Revenue collections needed to fund Mississippi state government fell below projections for the month of January.
January’s revenue collections, according to a report recently released by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, were $6 million or 1.1% below the official estimate. For the fiscal year, which began July 1, revenue collections remain $98.3 million or 2.4% above the official estimate. The official estimate is important because it represents the amount of money legislative leaders used in budgeting for the current fiscal year.
If revenue falls too far below the official estimate, legislators or Gov. Tate Reeves (or a combination of the two) would have to make mid-year budget cuts or dip into surplus funds to offset the shortfalls. The official estimate is being buoyed in large part because interest earnings are $56 million or 400% above the official estimate.
Officials said the state is benefiting from a significant spike in interest income because of the large amount of surplus funds that have been obligated but are yet to be spent and because of the higher interest rates currently in effect that increase the interest earnings.
“It is better to have it than not to have it, but I don’t want to base the budget on interest income,” Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, recently said.
While revenue collections are exceeding the official estimate, thanks in parts to the interest income, revenue collections are $44.1 million or 1% below the amount collected during the first seven months of the past fiscal year. The state is coming off two fiscal years of unprecedented revenue growth thanks in large part to the federal COVID-19 spending, so it might not be considered unusual for collections to be slumping. It is rare, however, for the state to collect less revenue year-over-year.
If it was not for the interest income, state revenue would be down more than 2% over the previous year.
One reason for the drop in revenue is that beginning in January 2023, an income tax cut phase-in began. State income tax collections are down $123 million or 8.6% over the previous year. Sales tax collections, which were expected to increase because of the reduction in the income tax, are up a more modest $63.3 million or 3.9%.
Even as a $525 million reduction in the income tax is being phased in, Gov. Tate Reeves is arguing that the remaining income tax, which accounts for about 30% of state revenue, should be eliminated by 2029.
State lawmakers recently filed legislation to replace Mississippi’s two statues of white supremacists in the U.S. Capitol in Washington — a move that would follow the lead of several other Southern states.
House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III, a Democrat from Natchez, filed a resolution to replace statutes of Jefferson Davis and J.Z. George in the U.S Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection with statues of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer and Hiram Revels, the first African American to serve in Congress.
Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons, a Democrat from Greenville, filed a measure to create a commission to select replacements for the Davis and George statues.
“I just don’t think having statues that represent the Confederacy is a correct representation of who Mississippi is,” Johnson said. “And I just think it’s time for change.”
Each U.S. state is allowed to place two statues of people “illustrious for their historic renown” or “distinguished civil or military services,” after Congress passed a federal law in the mid-nineteenth century establishing the national collection.
Around 3 to 5 million people pass through the collection in the Capitol each year, according to the Architect of the Capitol’s website, to glance at who are supposed to be the country’s most reputable figures.
But the leaders of the Magnolia State, who often boast about Mississippi’s literary, musical and artistic impact on the country, continue to honor the legacy of two slave owners who actively worked to maintain the white power structure of their day.
Davis served in the U.S. House and Senate from Mississippi before becoming the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, which fought to preserve slavery. Davis later said in a speech to the Mississippi Legislature that if he had the chance to change any of his past actions about secession, he would not do anything differently.
George was a member of Mississippi’s Secession Convention in 1861, and he signed the secession ordinance that included these words: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
George served in the Confederate Army and was also the architect of the 1890 Constitution that sought to reestablish white supremacy in the state and disenfranchise Black citizens from voting or holding elected office.
The Mississippians who initially honored George and Davis with statutes also had ties to the Confederacy or sympathized with the Confederacy.
A columnist at the time interviewed David Bramlette Jr., one of the men who selected Davis and George, and invited all Mississippians to attend the unveiling ceremony in Washington. The column specifically noted that “general officers of the Confederate organization” were invited to attend.
The article went on to quote Bramlette saying the reason the state honored George with a statue was because he was a “great constitutional lawyer and a leader in the preservation of the white, Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.”
Many Southern states have replaced their original statues of Confederate leaders with more inclusive figures. Alabama, in 2009, replaced a statue of Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, a Confederate officer, with one of Helen Keller, a political activist and disability rights advocate.
