Columnist: Singing River sale has intriguing possibilities

I grew up in Tupelo, but I came “home” to the Coast about a year ago. For me, the Coast is home because it is where I spent the first formative years (1982-1996) of my 40-year newspaper career as a sportswriter and sports editor at The Sun Herald.

Last July, I moved to Moss Point and as I become invested in my new/old community, I’ve followed with great interest the debate over the future of the Singing River Hospital System. My doctor is affiliated with the hospital, so like many of you, I have a direct vested interest in its future.

It is not my brief time back on the Coast that informs my view on the potential sale of the hospital, but rather my experience as a reporter and columnist in my previous work. For the past 12 years, I’ve worked at The Dispatch newspaper in Columbus, located in Lowndes County, where I often reported on Lowndes County government.

Until 1993, Lowndes County also owned the local hospital. That year, by a 3-2 vote, the supervisors voted to sell the hospital to the Memphis-based Baptist Memorial Hospital System for $30 million, which the county put into a trust fund.

It was not a popular move. In the next election, all three of the supervisors who voted in favor of the sale were voted out of office.

Yet even back then, the pressures associated with operating a modern hospital, one sufficiently equipped to serve the quality care patients demand, were building,

Expanding services and acquiring new technology is an expensive proposition. Compounding the challenge is the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid, leaving hospitals with a huge amount of uncompensated care. The margins, then, are small.

In 1993, as noted, the sale of the Lowndes County Hospital was wildly unpopular.

Today, almost 30 years later, it is widely considered the best decision the supervisors ever made.

I believe what happened to public opinion in Lowndes County is relevant to the present discussion here..

For the first 20 years, the $30 million Lowndes County received from the sale of the hospital remained more or less untouched. State law prohibited the county from investing in anything other than Treasury Bills, which in a good year, yielded only a few thousand dollars in profits.

That changed in 2013, about the time I started reporting on the county. The Lowndes County supervisors successfully lobbied the legislature to allow them to invest that $30 million in stocks and bonds.

Almost immediately, the profits began to roll in: $924,000 in the first year alone. In eight years, the county has pulled out $7.28 million in profits while growing the balance of the trust fund from $30 million to $37 million.

As a result, the county has built a new justice court system, a new health department building, an equestrian park and a handful of community centers, all at zero cost to the taxpayer.

Admittedly, $7.28 million in profits over eight years may not seem like a grand sum. Yet consider scale. According to estimates, the sale of Singing River would net anywhere from $158 million to $228 million for the county. If Jackson County were to follow the Lowndes County model and see a similar return on investment, a trust fund conservatively invested in the market would generate between $4.25 million and $7 million in annual profits, not to mention growing the value of the fund.

I suspect Jackson County could find plenty of capital projects where that kind of money would come in handy.

Slim Smith, a former Sun Herald editor, has been a journalist for over 40 years.