OurTupelo

Are you, as many, disillusioned with the current state of college football?

Join the club.

You don’t like the transfer portal because your favorite player this season might score his touchdowns for your arch-rival next year?

I feel you.

You say you don’t care for the NIL because you don’t think 20-year-old quarterbacks should make twice as much money as college presidents and heart surgeons? 

You are not alone.

You liked it far better when college players mostly played for the love of the game and not for the almighty dollar?

Boy oh boy, do I have two teams for you: Army and Navy.

Take your pick. Both are undefeated. Both are nationally ranked. Neither pays its players. Neither recruits players from the transfer portal. The Army Black Knights and the Navy Midshipmen are true student-athletes. They go to class and make their grades or they don’t play. Many were honor students, if not valedictorians, at their high schools. They don’t leave school after three years to go to the NFL. No, they become military officers and serve their country after four years of a rigorous, world-class education. 

Army, ranked No. 23, defeated East Carolina 45-28 Saturday to move to 7-0. No. 25 Navy clobbered Charlotte 51-17 to move to 6-0. 

I should tell you that my appreciation for Navy and Army football goes back all the way to childhood, when the annual Army-Navy football game was required viewing at my daddy’s house. He served in the Navy in World War II, so we cheered for the Midshipmen. Then, in our backyard after the game, I imagined I was Navy quarterback Roger Staubach, throwing passes to my brother, who was Navy halfback Joe Bellino. Both were Heisman Trophy winners. Both then served their country. Staubach delayed his Hall of Fame NFL career four years, serving as a Naval officer, including one year in Vietnam.

The six-plus decades since have been mostly lean times for both Army and Navy. Most blue-chip college football prospects dream of playing in the NFL, not fighting for their country. That both Navy and Army would experience this amazing resurgence just as college football has been turned upside down by NIL and the transfer portal seems almost far-fetched. 

But maybe it shouldn’t. While most college football teams’ rosters now experience a yearly fruit basket turnover, Army and Navy rosters don’t change except for graduates being replaced by new recruits.

“This is how we build our team here, and it’s how college football teams over the course of the history of college football history have built their teams,” Army coach Jeff Monken told reporters. “Recruit high school players, retain them in your program, develop them and hope you can put a team together that can win. That’s just how we do it here.”

You will hear TV commentators say that playing college football is like a full-time job. If that’s the case, Army, Navy and Air Force players are working three full-time jobs. They play their sports. They take a heavy, heavy academic load that does not allow for easy grades. And they also learn to be soldiers.

For the all-time best description of the rigorous schedule athletes face at the military academies, do yourself a favor and purchase author John Feinstein’s book “A Civil War.” In it, you will learn that the easiest two hours of each day for Army and Navy players are the time they spend at practice. Their days begin long before sunrise and end after required study late, late at night, if not into the wee morning hours.

The legendary Ole Miss All American Barney Poole played on national championship teams at Army before returning to Mississippi to play at Ole Miss. I called Barney in 1998 before a trip to West Point to cover a Southern Miss-Army game. I was taking my 12-year-old son and wanted to make sure he saw all the sights. Barney, one of the nicest men I’ve known, told me all of what my son and I should see, and then he said, “You show him all that, but you makes sure to also tell him, it’s a lot prettier from the outside looking in than it is from the inside looking out.”

How so, I asked, and Barney replied, “West Point isn’t for everybody. Those young men go through hell and back. Believe me, I know.”

Mississippi is represented on both the Army and Navy teams. Chance Keith, a former Biloxi High player, is a senior defensive back at Army. Sophomore tight end Jake Norris of Madison Central and freshman cornerback Noah Short of Madison-Ridgeland Academy both play for Navy.

Navy plays host to Notre Dame this Saturday. Army has an open date before playing Air Force on Nov. 2. Most college football players visit home or enjoy some down time during an open date. Bet on this: Most Army players will play catch-up on their studies and make up for any drills they might have missed because of football.

The annual Army-Navy game is slated for Dec. 14 this year. There’s also a chance the two teams will meet the week before in the American Athletic Conference championship game. The top two teams in that league play for the championship. Currently, that would be Army and Navy.

Wouldn’t that be something?

The post Tired of NIL and transfer portal? Consider pulling for Army or Navy appeared first on Mississippi Today.

At 3 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday in Cleveland, like clockwork, parents streamed into the children’s room of the Robinson Carpenter Memorial Library with their kids in tow. The year has just started for schools in the area, and everyone is in search of a book. 

A lot of things in a library change over time. The books on the shelves are crammed with copies of whatever’s in demand and new copies of old favorites. The technology is updated, and the kids grow up. But one thing that has been a constant in Cleveland’s public library is Youth Services Librarian Bobbie Matheney. 

