Originally published on Forbes.com.
Claiborne County, Mississippi is home to the Grand Gulf Nuclear Generating Station operated by Entergy. Having one of those things in the neighborhood is a little nerve wracking. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency defines a plume exposure pathway zone and a larger ingestion pathway zone in the vicinity of the plant, in the event something goes really wrong. On the upside, a power plant could mean a lot of tax revenue and Claiborne County shows up on lists as one of the poorest counties in the country.
Only under Mississippi law, a county doesn’t get to tax a nuclear power plant. The state taxes the plant and divvies up the money among counties in the plant’s service area. Some residents claim that the reason for that law is that Claiborne County, home to Mississippi’s only nuclear power plant, has a population that is over 80% African American. That was what the lawsuit Doss v Claiborne County Board of Supervisors was all about. Spoiler alert – it did not go well for the disgruntled residents. As is common in these sort of cases, they foundered on the rock of standing.
Some History
Claiborne County has significance in the history of the civil rights movement. In 1966, African American citizens of Port Gibson, the county seat, started a boycott of white merchants which was suspended after the City hired its first black police officer. Police shooting in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination rebooted the boycott with leadership from the NAACP and Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers, who had been murdered in 1963. NAACP liability for collateral violence associated with the boycott ended up at the United States Supreme Court, which overturned a Mississippi judgment of $1.2 million against NAACP in 1982.
And property taxes were a big part of the racial struggle in Claiborne County. Evan Doss Jr. became the first black county tax assessor in 1972. Historian Emilye Crosby in The Black Struggle In Claiborne County, Mississippi wrote:
During his campaign, Doss promised to establish a “fair and equal tax for all county residents,” and when he took office, the organizers initiated and effort to reassess and equalize the community’s property tax system. In keeping with their pattern, whites reacted with fierce opposition. The outgoing tax assessor specifically warned Doss not to alter the existing assessments, and the board of supervisors drastically cut Doss’s operating budget to roughly half that of comparable counties. ……………………Doss and his associates determined that blacks were being inequitably taxed and estimated that the overall assessment was bout two-thirds of the correct value.
In the nineties, there were issues about how Doss handled his tax collection duties serious enough to land him in federal prison. Doss does not seem real popular with The Vicksburg Post.
At any rate in 2009 Evan Doss Jr went on record supporting the lawsuit.
“I’m not a plaintiff, but I’m supporting them 250 percent,” said Evan Doss Jr., who personally served notice of the suit to Claiborne County supervisors, who are among multiple defendants. His wife, Emma R. Ross, is among multiple plaintiffs.
Reminds you of that Faulkner line – “The past is never dead, It’s not even the past. ”
Not The First Rodeo
The law that stripped Claiborne County of its ability to tax the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant was challenged in the eighties and went up to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Ironically, the Claiborne County Board of Supervisors was one of the plaintiffs in that case. The law had required a constitutional amendment, which seems to have consumed most of the Mississippi Supreme Court’s attention in Burrell v Mississippi State Tax Commission. They did not get into the racial issues, but left an intriguing opening.
For the reasons enumerated below, we find in state law no legal infirmity in the scheme devised. Taxpayers residing in Grand Gulf’s home county, however, have asserted claims to relief under federal law, claims which ought be heard and decided on their merits someday, somewhere. As the federal courts have declined subject matter jurisdiction, we remand with instructions that Taxpayers’ federal claims be heard within the concurrent jurisdiction of the Chancery Court. (Emphasis added)
Almost thirty years later and someday has not yet arrived. The Burrell plaintiffs allowed their federal claim to be dismissed with prejudice in exchange for a $2 million payment to the county.
Two Narratives
There are, as far as I can tell two explanations for the peculiar handling of the property taxation of Grand Gulf. One is pretty benign. The power plant took a long time to build and it was built with borrowed money. The cost did not go into the rate base until the plant went in service which caused customers to experience sticker shock on their electric bills. Spreading the extra tax revenue among all the counties in the plant’s service area mitigated that.
The other explanation is less benign. Racism. Voting rights legislation and enforcement had allowed African Americans to gain control of government in Claiborne County and the change in the law prevented them from having access to substantial revenue to improve infrastructure and spend on education. In the wake of Brown v Board of Education white Mississippians had largely abandoned the public schools for segregation academies. Professor Crosby, who was the only white student in her graduating class at Port Gibson High School tends to favor the racism narrative, although she has not studied the power plant issue closely.
