House Democratic Leader Johnson discusses upcoming legislative session, his political future
Rep. Robert Johnson III of Natchez, leader of Mississippi House Democrats, says the GOP leadership’s push for “school choice” is out of touch with rank-and-file Mississippians, many Republican lawmakers and educators. He also makes an announcement about his plans for his own political future, often the subject of much speculation.
Absentee voting is underway for Mississippi’s special legislative elections
Absentee voting has begun for several special legislative elections in Mississippi, which have the potential to add more Democratic seats in a state controlled by Republicans.
A federal three-judge panel ordered Mississippi to conduct special elections for 14 legislative seats this year because the court determined lawmakers diluted Black voting strength when they redrew districts in 2022.
Seven races are on the ballot for the Nov. 4 general election: six in the Senate and one in the House. But most of the attention will be on three specific elections that were at the heart of the federal litigation.
SEE THE MISSISSIPPI TODAY 2025 SPECIAL ELECTION GUIDE
The state complied with the federal panel’s order by creating two majority-Black Senate districts with no incumbents in them and by significantly redrawing one House district.
Senate District 2 contains portions of DeSoto and Tunica counties. Charlie Hoots is the Republican nominee, and Theresa Isom is the Democratic nominee. Neither has been elected to the Legislature before.
Sen. David Parker, a Republican from Olive Branch, was the incumbent in this district, but he announced over the summer that he would not run in the new district.
Senate District 45 includes portions of Forrest and Lamar counties. This is a new district without an incumbent. Johnny DuPree is the Democratic nominee, and Anna Rush is the Republican nominee. DuPree is the former mayor of Hattiesburg, and Rush is an attorney in Hattiesburg.
House District 22 involves portions of Chickasaw, Clay and Monroe counties. Jon Lancaster is the Republican nominee, and Justin Crosby is the Democratic nominee.
Unlike the two Senate races, Lancaster is an incumbent, currently in his second term. First elected as a Democrat in 2019, Lancaster switched to the Republican Party in 2021.
Republican House members are expected to fight to keep Lancaster in office, while national and state Democratic leaders are hoping to flip a GOP seat to a Democratic one in a rural area.
Seven candidates are also vying for a state Senate seat left open by John Horhn after he became Jackson’s mayor in July. He had represented District 26, which spans across north Jackson into parts of rural Hinds and Madison counties, since 1993.
READ MORE: Senate District 26 Special Election Guide
Unlike the other races, the seven candidates in the Hinds County race will appear on the ballot without a partisan affiliation.
Voters have until noon Nov. 1 to cast an absentee ballot in person at their county circuit clerk’s office. To vote by absentee, a voter must provide a legal excuse for being unable to vote in person on Nov. 4.
If voters have questions about voting on Election Day, they can contact their local circuit clerk or the secretary of state’s elections hotline at 1-800-829-6786. For more voter information, visit the secretary of state’s Elections and Voting Portal.
Leland mourns seventh death from shooting after homecoming football game
LELAND — A frenzy of gunfire after a high school football game earlier this month in a small Mississippi Delta town has claimed a seventh victim as a 25-year-old woman died of her wounds around a week later, medical officials said.
Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive for the shooting in Leland, but the FBI says it may have been “sparked by a disagreement among several individuals.” At least nine people have been arrested, several of them charged with capital murder.
The death of Ebanee Williams was reported Friday by the coroner’s office in Hinds County, which encompasses the state capital, according to a news release Saturday from LaQuesha Watkins, the coroner in Washington County where Leland is located.
More than a dozen people were wounded in the shooting, and several were taken to other cities for medical care. The violence broke out late in the evening of Oct. 11 as people were gathered in Leland’s tiny downtown to celebrate homecoming weekend. It is the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Leland, on the state’s western edge, is home to fewer than 4,000 people, and the FBI’s Jackson Field Office has been posting pictures of suspects wanted for questioning.
Witnesses described a chaotic aftermath with people wounded and bleeding as four people lay dead on the ground. Days later, tattered yellow police tape lay tangled at the scene in front of a boarded-up storefront not far from City Hall.
Mississippians protest Trump policies in a national wave of ‘No Kings’ rallies
People in Jackson, Hernando, Greenville, Gulfport, Oxford and other Mississippi cities took part in “No Kings” rallies Saturday to protest policies of President Donald J. Trump.
Demonstrators at rallies across the U.S. criticized ICE raids, the deployment of National Guard troops to Democratic-run cities, the federal government shutdown and redrawing of some states’ congressional districts to favor Republicans.
