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KOSCIUSKO – About once a year, usually as the late Mississippi winter hits, a peculiar odor wafts into the homes of residents on the east side of Kosciusko.

“It’s the equivalent to the smell of a bad perm, like when people used to get perms and it would smell like burning hair,” described resident Amanda DuBard. “And it is so strong, you can’t breathe.”

DuBard said in February that her kids, who she homeschools, had headaches for a week. 

“Honestly, I would sell my house today just because of the smell,” she said. 

Robert Black, another resident in the neighborhood, said this year’s stench was as bad as any one prior, and even woke him up one morning around 5 a.m.

“I’m not one to voice (issues), you know, I usually let it go,” Black said. “But they’ve had enough time to figure out the problem and get it resolved.”  

The culprit, Kosciusko’s officials and residents agree, is a 20-acre, murky colored lagoon, tucked behind some forest along the Natchez Trace Parkway. It’s one of several the town has to store and treat wastewater before releasing it into the Yockanookany River. 

The lagoon in question, though, is almost entirely made up of waste from a nearby dairy plant owned by company Prairie Farms, according to Kosciusko Mayor Tim Kyle. The Illinois-based business, which makes milk, cheese and other dairy goods, bought the facility from local dairy company LuVel in 2007.

“I would say probably 99% of the volume in that (lagoon) comes from (Prairie Farms),” Kyle told Mississippi Today. “There’s a lot of milk and other products that go in that thing, and I’ll tell you, I’ve learned more about sewer than I ever wanted to know.” 

The plant, which Kyle said employs about 125 people and is a major economic asset for the small city, jacked up its production about five years ago. The mayor said that’s around when the odor issues began, while DuBard and other residents say it’s been closer to 10 years. 

“I initially started complaining about it publicly in 2014,” said Emily Bennett, who lives two miles from the sewage spot and also said she gets headaches from the odor. “It’s progressively just gotten worse over the years.”

Records from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality show a dozen complaints the agency has received since 2021, several of which mention residents feeling sick from the smell. 

“I don’t know what it’s doing to us, but it can’t be good for us,” Black said. “Everyone says, ‘Get fresh air, get Vitamin D,’ and you go out and (the odor) hits you in the face.”

Kyle, who was elected mayor in 2021 after serving as an alderman, lives less than half a mile from the lagoon. Around February or March of last year, he remembered, the smell from the lagoon was especially pungent after a malfunction at the Prairie Farm facility.

“Prairie Farms did notify us that they accidentally broke a valve unloading a truck, and they dumped a full tanker load of milk into that lagoon at once,” the mayor recalled. “Now, you couldn’t hardly live in this town for about six weeks, it was so bad. I mean, it would gag you to death, it’s horrible.”

Kyle said he’s worked with the MDEQ to limit the amount of waste the plant’s allowed to dump in its permit. Prairie Farms buys 4 million gallons of water per day to wash its waste into the lagoon, he said. 

MDEQ spokesperson Jan Schaeffer said the agency couldn’t comment as it has a pending enforcement case against Prairie Farms. Since November, 2022, the state has cited the facility for five violations dealing with the content of its sewage disposal.

The facility’s wastewater repeatedly exceeded limits for “biological oxygen demand,” or BOD, which is a way of showing how much organic waste is in water. One test result from February 2023 showed Prairie Farm’s BOD output reaching over 16 times the legal limit. 

In January, when MDEQ issued the most recent violation, the agency told Prairie Farms that it was in “significant non-compliance,” and that the case was being turned over to MDEQ’s enforcement branch.

The dairy company, which did not respond to Mississippi Today’s requests for a comment, has had similar waste issues elsewhere. At a Prairie Farms location in Iowa, state regulators found that the company regularly exceeded limits for wastewater contaminants for a five-year stretch. 

Kosciusko’s Public Works Director Howard Sharkey showed Mississippi Today around the lagoon, and explained the various methods the city’s used to try to curb the odor. Its main strategy, Sharkey said, has been adding oxygen. The reason the smell is so bad during the colder months, he said, is because there’s less oxygen coming from the sun. 

Five years ago, the city spent $240,000 on aerators, including one attached to a tractor that Sharkey runs non-stop to keep the device turning. That’s in addition to the 40 bags of sodium nitrate he dumps into the lagoon every month. 

