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Zack and David break down recent headlines, including Senate Bill 2114, which places additional demands on local sheriff’s offices when it comes to ICE cooperation. We walk through what the bill actually changes, what many counties say they’ve already been doing, and why the “it’s no big deal” take doesn’t calm people who feel like their safety could depend on which county line they cross. We also get blunt about the language floating around online, especially the idea of “reporting” someone you merely “suspect,” and how easily that turns into profiling instead of evidence-based law enforcement.

Then we shift to Mississippi state appropriations and what a $54 million Golden Triangle package means for local projects, plus our frustration with stopgap funding and political games around MSMS facility needs. We round it out with a Kratom ban reality check, a quick guide to Columbus Pilgrimage and the Tales from the Crypt tradition, and three local storylines including tourism planning surveys, radar mapping for unmarked graves at Sandfield Cemetery, and Artemis II memories tied to Columbus Air Force Base.

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Progress has a sound, and sometimes it’s a chainsaw. We start in Burns Bottom, where a few dozen older trees are slated to come down as a new housing development prepares for infrastructure and dirt work. We talk through what’s actually happening on the ground and a plan to plant about 200 street trees.

Next, we dig into Mississippi public school accountability ratings and the frustration of changing standards year after year. We question what those A through F labels really communicate when the scale keeps shifting.

After the break, Matt Dowell, executive director of Golden Triangle Regional Airport, joins us from the world of air travel. We cover TSA during the government shutdown and the community support that kept morale up, new airline connections heading both east and west, major terminal upgrades like a first jet bridge, and what drives airfare pricing as planes fill and algorithms adjust. If you care about local growth, jobs, and the everyday logistics of travel, this one ties it all together.

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We talk to Iain Vasey, the newly hired CEO of the Golden Triangle Development LINK, to talk plainly about how the Golden Triangle can win industrial recruitment with limited resources and a lot at stake.

We get into Iain’s “Moneyball” approach to economic development: focus on the industries where you can win, keep your information accurate and verifiable, and build relationships that lead to repeat projects instead of a single splashy headline. He shares hard-earned lessons from high-dollar negotiations, including how incentives and tax limitation agreements can help when they’re structured well and hurt when they’re not.

We talk solar, workforce development, data centers and housing. If the region lands hundreds of new jobs with its latest Megasite, where do people live, especially the “missing middle” workforce that earns too much for assistance but not enough for new-build prices?