Matheney, a native of nearby Merigold, has worked in the Bolivar-County Library System since 2006. After working part time at the Merigold branch to help her elderly parents, Matheney landed a job at the Cleveland branch where she has worked for 17 years. Known for her fun outfits and bright personality, she is affectionately known by community members and patrons of the library as Mrs. Bobbie. 

Though she never imagined being a librarian, she quickly realized her passion for the job. 

“I’ve always been a people person. I got into being a librarian as a part timer, and started to enjoy it. My director told me that I finally had found my calling after working different jobs as a receptionist throughout the years,” she said. “I think it was my calling, also. I love what I do.”

Her desk is in the children’s room of the library, flanked by walls of colorful books. Next to her desk is a pair of rocking chairs, where she does story hour and show and tell with preschool and homeschooled kids on Friday morning. For young children, she says, reading is important to helping with their learning abilities. 

“Reading to babies helps because they’re listening. Believe me, kids are listening to you,” she said. “You might not realize it, but reading to them while they’re young, it helps their vocabulary. It, you know, it keeps them alert. It’s just the beginning of the learning process for children.” 

Families entering the library break up this conversation. As one child uses his library card for the first time, Matheney explains to him all the things he can do with it, and the money he’s saving by checking out books instead of buying them. 

Kids leaving with books is Matheney’s favorite thing about her job — but it’s not always easy. 

“There are those non-readers and helping them to find something on their level is challenging, because we can go through books and books and books, and it’s like, nope, nope, nope, nope,” she said. “So, it’s challenging trying to get the reluctant readers books that they might enjoy, but when they finally say yes, I celebrate.”

The Bolivar County Public Library System, at one point, operated eight libraries across the county. Three are still open — Rosedale, Merigold, and the main branch in Cleveland where Matheney works. While the role of the library has changed over time, it’s still an important community pillar in Cleveland, often going beyond just providing books for the city’s roughly 10,500 residents. 

“The library has changed in order to provide more information to the community. You would be surprised by the information that we provide for people that come in,” Matheney said. 

People come to the library for tax forms, voter registration forms and sometimes even to find phone numbers. Community elders often visit the library for help with electronics and electronic services. Some services, though, like the databases offered through the library, are underused. The library, Matheney said, is a learning and resource center. 

While most of Matheney’s work in youth services is with younger children, she also has a passion for working with teenagers. One of her fondest memories working at the library is when she operated the Teen Advisory Group, or TAG. 

“This was a group of teenagers that would come in and volunteer and plan different programs for the library,” she said. “The library is considered a safe place. I like to give teenagers something positive to do — they might not want to read a book or use the computer, but it was a safe place.”

TAG began with one teenager and at its height grew to a regular group of about 17. The goal was for the program to be something positive kids could participate in. TAG dissolved due to COVID, but it’s something Matheney wants to get started again. The library hosts teen game day every Wednesday at 3:30. And while it can be hard to get teens into the library, Matheney says you have to start somewhere. 

“A lot of people focus on a lot of people participating in a program,” she said. “If you can touch one person — that means a lot.” 

Cindy Williamson, her predecessor as youth services librarian, has worked with Matheney on and off nine years. She says Matheney is good with both kids and adults. 

“She’s just a very personable person. She’s a firecracker and just always has a smile on her face,” she said. 

Matheney couldn’t guess how many kids she had seen pass through the library during her time there. One of the highlights of her job, she said, is having the chance to watch people grow up. 

“It’s good to see some of the patrons who started out as kids coming in here,” she said. “It’s good to see them grow into adults, and it’s good for them to stop by and say, ‘Mrs. Bobbie, I just stopped by to see if you were still working here.’ Sometimes, I have to take a second look at them like — ‘who is this child? Who is this?’ You know, because they’ve grown up.”

A long-time pillar in one of the community’s most important institutions, Mrs. Bobbie is well known and well loved in Cleveland. In turn, she wants to be thought of as someone who loves everyone, too. 

“Bobbie loves everybody. That’s how I want to be thought of,” she said. “Mrs. Bobbie loves everybody.”

READ ALSO: Libraries see disconnect between use and popularity

The post Cleveland librarian found her calling matching kids with books appeared first on Mississippi Today.

People’s opinion of public libraries is as high as ever, but that isn’t translating into library visits and usage.

Annual reports from the Mississippi Library Commission show that library circulation per capita — that is, the number of library materials being circulated per person in a library’s given patron population — declined over five years. 

State libraries saw about a 43% decline in materials being checked out from the library between 2018 and 2022, the latest year for which figures are available, with a slight rebound from the 2020 pandemic period.

Mississippi’s numbers mirror a national trend. Physical library visits have been decreasing for years, dropping sharply because of the pandemic. Today, more people are visiting than during the pandemic, but still not as many as before 2020.