Trump and many of his supporters labeled the events as “Hate America” rallies.
Hundreds of people at a rally on the south lawn of the Mississippi Capitol chanted, “Vote them out.”
“We’re here, you know, fighting for our democracy,” Clinton resident M.D. Whitfield said at that rally. “We’re fighting for due process.”
Southern lawmakers say infant mortality rates could worsen with health care cuts
The infant mortality rate, a stat that tracks deaths of infants before their first birthdays, in many Southern states is higher than average for the U.S. — Mississippi’s health department even declared a state of emergency this year after the rate of infant deaths increased.
Lawmakers and medical experts say that health care spending cuts and restrictions on services could make things worse.
“These are states that historically have struggled both with infant mortality and maternal mortality,” Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock told NOTUS. “Medicaid is part of a safety net that impacts overall health. When that safety net is broken, things like infant mortality are impacted as well as chronic disease.”
READ MORE: Mississippi health officials declare emergency over infant mortality rate
Democrats warn that a confluence of factors could lead to fewer people accessing care, potentially with dire consequences. The reconciliation bill that became law this summer cuts $1.1 trillion in Medicaid. Enhanced subsidies in the Affordable Care Act will expire in December, resulting in increased premiums in 2026 for millions if not extended — something Democrats have demanded in exchange for their votes to reopen the government — and potentially lowering the rate of people getting care. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by 2034, the number of people left uninsured could increase to 11.8 million.
States in the South would be disproportionately affected if the enhanced ACA subsidies aren’t extended. According to analysis from the Urban Institute, Louisiana would see the steepest decline in subsidized marketplace enrollment in the country.
Many of these states — including Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina — have traditionally had infant mortality rates on the higher end of the spectrum. Nationwide, the infant mortality was 5.61 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2023; in Mississippi, which has the worst rate of infant mortality, the rate was 8.94 deaths per 1,000 live births. That number climbed in 2024 to 9.7 deaths per 1,000 live births.
Dr. James Bauerband, a retired OBGYN based in Georgia, told NOTUS that the strain that Medicaid cuts have put on rural hospitals could cause the infant mortality rates in Southern states to increase.
“I understand you don’t want to have to insure people that could get insurance on their own and want to incentivize getting a job and getting good insurance,” Bauerband said. “But, there has to be the safety nets, and I think that making sure Medicaid is well-funded is something they really ought to do.”
Alison Gemmill, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently did a study analyzing the impact that the Dobbs Supreme Court case decision had on infant mortality in states and found that there were “higher than expected” mortality rates “in states after adoption of abortion bans.”
She said the Trump administration’s termination of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System could lead to a lower understanding of infant mortality. The monitoring system collected insights from moms before and after giving birth, asking questions regarding alcohol use and stress during pregnancy, among others.
“Those are all things that we can’t capture in a birth certificate data source,” Gemmill said. “And that was a really important data for people like me to figure out what’s going on with pregnancy health in the nation, in a state over time. And they completely canceled that program.”
“So now it’s like we don’t even have the data to inform strategies on how to improve rates of pre-term birth infant mortality,” she added.
Democrats believe these reforms have lasting consequences.
“Not enough mamas get prenatal care, partly because of cost, and partly because of access,” Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. “Finding places that can treat them can be a real challenge. The Medicaid cuts will impact infant mortality, both for the people who are cut out of health care access, and also for people who depend on rural hospitals and community health centers that can’t survive the cuts and will close.”
Republicans have also raised concerns about infant mortality rates. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican whose state has more than 60 rural hospitals, told NOTUS that he wants to extend the funding for rural hospitals provided under the law from 2026 to 2030.
If changes take effect after that time, cuts to Medicaid could cause infant mortality rates to go up, he said.
“I want to make sure that that doesn’t happen,” he told NOTUS. “Under the president’s reconciliation bill, there’s increased funding for rural hospitals now for the next couple of years. … I want to see that extended.”
Some of the Republicans who voted against the reconciliation bill stopped short of saying its Medicaid cuts could affect infant mortality rates.
“We’ve had an infant mortality rate problem in this country for years,” Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who cited health care as her reason for voting against the reconciliation bill, told NOTUS. “This is not new, and it does warrant research to find out why we also have huge racial disparities in maternal mortality rates.”
North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who also voted against the bill, called the country’s infant mortality rate “unacceptably high,” with root causes including poverty and substance abuse. However, he didn’t see the correlation between Medicaid cuts and infant mortality rates.
“I haven’t seen any data,” Tillis said. “Maybe some people would say that. But they’d have to be statistically, not politically, motivated to catch my attention. I just haven’t studied it.”
Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt called on Democrats to support her legislation to help support women during the prenatal, postpartum and early childhood years of pregnancy. Britt told NOTUS that she will continue to work across the aisle to address it.
“That’s something we’ve got to get to the bottom of … find out what is the root cause,” Britt said.
This story is provided by a partnership between Mississippi Today and the NOTUS Washington Bureau Initiative, which seeks to help readers in local communities understand what their elected representatives are doing in Congress.
US Supreme Court considers gutting Voting Rights Act that has transformed Mississippi
Mississippi has one of the nation’s highest percentage of Black state legislators.
That should not be a surprise since Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black people of any state in the nation.
Despite Missisisppi’s large Black population, without the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the number of African Americans serving in the Mississippi Legislature would be far fewer than it is now. There is no disputing the fact that the Voting Rights Act has resulted in more Black people serving in the Mississippi Legislature and indeed in every level of government in the state – from the local to the national level.
Even with the Voting Rights Act, the number of majority-Black districts in the Mississippi Legislature – about 34% of the 174 seats – is less than the percentage of Black people in Mississippi’s total population – about 38%.
Before the Voting Rights Act, there were no elected Black officials in Mississippi during the 20th century except for those in the all-Black town of Mound Bayou.
This past week, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the section of the Voting Rights Act that ensures a certain level of minority representation in the drawing of political boundaries, such as for state legislative seats, city council seats and U.S. House seats, should be repealed.
Louisiana, which was forced by the courts to draw a second majority-Black congressional district this decade to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, argued before the court that race should not be a factor in redistricting. Louisiana was assisted by President Donald Trump’s administration in its arguments.
The case before the Supreme Court is a big deal. A decision by the court to gut the Voting Rights Act could provide a monumental boost to the desperate and unprecedented efforts of the Trump administration to convince some states to redraw their congressional districts to provide Republicans more safe seats before the 2026 midterm elections. The effort is part of a strategy by Trump to hold onto the small Republican majority in the U.S. House.
It appears some members of the Supreme Court – perhaps a majority – believe that the protections from racial discrimination provided by the Voting Rights are no longer needed. The nation has moved beyond that, they argue.
No doubt, there has been substantial progress made toward halting racial discrimination since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.
But it is worth remembering that in the 2010s, provisions of the Voting Rights Act were used to successfully argue a Mississippi Senate seat that covered 102 miles in various nonsensical directions on the fringes of the Delta was drawn to dilute the Black vote while protecting a white incumbent. Or more recently, the principles of the Voting Rights Act were followed to create three additional majority-Black districts in the Mississippi Legislature.
And it is worth pointing out that state Auditor Shad White, a Republican who aspires to be Mississippi’s next governor, took to social media to celebrate the possibility of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
“I hope they will rule that the kind (of) gerrymandering that has protected Bennie Thompson for years is out,” White wrote. “If they do, Mississippi should immediately move to create simple districts that are not gerrymandered to protect Bennie Thompson.”
Thompson, first elected to the U.S. House in 1993, is Mississippi’s lone Black congressman. He has been the only Democrat in the state’s delegation in Washington since early 2011, when 22-year Rep. Gene Taylor left office after losing to a Republican in south Mississippi.
Perhaps Auditor White does not know that Thompson lobbied the Mississippi Legislature to draw his district more compact after the 2020 Census. But the Legislature opted to draw Thompson a sprawling district that extends almost the length of the western side of the state – at least in part to protect Republican congressmen by packing as many Black residents as possible into Thompson’s district and keeping the other three districts whiter.
In a 2018 interview with Mississippi Today, Thompson spoke of the impact of the Voting Rights Act.
As a student at Tougaloo College in the 1960s, he was working in the Delta to help register Black people to vote when he had a conversation with his mother, who said, “You know we don’t vote here in Bolton. It was a shock to me that I was up in Sunflower County helping register Black people to vote and even in my hometown they didn’t enjoy the same luxury.”
Thompson said that his father, an auto mechanic who died in 1964 before passage of the Voting Rights Act, never voted. His mother, a school teacher, did and most likely cast her first vote for her son when he ran and was elected in 1969 to the Board of Aldermen in his hometown of Bolton.
Without the Voting Rights Act, that would not have been possible. And without the Voting Rights Act today, it is safe to assume there would be fewer Black people elected to office, not just in Mississippi but throughout the nation.
Some might say that is a good thing. But is it really?
Reddit AMA recap: How does Mississippi spend its opioid settlement dollars?
