TH URSDAY, mARcH 25, 2010 • 50¢
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Gaming, sales tax zap city’s income By Steve Sanoski ssanoski@vicksburgpost.com
HONESTY bEST Arnold Palmer has advice for Tiger b1
Five months into the fiscal year, gaming and sales tax collections in Vicksburg — which account for nearly half of the city’s operating budget — are each down by nearly 8 percent compared to fiscal year 2009. While Mississippi’s 30 statelicensed casinos collectively posted a 2.7 percent increase
in winnings from gamblers in February compared to a year ago, it appears Vicksburg’s five casinos did not fare as well as others in the state. Gaming tax revenues paid to Vicksburg, Warren County and the local school district were down by 21.9 percent in February — to $658,569, from $843,487. The city’s 18.5 percent share of sales taxes collected in the city limits
netted $556,997 in February, down from $606,755 in February 2009. Fiscal year to date, sales tax collections are at approximately $3.18 million, down 7.65 percent. The city’s cut of local gaming tax collections through the same time period is approximately $2.6 million, down 7.7 percent. “We went into this budget cycle knowing that revenues were going to be down significantly. We made the adjust-
ments, and we continue to watch our revenues closely each month,” Mayor Paul Winfield said Wednesday. The city’s operating budget is about $31.5 million for the year that ends Sept. 30. Under Winfield’s direction, the city has taken steps in recent months to rein in spending, including limiting capital purchases by department heads and travel outside the city.
Tonight: Partly cloudy; low near 44 Friday: Partly cloudy; high hear 65 Mississippi River:
35.6 feet Rose: 0.9 foot Flood stage: 43 feet
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By The Associated Press
DEATHS • Lee Manuel Burns • Adolph Maxie Cupit Jr. • Mary Evans • Mary Frances Payne Glatt • Nancy Ann Jones • Maxey D. Parish Jr.
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TODAY IN HISTORY 1865: Confederate forces attack Fort Stedman in Virginia but are forced to withdraw by counterattacking Union troops. 1894: Jacob S. Coxey begins leading an “army” of unemployed from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington D.C., to demand help from the federal government. 1947: A coal mine explosion in Centralia, Ill., kills 111 people. 1965: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leads 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks. 1975: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is shot to death by a nephew with a history of mental illness. (The King nephew Faisal was beheaded in June 1975.) 1990: 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, are killed when fire races through an illegal social club in New York City.
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ONLINE www.vicksburgpost.com VOLUME 128 NUMBER 84 2 SECTIONS
See City, Page A9.
State budget in limbo
rain day
WEATHER
City Accountant Doug Whittington anticipated gaming and sales tax shortfalls when he drew up the budget last year, but so far the collections have been even slightly lower than he expected. The city’s budget projects gaming tax revenues of $6.77 million this fiscal year, and sales tax revenues of $7.28 million. Gaming tax
merediTh spencer•The Vicksburg PosT
Dianne Davis, a school crossing guard with the Vicksburg Police Department, uses an umbrella to protect herself from morning rain as she operates the traffic light at Bowmar Avenue and Drummond Street this
morning. Rain remained in the forecast for the rest of today, but it was expected to clear out by Friday, and the National Weather Service said sunny skies are on tap for the weekend.
JACKSON — Mississippi lawmakers missed their budget-writing deadline Wednesday night, but they weren’t fretting about it. Leaders say they’ll renew efforts to either extend the three-month session or to let lawmakers leave for a few weeks and return in late April to finish the spending plan. The new fiscal year begins July 1. Some lawmakers say there’s no point in finishing a budget now because the state could receive $187 million from the federal government in the next few weeks. Two-thirds of the House and Senate must agree on new budget deadlines. If the regular session ends with no budget, Gov. Haley Barbour will have to call a special session.
Nissan lays bets vans boost Canton production By Maria Burnham The Associated Press CANTON — Nissan is betting millions of dollars and five years of research that the commercial van market in North America will finally let its Madison County auto manufacturing plant live up to its full production potential. The company halted production of the Quest minivan this year, reassigned 600 workers from other areas of the plant and just completed a $118 million expansion and modification of the facility to accommodate the new vans, which should be in produc-
Chris Martin of Nissan explains some of the features of the robotics to be used in body assembly of cargo vans, like the one above.
See Nissan, Page A9.
rogelio solis•The associaTed Press
Grand Gulf gets good marks for safety in 2009 By Danny Barrett Jr. dbarrett@vicksburgpost.com Grand Gulf Nuclear Station earned favorable ratings from federal regulators for safety performance in 2009, based on an annual safety and preparedness inspection. Mississippi’s only nuclear plant operated in a manner that preserved public health and safety, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. For three-quarters of the year, inspections of the Claiborne County facil-
ity showed very low safety significance and all performance indicators at levels requiring no additional NRC oversight. Those findings for the second, third and fourth quarters put the plant in the highest possible safety grouping in the NRC’s colorcoded system. Colors start with green and descend to white, yellow or red in the order of safety significance in various ratings. Those areas include incident response, integrity of the
barriers between radioactive fuel inside the reactor and the public, emergency planning and limiting radioactive exposure to workers. A first quarter inspection showed a white-coded performance indicator, tied to an “additional supplemental inspection” in February 2009, according to the NRC’s letter to Entergy Operations Inc. The extra inspection was done as a result of the agency’s response to two shutdowns during the fourth quarter of 2008, when four
BANNERS
occurred altogether. Equipment failure caused three of that year’s interruptions in power production, according to the NRC’s senior resident inspector when the 2008 assessment was released. The unit is returning to full power after a feed-pump trip March 8 halted production of electricity, an incident that did not affect service to Entergy customers but is sure to affect next year’s federal inspection. Output had risen to 99 percent of capacity Wednesday.
Results of a separate survey dealing with safety culture at Grand Gulf and four other Entergy-operated nuclear plants in Louisiana, Arkansas and Nebraska will be discussed Wednesday at NRC regional offices in Arlington, Texas. A $574 million upgrade to the plant’s power generating capacity — making it the nation’s largest single nuclear reactor — was approved by the Mississippi
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See Grand Gulf, Page A9.