At the same time, public opinion of libraries remains high. A 2024 survey from YouGov  found that 85% of respondents had a favorable opinion of public libraries, 47% said they should get more funding, and 53% said public libraries were very important to the community. A 2023 report from the American Library Association found that 54% of Gen Z and Millennials had visited a library in the past year.

“It’s wide open for libraries to be a true community hub,” said Kristina Kelly, public relations coordinator for the Mississippi Library Commission.

Kelly believes one reason some people don’t visit libraries is because they don’t know what services are offered. 

Libraries offer a wide variety of services and resources. “We do address problems that patrons have that go beyond reference, beyond literacy,” said David Muse, branch manager of the G. Chastaine Flynt Memorial Library.

And Mississippi’s literacy rate ranks among the lowest in the nation.

Much of the recent media attention on libraries is on book bans. The American Library Association found that censorship in public libraries increased by 92% in 2023. State law in Mississippi prohibits public and school libraries from working with digital content vendors that offer “sexually oriented materials.”

Mississippi’s libraries have other issues that keep people away. For example, several libraries in the Jackson/Hinds system are in disrepair due to lack of funding and years of neglect. Three libraries are closed, and one of them, the main Eudora Welty Library, is set to be demolished and turned into a greenspace. 

“The state should evaluate creative ways to support library infrastructure so that the physical spaces remain open, whether that is putting more authority into the hands of the library systems themselves, increasing state-level funding, or even creative solutions like establishing revolving loan funds for library facilities or opening other similar government programs to library systems,” said Peyton Smith, board chairman of the Jackson/Hinds library system 

Libraries allow patrons to access a variety of materials from DVDs to plant seeds. For many people it’s the only way they can access the internet. BroadbandNow ranks Mississippi 45th in internet coverage, speed, and availability. 

People can use apps like OverDrive, Hoopla, and more to browse ebooks, videos, and music through their local library. Libraries also offer programming for all ages. 

Verna Myers, a 77-year-old retired teacher, has been going to the library for over 70 years. She reads to the children every Wednesday. “You can get everything here – DVDs, CDs, movies, books. You can get a lot of material that we could not get.”

Angel Walton, 22, says library programs expanded her horizons. “The library introduced me to so many different activities that I didn’t know people from Mississippi could have the opportunity [to do],” she said.

The post Libraries see disconnect between use and popularity appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A state-funded project to upgrade an already well-paved north Jackson cul-de-sac that runs by a Mississippi lawmaker’s house will go forward, a group of officials who oversee the project said on Thursday. 

Rebekah Staples, the director of the Capitol Complex Improvement District’s Project Advisory Committee, said at the group’s latest meeting that the project to repave the road near the legislator’s home and four other projects the Legislature allocated money for will proceed “as quickly as possible,” though some of the details are still being worked out. 

“I respect the Legislature and the governor passing the law,” Staples said. “We’re here to follow the law.” 

A Mississippi Today investigation revealed that House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, a Republican from Senatobia, helped steer $400,000 in state taxpayer funds to repave Simwood Place in Jackson, where he owns a house.

Simwood Place, located in the affluent LoHo neighborhood of northeast Jackson, is roughly one-tenth of a mile long, with only 14 single-family homes.

State lawmakers and the local Jackson City Council member who represents the area previously told Mississippi Today they did not ask state leaders to allocate money for the Simwood Place project. Lamar has declined to answer specific questions about the Simwood project but said any “innuendo of wrongdoing is baseless.” 

A spending bill passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tate Reeves routed projects through the CCID committee. The advisory committee is housed in the Department of Finance and Administration.

DFA is the primary agency responsible for state government financial and administrative operations, including employee payroll, employee insurance and maintaining state buildings. However, the Legislature has also tasked the agency with overseeing some operations of the CCID.

Jackson City Councilwoman Virgi Lindsay is a member of the CCID committee and said she wants the five projects earmarked by the Legislature to proceed, but she does not want the committee to neglect the other projects they are currently overseeing.  

The CCID is funded through a 9% sales tax diversion and recommends to DFA and other state leaders which projects to fund. Efforts to expand the CCID and establish a separate court system within it have drawn outcry from several Jackson citizens and officials who view it as a state takeover of the more affluent areas of Jackson and claim the state otherwise gives the city few resources.

READ MORE: ‘Trey Way’: Millions in taxpayer funds flow to powerful lawmaker’s country club and Jackson neighborhoods

Liz Welch, the director of DFA, said at the meeting that the projects the committee has prioritized and the projects the Legislature has appropriated money for will run concurrently with one another. 

“We will not let these projects languish,” Welch said. “That’s not what we do. We’re going to come up with an internal process, and of course, we will discuss it with the advisory committee. But we’re going to do both.” 