Arkansas is in the process of replacing statues of Uriah Milton Rose, a Confederate sympathizer, and James Paul Clarke, a former U.S. senator, with statues of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and musician Johnny Cash.
Florida, in 2016, approved a measure to replace Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith with Mary McLeod Bethune, a civil rights activist and founder of a Florida university.
Virginia, in 2020, removed Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the collection and plans to replace it with civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns.
To change a statue, federal law requires a majority of lawmakers in both legislative chambers to vote to approve the replacement, and the state is required to pay for the costs of replacing the two statues.
Mississippi’s Republican committee leaders in the House and Senate were noncommittal about Johnson and Simmons’ proposals to change out the Davis and George statues.
House Speaker Jason White referred Johnson’s proposal to two committees for consideration: the House Rules Committee and the House State Affairs Committee. The measure must pass both committees before the entire House can consider it.
House Rules Committee Chairman Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, said he did not know much about the National Statuary Hall Collection, but that he would review Johnson’s proposal.
Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann referred Simmons’ proposal to the Senate Rules Committee, which is led by Sen. Dean Kirby, R-Pearl.
“I’ll probably poll the committee and see where we are,” Kirby said. “If I see that it’s a real negative, I probably will not bring it up.”
Both Johnson and Simmons said they are open to suggestions for who should replace Mississippi’s statues, but they want it to honor someone who is more representative of a modern-day Mississippi.
“I want two individuals that when my children who are 5 and 10 can look back 50 years from now and they will say those two representations of Mississippi are still positive representations of Mississippi,” Simmons said. “The unfortunate thing is we can’t say that now.”
Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Gregory Johnson, CEO and President of the Foundation for the Mid South, a foundation that serves Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
With 30% of America’s poverty in this tri-state region, the Foundation for the Mid South focuses on improving education, health and wellness, wealth building, and community development.
Like the Foundation itself, Johnson has a long history of service and philanthropy. He tells about his journey, the Foundation’s goals, and the importance of building trust through communication.
New Amsterdam depicted in a cartoon, circa 1642 Credit: Public Domain
The first known legal protest by those of African descent in what became the United States took place when 11 Black Americans petitioned the Council for New Netherland (New York) for freedom, saying they had fulfilled their contracts to the Dutch West India Co.
They had been brought to the colony just a few years after its 1624 founding. They won their fight, but they remained in legal limbo in what became known as “half-freedom.” They received property, but they still had to pay crops and cattle to the company each year.
One of them, Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, was accused with eight others of killing a Black man. The company decided to execute only one of them, and de Reus drew the short straw. But when the officials tried to execute him, both nooses around his neck broke. At the behest of witnesses, they pardoned him instead.
Five months later, eight Black Americans returned to court, demanding their full freedom. They cited the arrival of English soldiers, who might re-enslave them. Despite those fears, the Black Americans managed to keep their freedom and lived north of what is now Washington Square Park, creating New York City’s first free Black community.
Thick with irony is the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools’ contention that the provision of the Mississippi Constitution plainly stating that public funds cannot go to private schools should be ruled invalid by the courts because of its racist origins.
Perhaps the schools that make up the association should look in the mirror. Many, but not all, of the 125 Mississippi private schools in the association trace their beginnings to the 1950s and 1960s and their founders’ objections to the school desegregation mandated by federal courts. The Midsouth Association of Independent Schools previously was known as the Mississippi Private School Association, which was started in the 1960s by parents and others who did not want white Mississippians to go to integrated schools.
That nugget of truth was omitted by Buck Dougherty, an attorney with the Chicago-based Liberty Justice Center, in arguing last week before the state Supreme Court that Section 208 was enacted as part of the 1890 Constitution for racist reasons and thus should be ruled invalid. Dougherty was making his ironic argument on behalf of the aforementioned Midsouth Association of Independent Schools, which in 2022 received $10 million in public funds now in question before the state’s high court.
Dougherty said in a news release that Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution “targeted independent schools that dared to teach Catholic immigrants and newly freed slaves to read and write, and there’s no way to sidestep that ugly past. Ultimately, the tension between this discriminatory provision in Mississippi’s Constitution and the U.S. Constitution has been festering for a century, and the Court must resolve that tension.”