Professor Andrew Kahrl of the University of Virginia whose research focuses on “the social, economic, and environmental history of land use, real estate development, and racial inequality in the 20th century United States” has little doubt. A recent article by Professor Kahrl in “The Power To Destroy: Discriminatory Property Assessments and the Struggle for Tax Justice in Mississippi” in the Journal of Southern History included a discussion of Evan Doss Jr.’s struggle to clean up discriminatory assessments in the seventies wrote me:
As someone who has studied the history of taxation in Claiborne County, specifically, and in Southern states, in general, I can say that the state legislature’s decision in 1986 to strip this majority black county of its taxing authority over Grand Gulf was racially motivated. As my article shows, white-controlled local governments in Mississippi had, for generations, worked to prevent tax revenues from being used to the benefit of black communities as well as shifting the burden of local taxation disproportionately onto black taxpayers through various forms of discriminatory assessment and administration. During the Jim Crow era, these practices thrived because disenfranchisement had rendered white lawmakers unaccountable to black citizens. Upon passage of the Voting Rights Act and black southerners’ concerted efforts to register to vote and run candidates for local office, white lawmakers devised a variety of techniques for limiting the powers of new black officeholders and prevent them from doing their jobs. This was the case with Evan Doss Jr., who ran for Claiborne County Assessor in 1971 on the promise to restore fairness to a notoriously discriminatory tax assessment process, and, upon assuming the office, was thwarted at every turn by the white-controlled board of supervisors and subject to incessant harassment for, as he put it, “being black and doing my job.” The completion of the Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Station in the early 1980s promised to be a game changer for the county, in that it would provide it with much-needed tax revenue that could be used to provide vital social services for its impoverished population and improve its chronically underfunded public schools. By then, African Americans held most of the county’s elected offices and were poised to play a decisive role in the allocation of local tax revenues.The state’s unprecedented move to strip the county of its taxing authority over the power plant fit into this longer pattern of preventing black officials from playing a meaningful role in the distribution of tax revenues and limiting its use toward services that would benefit black communities. It was a nakedly racist move in a state with a sordid—and well-deserved—reputation for using the power of state and local government to oppress and exploit its black population and protect white political and economic power.
The Current Case
After nearly thirty years, the claims of racial bias still have not gotten a hearing. The problem is standing. A taxpayer does not get to sue about somebody else’s tax breaks. You can ask the Freedom From Religion Foundation about that in their long struggle over the dubious constitutionality of the parsonage exclusion. The decision was relatively short concluding.
Because Doss’s claims rest solely on the general and speculative conclusion that the statute is racially discriminatory because it causes her property-tax liability to increase, she failed to establish standing. It follows that the circuit court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction over Doss’s claim. Although the circuit court dismissed Doss’s complaint on the basis that it failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, “t is well established in our jurisprudence that the right result reached for the wrong reason will not be disturbed on appeal.” Cucos Inc. v. McDaniel, 938 So.2d 238, 247 (¶26) (Miss. 2006). No further analysis is necessary. Accordingly, we find no merit to Doss’s claim that the circuit court erred when it dismissed her complaint.
So it is still not someday.
Other Coverage
The only coverage I have found of this decision which came out in March, but had to wait for the end of tax season and subsequent vacation for me to notice it is on Jane’s Law Blog – What’s happening in the Mississippi Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.
The Claiborne County Circuit Court dismissed Doss’s complaint. The COA affirms. Taxpayers are not injured merely because a statute excuses the tax obligations of others.
As it turns out, Jane is attorney Jane Tucker who wrote the briefs for the county. The county’s attitude was “Why are you suing us?”. It is kind of an illustration of Reilly’s First Law of Tax Planning – It is what it is. Deal with it. The county had objected to the law along with others, but now is constrained to obey it.
On Getting Old
This case caught my eye because it was about a nuclear power plant, but I found the history behind it irresistible. I spent an incredibly unsuccessful year as a graduate student in American history before I studied accounting. So rubbing shoulders electronically with a couple of historians was pretty rewarding. On the other hand, this history that they are writing about was current events when I was a graduate student, which is a little disturbing.