Mental health reporter Allen Siegler recently published a series of stories investigating how Mississippi’s elected officials have been managing about $124 million of Mississippi opioid settlement money — money that the state is receiving as a result of lawsuits against companies that profited off a devastating overdose crisis.
His findings were staggering.
Most of the money spent so far has been for lawyers’ fees or stuff that isn’t related to addiction, like police cameras and fiber optic cable installations.
And it’s not that the crisis is over — more people are dying now than seven years ago, when the biggest lawsuit was filed. But less than 1% of the Mississippi money has actually been used to stop the problem.
This project took over three months to report and write, and there were plenty of weird things that happened along the way. So Allen answered questions from our readers on Reddit, taking them behind the scenes on what it takes to undertake such an investigation.
You can read the conversation below. This includes guidance on how people can file a Freedom of Information Act request to access public records (with a link to a sample FOIA request you can use) and other actions community members can take to ensure these funds are used to address the problems highlighted in the lawsuits.
If you want to be alerted about future AMAs with our reporters, sign up here.
Some questions have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What can we do to help pressure whoever is in charge of distribution of the funds?
Click for the answer.
I think it depends on what someone would want to accomplish. At the most direct level, the city/town council members and county supervisors are the people who decide where the local money goes. If your town, city or county is spending the money without the input of those most impacted by the crisis (which, to our knowledge, is every local government besides Hattiesburg), you could call city hall or the your supervisors and let them know what you think of that and where you think the money should go. Most elected officials’ emails are also publicly available, so contacting them that way could be a good strategy as well.
The contract Attorney General Lynn Fitch made with the local governments is already finalized, so I don’t believe she can change the unrestricted terms of that spending. But other states’ attorneys general have provided guidance for how local governments should spend their money in overdose prevention, regardless of what their contracts say the cities and counties have to do. North Carolina’s former attorney general wrote extensive FAQs about local settlement spending that experts have brought up to me multiple times. If she wanted to/if her constituents made it known that’s something they want to happen, Fitch’s office could write similar guidelines.
To my knowledge, the only state group that can legally change how the towns, cities and counties spend their opioid settlement money is the Mississippi Legislature. And we’ve seen that happen in other states. Similar to Mississippi, Maine didn’t require its local governments to report what they were spending their settlement money on (although Emily Bader with The Maine Monitor did a remarkable job filling those reporting gaps where she could). Then this spring, state lawmakers passed a simple bill to require that from hereon out. If Mississippi lawmakers hear from their voters that they want a bill like this as well (or others that require the money to be spent on addiction-related purposes), they might look to pass similar legislation during the 2026 regular session.
Q: I see a lot about police funds and even some that explicitly state money was put towards guns. My understanding is that some funds were allotted to counties to be used at their discretion.
Click for the answer.
In Mississippi, Fitch wrote a contract that says all the settlement money flowing to towns, cities and counties (expected to be around $63 million when all is said and done) can be spent for whatever public purpose their town/city council and Board of Supervisors think is appropriate. The settlements allow for up to 30% of spending to be on things that don’t have to do with addiction; because the local governments are getting 15% of the total Mississippi opioid settlement pie, all of their shares can be spent like any other public dollars.
While this is technically allowed by the national settlements, the lawyers who wrote the settlements explicitly said they didn’t want that to happen. Most states created arrangements that say all the lawsuit money has to go to something related to addiction (even for purposes that have been criticized by the public). But as of right now, that’s not the case here.
Q: Are any of these funds discussed with constituents, or does it seem to entirely be at the whims of the ones in charge? How can we know whether or not they will a) use the remaining funds at all b) use them for anything remotely related to dealing with the supposed target issue?
Click for the answer.
Entirely at the whims of the ones in charge, at least for the local money. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Toby Barker, the mayor of Hattiesburg, created a committee this summer to advise how to spend the city’s settlement money. The committee, made up of locals who have experience addressing addiction, has come up with a few priorities so far, and I heard they’re in the process of moving forward on putting up money for those priorities.
For questions A and B, it’s going to be hard if the current setup continues. For example, cities and counties have been getting money for three years now, but even those I consider most familiar with the Mississippi overdose crisis (people like James Moore in Hattiesburg) didn’t know anything about the local spending until I requested records and told him about that. But, as you allude to in your next question, anyone can request records from Mississippi governments. And I think we proved that while not ideal, the public record technique is an effective way to bring spending information to light.
Q: Could you give a rundown of how one goes about requesting (or accessing) these documents?
Click for the answer.
