The Democratic Governors Association announced Tuesday the organization is donating $750,000 to Brandon Presley’s campaign for governor, giving the Democratic candidate a boost in operating expenses as the bitter governor’s race heats up.
Meghan Meehan-Draper, the executive director of the DGA, said in a statement that the organization has a track record of unseating unpopular incumbent Republican governors in tough states like Kentucky, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
“As Brandon Presley continues to run a strong campaign and Mississippi families are bearing the burden of Tate Reeves’ costly grocery tax and car tag fees, corruption, and hospital closure crisis, we know there’s a real chance in Mississippi this year to once again defy the odds,” Meehan-Draper said.
The DGA’s investment mirrors a similar donation it made in 2019 to Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood’s campaign for governor, though that appears to have occurred later in the year compared to the current election cycle.
The organization donated $750,000 to Hood in September of that year and contributed $250,000 in October, according to the former attorney general’s campaign finance records. Reeves defeated Hood in the 2019 contest by 5%, making it the most competitive governor’s race since 2003.
“This race is competitive because Brandon Presley is gaining support from Republicans, Democrats, and independents who know he will cut taxes for Mississippi families, fight corruption, and end Tate Reeves’ hospital crisis once and for all and expand Medicaid,” Presley spokesperson Michael Beyer said in a statement.
For Presley to become the first Democratic governor since Ronnie Musgrove’s 1999 election, the four-term utility regulator will have to convince donors to invest in his attempt to oust a Republican governor from office in the Deep South.
But the Democratic candidate will likely face a brutal fundraising competition with Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ reelection campaign.
The DGA’s conservative counterpart, the Republican Governor’s Association, through its Mississippi Strong political action committee, contributed $500,000 to Reeves’ campaign earlier this year. The RGA was also a major contributor to his 2019 bid for the Governor’s Mansion.
Reeves is expected to capture the GOP nomination for governor in the Aug. 8 primary. The winner of the party primary will compete against Presley, the only Democratic candidate in the race, in the Nov. 7 general election.
A challenger for the Southern District Public Service Commission seat has filed ethics complaints against incumbent Dane Maxwell, claiming he violated campaign finance laws.
Maxwell says the complaints are “dirty campaigning” from a desperate candidate, and that his campaign has returned any improper donations and amended its reporting where necessary.
Republican candidate Wayne Carr claims Maxwell has accepted $18,000 in illegal contributions from PSC-regulated utilities or affiliates and failed to report thousands in campaign spending. He said Maxwell is beholden to large companies buying up small water systems in Mississippi, then asking the PSC to allow large rate increases.
“This is not right for the ratepayers,” Carr said. “This is not transparency.”
Maxwell said much of Carr’s claims are bogus – that three companies he claims fall under a prohibition on donations are not regulated utilities. Maxwell said his campaign unknowingly accepted other improper donations and is returning the money – including $4,000 of a $5,000 donation from a corporation. Mississippi campaign laws limit corporate donations to $1,000 a year. Maxwell said the company failed to note it was a corporation when it made the contribution.
Maxwell said he has a CPA firm that manages his campaign finances and, “I can’t even write a check out of that account.” He said that when Carr “started slinging mud” about his finances, he had the CPA firm go back through the reports, and consulted with the secretary of state’s office. He said his campaign is returning any improper donations and correcting its reporting.
Maxwell said stringent campaign finance laws for PSC commissioner candidates – emplaced by state lawmakers years ago after past scandal and corruption with the utility regulating authority – provide challenges.
“That’s why I hire a company to do it,” Maxwell said. “We have the strictest laws of any elected officials. We try to vet everything that comes in, but when people send this money to the CPA firm and they can’t determine if it’s associated or not – they generally just return it. Some of these people don’t understand the regulations. They send us money, and then we return it. Our laws are very strict.
“… This is a last-minute desperate attempt to get some attention to his campaign,” Maxwell said. “I’m a Christian conservative. I’m not going to get into negative campaigning and not going to do that to a fellow Republican. It’s disgraceful.”
Carr claims Maxwell failed for months to report thousands in spending for campaign ads on Coast Transit Authority buses. He said the buses have been rolling across the Coast with Maxwell ads on them since mid-May, but the spending did not show up in Maxwell’s June or July finance reports filed with the secretary of state. He noted that Maxwell posted about the bus ads in June social media posts.