It’s unclear exactly when DFA and the CCID committee will solicit bids for the project, but Staples and Welch said they hope to provide a substantive update to the rest of the committee by its next meeting on January 16.

The post State-funded project to improve Jackson cul-de-sac near lawmaker’s home moves forward appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Five years after Mississippi officials were exposed for raiding the state’s cash welfare program for the poor, the department in charge of cleaning up the mess does not employ an expert in the program or enough workers to improve its on-the-ground operations, the agency’s top leader said Tuesday.

“We have a sore need for TANF expertise in this agency,” Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson said in a legislative hearing Tuesday, referring to the federal cash assistance program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Like every state agency and every business, we have lost a wealth of institutional knowledge. We don’t have a TANF expert at MDHS. I’ll be the first to admit it. We’re looking for a TANF expert. And we need more PINs (budgeted positions) in our county offices to train people to run the TANF program better.”

The Mississippi Legislative Democratic Caucus held its third hearing about ongoing issues in the federal assistance program Tuesday — a four-hour meeting that, because of the Republican supermajority, is not likely to result in any reforms.

Even Anderson, an appointee of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, acknowledged necessary changes that the Legislature has failed to enact — though the agency can make some improvements on its own with the governor’s approval. Today, less than 10% of people applying for the assistance make it through the application process each month.

“There are barriers. I’ve talked to you about barriers. I’ve talked to the Legislature about barriers. I’ve advocated for some legislative changes around the program at times,” Anderson said as he displayed a complicated flowchart his agency created to illustrate the eligibility determination process. “Just looking at it, it is unbelievable what is required of an applicant and at every turn, you have ‘case denied’ hanging in the balance every time something doesn’t go as it should for that person who is applying. So it is very difficult.”

Part of the problem is a law the Legislature passed in 2017 called the HOPE Act, which created a maze of bureaucratic red tape that is expensive for the department to administer and arbitrarily kicks people off of its programs. Anderson has said the Legislature should repeal the act but lawmakers have not seriously considered his recommendation. 

The amount of the monthly TANF check — a max of $260 a month for a family of three — is also too low to make a meaningful dent in household necessities. In recent years, the state has been spending such a small fraction of its TANF funds that it has accumulated an unused balance of at least $145 million.

“Mississippi has this money stockpiled to misspend because it spends so little on cash assistance,” Sonya Williams Barnes, the Mississippi policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said during the hearing.

Lawmakers and witnesses who testified on Tuesday referred to the TANF program as broken.

“I’m going to disagree with you. Our system is not broken. Our system is designed against the poor. If it was designed for them, we would not have poverty. Poverty is by design, and it profits industry leaders immensely in the state of Mississippi,” Rev. Dr. Jason Coker said during the hearing. “… We create this kind of poverty by the policies we create in this very building and the policies we hang out to dry in this very building.”

Republican leadership has not held a similar hearing to discuss improvements to the TANF program. Several pieces of legislation introduced by Democrats in recent years to significantly increase the amount of monthly assistance, require more TANF spending on child care, and remove burdensome requirements for applicants died without consideration.

In 2021, Anderson secured from the Legislature a $90 increase to the monthly amount, which had been stagnant since 1999, and he said he will be requesting another $60 increase next year. Asked by Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, why he didn’t request more, Anderson said, “The governor appointed me. The governor can disappoint me by telling me to go home. So I have to operate within a certain framework.”

Since the state only approves about 125 applications, or 9% of those who apply for assistance each month, most of the money goes elsewhere. Mississippi currently only spends about 5% of its roughly $86.5 million annual TANF award on cash payments to needy families, making it one of just 14 states that spend less than 10% of their grant on direct assistance.

The rest of the state’s TANF spending — anywhere from $32 million (2021) to $107 million (2018) depending on how much of the money Mississippi chooses to use in any given year — is what caused trouble in recent history.

From 2016 to 2020, subgrantees — organizations that receive TANF funds to provide programs like workforce development, teen pregnancy prevention, and parenting initiatives — misspent or stole at least $77 million after receiving political blessing and large up-front cash advances.

Headline-grabbing purchases included a $5 million payment towards the construction of a volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi and $2 million in investments in a pharmaceutical startup called Prevacus that claimed to have found a cure for concussion. 

Former NFL quarterback Brett Favre asked welfare officials to fund these projects, and according to text messages first published by Mississippi Today, the athlete communicated about both to former Gov. Phil Bryant, who had authority over the department during the scandal. Favre continues to face a civil lawsuit, but not criminal charges, over these alleged schemes, while Bryant has faced neither.

Seven people have pleaded guilty in the scheme since 2020, including former welfare director John Davis and nonprofit operator Nancy New. None are in prison as they all await sentencing.

