Vicksburg’s longest serving elected official told those gathered at the second event in the last five weeks to discuss issues of race in Vicksburg to focus on facts rather than rumor.

Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, joined one current and one former candidate for office at the E.J. Straughter Baptist Memorial Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Street at a gathering organized and promoted by the Vicksburg NAACP and Vicksburg resident and Jackson Advocate newspaper writer Earnest McBride.

Flaggs urged the dozen or so people gathered that any complaints fielded must be factual.

&#8220My office is always glad to look at it, but I don’t make responses based on rumors,” Flaggs said.

Flaggs’ comments came in response to issues that McBride mentioned, ones mirroring those discussed at a similar rally outside City Hall March 28, including criticism of the city’s urban renewal plan and personnel issues in city government entities.

Flaggs, first elected to the state House of Representatives in 1988, also rebutted some remarks made at the March 28 rally by the Rev. Robert Miller, chairman of the Warren County Baptist Association, that indicated no progress had been made in Vicksburg in 40 years.

&#8220Rev. Miller is part of the reason I’m in public life, but progress is sometimes measured differently by different people,” Flaggs said.

Rev. Miller was unable to attend Saturday’s gathering, McBride said.

One topic that Flaggs indicated agreement on with McBride was that of the management of the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau.

In January, the 11-member tourism promotion board voted to have Compass Facility Management assume much of the bureau’s management functions.

Flaggs sought and obtained an attorney general’s advisory opinion that backed up the legislation that created the VCVB stating that its executive directorship, currently vacant, had to be a person and not a private company. &#8220They ignored what I said and hired a management company. I thought it was wrong,” Flaggs said.

Attorney general’s opinions alone do not carry the force of law.

State Sen. Erik Fleming, D-Clinton, who is running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, broke from the race-based script and honed in on economic and labor issues, such as health care and illegal immigration.

Fleming said that, if elected, he would &#8220find a way to fine corporations that bring illegal immigrants into the United States.”

Tommie Rawlings, a construction worker who ran as an independent candidate for the North Ward alderman’s seat in 2005, said the current structure of county government has become ineffective in the years since the switch to the unit system in the late 1980s.

&#8220There’s no power for the supervisors because it’s all in the administrator and the road department,” Rawlings said, adding that all counties below 50,000 residents should revert to the beat system.

According to a 2005 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau, Warren County had a population of 49,113.

Moses Howard, who said he was a resident and native of Vicksburg, made note of the light turnout for the gathering and urged the others to &#8220find the passion to fill these seats.”

&#8220That’s what we need to do instead of talking about it in an esoteric way,” Howard said.