# Jackson Wants Rate Quotes by Tuesday on a Lease-Purchase Deal It Has Not Priced or Named

> The city's RFP 94654-092926 asks lenders for an interest rate on a lease-purchase financing, with bids due Sept. 29. The solicitation names no asset, no principal amount, and no term, and it lands three weeks after the council adopted a 2026-2027 budget that never mentions the borrowing.

*Business · By Jackson Wire Staff · September 27, 2026*

Jackson is asking banks to quote an interest rate on a lease-purchase financing without telling them, in the public solicitation, what the city is buying or how much it intends to borrow. RFP 94654-092926, "Lease Purchase Financing Interest Rate Proposal," was published Sept. 17 on the city's bid portal and carries a due date of Sept. 29, according to the posting at jacksonms.gov. The bid document link on that page returns no text.

That is the whole public record. No principal amount, no term, no asset description, no collateral schedule, no stated use of proceeds. A lender pricing that request is pricing an unnamed credit for an unnamed purpose.

The timing is the tell. The council adopted the fiscal year 2026-2027 municipal budget in a special meeting that began Sept. 8 at 1:30 p.m., recessed twice, and reconvened Sept. 11 at 10 a.m., according to the meeting notices posted at jacksonms.gov. The single agenda item in each notice was the budget resolution, sponsored by Chief Finance Officer Jillian Caldwell and Mayor John Horhn. No lease-purchase authorization appears on any of those notices.

The city's most recent full regular agenda, for the Sept. 22 meeting, runs 31 numbered items and does not mention lease-purchase financing either. It does include an order authorizing the mayor to execute a policy renewal with MetLife for group life and AD&D coverage for the plan year Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2027, and an order naming 3P Benefits Solutions, LLC as administrator of a Section 125 cafeteria plan, according to the agenda packet. Those are the employee benefit decisions the Wire flagged as locked in earlier this month. The borrowing is not among them.

So the sequence reads backwards from how municipal finance usually works. Ordinarily a city identifies an asset, gets a council authorization, then shops the rate. Here the rate shopping is public and dated, and the authorization is not.

There is a plausible explanation, and it is not sinister. Lease-purchase financing is a common workaround for Mississippi municipalities that want to buy equipment or vehicles without issuing general obligation bonds, which require voter approval in most cases. A city can solicit rate quotes first, use them to build a financing schedule, and bring the council an order once the numbers are known. The Sept. 29 deadline is tight enough that the city likely wants pricing in hand before the next regular council cycle.

But the structure has a cost that does not show up in a rate quote. Lease-purchase debt is typically secured by the asset itself and repaid from the general fund, which means it competes directly with payroll, insurance, and the paving and drainage work the council spent September arguing about. The council's Sept. 22 agenda includes a resolution supporting an agreement with Municipal Intercept Company, LLC to collect unpaid debts under the Local Government Debt Collection Setoff Act, sponsored by City Attorney Drew Martin. A city that is adding collection capacity and adding lease debt in the same month is a city managing a cash position, not a city with surplus.

The scale of the city's own revenue picture makes the silence more consequential. Jackson's August sales tax diversion from the Mississippi Department of Revenue was $2,612,443, up 9.5 percent from $2,385,899 a year earlier, and fiscal-year-to-date diversions are $5,328,637 against $5,027,894, up 6.0 percent. That is real growth, and it is the city's most reliable monthly economic signal. It is also roughly $2.6 million a month against a general fund that carries police, fire, and the trash contract. A lease-purchase payment of any size comes out of that same stream.

The comparison to Jackson's neighbors cuts the other way. Ridgeland collected $1,611,884 in August, up 23.7 percent. Flowood collected $1,393,313, up 9.8 percent. Madison collected $975,622, up 11.4 percent. Pearl fell 8.6 percent to $1,166,022. Jackson's growth is solid but mid-pack, and its per-resident base is far thinner than any of those cities'.

There is a precedent worth remembering. Jackson has leaned on lease and lease-purchase structures repeatedly in recent years, including the Verizon tower site licenses the council amended again on Sept. 22, the fourth amendment to the Alltel/Verizon master agreement at the Riverside Drive tower and the third amendment at the W. Northside Drive site, both sponsored by Information Technology Director Nathan Slater. Those are revenue leases, not debt. But they show a city that has gotten comfortable with long-term encumbrances on public assets, and a council that approves them in batches.

The question nobody has asked publicly is what asset this financing covers. The city's Sept. 22 agenda includes an order amending the bid award to Hemphill Construction Company for the Shaw Road Bridge Rehabilitation Project to correct the award amount, and an order authorizing payment to Entergy Mississippi to raise a power line conflicting with a mast arm on the Traffic Signal Group B project. Both are capital items with real numbers attached. Neither is described as lease-purchase financed. Chief Finance Officer Caldwell and Chief Administrative Officer Pieter Teeuwissen are the two officials who could answer what the Sept. 29 quotes are for, and neither has said so on the record.

What's next: rate proposals are due Tuesday, Sept. 29. Watch for a council order authorizing the mayor to execute a lease-purchase agreement, which would be the first public document naming the asset, the principal, and the term. The council's next regular meeting follows its usual cycle, and the Hinds County Board of Supervisors holds its next regular meeting Monday, Oct. 5, though the county is not a party to this financing.

The number to hold onto is the one the city has not given: the principal. Until it appears in a council order, every rate quote in the city's inbox is a price on an unknown quantity, and Jackson taxpayers are the ones who will pay it.

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