For nearly two years, I’ve been writing about a compelling case for action: Coastal Mississippi has the assets of a much bigger economy and the habits of a smaller one. The feedback has been strong. A few people in economic development got irritated. One Coast senator told me to drop the Gulf Coast Restoration Fund narrative if I wanted to make a difference. I didn’t. That money is one piece of a larger puzzle, and the last few months have shown the case was worth making.
Joe Max Higgins said Coastal Mississippi is an 800-pound gorilla that doesn’t know it. John Hairston of Hancock Whitney and Dave Dennis of Specialty Contractors have said the same thing on my show. Hairston summed it up when he talked about what becomes possible if our cities, counties, and economic development groups get “truly in consensus” and team up with a Mississippi Development Authority ready to swing.
“We can make magic happen on the Coast,” he said.
Hairston also called what’s left of the Deepwater Horizon money “the last of the free money” and worried we weren’t aiming it at projects that pay off for decades.
The scoreboard hasn’t moved enough. Pre-Katrina, Harrison, Hancock, and Jackson counties had about 364,000 people. We’re around 412,000 now. That’s resilience. It’s also fewer than 50,000 people gained in a quarter century, and it took 17 years to regain pre-Katrina job levels. While we were still recovering, the Golden Triangle wrote one plan, spoke with one voice, and landed more than $11 billion in economic development.
We’re strong with casinos, Ingalls, Bollinger, Chevron, Stennis, Keesler, and the Seabee base as the backbone. Those are pillars, but not a diversified future.
Long Beach Mayor Tim Pierce said the quiet part: “We’re not acting as one Coast. Every town fights for its piece. We need to focus on what lifts everyone.”
Former MDA director Bill Cork said we’re squandering a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Gov. Tate Reeves has called the Coast a gold mine that has to organize the way North Mississippi did.
The assets were never the problem. What we’ve lacked is one place where the region decides the big stuff together. That’s why the credit now belongs to the Gulf Coast Business Council executive committee, led by Jonathan Jones and now by Roy Anderson III, and to the staff that turned a conversation into a work plan.
Jamie Miller put it cleanly at the State of the Coast Symposium: “For the last 20 years, our story has been one of resilience. But resilience was never meant to be our finish line. … Resilience was our recovery story. But competitiveness needs to be our legacy.
The tool they built is the Plan of Plans. Instead of asking every city and county to scrap what they’ve already adopted, the Council looked across those documents for the places we already agree like workforce, infrastructure, downtowns, aerospace, maritime, and competitiveness. Regions don’t fail for lack of plans. They fail because the plans never talk to each other.
Now the Council has stood up a Select Committee of 14 leaders from 12 cities and the three coastal counties, co-chaired by Miller and Dennis, to turn that alignment into a short list of priorities. Anderson succeeded Jones as chairman with a mandate to put those priorities into action. This is the work I’ve been asking the Council to lead and I couldn’t be more happy with this progress.
What I hope they do now is refuse to stop at alignment. We need a living regional blueprint, one voice to a company that doesn’t care about county lines, and a serious claim on what remains of the Restoration Fund aimed at family-sustaining jobs rather than another round of fixes. Local economic development teams aren’t absorbed, they’re multiplied. They are still scrapping for every job in their county while a regional plan goes after the projects none of them can land alone.
I’ve been impatient in these columns, but impatient is not the same as ungrateful. The Council listened to stakeholders, built a process, and put private-sector weight behind the idea that Coastal Mississippi has to compete as a region or watch the next decade happen somewhere else. Now, they’ll name the priorities, publish them, and make them specific enough that a mayor, a supervisor, and a site selector can all point to the same page.
The compelling case for action has not changed. Thanks to the Gulf Coast Business Council, more of the right people are finally ready to act on it.
Onward and upward!
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