Ongoing partnership between city/county now even more vital

We are disappointed that the City of Batesville has not replied to a request from the board of supervisors to help the county fund the ambulance service. This after the many minutes of discussion spent by the mayor and aldermen during their November 7 meeting about why they could not help with the funding.
(Background: During an August city budget meeting, supervisor board president Cole Flint brought city officials a letter from his board, a written request for the city’s help. Weeks later, having had no reply from the city, the question came up during a November 6 supervisors meeting. Supervisors voted to have Batesville Mayor Jerry Autrey come to their next meeting to respond for the city. We suppose it was an invitation; supervisors can’t order a mayor to do something.
That prompted the November 7 discussion among the mayor, aldermen, their attorney and accountant during which they cited a number of what they consider valid reasons the city should not provide the funding — double taxing city taxpayers main among them. Which is fine. City elected officials have responsibilities to their constituents just like county elected officials.)
But — and this is not saying that the city should have responded positively or negatively — just that they should have responded, showing the courtesy either by letter or by the mayor in person.
Instead, the city communicated — if you can call it that — by letting supervisors read about it in the newspaper. The background noise during meetings has gone something like, “Well, if the city won’t help us we may not be able to help them with our equipment and workers to move the dirt from the floor at the civic center when events change.”
Or, “If they won’t move our dirt, we’ll buy a loader (dirt digger, scooper blade tractor, whatever) and move it ourselves.”
Huh? So now we’re going to get into nah-nahhny-nahh-nahh like kids on a playground?
Immature attitudes expressed around board tables threaten the growing rapport between the city and the county that has allowed a number of successful joint ventures between them, paving, road building and especially economic development among them.
The value of having a county board of supervisors and a city government that can work together is tremendous. Panola County and the City of Batesville (or Como, Sardis, Crenshaw, Courtland, Pope or Crowder) will always be small players in a sea of big fish. Any time supervisors, or and alderman or a mayor start getting turf protective, we become even smaller.
Sure, every elected official represents his or her own constituents, but political and government boundaries are really just artificial lines drawn to separate jurisdictions among us. In our city/county micro setting within the larger world, we get weaker when we start taking those artificial boundaries too seriously.
So how should the city respond to the county’s request for help with ambulance service? Assuming that for all those reasons the city entourage discussed during the November 7 meeting are valid and the city should not supplement payment for ambulance service, the city should go to the county and say so — tell them why without making them have to learn about it from the newspaper. (Don’t make a mistake: we love to have people learn everything they can from these pages, but we should not be the first line of communication between elected representatives of local government who are right across the street from each other.)
Then — what we would like to see and what we have been proud to see several times in the past from both city and county officials — should come the reply: We can’t help you here, but is there somewhere else where we can help?
In our opinion, cooperation between local governments has never been more vital than right now, November, 2017. Our national government is imploding and with the exception of a few bright stars, state government is in the sway of ideologues and special interests. We simply can’t afford to allow our local governments to devolve into the same abyss.