Chip's Vision for Hernando

My vision for our city is to protect Hernando’s quality of life, ensure that our property values are protected, and provide a place that every citizen of Hernando is proud to call home. I plan to use my experience and leadership skills to move our city forward by promoting and preserving the highest standards for Hernando. It is also important to maintain high standards and expectations for Customer Service and to treat every citizen with respect.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted our lives in profound and unprecedented ways. It is safe to say that most all of us have been affected by Covid-19. The Covid-19 pandemic has hammered local small businesses vital to our economy. Hernando’s small businesses are in a vulnerable position. Loans may help many of them in the short run. But when the crisis is over, many businesses will have already permanently shut their doors. These impacts on small businesses have broad economic effects for at least two reasons. One, small businesses are an important avenue for economic mobility; they allow enterprising individuals to become economically independent. Two, small businesses employ nearly half of the US labor force and are a major source of US job creation and productivity growth.  They reinforce the direction of growth or contraction of the entire economy. How our small businesses recover from this pandemic will likely determine the pace of the national economic recovery. We need to strongly support our locally owned small businesses.

We have put many things in place that enhance the quality of life for the citizens of Hernando. The Farmers Market that we opened in 2008 has become the largest and favorite market in the state of Mississippi and provides a place where we can purchase fresh foods and meet with our neighbors. The Water Tower 10k race was started with seed money from a Mississippi Development Authority grant and now draws hundreds of runners from out of town to Hernando each year. Our administration built our first small, enclosed animal shelter years ago. We have obviously outgrown this facility and need to move forward on a new animal shelter that is of adequate size to house the huge numbers of abandoned pets we see each year. We opened Lee’s Summit Park, Kuykendall Park with the rubberized track, Pidgeon Park for our skateboarders, the Hernando Dog Park, the Gale Community Center, the soccer complex, and took over the Hernando Civic Center Baseball Fields to name a few. We added walking trails and bicycle lanes throughout the city for our pedestrians and cyclists and created wellness programs at the Gale Center. These programs and amenities are widely used by many of our citizens. Even if you do not use these amenities, they are a big part of the reason that your property values continue to increase. We must not only protect these city assets but continue to improve and add to them as our town grows.

We have created a great town for our citizens and others want to join our community. It does not appear that our growth will slow down anytime soon, and we have to keep up with the necessary infrastructure improvements. There is no way that Hernando can afford all these improvements with our low tax rate. The way we keep pace is to use our contacts and experience to continually lobby for federal and state funds. It takes many years to get the projects approved, more time to get them funded, and even more years to get them built while working through the government bureaucracy. When I left office in 2017, we had over 20 million dollars in APPROVED projects that we are now seeing be built. Projects such as the pedestrian improvements on the square, the multi-use pedestrian/bicycle path on McIngvale, the McIngvale Road re-alignment, the repaving of portions of McIngvale Road, new traffic signals at Nesbit and Robinson Street on Highway 51, Mt. Pleasant and Byhalia Road paving project, the fiber-linked synchronization of traffic signals on Commerce Street, and the McIngvale/I-269 exit are a few of these. I am concerned that there are no new projects being approved and we are falling behind on our infrastructure needs.

I want to do a listening campaign. That means that I will be listening more than talking. I intend to run a campaign of actively listening to the citizens. I am available to meet in person or on the phone. My cell is 901-371-7743 and I want every citizen to have access to this number. I want to move YOUR vision into the Mayor’s office. The City of Hernando is at a crossroads and I will use my experience and love for our city to help fulfill YOUR vision for the future of Hernando.