All of those expenses, he said, are just ways to create more oxygen. Of the roughly seven feet of depth in the lagoon, Sharkey added, two feet of that is just sludge that’s built up over the years.  

“We’ve done everything (MDEQ) has told us we could do in the past to try to alleviate this,” Kyle said. “It’s not like the city’s not doing anything.” 

In all, the mayor said the city – which has a population just over 7,000 – spends about $212,000 a year just on that one lagoon. 

But new funding will give Kosciusko one more chance to eradicate the foul odor: Kyle said the city recently received $1.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to make infrastructure fixes, and that the plan is to spend all of it on dredging the lagoon, as well as raising its walls so it can fit more water to dilute the waste. The mayor said he hopes to have a contractor working on the project by the fall.  

Whatever it takes, Kyle hopes to cleanse the area of its reputation. 

“Every time anybody comes through town, it’s ‘what’s that smell?’” he said. “Ducks won’t even land on the lagoon it smells so bad.”

The post Curdled creek: Kosciusko residents sour over town’s milky lagoon appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down the one and only Malcolm White. White and Ramsey talk about this year’s Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade, which will be held on March 23, 2024 with the theme of Telling the Mississippi Story. This year’s Grand Marshal will be Walt Grayson. The pair discuss what the future holds for Mississippi’s own party that’s a wonderful mix of St. Patrick’s Day parade and Mardi Gras. What does it take to put on a parade and keep it going? Malcolm tells it all.

The post Mississippi Stories: Founder of Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade Malcolm White appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A large majority of House members voted on Thursday to approve a plan that creates a process for people previously convicted of some nonviolent felony offenses to have their voting rights restored — the first of such a vote in Mississippi in more than a decade. 

The House voted 96-11 to pass House Bill 1609, a bipartisan proposal to automatically restore suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent disenfranchising felonies after they’ve completed the terms of their sentence. 

“It lets folks, five years after they’ve finished their sentence and satisfied all conditions, restore their rights … for folks that have cleaned their life up and gone straight,” House Speaker Jason White, R-West, told Mississippi Today. “It’s not about rewarding that, but it’s about recognizing it and placing them on that better path.”

Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of any of 10 types of felonies lose their voting rights for life. Various opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 23. 

White, the first-term speaker, tasked House Constitution Committee Chairman Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall, and House Judiciary B Chairman Kevin Horan, R-Grenada, with coming up with a feasible plan to restore suffrage to some people convicted of nonviolent felons.

READ MORE: Speaker White asks GOP leaders to explore restoration of voting rights to some people convicted of felonies

The House measure would allow people convicted of nonviolent offenses such as bad check writing and theft to regain their suffrage if they have not been convicted of another felony for five years after completing their sentence and paying any outstanding fines.

But people convicted of murder, arson, armed robbery, carjacking, embezzling more than $5,000, rape, statutory rape, bribery, perjury, human trafficking and voter fraud would still lose their voting rights for life. 

Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus, has filed legislation for years to restore voting rights to people convicted of felony offenses, but it never gained major traction at the Capitol. Karriem called the bill’s passage a “historic moment” and thanked Republican leaders for working with him on the proposal.

“I think this bill restores hope as it makes its way through the process,” Karriem said. “It gives folks who have walked around with a scarlet letter on their chest for so long who have paid their debt to society a sense of hope.”

About 37,900 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of Jan. 29. The list, provided to Mississippi Today through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court.

That number, however, may not be fully accurate because no state agency tracks people once they are struck for the voter rolls. Studies commissioned by civil rights organizations in 2018 estimated between 44,000 and 50,000 Mississippians were disenfranchised.

The practice of stripping voting rights away for life from people originated in the 1890 Constitution, when white supremacist leaders intentionally tried to disenfranchise Black Mississippians or keep them out of elected office. With a justice system fully on their side, the white leaders at the time chose to include crimes they believed Black people were more likely to commit.

Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, who is also the current chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, said that while the practice has racist roots, he believes the bill’s passage debunks the notion that only Democrats and people of color are convicted felons.

“People suffer from these conditions in every village and hamlet in the state of Mississippi in all of our districts — and not just minority districts,” Taylor said.  

The current process to have someone’s suffrage restored is burdensome. It requires a lawmaker to introduce a bill on an individual’s behalf, and two-thirds of lawmakers in both legislative chambers must agree. A person can also seek a gubernatorial pardon, though no executive pardon has been handed down since Gov. Haley Barbour’s final days in office in 2011.

