As most of you are aware, there was a White House conference in DC two weeks ago  in which many Deltans attended. The stated purpose of the meeting was to discuss plans for a Delta Regional  Authority similar to what was created over 30 years ago in Appalachia called the Appalachian Regional Commission. That entity was created to help with the economic development efforts in that region of the U.S.

BY ROBERT MCFARLAND, JR.
Delta Business Journal
Two weeks ago a cross section of Deltans traveled to Washington to attend a conference on the proposed Delta Regional Authority called "Delta Vision, Delta Voices".
This proposed authority would cover 219 counties and be modeled after the Appalachian Regional Commission which was created to boost economic development efforts into an area that spans the mountain region from West Virginia to the Northeast corner of Mississippi. Estimates are that the proposed Delta Regional Authority would have $30 million in start-up costs. The authority would also require congressional approval.

BY ROBERT MCFARLAND, JR.
Delta Business Journal
The Mississippi Delta will receive coverage in the July 10 edition of Time magazine as that publication’s executives and reporters visited various Delta river cities on a river tour that began in Missouri.
“The idea of our tour down the Mississippi River was to get a sense of what people were thinking about and what issues concerned them as we go into an election year,” says Barrett Seaman, special projects editor for Time. “We used the river as kind of a metaphor for the country as a whole, but realizing that we’re not getting the cross section that we did three years ago when we took a similar bus trip across the country from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco on Route 50.

“The Mississippi Delta is much better than I expected,” says John Slagter.  “It’s green and beautiful, and the people are wonderful.  All my preconceived ideas were wrong.”
In the mid-Nineties, Slagter struggled to operate a business in Haiti where a dangerous and volatile political atmosphere made work extremely difficult.  “On the same day my life was threatened, one of my investors called and told me about an opportunity to build a business in Rolling Fork.  I was on the plane to Mississippi the next morning.”

BY NANCY COTTEN HIRST
Contributing Editor, Delta Business Journal
On Friday, May 19, nine new nations banded together to ask NATO to invite them for membership in 2002.  These Central and Eastern European countries, several of which are former Soviet republics, have an obvious agenda that would be very dangerous to the present balance of power.
I have been worried about the military activism of NATO for some time now, but the inclusion of these new countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Albania, and Macedonia) would be an obvious play for military dominance unequaled since the days of imperialism and would threaten the stability of not only the region, but probably of
the world.

Gov. Ronnie Musgrove
I have always felt that one of the best features of our state is our people. Mississippians have a kind and caring nature toward one another, and go out of their way to help others in need.
With that being true, how can we, as the people of the State of Mississippi let any portion of our state struggle? While much of our nation and our state have experienced growth over the last decade, many Delta communities have not participated fully in our newly found prosperity. It is time for us to come together and work as one to bring the Delta up to equal footing with the rest of our state. If any portion or region of our state is faltering, then we all suffer.

BY Elizabeth Reid
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal
By the time the 125-day session was completed last month, several significant pieces of legislation netted benefits for the Delta. But a special session that will probably be called this summer may bring even more improvements to the region.
“As for particular Delta legislation, most of the economic issues have been set aside until the Governor’s special session,” said state senator Neely Carlton of Greenville.

BY Elizabeth Reid
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal
After 16 years in the grocery business, Patty Richardson still loves to go to work. So does scan coordinator Pat Fendley. And store manager Derrick Simpson, another 16-year veteran rarely thinks about job burnout.
Richardson, Fendley and Simpson are three of the 92 employees at Market Place in Greenwood who are singing the company’s praises these days. After all, company president and 30-year grocery veteran Kenneth Storey left them a gift when he retired: he let them buy the business.

BY Elizabeth Reid
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal
With construction of the 128-bed federal work camp underway, the Federal Correctional Institute Yazoo City is one step closer to becoming the largest employer in that town. Already, FCIYC is one of the larger federal prisons in the U.S. and is the only federal prison in Mississippi.
“The new work camp project, a 128-bed facility, has a cost of approximately $1.9 million and will house very, very low-risk prisoners,” says Elliott Caggins, executive assistant at FCIYC.

Former Jackson business publication owner and radio talk-show host, Jack Criss, has joined the Delta Business Journal as its Executive Editor. In taking the newly created position, Criss is reunited with the person who gave him his start in the publishing business, DBJ publisher J. Scott Coopwood.
“I first met Scott in 1990, while I was hosting a successful afternoon talk-show in Jackson on WJNT Radio,” Criss recalls. “I called him out of the blue one day and asked if he might be interested in my contributing some columns from time to time to his paper in Jackson, the Jackson Business Journal,” Criss says, adding with a laughs that “the rest, we hope, will be history!”

BY Elizabeth Reid
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal
David Potter is winding up his first year at the helm of the 4,000-student Delta State University located in Cleveland. The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce recently appointed economic developer Scott Luth as its new executive director. The four-lane bypass north of Cleveland will spur more commerce into the city when it is completed soon. And spirits are at an all-time high in the Delta’s hub city.

BY Jack Criss
Executive Editor, Delta Business Journal
It’s an accurate enough business cliche: As goes construction, so goes the economy. The number of new builds, the workloads of contractors and their subs, the amount of renovations—all of these variables can be used as fair gauges of a region’s economic progress, or stagnation. This is certainly true of the Mississippi Delta.

BY Molly Matthews
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal
New laws, a new lease, and other positive changes continue to improve the healthcare landscape in the Delta.
Sam Cameron, president of the Mississippi Hospital Association, says the Delta could soon see funds funneled into the area, considered by the federal government as a Medically Underserved Area, that would provide much needed infrastructure changes in health care services.

BY karen mccary
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal
A lot of money is invested in producing a crop. So why not invest in marketing it? That’s just what many farmers are doing-through SCI Producer Services.
Headquartered in Memphis, TN, Sparks Companies, Inc. (SCI), a world leader in comprehensive agriculture, food industry, agribusiness and commodity research, information, analysis and consulting, recently expanded its on-farm consulting business through a new program called SCI Producer Services. The program assists farmers who strive for a higher, overall net
return for their crop production through the development of customized farm price risk management. This is done by integrating fundamental analyses of the commodity markets into crop marketing strategies.

BY Hugh D. Palmer
Delta Business Journal
For the past several years, the Indianola based catfish processing company, Delta Pride Catfish, Inc. has seen some very hard times. In fact, in as many years almost as many CEO’s have passed through the company’s corporate doors. There has been setback after setback and according to many, the company’s future had been uncertain. Until now.