When Lowndes County Board of Supervisors President Harry Sanders thinks of Republican U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, who died Thursday at age 81, he remembers the senator’s sense of humor.
“I attended a meeting (at the Trotter Convention Center in downtown Columbus) where he was the keynote speaker, and he was adjusting his chair and he moved a little too much and fell right off the stage,” Sanders said of the fellow Republican. “He just came right back up… and said, ‘You know when I fell just then? It’s because I moved a little too far to the left.'”
Joe Max Higgins, CEO of the Golden Triangle Development LINK, attended the same meeting, along with about 100 other local, state and federal leaders.
“There wasn’t a soul in there that wasn’t deep-belly laughing,” he remembered.
Another thing Sanders, Higgins and other area leaders agreed on: Without Cochran the Golden Triangle would look very different today.
Cochran represented Mississippi in Congress for 45 years. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1973 and served there until being elected to the Senate in 1978. He was known for his attitude of bipartisanship when trying to get things done for his state.
He served there until April 1, 2018, when he retired, citing health concerns.
Former Starkville Mayor Parker Wiseman, a Democrat, who interned with Cochran’s office for a summer in 2001 and worked with Cochran’s office on different projects in Starkville when he was mayor from 2009-17, said Cochran’s tenure in Congress affected everything from Mississippi State University to small infrastructure and building projects.
“Certainly there are numerous projects on the Mississippi State University campus and in the research park that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the work that Thad Cochran and his staff did for the years during Washington,” Wiseman said. “The same is certainly true of the industrial development that the region has seen through the years. Often having a senator with seniority and powerful committee chairmanships who was willing to go to bat to make sure that investment landed in Mississippi is what made economic development happen in the region.”
Appropriations
As chairman of the appropriations committee from 2005 to 2006 and from 2015 to his retirement in 2016, and as a senior member of Congress, Cochran championed funding for infrastructure, economic development and federal projects that forever changed the trajectory of the Golden Triangle.
“I think he was the behind-the-scenes on everything … that happened in (Oktibbeha) County and this Golden Triangle region that’s had any type of federal aspect to it,” said Orlando Trainer, president of the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors. “That could be something as simple as getting federal dollars to do a small road project, to getting money (for) research and other infrastructural-type things.”
Wiseman agreed.
“If there was federal money involved in it, he was involved in it,” Wiseman said.
Cochran was instrumental in securing a $6.1 million federal grant in 2015 from the Appalachian Regional Commission to complete funding for the Communiversity, a $42-million workforce training center for the Golden Triangle built in partnership between the Golden Triangle LINK, East Mississippi Community College and area counties. Over the years, he also helped secure funding for everything from wastewater treatment expansions and bills ensuring the U.S. Army could keep its contracts with Airbus to multi-million dollar grants and funding for highways and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
“He is the Mr. Appropriate,” said Mississippi District 37 Rep. Gary Chism (R-Columbus). “… Being the ranking member (of the appropriations committee) when the Democrats were in charge and being the chairman when the Republicans were in charge. He brought billions of dollars to the state. When we lost him, when he decided to step down, there was going to be a hole left there that was nearly impossible to fill.”
‘The gentle persuader’
Beyond securing funding for area projects, Cochran often negotiated to bring benefits to the area.
Higgins remembers when the LINK was negotiating with PACCAR to get a Columbus plant in the early 2000s. At the site where the plant is now was a cattle pond that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ruled protected wetlands, slowing down negotiations.
“We were getting caught in a bureaucratic tornado, just spinning around and around,” Higgins said.
It was Cochran who arranged an in-person meeting at the site between representatives from the LINK, PACCAR, the Corps of Engineers and other parties to negotiate and find ways to expedite the bureaucratic processes the LINK had to go through for the Corps of Engineers to OK an industrial park at the site. Higgins said that was “critical” in getting the PACCAR plant to Columbus in 2007.
That same attitude brought Yokohama Tire Company to West Point in 2015, said Clay County Board of Supervisors President R.B. Davis. Between 2007 and 2012, West Point and Clay County experienced a severe drop in industrial jobs as plant after plant closed down, leaving hundreds without employment. Davis said when he raised that issue to Cochran, the senator worked closely with state legislators and the LINK in a “combined effort” to revive industry in the county.
“It was definitely a team effort, and (Cochran) was a big part of that,” Davis said. “He wanted to help make the area attractive to industry, and Yokohama being here opened it up to more and more industry.”
Cochran was also a champion of the Columbus Air Force Base, which was threatened with closure multiple times during Cochran’s tenure.
Sanders said the senator secured millions of dollars in funding for new facilities, a change that did not go unnoticed by longtime residents both in the base and outside it.
“When I was a kid, I remember the (CAFB) was just wooden barracks,” he said. “But thanks to what Cochran did on the appropriations committee, it really transformed.”
Over the years, Cochran secured tens of millions of dollars in appropriations for improvements to housing, hangars and equipment on the base in an effort to attract more airmen and employees. Lowndes County District 5 Supervisor Leroy Brooks told The Dispatch Cochran always advocated in favor of CAFB any time it was on a closure list. Chism called Cochran the “go-to person” for efforts to keep the base in Columbus.
“There were several times the base was in danger of closing, and every time, he and our congressional delegation worked hard to make sure it wouldn’t be on the closure list,” Brooks said. “He knew it was something the county needed, and any time there was anything he could do to further the economic growth of the county, he would do it.”
Those talents for negotiation didn’t end with members of Cochran’s own party. No matter the issue, concern or project before him, Brooks said Cochran was always “a fair and moderate voice.”
“…They called him ‘the gentle persuader,'” Chism said. “He was sorely missed, but we are really going to take us a long time to ever get somebody in the position that he was in to be able to help this state like he did.”
Wiseman remembers a day during the summer he interned for Cochran’s office when Cochran took all the interns out to lunch.
“The thing that I remember him saying on that day is that he had always viewed his job as serving the people of the state of Mississippi,” Wiseman said. “That sounds simple and quaint but often in the power struggles that define Washington D.C., I think senators and representatives sometimes lose sight of their core mission, which is to serve the people that sent them. And I think that’s something he never lost sight of.”
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