31%…..  Sales Tax

24%…..  Property Tax

17%…..  Miscellaneous

14%…..  intergovernmental Revenue

8%……  Franchise fees, license and permits

6%……  Fines and Forfeitures

This particular issue of Mississippi Municipalities Magazine is entitled How Mississippi Cities Work.  I recommend it highly for anyone who wants to better understand the subject.

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future. The countries that thrive will be those that build more of these towns that make possible “high-performance knowledge exchange and generation,” explains Blair Levin, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Gig.U project, a consortium of 37 university communities working to promote private investment in next-generation ecosystems.

1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment.

2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests.

3:  They think they have all the answers.

4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them.

5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image.

6: They underestimate obstacles.

7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

Although the above list is written about public officials, I wonder if it could also apply to mayors and governors.

How a community solves its problems or deals with serious issues says a lot about a place.  Tupelo, Mississippi is one of the best at this of any community I have dealt with. No matter the issue, public dialogue is a major part of the process.  The key is to get problems out in the open and to provide forums where people can discuss the issues.  There is an art to public forums.  People must feel that they can speak about their true feelings instead of what they think other people want to hear.  Tupelo’s success at this is a result of various local organizations, including local government, providing such opportunities.  Another factor is the local newspaper.

Tupelo is now addressing the issue of some changes in the public schools, many of which are rooted in local demographics. For example, when Tupelo’s schools were integrated in 1970, 80 percent of the district’s students were white.  Today, 56 percent of those students are minorities.

The local newspaper is providing a perspective that is thought-provoking, informational and non-patronizing.  The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal’s “Bridging the Gap” series is well worth reading for anyone involved in education or community and economic development.

This sharing is all very good for the most part because much of it is sharing of articles in newspapers and other media.  I’m told that newspapers love it because it drives traffic to their websites, and therefore can be useful for commercial purposes.  But when I read the small print on some newspaper websites it becomes very confusing.

For example, today a Google news alert linked to an article in the  Hattiesburg American that is entitled “Achievement gap threatens city, schools’ future.”  I clicked on it and read a very interesting article on a subject that is of interest to me and presumably those who follow my tweets (@philhardwick) on Twitter.com.  It appears that the article is a repost of an article written by Chris Kieffer of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and reprinted in USA Today.  I was just about to tweet it when I read this copyright notice at the bottom of the page:

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Uh, oh.  Being a writer myself I am sensitive to copyright issues so I immediately moved the pointer away from the Tweet logo hyperlink at the bottom of the page.  I wondered whether the newspaper wanted me to retweet, but that AP did not – and wait, wasn’t this from USA Today?  Obviously, there is a trail here, and at some twists and turns along the way the copyright notice got amended, discombobulated or simply not reposted.

I clicked on the home page of the Hattiesburg American to determine what a story written by one of its own reporters revealed about copyright and tweets.  The article I viewed was entitled “Auditor: USM has 3 weeks to gather tablets.”  At the top of the article were the usual tweet, facebook, email, and share icons.  Hmm.  I decided to check out the newspaper’s copyright notice found in the “terms of service” section of the website. Here’s what it said:

Your Limited Right to Use Site Materials. This Site and all the materials available on the Site are the property of us and/or our affiliates or licensors, and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. The Site is provided solely for your personal noncommercial use. You may not use the Site or the materials available on the Site in a manner that constitutes an infringement of our rights or that has not been authorized by us. More specifically, unless explicitly authorized in these Terms of Service or by the owner of the materials, you may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit, (emphasis added) translate, sell, create derivative works, exploit, or distribute in any manner or medium (including by email or other electronic means) any material from the Site. You may, however, from time to time, download and/or print one copy of individual pages of the Site for your personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices. For information about requesting permission to reproduce or distribute materials from the Site, please contact us.

In short, it appears that one the one hand the newspaper encourages redistribution while on the other prohibits it. Back to the original article about “Achievement gaps…”.  I would love to share it with you, but I don’t know whether I can do that or not.

Obviously, the practice of sharing articles via social media is immensely widespread and encouraged by media websites.  That is a good thing.  It just appears that the copyright notices have not caught up with the practice.

By the way, feel free to share this blog post.  Just attribute it to the writer in accordance with the copyright notice on the left column of this page.

Sometimes the blue handicap space zone does not stop some people from parking there.  These same people seem to have no problem tossing their litter in the parking lot.  So would a no-littering sign help solve the problem.  Not if the below research is any indication.

This from The Harvard Daily Stat:
When an anti-littering sign appeared on an alley wall, the proportion of people who littered there declined from 47% to 39% if the alley was clean—but rose from 61% to 70% if the alley was already strewn with soda cans and candy wrappers, say Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. A prohibition sign can become counterproductive if people see that its instructions have already been ignored, the researchers say.
Source: The reversal effect of prohibition signs