A brief item in a news story last week reported that the Cherry Street bridge over Glass Bayou — right where Cherry becomes Fort Hill Drive — is to be replaced or upgraded in a project by the Warren County Board of Supervisors.

The decision is certainly welcome, but it also made me think about James A. Waits.

The item took me back about 30 years to the days when something called Revenue Sharing, which has ended, provided extra cash for local government budgets.

Charlie Mitchell is executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. Write to him at Box 821668, Vicksburg, MS 39182, or e-mail.

There was high anxiety last year when Barack Obama was campaigning and talking about wealth redistribution. Here’s a bulletin: He didn’t invent it.

Indeed it was the much-loathed Richard M. Nixon who in 1969 pushed — and met a lot of opposition — for something he called Revenue Sharing. He got it established by Congress as what today would be called a stimulus. Revenue Sharing provided supplemental federal money to locales across the country, especially those with limited tax resources of their own.

Vicksburg got a Revenue Sharing check every year. And because it was a federal program there were lots of strings attached. One of them was a requirement to hold public hearings.

The hearings were advertised in the newspaper and the idea was that anyone could show up and suggest projects for the money. It was supposed to go for parks and such, not recurring expenses such as payroll.

Hearings were usually held in the spacious Vicksburg Auditorium. The regular — and usually the only — attendees were Jimmy Gouras, city planner; Marie Pantoliano, city clerk; a court reporter to transcribe the session; me, the obligatory news reporter; and James A. Waits, citizen. Sometimes the mayor or an alderman would be there. Sometimes Eddie Thomas, a barber and Vicksburg’s civil rights monitor, would be there. (Thomas’ interest in civil rights was kindled when, as a youth, he was denied a library card at the “white” library at Monroe and South and was sent to the “black” Etta O’Neal Library near the “black” Jackson Street YMCA. I think Thomas was the first black person to get a card at the white library when desegregation came, but that’s a different column.)

Anyway, this was the mid- to late 1970s and Revenue Sharing had been around for a few years. That meant city officials were anticipating the checks and usually had their own ideas on how to spend them — usually paving or adding street lights.

But Mr. Waits was always there and, when invited, stood up, came to the microphone and made a request for a replacement bridge over Glass Bayou at North Locust Street.

The city folks always thanked him for coming. At the time there were 20 or 30 modest frame homes and one clapboard church north of the bayou. Traffic on the North Locust bridge was probably about 5 percent as heavy as it was on the Cherry Street bridge, built about the same time and located two blocks downstream.

One year, some weeks after the hearing, I saw the list of how the city was going to spend its Revenue Sharing money, probably about $700,000 in all. On the list was $200,000 or so for a new bridge on North Locust. I asked Gouras if the city was really going to replace one of the least-used bridges in town while tour buses and tourists visiting the national military park were still using the nearby crumbling and ancient Cherry Street bridge. He said yes. I asked why. He said, “Because Mr. Waits asked for it.”

Years later my family moved to a house on Fort Hill, so I crossed that narrow bridge — the one now to be replaced — a couple of times every day. In winter when trees were leafless, I would look upstream and see the new concrete and steel bridge on North Locust, still little used.

It always made me kind of appreciate America or something.

Objectively, replacing the Cherry Street bridge 30 years ago would have been more practical. But a citizen who chose to avail himself of an opportunity to speak up to his government eventually got what he wanted. The system worked.

It was a good thing, I thought then. And still do.