“Mayors are not in the municipal services business. They are mixed use real estate developers,” was how Leland Speed, head of the MS MDA, viewed the job of mayors in today’s society. I wrote yesterday about Leland and his visionary ideas on recreational land as a catalyst for small towns and rural counties.
Leland told me about Jim Storer, who moved back to Magnolia, MS (population 2,071) after retiring from the staff of the Medical School at Tulane University. He has personally bought 15 old houses in Magnolia and fixed them up. “He’s brought in a call center and really has things hopping in the town.”
Leland also has several sites laid out for large lakes in these rural areas, hoping to do them as joint ventures between the county and state. He has an 850 acre lake sited near Picayune, a 1,250 acre lake in Kemper County which has the second lowest population density in the state and a $5 million lake project planned for Dekalb County.
I’d never thought of mayors in quite that light, but think that Leland is onto something. The towns that I’ve seen from my travels that seem to be doing the best are the ones that are aggressively developing their downtowns, leveraging their resources and finding new job opportunities for their citizens.
Stay tuned. I’ll be with Leland later this month and should have more great tidbits from my talks with him.
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