Dorsey Carson didn't think he'd ever run for Jackson City Council, but the resignation of Ward 1 Councilman Quentin Whitwell in August opened a door for the attorney and Jackson native who will be on the special-election ballot.
A Mississippi State University and University of Georgia School of Law graduate, Carson has practiced law for more than 15 years, including in Atlanta for three years. He started his own law firm in Jackson in 2013.
With his downtown firm, Carson Law Group, he represents clients locally and all over the nation, including the Jackson Free Press. Carson said his experience with practicing law within the construction industry gives him the edge that Jackson needs in respect to economic development.
Carson also approaches the discussion of improving Jackson schools with special interest—his 4-year-old daughter, Hayes, just started preschool at McWillie Elementary School. He is married to Susan Hays Carson, also from Jackson.
Name the top issues facing Ward 1.
Economic development, and by that I mean retaining and recruiting businesses, retaining and recruiting our middle class, and that ties into public education and public safety. And I think generally a sense of going somewhere positive instead of apathy, which has really pervaded city hall for way too long.
How do you see council's role in public education?
In general, the council has not been as involved with JPS as they should be. The budget of JPS is actually bigger than the city budget, and the importance of public education in our city is huge on every level—whether it be businesses that are looking to build, expand, recruit in our community, or whether it be, more often than not, middle-class residents who leave Jackson because they've got three kids, and they're not comfortable sending their kids to a middle school. They don't have money for private school, so they move to Madison and Rankin counties, and once we lose them we don't get them back. That's at the core of why we've lost more residents than we've gained over the past couple of decades.
(Editor's note: The proposed JPS budget for 2014-2015 is $295 million; the city of Jackson recently passed a $390 million budget for the upcoming fiscal year.)
What will you bring to city council, and how will you be effective?
The exciting part for me is that four years ago or even two years ago if you would have told me that I should run for city council, I would said not "no," but "hell no. Why would I go down there and beat my head against the wall?" But now we've got a new mayor who, whether you always agree with where he's going or not, he's going. And he's going in a direction with vision and with a desire to make real changes in the community.
You've got a city council that's much younger than it's ever been, with fresh ideas and they're going to make some freshman mistakes, but there are six other members on the council, and I'm friends or friendly with all of them. Three of them I would consider to be close friends, so we have the ability to put together a unified group on city council that can really move the city forward. The ideas that we have, have an opportunity to actually come to fruition.
Professionally, what I bring to the table is a vast experience of construction. I'm a construction lawyer primarily. Over half of my clients are in the construction industry. Jackson is about to undertake one of the most massive construction undertakings it ever has in improving our infrastructure, so I think I bring some institutional knowledge of that industry and how that works in the private and public arenas so that I can really help guide the city council on some stuff issues and bring some oversight to how we effectively and efficiently use those funds.
What role should council should play in economic development?
That's probably the area we've really been lacking. For businesses to invest in your community, they have to feel welcome. In general, in the past we've had at best apathy, at worst an adverse relationship with the business community. For those businesses that exist here, you're not ever going to live in a community without crime, but when crime happens, you want to at least deal with a city hall that cares, or where you feel like they care. And that hadn't always been the case.
When it comes to recruiting new businesses, economic development is not rocket science. Sometimes it's just as simple as getting on a plane and going to tell somebody who has money to invest in your community: "We want you. We want you to come in and create jobs. We want you to be part of our community. What can we do to help get you there?" That time commitment is the biggest thing. It's not even the money. It's the time to say, "You've got something to offer us, and we've got something to offer you."
It's building relationships. Through 18 years of practicing law, business law and construction law, I've developed lot of relationships across the nation. I practiced law in Atlanta for three years, and those contacts, it's a small world, and those contacts come into play. I know developers that I believe would be interested in coming into Jackson if they felt they were welcome here.
With the increase in sales tax, what's your wish list for Ward 1?
It's not just Ward 1, but my wish list for the whole city, because we really are all together in this—but number one is the infrastructure. In my neighborhood when cars have to drive around a big sink hole in front of Jackson Academy for months on end, and you pay for emergency repair work that costs three times more than if you had just done it right the first time, well, this is an opportunity now. We've got this 1-cent sales tax that provides the revenue for us to plan ahead of time, and not spend all our time putting bubble gum on leaking pipes when we can use our funds wisely to replace those pipes that need to be replaced. I think with appropriate oversight we can get more accomplished for less money.
You do legal work for clients and, you said, a lot in economic development—contractors, Socrates Garrett. How do you ensure voters that you'll make decisions independently from your clients' interests?
It's really not that tough of a question for me. Ethically, I can continue to represent clients that do work for the city. I can represent them against the city, but I just can't vote or have any impact on any votes for settlement or anything regarding that, because I do have one case for Socrates where we're technically adverse to the city. Through the years I've had over a thousand clients. No one client represents more than three percent of my business.
When I was at Butler Snow, Larry Franck was the managing partner. Larry's quote was to always try to have 10 good clients so that you could tell one of them to go to hell. Well, I've got many more than 10 good clients, so I always have the opportunity to not even get close, in my mind, to ethical dilemmas. The experience I have with contractors is a benefit, not a disadvantage and any conflict of interest, I'll just recuse myself.
Tell me something about you that most people don't know?
Well, people that know me know that I like photography, and my favorite subject is my 4-year-old daughter, but most people don't know that really started in high school where I had a darkroom and developed black-and-white film. I had two of my photographs that won at the statewide level, and one of them went on to win in New York. I ended up with an art scholarship to Savannah College of Art and Design that I never took, so my life could be a lot different had I gone and been an artist.
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