On its own without changes to state law, the welfare agency has implemented several reforms designed to reduce favoritism and theft, including reinstating a bidding process for subgrants, removing the director from any decision-making in the awards, switching payments to a reimbursement-only model and requiring more financial and participant data from the organizations.

“I want to tell you it’s a new day in TANF,” said Randy Kelley, director of the Three Rivers Planning and Development District, which currently holds a TANF subgrant. “He (Anderson) demands two things that are high on my list, and I’m proud to tell you this about him. Fiscal accountability. If you don’t have fiscal accountability, you don’t have anything. That’s what happened to the Nancy News and the things y’all are seeing. And he demands program integrity.”

“They look at us so many times, I think I’m in prison,” he joked.

Today, the welfare department awards TANF grants to 21 organizations, including some of the 1960s-era quasi governmental economic development districts such as Three Rivers, which runs a $2.6 million career advancement program.

Three Rivers, located in Northeast Mississippi, began receiving a TANF subgrant in 2020 shortly after officials arrested the former welfare director John Davis and nonprofit operator Nancy New for allegedly stealing $4 million in TANF funds, which marked the beginning of the still unfolding welfare fraud saga.

The day it received the contract, Kelley said the organization’s in-house lawyer walked into his office and shut the door, waving the paperwork in his hand.

“He said, ‘Have you lost your blankety blank mind?’ I said, ‘No, why?’ He said, ‘Do you not keep up with the news?’” Kelley said in Tuesday’s hearing, referring to publicity around the welfare scandal. “I said, ‘I have.’ And he said, ‘Why would you take this money?’ and I said, ‘Our people need it.’”

Three Rivers boasts a 27-county wide training and job placement program, administered through contracts with local community colleges and the state unemployment office, for low-income Mississippians struggling to find work or who are stuck in low-wage positions, under 200% of the poverty line.

According to a budget Mississippi Today retrieved through a public records request, the bulk of Three Rivers’ program funding in the federal fiscal year ending last month went to the Mississippi Department of Employment Services, Itawamba Community College, Northeast Mississippi Community College, Northwest Mississippi Community College and East Mississippi Community College. According to ledgers Mississippi Today retrieved, Three Rivers lists these payments as sub-expenses and does not provide additional documentation of how its partners spend these funds. 

It budgeted another $100,000 for supportive services, but little of that had been spent by the end of August, and $218,000 for administration, mostly salaries.

Three Rivers reports serving between 600 and 700 people a year, but the participant data it is required to submit to MDHS includes numerical codes instead of written descriptions for the services it provided, according to the submitted spreadsheets retrieved by Mississippi Today. Additional reports are not made available to the public. MDHS and Three Rivers did not respond to requests for additional information about the data. 

Currently, Kelley said his organization is serving 83 TANF-eligible clients and four of them are in truck driving school with the opportunity to increase their income to $80,000.

“This program started with Mr. Anderson. Y’all need to recognize, he’s done away with the volleyball courts,” Kelley said.

Beyond the roughly $4.5 million in direct cash assistance payments and $26 million spending on subgrants annually, Mississippi allocates $29 million in TANF to the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services and transfers $25 million to supplement the Child Care Payment Program that provides vouchers to working parents.

Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, acknowledged that TANF is supporting some good programs in Mississippi, but that more of it should be used on direct cash assistance — the more efficient option.

“The TANF money is the only money in the budget that we can put into the hands of poor people. The state budget is $31 billion dollars. And this is the only money that can directly help poor people,” Blount said. “There’s a massive bureaucracy, and RFPs, and ten-step process, and fiscal management, and all that bureaucratic crap, where you could just send people checks, and they can spend it, and pay rent, and buy food with it, and that, to me, is more efficient.”

U.S. Congress created TANF in 1996 to replace the former Aid to Families with Dependent Children entitlement program known as welfare. TANF was primarily considered a work program intended to provide a small stopgap while parents — 99% of whom are single mothers in Mississippi — seek new or better employment. Yet, the majority, 80%, of families on the program are child-only cases, meaning they do not have a work-eligible parent in the home. This includes caregivers with disabilities or homes where a grandparent is taking care of the children.

An average of just 307 Mississippi adults were on the program each month in 2023.

Because the household income limit to qualify for TANF is so low — less than $10,000 a year for a family of four — it is very difficult for a parent who has a job to enter or remain in the program. This helps explain why just 1.4% of adult recipients are employed.

Only about 5% of families experiencing poverty in Mississippi receive cash assistance compared to almost 40% of those families in 1996 at the start of the program.

One of the biggest barriers to parents seeking the assistance is that they must provide information about their child’s noncustodial parent, so that the state can pursue them for child support, in order to qualify. Any child support it collects in excess of $100 each month is seized to reimburse the state for the cash assistance it provided the family. 

