Author: John Branston

A penny in your pocket or purse is trash. A penny on the sales tax or property tax rate or at the gas pump or in a slot machine is treasure.

Big treasure. Pennies have never been in the news more than they are now. The reason, of course, is that the penny figures into the taxes that fund the new Unified Shelby County School System, the city budget, and the county budget. Reporters and elected officials have pennies on the brain, and never mind that the fastest way to lose readers and voters is to make them do arithmetic.

Truth in advertising would compel us to label stories “contains math” the way gas pumps say “contains ethanol.”

Which is as good a place as any to start. Gas prices are going up this summer because that is what gas prices do in the summer. There is no reasonable explanation, it just is, like rising temperatures and headlines that say “pain at the pump.”

If one gas station is selling regular for $3.35 a gallon and the one across the street is selling it for $3.36, the savings on a 20-gallon fill-up is 20 cents. Drive around Memphis a bit and you can probably find price variations of 20 cents or more, which works out to saving a few bucks each fill-up and a few hundred bucks a year.

The sales tax in Memphis is 9.25 percent. Some city council members want to raise it to 9.75 percent, matching the new rate in the Shelby County suburbs. The proposed increase, which was defeated in a referendum last year, would cost consumers $5 on every $1,000 worth of purchases.

Call it a sandwich or a lottery ticket worth of added expense, but don’t bet your pennies on the referendum passing if it gets that far. If it did pass, it would raise more than $40 million in Memphis. The add-on in the suburbs is enough to satisfy the legal requirement for funding municipal schools.

The Memphis City Council met Tuesday to clarify the impact of a penny — actually only a fraction of a penny — on the $3.40 cent property tax rate. Finance director Brian Collins told them the city gets $1,052,000 for each penny on the tax rate. From a property owner’s point of view, a penny on the city tax rate on a house appraised at $100,000 is $2.50. Call that a cup of coffee and a donut. The council has been meeting for months to try to set the tax rate, going through entire kegs of coffee, as has the Shelby County Commission, which still has not finished the job.

We watch our pennies at the grocery store, one of the few places where the jar of pennies and coins on your dresser is worth anything. The Coinstar machines charge a 9.8 percent “processing fee” to convert them to cash or grocery credits. A sack of 1,000 pennies buys about $9 worth of groceries. The truth is that I would pay 20 percent or even 30 percent to get rid of them. My bank won’t even take them, preferring to impose fees of $1 or more at every opportunity.

Nowhere has the penny exerted greater power than at the Mississippi casinos. When the casinos came in 20 years ago, the cheapest slots accepted nickels, and the places that installed such machines were derided for catering to poor people.

But a few years ago, coins and plastic coin buckets and the sound of silver dollars clattering into a metal tray beneath blinking lights and whining sirens disappeared. Coins were replaced by bill acceptors, and the penny slot machine became the most popular game in the casino. You don’t actually drop in a penny at a time, but you can play a penny at a time or several dollars worth at a time. Pick your poison. Speaking from experience, the thrill is not all that different, considering that I play Vegas solitaire on my computer for nothing.

According to Mississippi Gaming Commission reports, there are 21,090 penny slots in the state. There are only 62 slots that play $50 at a time and exactly one $500 slot machine.

The amount of “coin in” wagered on penny slots in the month of May this year was just over $1,202,000,000.

If you want to know how many pennies that is, and I know you do, we must resort to the language of astronomers. The answer is more than 120 billion, or 120,200,000,000 pennies. Enough to support nine casinos in Tunica County and 31 in the state of Mississippi or build a stack of pennies halfway to the moon.

If you think phone companies, pay-day lenders, and airlines are bad about hidden fees and add-ons, wait until you see how Memphis city government plans to gouge citizens for more bucks.

For want of a nickel to stick in a parking meter, violators face more than $200 in fines and court costs, plus a mark on their driving record that could boost their insurance rates. Either that or they can spend half a day and take their chances in Ticket Hell, otherwise known as the courtrooms in the basement of 201 Poplar.

Parking meters are a vestige of the days when downtown really was the “central business district” of Memphis and home of the headquarters of three banks, a brokerage firm, and law firms, retailers, and professional offices that have since moved away. With the exception of the University of Memphis, your chances of getting a parking ticket anywhere else in Shelby County are nil. When I called suburban officials to ask if they had meters, I might as well have been asking if they had brothels or casinos.

“No, and the likelihood of having them in the future is slim to none,” said Germantown city administrator Patrick Lawton.

Metering downtown is wildly inconsistent. In addition to the broken ones, there are no meters on most of Front Street and Main Street south of Beale or north of the convention center and none in HarborTown on Mud Island. Eat lunch meter-free at Gus’s Fried Chicken on Front, but bring some change and keep an eye on your watch if you eat at Lenny’s a few blocks away.

The revenue-hungry Memphis City Council and the Wharton administration’s response to this is to add more meters in more places and jack up fines. A $21 ticket (it was $5 back in 1996) has to be paid within 15 days to avoid Ticket Hell. Contesting a ticket means going to court, where the ticketing officer’s appearance is mandatory — a double waste of time better spent. Otherwise, the violator is hit with a judgment of $186.75 in additional fines and court costs. No-shows get a mark on their license.

