Please note that this post contains affiliate links and any sales made through such links will reward MageeNews.com a small commission – at no extra cost to you.
A Successful September in Magee, MS
September of 2017 was a good month for the City of Magee. The Board and the Mayor have been hard at work making sure that the city is well cared for and making forward progress. For June and July, the City of Magee had the 48th highest sales tax revenue out of 313 municipalities in Mississippi and along the 49 corridor only 3 cities surpassed our sales tax revenue for that period.
As some of you may well remember, there was an incident in another municipality several months ago that resulted in the death of an inmate working with a city sanitation crew. Because of this, several new requirements were made by the MDOC to help ensure the safety of the inmates on work detail. The City of Magee moved quickly to make the necessary modifications to our garbage trucks so the public would not experience any lapse in garbage pickup service.
Our Recreation Department has been successful in enticing people to bring their tournaments to the Magee Sportsplex and we will be hosing the MAIS State Softball Tournament in Magee at the end of September. These tournaments bring people in to our city who rent hotel rooms, eat and shop here and helps generate a great deal of sales tax revenue for us.
A 2017/2018 budget for the city was adopted and among other things it includes several paving projects that will begin as soon as the weather permits. It also includes some new and necessary equipment for our Parks & Recreation Department and Public Works Department. In addition, all non-elected employees of the city received a 3% pay increase.
Some news that you might have missed in our meetings that may be of interest to you, is the approval of Magee to start its own chapter of Keep Magee Beautiful, previously the organization that operated on our behalf was Keep Simpson County Beautiful. Changing this to a one city organization offers us many advantages and opportunities for grant money and beautification projects. The Board also voted unanimously to amend the existing restaurant beer sales ordinance to include the downtown area of Magee. This change should help spur some growth downtown and give the area some of the same advantages as the businesses closer to the Highway. The ordinance states that a restaurant’s sales must be at least 60% food and they may not advertise alcohol sales on the exterior of their building. Our Police and Fire Departments continue to work to make our city safer and one tangible piece of evidence to that is their efforts over the past month to identify and have repaired, the streetlights in the city that were not in service. At this point 95% of the lights that were not operational have been repaired.
We are looking forward to an even better month in October and more positive changes for the City of Magee. Some things to be on the lookout for are: The appointments of the members to Keep Magee Beautiful, the possibility of some grant funds for a Senior Citizen Day Center, new businesses locating in Magee, an updated city website, and much more!