The state imposes a “family cap,” meaning that if a parent is receiving TANF assistance and then births another child, that child would not qualify to receive assistance — a policy that only five other states still have on the books.

Mississippi also requires TANF applicants to complete a substance use disorder questionnaire and, if suspected of drug use, a urine test — a policy opponents say is based on racist stereotypes about the poor. The state spent $50,000 TANF funds on this test in 2022, according to state expenditures available online, though out of thousands of applicants in roughly the last year, Anderson said only 59 were drug tested, and of those, just 6 tested positive.

All of this is compared to the workforce programs offered with the same federal funds by the subgrantees, which serve people who make up to about $50,000 for a family of three and do not impose child support requirements or drug testing.

“I’ll say again, it’s not Bob Anderson’s drug test requirement, it’s in the statute,” Anderson said. “I can’t take it out of the statute. I have to comply with what’s in the statute.”

The former professional wrestler Brett DiBiase, who pleaded guilty within the welfare scandal in 2020 for receiving $48,000 in TANF funds through a contract he could not perform because he was in rehab, which was also paid for with TANF funds, has not been sentenced. 

Despite the frustrating red tape and low approval rate, Mississippians in need continue to seek assistance. In 2015, before the alleged scandal occurred, the department received 13,517 TANF applications. In 2023, it received 16,376 applications.

When Congress adopted TANF, it turned one of the nation’s primary safety net programs into a block grant and allowed states to spend the money on other goals, such as reducing out-of-wedlock births and promoting two-parent families. But while it created strict requirements for poor parents attempting to receive the assistance, it provided little accountability for organizations receiving the funds for programming.

States began using the funds to plug budget holes in other areas of government, like the nearly $30 million Mississippi currently allocates to the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, which conducts investigations into abuse or neglect. 

Subgrantees receiving the largest amount of TANF funds in 2024, according to the state’s expenditure database, were the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services ($15 million), MS Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs ($6.5 million), Canopy Children’s Solutions ($4.5 million), Save the Children ($2.4 million), Three Rivers Planning and Development District ($1.8 million), the Mississippi Department of Employment Security ($1.4 million), Institutions of Higher Learning ($1.3 million), and South Delta Planning and Development District ($1 million).

But nonprofit or government subgrantees providing TANF-related services are not the only vendors who received the funds. Jones Walker, the law firm bringing the civil litigation against Favre and others, received nearly $1 million in TANF funds in 2024, and the Office of the State Auditor, which conducts an annual audit of MDHS spending on behalf of the federal government, received $162,000. The state also recorded some payments under the TANF Work Program to private contractors and vendors such as Guidesoft Inc. ($160,000), Horne LLP ($124,000), Staffers ($57,000), Cronus Consulting ($20,000), Dell Marketing ($13,000), Office Management Systems ($11,000) and various hotels.

In response to emailed questions about these expenses, the Mississippi Department of Human Services provided only the following explanation: “Each of these expenditures are in compliance with the TANF administrative policy and statute. MDHS adheres to federal guidance to the percentage of the annual state grant that is utilized for administering the TANF program and the guidelines for which expenditures qualify as administrative costs.”

During the scandal, TANF subgrant recipients did not receive proper auditing and officials accused Davis, the former director, of forcing employees to look the other way when they suspected a problem.

MDHS says it now does conducts subgrantee monitoring and when it flags an issue with a subgrantee’s expenditures, such as unbudgeted purchases or missing documentation, it sends a finding letter to the subgrantee, and if the subgrantee cannot account for the spending, the agency requires repayment. 

From late 2021-2023, the welfare agency questioned nearly $660,000 in expenditures from 13 subgrantees, most of which were cleared, though four grantees were ordered to return $95,000. The largest error MDHS found was $65,000 in spending by the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, which the MDHS said failed to provide proper documentation for payroll expenses.

From 2020-2021, the agency questioned $4.5 million in expenditures and demanded $1 million returned.

The ongoing civil suit, which attempts to claw back a whopping $80 million in misspending, including from nonprofits that are now defunct, has so far resulted in settlements of $1.7 million. The state has yet to recoup the $7 million lost to the volleyball and pharmaceutical projects.

While MDHS has decided generally how it’s going to divvy up most of its annual TANF grant in future years, it has not answered questions from Mississippi Today about how it plans to use roughly $150 million in accumulated TANF funds.

The agency has instituted better controls and continues to sue the alleged fraudsters. But some advocates suspect that the TANF program — no longer operating as a criminal enterprise — remains a scandal of another kind.