So, just pay the ticket within 15 days? Easy to say for those who don’t share a car with family members, use a car to get around downtown for work, or know the frustration of jammed meters, parking outside the lines, insufficient change, and coping with the pedestrian and trolley mall and tell-it-to-the-judge police officers.

We are targets of opportunity. And if new meters that accept credit cards are installed, it won’t be long before hourly rates are raised, hours of operation are increased from the current 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and more personnel are assigned to enforcement. The brunt of this hidden tax will be borne by citizens and visitors who patronize downtown, where some muggers carry weapons and others carry ticket books.

City Court clerk Tom Long was more sympathetic than defensive when I met with him Monday to get an explanation. Long, who has been in office for 18 years, says he is whipsawed by the state legislature and the council telling him how to do his job.

“They are looking for revenue any way they can get it,” he said. “What’s going to happen is people are not going to come downtown.”

Long’s office collects one third of fines within one year and two thirds within five years. He keeps a “Top 100” list of violators who owe $577 to $2,111 each in back tickets. Until this year, tickets were “abated” (forgiven) and purged from the system after one year.

“Our collection rate was higher before the media publicized that,” he said. “As of this January 13th, no tickets are abated.”

City council members, led by Councilman Bill Boyd, have zeroed in on uncollected fines and see a revenue windfall of more than a million dollars a year. This is the same council that couldn’t find seven votes to crack down on tax breaks for corporations and developers. Boyd knows better than anyone how much property tax is abated, because he used to be the Shelby County assessor. He could not be reached for comment.

Downtown Memphis is not downtown Chicago or Nashville or some other city with tall buildings and actual tenants. Its pockets of prosperity are offset by blocks of blight. Businesses that choose to locate in downtown get a tax break in hopes that they’ll generate sales taxes and jobs. Individuals deserve a small break too.

TUNICA — Luck turns on a dime.

A flip of the cards, a roll of the dice, a spin of the wheel, a turn of the reels. One minute you’re up, the next minute you’re down, and that goes for slot junkies and high-rollers.

A slip of the tongue can do it too if you’re Paula Deen. Paula Deen’s Buffet opened in Harrah’s Tunica Casino in 2008. Harrah’s went all in. Getting Paula out of the casino would be like getting the butter out of a pound cake. Her name and likeness are everywhere.

On the sign at the entrance just off of U.S. Highway 61. On the cardboard cutouts at the restaurant with its homey white shutters and Paula Deen photo collage. On the tables with Paula Deen hot sauce and Paula Deen recipe cards for Mississippi Mud Cake, cheese biscuits, and hoe cakes. In the Paula Deen Gift Shop, you can buy Paula Deen pots and pans, books, knickknacks, aprons, candy, picture frames, and T-shirts (“Our hoes are complimentary”).

The Tunica Convention and Visitors Bureau website features a three-minute video of Paula taking a chowhound on a tour.

“Do you know why I was so excited about coming to Tunica, Mississippi?” she coos. “You’ve got to have cooks, and I knew that these women and men were good Southern cooks.”

Then she autographs the host’s forehead with a Sharpie.

Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows.

Last week, the Food Network announced that it is ending a partnership with Deen that began in 1999. On Monday, Smithfield Foods, known for its hams, dropped her as its spokeswoman. On Wednesday, she went on the Today show. Paula Deen’s goose was cooked when a 2012 deposition became public earlier this month. She admitted using racial slurs in the past. No public figure can survive the “have you ever” question and the resulting media feeding frenzy. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni scoffed at suggestions that Deen, 66, is a product of her place and time.

“All of her adult years post-date the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and she’s a citizen of the world, traveling wide and far to peddle her wares. If she can leave Georgia for the sake of commerce, she can leave Georgia in the realm of consciousness.”

Sounds like somebody’s got a Georgia problem. Ever used the word “cracker,” Frank?

Can Paula Deen hang on in Tunica County, where 73 percent of the population is black, or with Harrah’s, the biggest player in gambling in the state of Mississippi?

A spokesman for parent company Caesar’s Entertainment said “we will continue to monitor the situation.”

When I visited the Paula Deen Buffet for lunch this week, a black woman at the hostess stand mumbled “all right, I guess” and let it go at that when I asked her how things were going.

The buffet was doing a good business at $14.95 a head. Answering duty’s call, I started with a plate of fried dill pickles, fried catfish, and chicken gumbo, then attacked Bobby Deen’s “healthy” kitchen for corn bread dressing, sliced ham, cheeseburger meatloaf, baked catfish, and a cheese biscuit before finishing strong with hot bread pudding with caramel sauce and a peanut butter “gooey” from the bakery.

Then I bought a Paula Deen “Queen of Southern Cuisine” picture frame for $4.95 in case there’s a Twinkies effect.

Queen Deen has talked her way out of tight spots before, such as her belated disclosure of her Type 2 diabetes. Where Bruni saw a racist buffoon in her 80-minute interview with the Times before a live audience last year, I saw a woman who could make it as a stand-up comic with a blue streak in another life. Like Oprah and Ellen, her following bridges race. One fan, a black woman, calls her “one of my four vanilla mommas.” Paula is clearly touched.

The question Harrah’s should ask is this: If Paula Deen is a racist, has it come out before this in her daily and very public life? Harrah’s pioneered customer research in its industry and has a racially mixed workforce of more than 3,000 people in Tunica. There’s your focus group.