A chapter of the Move Weight Foundation
Olive Branch
The Question · Olive Branch, MS

The other side of the DeSoto County tax base

Olive Branch shares a county, a tax base, a water table and an industrial corridor with Southaven — where an ad valorem tax agreement abating two thirds of property tax on a recital of twenty new jobs is already published in full on this Foundation's Mississippi chapter. The same agreements, the same aquifer and the same board structure exist here, and no one has asked for them.

This is a question, not an accusation

No one at this Foundation has alleged that anybody in Olive Branch has done anything wrong, and nothing on this site should be read that way. Chapters are opened on structural risk — large capital programmes, fast growth, a single dominant employer, a utility or authority that meets away from the council — because those are the conditions under which decisions get made with nobody watching. That is a statement about attention, not about anybody's conduct.

Naming a city next to an accusation we have not documented would be precisely the thing this project exists to oppose. So the page you are reading names the question and the record that settles it, and then we go and ask for the record.

The record that answers it

Ad valorem tax exemption agreements approved by the Board of Aldermen, and the City's water-well permits and monthly pumpage reports.

How this gets resolved

  1. Ask. A request goes to the City of Olive Branch under Miss. Code Ann. § 25-61-1 et seq.. The City has seven (7) working days.
  2. Publish what comes back, whole. Released public records go up unredacted. We do not summarise a document in place of showing it, and we do not redact what the government already released.
  3. Publish what does not come back. A missed deadline, a refusal with no statute cited, an estimate that prices a resident out — those get published too, with dates. Silence is a finding.
  4. Rewrite this page. When the documents are in, this page stops being a question and becomes what the records showed — including if they showed nothing. A chapter that only ever reports wrongdoing is not doing arithmetic, it is doing marketing.

What you can do right now

You do not need us. The statute is yours, and a request from a resident of Olive Branch is harder to wave away than one from a nonprofit two states over.

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