It is true that Mississippi is one of more than 30 states with so-called Blaine Amendments that were passed in an effort to keep public funds from going to Catholic schools. But Mississippi is unique in that it is one of only two states with a constitutional provision that prevents not only public money from going to religious or sectarian schools, but also to any school “not conducted as a free school.”
Let’s give the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools the benefit of the doubt. It could be argued that most of the private schools today do not discriminate against Black Mississippians. It also is a fact that Section 208 of the constitution does not cause discrimination against minority students, considering that Black students and other minority groups make up a slim majority of the about 440,000 students in the public schools and white students compose the overwhelming majority of the about 45,000 students attending private schools in Mississippi.
In other words, it is difficult to claim, as the Liberty Justice Center is attempting to do, that the state constitution, which prevents public funds from going to private schools, discriminates against Black students since a narrow majority of public school enrollment is composed of Black and minority groups, while the vast majority of private school enrollment is white. The plain and simple fact is that public money going to private schools is going to majority white schools, while public money going to public schools is going to majority-minority schools.
Perhaps the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools and Section 208 of the state constitution have something in common — maybe they both were created with racist intent, but neither is racially motivated now.
The current lawsuit is not the first involving public money going to private schools and Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution. In 1964, during the height of efforts to circumvent federal court orders to desegregate Mississippi public schools, the Legislature passed a law that offered tuition for students to attend private schools in clear violation of Section 208.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that law unconstitutional in 1969. The federal court said that the “tuition grants have fostered the creation of private segregated schools. The statute, as amended, encourages, facilitates, and supports the establishment of a system of private schools operated on a racially segregated basis as an alternative available to white students seeking to avoid desegregated public schools.”
The ruling pointed out that when the Mississippi law was enacted, there were three non-sectarian private schools in the state. But three years later, thanks in large part to the tuition grants and the efforts to avoid integrated schools, there were 45.
If someone doubts the findings of the 5th Circuit, look at the website of the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools. It points out that the formation of the Mississippi Private School Association, which later changed its name to the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools, was precipitated in large part because of that 5th Circuit court ruling.
“That lawsuit, as well as other seismic political and social revolutions in states and communities orchestrated at the federal level, motivated a group of men to meet in Greenwood, MS, and there to draw up a draft of bylaws and a charter of incorporation for the Mississippi Private School Association,” according to the organization’s own website.
Duvan Perez spent time with his mother and siblings and liked to listen to music and work out at the gym.
At night, he arrived at Mar-Jac Poultry in Hattiesburg to clean machinery used to process chicken for sale in restaurants. He was earning money to buy his own car.
“He was living the life that you’d expect of a 16-year-old,” said Seth Hunter, a Hattiesburg attorney.
Until he wasn’t and became the third person to die at the poultry plant in less than three years.
Duvan Perez, 16, a Hattiesburg middle-schooler, was killed July 14, 2023, while cleaning a deboning machine at Mar-Jac Poultry. Credit: Courtesy of the family’s attorney, Seth Hunter
On the night of July 14, 2023, the Hattiesburg middle-schooler was cleaning a deboning machine when he got caught in a rotating shaft and sprockets and pulled in, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found in an investigation of the incident.
Federal child labor laws prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from working in meat processing plants because the machinery can be dangerous.
In court records and a statement released after Duvan’s death, Mar-Jac pointed the finger at its contractor, Onin Staffing, saying it relied on the company headquartered in Birmingham to verify employees’ age, qualifications and training, a wrongful lawsuit filed by the teenager’s mother, Edilma Perez Ramirez, alleges.
Despite this, Mar-Jac allowed Duvan to clean the equipment “without actual or constructive knowledge that Perez was under the legal age to legally perform such job duties,” according to court documents.
The Feb. 1 lawsuit, filed in the Forrest County Circuit Court, is asking for compensatory damages from Mar-Jac, Onin and other defendants, including damages for funeral and burial costs, pain and suffering and the value of future earnings Duvan would have earned.
“(The family knows) that this should not have happened,” said Hunter, who is representing the family with Biloxi attorney Jim Reeves.