Yep, no problem! First, you need to have an idea about what information you’re looking for and what documents might contain that information. I knew very little about the recordkeeping of these local settlements going into the project, so I asked for “All receipts of dollars received by the [local government name] related to the National Opioids Settlements since June 1,2022,” and “All internal records related to [local government name]’s spending of money received from the National OpioidSettlements since June 1, 2022.”
Here’s one I sent to the city of Hattiesburg, which has all the template information to make sure we get the information as quickly and accessibly as possible. I tried to email them to city/town/chancery clerks, and sometimes added in the county administrator/government attorney. When a local government has a specific city portal or form, like Oxford and Long Beach respectively, I put the same information into those forms.
I was expecting to receive documents like spending ledgers and city council resolutions from this request, which I sometimes did. But there were tons of other formats clerks and administrators used to provide me the information. I got everything from county budgets mostly unrelated to opioid settlement spending to a handwritten note saying nothing has been spent yet.
Sometimes, helpful public servants would call me to clarify what information I wanted. I nudged some of the clerks a lot, and made sure the Mississippi Ethics Commission knew when the public bodies were breaking state law. It took up most of my summer to do this with all 147 local governments, but I think the importance of this information justifies the work
Q: How are other states handling/distributing funds to address opioid overdoses? Who should the public turn to for recommendations on how best to use these funds to address the problems? Health professionals? Law enforcement officials? Local Politicians? How can the public be more involved?
Click for the answer.
It’s a very mixed bag from state to state. Like I wrote in this story, every other state has used at least $3 million of opioid settlement money to at least try to address their overdose crises. But that certainly doesn’t mean everything’s sunshine and roses everywhere else.
Christine Minhee has a better national perspective on the settlement distribution than anyone I’ve met, and she created a state opioid settlement guide last December to give folks baseline information about what’s going on in each state. And the guides show that while there are states effectively using their dollars to prevent more deaths, there’s plenty of opportunities for spending that doesn’t address the opioid epidemic across the country. When I was reporting in West Virginia, I wrote a story about county leaders using nearly half a million settlement dollars for a shooting range. I just saw a story from Hawaii that leaders are using some of the state’s money for waterpark and Chuck E. Cheese vouchers.
For best practice recommendations, there are a lot of national level resources (like Johns Hopkins University’s guide) that provide broad recommendations for how the settlement money can prevent more deaths.
The settlements themselves have lists of strategies that are proven ways to curb the crisis. But public health professionals repeatedly told me that for any given town, city or county, the people who make up the community whose lives have been touched by the overdose catastrophe are the best people to share what will and won’t work.
Q: Why would the crowd that diverted welfare money to a volleyball stadium with little consequences be expected to do the right thing with the settlement money?
Click for the answer.
I sent Anna Wolfe this question, and she said the welfare scandal teaches us that when public money intended to assist the state’s most vulnerable residents has so few guardrails, the likelihood it will be squandered is great (whether straight-up stolen or spent on things that have nothing to do with the intended purpose–both of which yield the same result: people don’t receive help and opportunities for better outcomes are lost). I think she’s completely right.
What I would add about the opioid settlement situation in particular is that the State Legislature, the group that will control as much as $300 million when all the payments come in, hasn’t done much to indicate one way or another how it will spend the money it oversees. We’ll know a lot more about what’s to come when the Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council presents recommendations for which overdose response efforts lawmakers should fund in December, and when the lawmakers act on those non-binding recommendations in the 2026 regular legislative session. I’ll be keeping eyes on what happens there, and I hope the public does too.
Q: Are there any accountability frameworks that would allow the money to be used in a way that it benefits the actual victims of the opioid crisis?
Click for the answer.
I think so! I think the Maine bill that requires local spending reporting is a great way to encourage city and county leaders to be responsible stewards of the money. I think there could be a lot of ways states can incentivize spending on preventing more deadly overdoses and a lot of people willing to help develop these incentives. I cite many people with a lot of experience in that department in my stories.
Q: How will the One Big Beautiful Bill impact mental health and those that work in this field in private practice, agency settings and psychiatry hospitals?
Click for the answer.
I won’t pretend to know everything about the health and health care implications of this summer’s federal spending bill. But nearly half of people diagnosed with opioid addiction used Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for vulnerable Americans.
So, I would guess that if fewer people have health insurance through Medicaid – which is what I understand the spending bill to incentivize in 2027 – that likely means fewer people can get effective opioid addiction treatment, like the medications buprenorphine and methadone.
This Kaiser Family Foundation article was published before the bill was passed, but I think it does a good job laying out the implications of Medicaid cuts on addressing the opioid epidemic.
