Nearly each businessperson in our area in which I’ve come in contact shares my interest in understanding what benefits could be realized by having less, more focused local government.

The word “consolidation” bears a black eye of sorts from some folks. Most of those folks seem to live in the county and think they are smarter than others for avoiding “city taxes.”

And while it is true that county taxes are less than city taxes, the premise that you get what you pay for never works out fairly in the city-county tax equation.

County residents who live outside the city limits almost certainly use some services of the City of Natchez — some of which are directly reimbursed, some of which are not.

But this invisible wall seems to exist in the minds of some that the world changes as you pass from the city to the county.

Not true.

We’re all one community. Period.

Young, old, black, white, rich, poor, deeply rooted or recent transplants, Natchez and Adams County people should be one group represented by a single entity of government.

Natchez and Adams County are like a married couple, but one that doesn’t work well together.

It is as if the “couple” got married years ago, but simply kept all of their “stuff” and never bothered to try and merge their lives together.

Effectively, we are running two households.

“He” has a complete set of gardening tools, and “she” does as well. They are kept in two separate sheds.

That’s two lawn mowers, two string trimmers, two blowers, two edgers and the list goes on and on. Natchez and Adams County operate the same way. For goodness sakes, each government entity has its own pothole-patching device.

The duplication is nuts.

To be fair the city and county have begun to work with one another on some projects.

Years and years ago the city and county schools were consolidated.

After much teeth gnashing the city and county have agreed to work together on recreation, though it effectively took a Mideast Peace like detente to accomplish a bit of progress here.

And, as some of our leaders famously tout, we have the city-county fire agreement.

The agreement includes the county paying a fee to the city in exchange for the city’s fire crews responding to fires outside the city limits.

In theory this works OK, but the county seems intent on working to improve the volunteer firefighting crews to the point that the agreement is no longer necessary.

When the city recently came forward and sought an increase in money to help better staff the city’s fire crews in the face of a warning that the city’s fire rating would drop, the county effectively said, “No, thanks.”

If the city cannot get its firefighting ducks in a row soon, city residents are going to see increases on property insurance rates when the fire ratings diminish in quality.

If city and county leaders would work together to simply explore the “what ifs” of merging resources together, taxpayers might find benefits in the process.

Despite a few grumbling Guses out there, the truth is city and county residents might come out better by merely joining forces.

The entire hubbub about the city’s health insurance premiums could improve if the city and county simply merged their employee pools together. While I’m no health insurance expert, a larger pool of insured people may provide better buying power and may lessen the risk and expense for the coverage.

What I fear may happen, however, is that the egos involved will not allow sharing of the spotlight and no discussion or serious study will go into how joining may make the group stronger.

If that happens, problems like rising insurance rates and tight budgets are going to get worse before they get better.

We have time to build a plan to address all of this now, but that requires our leaders to focus less on their own little elected fiefdoms and more on the great good of the community.
Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.