The bill now heads to the Republican-majority Senate, where it may receive a frosty reception.  The 52-member Senate on Wednesday voted 29-23 to reject a separate bill that would restore Second Amendment rights to people previously convicted of nonviolent felony offenses. 

Senate Bill 2626 did not address voting rights, but it could serve as a barometer for how the Capitol’s upper chamber will address the House’s suffrage restoration proposal. 

Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, said he voted against the proposal because he didn’t know enough information about the legislation, but he was open to reconsidering his vote. 

“I’m sure even I have constituents who served their time … and would like to have this right restored,” England said. 

Senators held the bill on a procedural motion, meaning they could debate the issue again at a later time and change their minds. 

Senate Judiciary B Chairman Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, and Sen. Rod Hickman, D-Macon, told Mississippi Today that they plan on working with their colleagues to address their concerns and reiterate what the legislation aims to accomplish. 

“I think some people just didn’t understand what the bill was trying to actually do,” Fillingane said. “If you’ve completed the terms of your sentence, it was nonviolent, you haven’t committed another crime for five years, then what’s the problem?” 

READ MORE: Lawmakers consider restoring suffrage, gun rights to those convicted of some nonviolent crimes

The post With bipartisan majority, House passes bill to restore voting rights to people convicted of nonviolent crimes appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Today is inviting college juniors and seniors with a passion for journalism to apply for summer internships.

The Mississippi Today reporting internship provides aspiring journalists the opportunity to work in a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom, and learn a multitude of skills that will prepare them for a career in mission-driven, public service journalism.

We are looking for interns who can easily jump into daily news and enterprise coverage — including reporting on critical topic areas such as government, healthcare, education, justice and climate — alongside our seasoned reporting staff.

Ideal candidates will have experience reporting and writing on deadline and an interest in learning more about data analyzation, reader engagement and trust building.

“Internships serve a vital role in an aspiring journalist’s development,” said Debbie Skipper, Justice and Special Projects Editor at Mississippi Today. “While university and college journalism and mass communications programs offer a firm foundation, nothing prepares a student for a professional career like on-the-ground reporting and working in an atmosphere surrounded by experienced journalists. And, selfishly, we need to prepare the next generation of journalists to provide the reporting necessary to keep the public informed.”

Among past interns is Alex Rozier, who has been Mississippi Today’s data and environmental reporter since 2017.

“Mississippi Today’s internship threw me right into the mix of local reporting, something that was hard for me to find just coming out of college,” Rozier said. “At a lot of other journalism internships, you get stuck doing data entry or transcribing interviews. But here I was immediately getting assigned stories to do by myself. Even though I was new to the state and much greener than my colleagues, I felt treated like an actual reporter, and like I was actually needed to fill holes in our reporting.

The paid, 10-week internship runs June 3 through August 12. Interested candidates can apply here. Deadline to apply is Friday, April 5. Additional questions? Contact HR Director Dylan Penny at dpenny@deepsouthtoday.org.

The post Mississippi Today announces 2024 summer internships appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lawmakers in Mississippi are moving to protect in vitro fertilization, but state Agriculture Commissioner, Baptist preacher and outspoken anti-abortion advocate Andy Gipson is calling it “the greatest assault on the cause of life that we’ve seen in Mississippi in a long time.”

Gipson, also an attorney and former longtime lawmaker, posted a video statement on social media Thursday morning, saying “Don’t let anybody tell you it’s IVF. IVF is already legal in Mississippi, perfectly legal.”

But IVF was “perfectly legal” in Alabama until an Alabama Supreme Court decision called it into question mid-February.

House Bill 1688, authored by Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, outlines reimbursement for community health workers. But after a Feb. 16 Alabama Supreme Court decision declaring frozen embryos are children threatened IVF and other procedures there, McGee was successful in adding an amendment to the bill that would protect the right to assisted reproductive technology in Mississippi. 

In Alabama, the IVF came under question when a couple pursued litigation after an unauthorized person got access to a storage room in a fertility clinic and accidentally dropped a dish of frozen embryos on the floor, destroying them. After weeks in limbo as fertility clinics shut their doors and paused treatment, Alabama has since passed legislation to protect the procedure that allows couples facing infertility to create families. 