“If we wanted to reduce poverty in a serious way, we wouldn’t be ending any federal fiscal year with tens of millions of federal assistance dollars unspent,” said Matt Williams, longtime TANF researcher with Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. “... So why are the leaders in our state so silent on the obvious big issue, the obvious elephant in the room, which is widespread persistent poverty and what to do with the TANF program?”

The post If you count unspent millions, high denial rate and mysterious outcomes, the TANF scandal persists appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed another brief in support of the argument that states with strict abortion bans should be able to deny emergency medical care to pregnant women if that care involves an abortion. 

The filing in the Idaho case is called an amicus curiae brief, which allows interested parties not directly involved in a court case to submit legal documents voicing their opinion. 

The case began when the Biden administration sued Idaho for barring abortions when a pregnant woman’s health is at risk. 

Fitch added Mississippi to the amicus brief in 2022, immediately after the Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Nineteen other states now stand with Mississippi, according to the newest court filing.

Fitch’s office declined to comment for this story. 

At the heart of the case, explained Mary Ziegler, one of the country’s preeminent experts on abortion law and a professor at UC Davis School of Law, is a discussion of health versus life – which she says is less of a philosophical distinction and more of a political strategy. 

“There are plenty of things that go wrong in pregnancy that can really affect your health that aren’t going to necessarily imminently kill you. But if you’re coming from a movement perspective, you see all these health justifications basically as loopholes that people are exploiting,” she said. “So, some states responded to that anxiety like Texas by having a health exception but having it be very, very, very narrow, and other states like Mississippi responded by just not having a health exception at all.”

In fact, national health policy organization KFF does not consider Texas’ health exception – to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function” – to be an exception at all. Mississippi is one of six ban states which does not have an exception for the health of the mother. 

Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas are the other five, according to KFF. All six have exceptions to protect the life of the mother.

The federal law at odds with these state bans is called EMTALA, or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires medical providers to stabilize everyone entering the emergency room before discharging or transferring them. The Biden administration argued that treatment should include abortion and should apply to mothers in ban states – if the mother’s pregnancy poses a risk to her health. 

These 20 states, including Mississippi, that have joined the “friend of the court” brief have “a profound interest in preserving the federalist structure, their power to regulate for the welfare of their citizens, and state laws adopted by citizens’ elected representatives to protect unborn children from intentional destruction,” according to the brief. 

While the argument of the amicus brief relies heavily on the principle of state rights, it also presents several anti-abortion defenses, including that doctors should not be allowed to prioritize the health of women over unborn children. 

“That EMTALA imposes obligations on hospitals to pregnant women does not allow hospitals to ignore the health of unborn children,” the brief reads. “Hospitals cannot ‘pick and choose’ between their dual obligations. They must stabilize both women and unborn children.”

But allowing states to treat life and health differently, Ziegler said, doesn’t create a distinction as much as it causes confusion. 

“If you’re going to lose an organ or be permanently disabled – does that fall under life exception or not? And some states say ‘well, yeah, our life exception doesn’t require you to be imminently dying, it just requires that there be a threat to your life, and certain organ damage could qualify.’ But it’s also sort of unclear.” 

After Mississippi’s abortion ban took hold in July 2022, the state’s number of abortions plummeted to nearly zero – despite the fact that Mississippi’s ban has two exceptions: to protect the life of the mother, and cases where the pregnancy was caused by rape and reported to law enforcement. 

Cases like Ashley, the 13-year-old Delta girl TIME magazine wrote about who was raped and forced to carry her baby to term, show that the exceptions can be theoretical.

Only four abortions were performed in Mississippi in 2023, according to data from the Mississippi State Department of Health.

If the Supreme Court votes in favor of the states, Ziegler says it probably wouldn’t change much for a state like Mississippi. If, however, the Supreme Court votes in favor of the Biden administration, it could change the landscape – not of abortion generally, but in those instances where a woman goes to the emergency room for pregnancy complications and doctors are deciding if they can legally treat her. 

“If the Supreme Court ultimately said that EMTALA does cover a universe of physical emergencies that are not imminently life-threatening, and here are some of those examples, it would be very hard for Mississippi prosecutors to go after anyone who performed procedures in those circumstances,” Ziegler said.

A similar case is playing out in Texas.

The Idaho case is currently awaiting an oral arguments hearing in December, after which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will issue an opinion. If appealed, it will return to the Supreme Court.

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Mississippi’s 165th state fair just came to an end. The past week saw Mississippians of all ages flock to the heart of Jackson to enjoy freshly squeezed lemonade, every kind of fried food imaginable, gentle animals, thrilling games, and rides (for the particularly brave). The Mississippi Today team didn’t miss out.

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On Thursday evening and Friday morning, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency held listening sessions in the capital city to hear Jacksonians’ thoughts on the work being done with the city’s drinking water system.