The lawsuit alleges Mar-Jac’s procedure for cleaning machinery did not did not follow proper safety procedures and industry standards. Typically, the machine would be disconnected from power and a lockout would be used to prevent the machine from intentionally starting.
It also alleges Onin allowed Perez to perform a task outside of his scope due to his age and lack of training.
Attorneys representing Mar-Jac and Onin did not respond to a request for comment. The companies and other defendants have 30 days to respond to the complaint.
In a statement released shortly after Perez’s death, Mar-Jac said the company “would never knowingly put any employee, and certainly not a minor, in harm’s way” but reiterated that the staffing companies are responsible for verifying age and identification.
Other defendants named in the lawsuit are Letissha Hill, a human resources and staffing director at Mar-Jac, and John Daniels, a safety supervisor at the plant. Unknown defendants are others who may have worked for either company and those who manufactured and maintained the machinery Perez was operating when he died.
Hunter said the goal of the lawsuit is to find out why this happened to Perez and seek change to prevent other children from across the country from being placed in dangerous work conditions.
“They shouldn’t be there in the first place,” he said.
Perez was indigenous and from Guatemala, according to the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, a Jackson-based nonprofit organization that supports immigrants across the state.
The lawsuit alleges Mar-Jac has a history of worker safety issues.
Safety records show OSHA issued at least eight citations for safety violations at the plant before Perez’s death for deaths in 2020 and 2021, three amputations and injuries from a fall that required hospitalization, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit comes weeks after OSHA cited Mar-Jac for 17 violations in Duvan’s death, and 14 of them were classified as serious, totaling over $212,000 in proposed penalties.
Mar-Jac could have enforced strict safety standards, but less than a year after Perez’s death, that has not happened.
“Nothing has changed, and the company continues to treat employee safety as an afterthought, putting its workers at risk,” OSHA Regional Administrator Kurt Petermeyer said in a Jan. 16 statement.
Representative Gene Newman, R-Pearl, says you can’t advertise to sell cocaine – and abortion should be the same.
“It’s as simple as this. You can’t advertise to sell cocaine. You can’t advertise to sell anything that’s illegal. And that’s all this does. If something is illegal, you cannot advertise for it.”
But other lawmakers disagree.
Newman’s bill, House Bill 31, would prohibit the advertisement of abortion in Mississippi. It has been assigned to the House Public Health and Judiciary B committees.
Public Health Chair Sam Creekmore IV, R-New Albany, said that although he is pro-life, he doesn’t believe anything restricting advertisement should be written into law. He plans to kill the bill.
“I’m pro-life, but we have civil liberties and rights,” Creekmore said. “We advertise for what some people think are not good things. We respect the rights of free commerce and civil liberties. I don’t think that should be something we legislate.”
Creekmore said he met with Newman because “when people have bills, I like to hear their side.”
But, he went on, “Gene Newman and I reached an understanding that I’m not going to bring it out .”
Newman said he got the idea to write the bill last legislative session during conversations about crisis pregnancy centers.
CPCs are counseling centers that typically offer little or no medical services but give out freebies such as diapers and pregnancy tests. Critics say the centers often lure women in under false pretenses, such as appearing to offer abortion services, and then steer women away from abortions through deception, fear-mongering, or scheduling appointments so far out in advance that by the time they come around, abortion is no longer feasible.
Last year, CPCs got $10 million in tax credits and were touted as the primary solution to help women in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and a near total abortion ban in Mississippi.
According to Newman, CPCs are still being overshadowed by abortion advertisements.
“I learned they have problems when they try to advertise their services, they get overrode by abortion agencies running ads in Mississippi, so it’s very hard for them to get their word out online. It kind of aggravated me that you got people in here advertising for something that’s illegal in the state of Mississippi.”
With Creekmore planning to not bring it out for a vote, the bill is poised to die in committee.
Research shows that currently, the abortion ban has stopped just over a quarter of Mississippi abortion seekers — likely those with the lowest social determinants — from attaining an abortion. The other roughly 75% of abortion seekers have found ways to travel out of state or mail order abortion medication online from overseas.
However, it’s not clear that the abortion ads the bill would ban — not including web sites that list and give directions to clinics in other states or how to obtain medication — have played any role in those numbers.