The series of events caused enormous public outcry across the aisle. 

“There is nothing more pro-life than trying to conceive a child,” McGee said on social media and again in a recent committee meeting.

Gipson said in his statement the bill was modeled after a federal Democrats’ bill which, he said, created a precedent for “back door abortion and possible cloning and selling of ‘genetic materials of humans.’” But the bill does not mention either. 

In the committee meeting where she added the amendment, McGee said the amendment aims to protect families who are trying to have a baby, protects individual rights to their genetic material and protects the provider in performing or assisting in IVF. There is an enforcement section which states that an individual or a provider may sue the state if they have been prevented from receiving or providing the procedure. 

“The direction things have been going in the nation, especially with all that’s happening in Alabama has been a big concern to a lot of folks,” McGee said. “… there is really nothing more pro-life than a family trying to conceive a child that’s having difficulty in doing so and we want to protect those rights for our Mississippians who are going through that process.”

The measure passed unanimously with no debate in committee. It is expected to be brought to a full House vote before the March 14 deadline.

The post Mississippi Ag chief: IVF bill will lead to ‘back door abortion, cloning’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The divide between the Senate and the House over how to fund public education — specifically local school districts — intensified dramatically on Thursday, setting the stage for a potentially contentious remainder of the 2024 legislative session.

On Thursday, the Senate passed its public school funding plan with no senator voting no and two voting present. The Senate plan would update the long-standing Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) that features an objective formula to determine the amount of money schools needs for their basic operation.

The House leadership, conversely, passed its plan on Wednesday. While it is still supported by a strong majority of the House, it lost support after its initial approval on Wednesday, when just 13 members voted against it. But on Thursday, during a vote on a procedural motion to send the bill to the Senate, 36 members voted against it.

Before the vote on the procedural motion, Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, the chamber’s minority leader, blasted the House Republican leadership in a fiery speech for providing members with what he said was incorrect information on the bill when it was debated Wednesday in the chamber. He said the Legislative Budget Office told him that the numbers used to determine the cost of the program and how much money each school district received were not developed by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee as House leaders had told the chamber on Wednesday.

He said as far as he knew, the numbers in the House plan were “pie in the sky.”

“I don’t mind anybody having a good idea,” Johnson said. “I don’t mind anybody coming up with a new plan. But if I am going to rely on the information presented to me, ask me to vote on something and I ask a question, I don’t think it is right to misrepresent information to me.”

House Education Chair Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, the primary author of the House bill, called it a “miscommunication” and that the numbers that the Legislative Budget Office staff verified were from publicly available data from the Mississippi Department of Education.

Speaker Jason White, R-West, said during a news conference Thursday that he respected the Senate, but indicated that basing funding on an objective formula was a non-starter. He said the House plan placed an additional $240 million into public education and that it was more equitable for poor students than the plan passed by the Senate.

But Senate Education Chair Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, said on Thursday that the Senate plan, which will increase education funding by about $210 million, was based “on real numbers” compiled with the assistance of the Department of Education.

Plus, he said, “I think it is extremely important we have an objective formula that everyone (every school district) can run and know what they are going to receive,” adding that an objective formula “provides accountability for us.”

DeBar is hoping with the changes in the Senate plan that the Legislature would choose to fully fund the formula each year. The formula has been fully funded only twice since 2003. And past House leaders have tried to replace the MAEP because they said it cost too much money.

The House plan would create an advisory committee composed of education professionals to make a recommendation to the Legislature of how much money schools needed.

During debate in the Senate and the House on Thursday, there was specific mention of three advocacy groups working on the House rewrite plan: Mississippi First, Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Two of the groups, Empower and Mississippi Center for Public Policy, are vocal supporters of vouchers, while Mississippi First has been a charter school proponent. Some public education advocates oppose charter schools that are not held to the same laws and regulations as traditional public schools.

DeBar pointed out the three groups began working in January on a plan similar to the House proposal. House leaders said they have communicated with Mississippi First, but did not know the other groups were involved. Plus, Roberson added he was willing to work with everyone.

The post Fight over how to fund public schools intensifies in Legislature appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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For the first time since 1953, Mississippi would not rely on an objective funding formula to determine the amount of money local schools needed under legislation that overwhelmingly passed the House by an 95-13 margin on Wednesday.