Q: Has any of the spending been audited so far?
Click for the answer.
I have not come across any audits in my reporting.
Q: How will the settlement be spent?
Click for the answer.
We mostly don’t know right now. Mississippi has received about $125 million as of this summer, but it’s slated to receive another roughly $300 million over the next 15 years. A lot can change in that time, from who’s making the decisions to what the addiction epidemic looks like.
This graph I made breaks down what’s broadly happened with the $125 million. The biggest chunk of money is with the Legislature, and it’s unspent as of now. That will very likely change after the 2026 Regular Legislative Session, which begins in January and ends in April. I expect lawmakers to make some decisions for these dollars by April, and the public will know more then.
The $15.5 million controlled by 147 towns, cities and counties can and is being spent on any public purpose their leaders want. This other graph I made digs into whether the local governments are spending the money on addiction, spending it on something else or not spending it yet.
Q: A lot of states are using the opioid settlement to purchase equipment like Reassurance Solutions cell monitoring devices; basically vital sign radars that go in county detention centers and jails to monitor for overdoses (which happen most often within the first 24 hours of incarceration). Is tech like that a viable option for Mississippi’s funds?
Click for the answer.
I don’t know anything about that specific device, so I don’t want to comment on that specifically. But the settlement lawyers list initiatives that prevent more overdoses for inmates and former inmates as acceptable ways to address the crisis. They speak about providing “MAT (medication assisted treatment), recovery support, harm reduction, or other appropriate services” to people involved with the criminal justice system.
Q: Grant decisions will be determined by the legislature. Will there be any opportunity for public comment on the grants recommended to the legislature?
Click for the answer.
I have not heard of any opportunities for public comment, and I don’t see anything in the law state senators and representatives passed in spring that says there will be public comment opportunities. But lawmakers don’t just make laws — they can also change them! So if Mississippians think public comment opportunities for how these dollars get spent are important, a good way to make that known would be to call/email their state senators and representatives.
Q: Did you find that Mississippi officials resisted sharing records or delayed responses? If so, how did you overcome that and what rights do regular residents have to push back when agencies ignore or stonewall?
Click for the answer.
Oh, absolutely. The most common obstacle I came across was staying in contact with whoever handles the public records in any given town, city or county. I filed almost all of my records requests in mid-June, so I started following-up with local governments I hadn’t heard back from in early July. First, I would ask for an email update and often add the town/city/county attorney. For a lot of governments, that was enough. But going into mid-July, there were still dozens of governments that I hadn’t heard back from.
From there, it branched out into a lot of phone calls to city halls and county boards of supervisors. Mississippi has laws that say public officials have to fully respond to public records requests by at most 14 business days, and it has a state Ethics Commission to enforce them.
So I spent a lot of July reminding city or chancery clerks what the state’s public record act says. My deskmates got a kick out of the number of times I told record keepers I was going to loop in the ethics commissioner Thomas Hood about not receiving these records in a timely manner. But doing that usually worked, so I stand by it.
For anyone looking to file records requests, feel free to copy and paste the language from my Hattiesburg FOIA where I talk about asking for electronic copies and other things of that nature. I would also recommend reading the public records act I linked above and the state’s model law so they know what you are and aren’t entitled to. If a government is looking to charge 50 cents a page for emailed copies of documents (as happened to me multiple times), that’s a problem. Tom Hood successfully mediated a number of these disagreements between public officials and me. If you run into any issues, you can loop him into the email thread (thood@ethics.state.ms.us), and he might be able to clear up any disagreements. If not, you can file an ethics complaint with his office.
Q: Who is responsible for making sure this money is spent on addiction treatment instead of unrelated projects?
Click for the answer.
For the local Mississippi money, no one right now. There’s very few reporting requirements the settlements themselves actually require, and Attorney General Fitch’s agreement with cities and counties doesn’t require it either. But the state Legislature could pass a law to change that, if lawmakers think that’s an important priority.
For the state’s money, Fitch has designated a small chunk of its share (“small chunk” is relative as it’s still expected to be over $60 million in total) for purposes that don’t have to address addiction. The settlements say the remaining pot of money, set to be around $300 million by 2040, has to be spent on addressing addiction.
The law the Legislature passed this spring says the Attorney General’s Office is in charge of making sure the money is spent legally. So, unless the Legislature changes something, the person responsible is Fitch or whoever is attorney general in the future.
Q: When you filed 147 records requests, how many governments actually complied fully and how many gave partial or no responses?
Click for the answer.