While many recognized the progress in the system’s reliability, residents continued to lament JXN Water’s increased water bills, which went into effect earlier this year despite a key component of the billing change — a discount for SNAP recipients — being held up in court. Most of the complaints centered around the new $40 availability charge, as well as issues getting help through JXN Water’s call center in Pearl.

But before those meetings kicked off, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, whose 2022 order put JXN Water and its leader Ted Henifin in charge of the water rehabilitation, criticized federal attorneys over the EPA’s decision to hold the public meetings.

During a Thursday afternoon status conference, where Henifin detailed the faster-than-expected progress in fixing Jackson’s sewer system, Wingate questioned DOJ attorney Karl Fingerhood, who represents the EPA in the lawsuit over Jackson’s water system, for roughly an hour about the meetings.

The judge wondered why the EPA would invite feedback from the public in a venue outside the court, and even asked Fingerhood if the listening sessions would somehow undermine the court proceedings. Wingate repeatedly referred to a hearing he held in 2023 where he invited feedback from Jackson residents about Henifin and JXN Water’s work thus far.

While that meeting was held more than a year ago and Wingate hasn’t announced plans for one since, the judge wondered why the EPA didn’t consult him about their plans. Fingerhood explained that the meetings weren’t meant to be formal proceedings, but that the EPA had made a commitment to hear Jacksonians’ feedback and that it had been a while since the agency had last engaged with residents.

After last year’s hearing in Wingate’s courtroom, where residents and advocates made a range of requests including more communication from JXN Water, the judge filed a response brushing off most of the feedback he heard, even calling some criticisms of Henifin “racist.”

Both Wingate and Henifin also pointed to a letter that Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba sent the EPA in March criticizing JXN Water, wondering if the EPA was holding the meetings in response to the mayor’s concerns. Fingerhood denied any connection.

Wingate also used the moment as a chance to call out Lumumba, who the judge has scolded in prior status conferences, saying: “The mayor it seems to me is not a friend of this endeavor to straighten out this mess.”

Sewer and water system progress

At the start of Thursday’s status conference, Henifin informed the court that JXN Water has already repaired close to 300 sewer line failures around the city since it took over the wastewater system last year. Those include 215 that the court order listed in one of the priority projects. Henifin initially expected that project would take two to three years to finish. He added that JXN Water was able to make the repairs without any federal funds. Most of the lines needing repairs, Henifin said, were collapsed underground pipes, and were causing raw sewage to leak out onto city streets and even on residents’ property.

Henifin added that JXN Water inherited 2,200 service requests dealing with sewer issues around the city, and they’ve since reduced the backlog to under 200.

He said one of the city’s three wastewater treatment plants, the Savanna Street plant, still needs a lot of investment — about $36 million — for capitol improvements, but he added that JXN Water has been able to reduce the number of prohibited bypasses of wastewater into the Pearl River.

On the drinking water side, Henifin explained that by fixing leaks JXN Water has been able to reduce the amount of water it needs to put into the system by 25%, adding though that there is still a 50% loss of what water does get treated and sent out. The hope, he said, is to keep decreasing the amount of water needed to go out — to below 30 million gallons a day, versus the current output of 40 MGD — so that the city can finally close the age-old J.H. Fewell plant and save money on operations. To do that, JXN Water is working with four different contractors to find suspected underground leaks that never show up above the surface, thus making them harder to find.

In terms of billing, Henifin said JXN Water will in “the next few weeks” start shutting off connections to single-family homes that are falling behind, starting with the largest balances. Wingate added, “I don’t have very much mercy for those people” not paying their bills.

Public’s feedback

About 50 people showed up to each of the two meetings the EPA held at the Mississippi e-Center on Thursday and Friday. Some, like Jessica Carter, complained about a lack of communication from JXN Water when it shuts water off to make repairs.

“Just three weeks ago, I woke up and the water was off,” said Carter, who lives in northeast Jackson. “No notice, no letters, no nothing. I kept calling, kept calling, asking what’s going on … We went about 36 hours without running water this time. I have a 4-year-old, so I’m trying to figure out what do I have to do? Do we need to get a hotel room?

“I kept calling the hotline, they didn’t have the answers either… then once water came on, I was like, will be there be a reduction in the water charges for the 36 hours that the water was turned off?”

Part of the feedback the EPA asked for was over the long-term future of the system. While some said that the water system shouldn’t return to the city’s control, others noted that the city never had the resources that JXN Water is accessing.

“Before that Jackson didn’t have that money to do that work,” Natt Offiah, who grew up down the street from the meeting but now lives downtown, said about the $600 million Congress appropriated for Jackson after the federal takeover. “Now we got that money to do the work, everyone’s acting like Jackson didn’t care, but we didn’t have those resources to begin with.”

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