and an active social media presence, and we send out a lot of emails. We’re moving more into text messaging now because these days people are more apt to see a text before an email. So in our next legislative sessions, if we need to send out an alert about a bill, we’ll be doing that through text messaging.” Brown: “We put out an annual Grants & Loans book that we send to our members. In that book, they’re organized by category and we update it once a year, after I’ve talked to every state agency in Mississippi to find out what grants are available to municipalities. Grants are very competitive, so we want our members to know where and when they can apply.” Veazey: “Robbie is in charge of our City Hall Center which is focused mainly on small towns; it’s a clearing house of information they can go to. There’s a special section on our website and in our quarterly magazine. Just making sure the smaller towns know what resources are available because they don’t have all the people and departments that a larger city has to access information. That’s something we spend a lot of time doing. Eighty-five percent of our member cities are under 10,000 and about 55 percent of them are under 5500. So there are a lot of little towns that need some handholding and help