For 141 governments, I believe public officials gave me their best estimates of how much money they’ve received and how they’ve been spending the funds. That doesn’t mean I think they got all the information right. For instance, Gulfport wrote me a letter that they hadn’t spent any of their money despite meeting minutes showing that they spent $4,000 for a holiday feeding program in 2023. There could be other governments that did similar things that my editor and I didn’t catch.
Three governments — Byram, Tunica County and Kosciusko — found some but not all of the payments they’ve received. So their numbers are likely underestimates of the total money they’ve received.
Moss Point and Rankin County never told me how they’re spending their dollars, and we noted that in the various charts and graphs. Mound Bayou was the only government to provide no information, which led me to file this ethics complaint against the city in August.
Q: Were there clear reporting requirements for these funds, or is it left up to local officials to decide what to disclose?
Click for the answer.
The only reporting requirements I’m familiar with in the settlements is for a chunk of the money that is allowed to be spent for purposes other than addiction. My understanding is this provision was added for tax purposes for the pharmaceutical companies paying the settlements.
That money is supposed to be reported here. My understanding is that if/when the Legislature spends some of its settlement money without the recommendations of the advisory committee, that spending will have to show up here. But I don’t know if there’s an enforcer of this reporting.
Q: From your experience, what is the most effective way for everyday citizens to get attention on financial mismanagement of public records, media coverage, state agencies, or something else?
Click for the answer.
I think reaching out to the local public officials making decisions is a good first step. Now that MT has published our database, there’s hopefully less room for elected officials to say they don’t know what’s going on with the opioid settlements they oversee. I came across many local officials who said they wanted this money to be spent appropriately — they just didn’t exactly know how to do that. So a nudge/recommendation from a helpful constituent could go a long way.
If that doesn’t work, and state senators and representatives don’t respond to calls and emails, I think going to the media might be a good idea. It’s a story I’d be interested in trying to write, and it looks like Gulf States Newsroom’s Drew Hawkins (whose opioid settlement work I really admire) is looking to produce stories like that as well.
Q: If Mississippi is spending less than 1% of opioid settlement money on the crisis itself, what avenues are there for residents to push for change? Lawsuits? Federal oversight? Public campaigns?
Click for the answer.
I’m not sure. The general local spending is allowed by both the law and the settlements (although the lawyers say non-addiction spending is “disfavored”), so it’s not illegal. One of the biggest issues I’ve seen in Mississippi’s opioid settlement distribution is because so little information was made public, most people aren’t familiar with the spending or the settlements themselves.
At large, it just hasn’t been on the Mississippi media and public’s radar.
I hope that starts to change with this “Black Box” series, but I don’t know what will happen. In my experience, nearly everyone I’ve talked with says overdoses are bad and the government should do whatever it can to prevent them.
Attorney General Fitch and Jackson Mayor John Horhn held a press conference yesterday to say just that. So, if the public continues to connect those dots to the opioid settlement money, I would hope that decision makers see that spending the money for overdose response and prevention is aligned with their priorities.
In other states, citizens dismayed by opioid settlement spending on things other than addiction have been able to draw a lot of public attention with protests and editorials. I don’t know if that solves all the problems, but it would certainly make this general spending more visible.
Q: How were local needs assessed, what outcomes will be measured to determine program effectiveness due to funding, and how are programs or intervention evaluated & will the results be shared publicly?
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Because Attorney General Fitch didn’t require local governments to spend the money they oversee on addiction, I found little evidence that there’s been many needs assessments or program evaluation. That could change if Mississippi’s laws and resources change, but for now Hattiesburg is the only government I could find using citizen input to assess how this local money can be spent to best prevent more overdoses.
Q: Can you let me know if ANYONE/ ANYWHERE has purchased or contemplated purchasing Fentanyl test strips?
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Anecdotally, I know people who use test strips to verify what’s in their drug supply. But I haven’t asked them if they purchased the strips or were given them by a mutual aid group.
How would Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom handle the government shutdown?
Scott Colom, a Democrat running against incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, said he would largely side with Democratic leaders in the current partisan dispute that has the federal government shut down and has pitted Senate Democrats against President Donald Trump.
While campaigning in Jackson on Oct. 11 at Jackson State University’s homecoming game, Colom told Mississippi Today that if he were a U.S. senator from Mississippi, he would pressure congressional leaders to reach a deal on health insurance costs alongside an agreement to fund the government.
At the heart of the government shutdown fight is a dispute over extending expiring subsidies that help people buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Colom said this is “common sense policy” for Mississippi.
