I have great empathy for Starkville’s city officials as they try to appease all those who are up in arms about how — or if — the city should regulate short-term property rentals in residential neighborhoods.

Notice, I used the word “empathy” instead of “sympathy.” Way back in the previous century, when I was the sports editor on The Sun Herald on the Mississippi Coast, I found myself in the middle of a similar fight.

Since its inception, the newspaper served a divided readership, based on geography. You were either on the Biloxi side of our circulation area or the Gulfport side and that was no small matter. Remember Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets? It was that kind of dynamic.

The camps were bitterly divided that The Sun Herald’s predecessor had offices in both Biloxi and Gulfport to make sure residents felt it was “their newspaper.”

When the afternoon Daily Herald added a morning edition, The South Mississippi Sun, in the early 1980s, the entire operation moved to a new location on DeBuys Road, which by no coincidence is the road that separates Biloxi from Gulfport. Even that wasn’t entirely satisfactory. The building had to be erected on one side of the road or the other, after all, and Biloxi people cynically noted that the offices were built on the Gulfport side.

But even then, the newspaper did all it could do: It chose to have a Biloxi mailing address — which meant the mail had to be picked up at the post office in Biloxi — and a Gulfport delivery address.

Readers in both cities pored over the pages of the newspaper with grave suspicion, jumping on anything that remotely suggested favorable coverage of the other city or critical coverage of their own.

Nowhere was this more prominent than in the sports section because sports has a way of making people abandon all sense of perspective. The term “fan” — short for “fanatic – was created as a sports term. So you get the picture.

As sports editor, there wasn’t a week — and sometimes not a day — that I didn’t an angry call or five from a Gulfport or Biloxi fan certain that I hated one city and loved the other, even though I grew up 300 miles away in Tupelo.

I never lived down the damning fact that I lived in Gulfport, though.

Football season was the worst. Fans from either city would scrutinize our coverage of the Biloxi Indians or Gulfport Admirals like linguists examining the Rosetta Stone.

People would go so far as get out a ruler and measure the lengths of the stories devoted to the teams and cite whatever disparity there was as proof of bias.

Photos were treated much the same: How come the big photo on the front page was from the Biloxi game? Why did you use a photo of a Biloxi player getting tackled when you used a photo of a Gulfport player breaking a tackle? Why is the Gulfport photo grainy and poorly-lit while the Biloxi photo is clear, sharp?

Headlines were viewed critically. Stories were picked apart in the search for any slight, real or imagined. Any adverb or modifier, was considered an assault by stealth.

It didn’t take long to realize that defending our work was pretty much an exercise in futility, like breaking up a dog fight with your bare hands. All you get for your efforts is a mauling.

So finally, I just decided to be as fair as I could be and let the chips fall where they would fall.

It didn’t end the criticism, but I did sleep better.

I don’t know how Starkville Mayor Lynn Spruill sleeps these days, but my guess is that this dispute over the city’s efforts to please both short-term renters and residents alike is something she could live without.

The mayor and board of aldermen have been doing back-flips trying to find common, peaceful ground between the two parties — the plan has been amended 10 times in the past three weeks alone. But there is no peace in the valley to date. The lion will not lay down with the lamb. Swords have not been beaten into plowshares. Biloxi despises Gulfport. Gulfport wishes Biloxi would just go away.

So ultimately, I think the city will reach same conclusion that I came to all those years ago: Carefully consider all the arguments, adopt a plan that is as fair as you can make it, then let the chips fall where they may.

There is no solution that will satisfy both parties.

So the best alternative is to choose a plan that evenly distributes the grumbling.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].