Under the “Investing in the Needs of Students to Prioritize, Impact and Reform Education” (INSPIRE) Act, a group of eight local superintendents and employees of the state Department of Education would make a recommendation to the Legislature every four years on how much state money should go to local school districts.

The INSPIRE Act, if it is agreed to by the Senate, would replace the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. MAEP was passed in 1997 to replace the Minimum Education Program that was passed in the early 1950s as the primary source of state funding for local school districts.

The Minimum Program provided funds to local school districts based primarily on the number of teacher units they needed. Under MAEP, that process was changed to provide funds per student, referred to as the base student cost. MAEP defines the base student cost as the amount of money spent in an efficiently run “adequate” school district to educate a child. Districts receive their base student cost times their average attendance. And an important caveat in MAEP is that poor districts receive more per student than do more affluent districts.

READ MORE: House leaders tweak school funding plan after feedback from education groups

House Education Committee Vice Chair Kent McCarty, R-Hattiesburg, who spent about an hour and a half answering questions on the bill Wednesday, told House members that INSPIRE was much more equitable than the MAEP.

“We have a bill that puts more of an emphasis on equity than anything you have ever seen,” said House Education Chair Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, who is the primary author of the legislation.

Under the bill, there would be a base student cost — $6,650 — which is about $800 less than MAEP if fully funded. But the schools would receive significantly more money than the $6,650 per student for children who are deemed as needing additional funds to be educated, such as poor students, special needs students and others. In the end, the total funding for the new House plan would be slightly less than the total funding for MAEP if fully funded.

But MAEP has been fully funded only twice since 2003, and McCarty said there is no appetite by House leaders to fully fund MAEP this year. Many legislative leaders have complained in recent years that the state could not afford full funding while saying at other times the formula was outdated and too complex to fund.

READ MORE: The fate of the House school funding plan could come down to one question: Who wrote it?

McCarty pledged that the INSPIRE Act would be fully funded this year — an additional $240 million for education — or he would vote against it later in the session. Rep. Bryant Clark, D-Pickens, said he feared that in the future, lawmakers would not fund INSPIRE just as they have not fully funded MAEP.

In the end, Clark voted present along with 13 others. The school district in his home county of Holmes, one of the poorest counties in the state, would receive about 25% in funding more than it received for the current year. Clark said he was torn on the bill.

“When you look at the bill, it has a lot of good things that would benefit my area – providing more help for low income students,” he said. But he added he is concerned that the bill leaves it up to people instead of an objective formula to determine the amount of money school districts receive, and that in future years the current funding levels would not continue.

Some wealthy districts, such as Rankin and Madison counties, will receive less funding under INSPIRE.

Rep. Jill Ford, R-Madison, said she voted for the legislation because she thought it was a better funding formula and that the reduction for her county would be phased in over three years. Plus, she said, Madison is getting the new Amazon Web Services data center that will add to its tax base.

“I think we will be all right.” she said.

Rep. Fred Shanks, a Republican who represents Rankin County, said he thought by the time that the three-year phase-in of the cut to his school district is complete, growth in funding in the formula would offset the reduction.

The House bill now moves over to the Senate, where it faces a Republican leadership that appears to this point more intent on tweaking and fully funding MAEP than scrapping the current formula and passing a new one.

The post House passes bill that would change how public schools are funded appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Reports to: Newsroom Editor

Mississippi Today is seeking an energetic and enthusiastic student to spend a summer in our newsroom as part of our paid internship program.

Mississippi Today immerses students in journalism with real-world work, training and connection-building with working journalists.

Interns have the exciting opportunity to pursue reporting in the field, to learn the systems and tools used by media professionals and to serve as a critical part of our community news team.

Areas of focus for interns may include reporting, writing, photography, social media and videography.

Internships are offered for a 10 week period starting on June 3, 2024 through August 9, 2024.

We welcome students from a broad range of majors and areas of focus. Applicants must be able to demonstrate strong communication skills, both verbal and written.  

Interns often have the opportunity to pursue work in the field, and are responsible for their own transportation to news assignments.  Knowing your way around Mississippi is a plus, but not required. 

Interested candidates should apply below. Be sure to include a copy of your resume and any clips you have available. 

Requirements:

• Current College student (junior or senior preferred)
• Laptop that can be used for writing assignments
• A valid driver’s license, and proof of insurance, is required.

Mississippi Today is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, age, disability, or veteran status.

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