Hyde-Smith, Mississippi’s former agriculture commissioner and a former state senator, has voted with the Republican leadership in favor of funding the government, but punts the issues of the health insurance subsidies.
She wrote on social media that Democratic senators were putting on a “political show” by not agreeing to pass a bill to fund the government without promised protections for the subsidies.
If the subsidies are not extended before the end of the year, the cost of insurance will go up on average $480 annually for an estimated 285,000 Mississippians on the federal health exchange, according to KFF, a national nonprofit health care research organization. The premiums would increase significantly for some Mississippians.
Participation in the marketplace by Mississippians has increased 242% in recent years since the enhanced federal assistance program was enacted, according to KFF, and Mississippi has one of the highest percentages of residents who don’t have health insurance.
Some Republicans argue that Congress should debate the subsidies once the government is funded, but most Democratic senators have said they should act urgently to extend them because they will expire in the coming months.
Colom, like most of the current Democratic senators, said the deal on funding the government should happen concurrently with an agreement over the subsidies because less affluent Mississippians would suffer without the extra government assistance.
“It has to be at the same time,” Colom said. “We have to do it at the same time.”
Colom, the current district attorney in the Golden Triangle area, also criticized Hyde-Smith for not using her close relationship with Trump to negotiate a deal on the subsidies or the shutdown.
“Why do we have a senator who is constantly giving away her voice?” Colom said of Hyde-Smith. “Why isn’t she in the negotiating room?”
“Democrats have repeatedly refused a clean, bipartisan bill to reopen the government,” Hyde-Smith said. “Everyday Americans are beginning to feel the pain, and it will only get worse as this unnecessary Democratic shutdown continues. This did not have to happen.”
The U.S. government shut down on Oct. 1, and federal lawmakers have been unable to reach an agreement for three weeks now on how to fund and reopen it.
Many federal agencies are operating at reduced capacity because of the shutdown, but core programs such as the military, Social Security and Medicaid have continued.
IHL board begins selection of Jackson State president search advisory group
The Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Board indicated Thursday it has heard the clamor for more transparency in the selection of Jackson State University’s next president.
The board unanimously approved the request by Steve Cunningham, chair of the Jackson State search committee, to begin gathering a proposed list of potential members to serve on a Search Advisory Constituency.
The advisory group will support the board’s search committee by providing recommendations and insights during the process.
Cunningham and IHL Commissioner Al Rankins must submit a list of names for review and approval at a future meeting, possibly before IHL’s next board meeting on Nov. 20.
“This is the first time our board has done this in a long time,” said Gee Ogletree, president of the IHL board. “It’s because we have heard from many people asking us to broaden this process and we’re listening, and you’ve seen the board act.”
The move marks the first time in recent years the board has used an advisory group to assist with Jackson State’s presidential searches. The last time the board used a group was in 2017 during the university’s executive search that resulted in William Bynum. In 2022, the board’s policies were revised to provide for a Search Advisory Constituency.
Alumni and supporters of the HBCU have repeatedly raised questions about the board’s opaque process, calling for a fair, transparent national leadership search for the university. This includes having multiple supporters’ voices heard and valued.
The top job at Jackson State has been vacant since May. Marcus Thompson resigned as president less than two years into his tenure without explanation from the IHL board.
Thompson was the third president to depart in five years — similar to his two predecessors, Thomas Hudson and Bynum.
Denise Jones-Gregory is serving as the interim president.
The IHL board can seek additional input from constituents and stakeholders by appointing members to serve on an advisory group for a university’s presidential search, according to board policies.
The group can have up to 15 members and should represent a diverse range of university stakeholders, such as students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members. The advisory group will not discuss potential candidates, since the process only seeks to gather input. Nor will the board publicly share the group’s input, as stated in board policies.
The board also heard Thursday from Kim Bobby and Carlton Brown, two consultants with ABG Search, an executive headhunting firm based in Washington. The consultants presented a proposed timeline for Jackson State’s president search as well as best practices.
In September, the board voted to select ABG Search, to assist with naming the university’s next leader, departing from its usual pick of Academic Search, an executive firm it has used twice in the past.
It is unclear when the board will announce constituency group members or how long the presidential search will take, but AGB’s proposed timeline said it could be up to five months. The board said it is committed to getting it right.
“This work will take time and due diligence, and is not locked into a specific timeframe,” John Sewell, director of communications for the IHL board, said in a statement.
Cunningham, who is also a Jackson State alum, said the board is working to find the best possible candidate.
“We all know the university has a rich history and bright future,” Cunningham said.