Maxwell said the spending will be listed on his campaign finance report due Tuesday – the final report before the Aug. 8 Republican primary.
“Sometimes when you pay for something you don’t get the invoice right away,” Maxwell said. “Everything will be in the filings.”
There have been other questions about PSC candidate campaign finances this election cycle. The Magnolia Tribune in June questioned a donation to PSC Commissioner Brandon Presley – now a gubernatorial candidate – from a regulated utility. Presley returned the $500 donation. The publication also questioned donations to Presley and Central District PSC Commissioner Brent Bailey from a law firm that represents the PSC, with its fees paid by Entergy, a regulated power company.
Both Bailey and Presley have denied the contributions fall under the PSC campaign finance prohibition.
Carr filed complaints with the state Ethics Commission. But the commission has recently said it lacks clear authority to investigate or enforce campaign finance laws.
Mississippi’s campaign finance laws and reporting requirements are weak, and violations are almost never investigated or prosecuted.
Democratic candidate for governor Brandon Presley on Tuesday hammered Republican Gov. Tate Reeves in a new ad, attempting to tie him to Mississippi’s welfare scandal, marking Presley’s third television ad of the campaign cycle.
“Under Tate Reeves, millions were steered from education and job programs to help his rich friends,” a narrator in the advertisement says.
The ad goes on to profile several of the items that state investigators have said were incorrectly paid with federal welfare funds, such as a fitness program and a University of Southern Mississippi volleyball stadium.
“Tate Reeves has been caught red-handed in the largest public corruption scandal in state history — and he will be held accountable for the millions of taxpayer dollars lost, stolen, and wasted on his watch,” Ron Owens, Presley’s campaign manager, said in a statement about the ad.
Brandon Presley, Democratic candidate for governor, airs new TV ad hitting Gov. Tate Reeves with the state’s welfare scandal
Reeves has denounced the welfare misspending and has adamantly denied he had any involvement in which projects received funds, which occurred while he was the state’s lieutenant governor.
The governor’s campaign in a news release called Presley’s ad “patently false” and said the allegations that Reeves played a role in the welfare scandal are “nonsensical and opportunistic.”
“The facts are clear that the transgressions occurred before Tate Reeves was governor, and he has supported vigorous and effective prosecution against those involved,” the news release reads.
Given his low name ID in central and south Mississippi, television ads for Presley, who has served 15 years as north Mississippi’s utility regulator, will be one of the key tools he must implement in his bid to oust the Republican governor from office.
This is the first campaign ad from Presley attacking the incumbent governor. The Democratic candidate previously aired ads highlighting his low-income roots and his advocacy for cutting car tag fees.
Reeves has previously aired ads touting economic investment in the state and legislation he signed into law that bans transgender youth from participating in public school athletics.
At the U.S. District Court in downtown Jackson Monday, Judge Henry Wingate approved putting even more of the city’s aging and broken infrastructure under the control of a third-party manager.
Ted Henifin, who is already overseeing the drinking water rehabilitation for Jackson, will now also take the reins of fixing the city’s wastewater system, which for years has plagued both residents and the local ecosystem with sewer overflows and under-treated discharges. In recent years, city officials estimated that the water and wastewater systems would each require about $1 billion to fix.
The parties in the city’s sewer case, which traces back to a 2013 consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency, submitted a proposed agreement days ago. Mississippi Today reported details on the agreement last week. Wingate approved the agreement at Monday’s status conference, putting the sewer system in Henifin’s control for four years.
Before doing so, the judge asked Henifin if managing the sewer infrastructure would interfere with his work fixing the drinking water system, to which Henifin said no.
The biggest challenge, Henifin noted, will be procuring funds for the sewer system. As he took over the drinking water system, the federal government agreed to invest about $600 million into those fixes. For the sewer system, there’s roughly $140 million in available funds that was mentioned in the now-signed order. Officials Monday also mentioned roughly $600,000 that could be used to help Jackson homeowners make sewer repairs on their private property.
Henifin said a key step will be getting consistent revenue from water bills. He said the city’s current collection rate stands at just 56% as far as connections with accounts in the city’s billing system, adding that there are about 7,000 connections without accounts.
Henifin reiterated that his company, JXN Water, will soon shut off water to people who don’t pay their bills. He said that process will start with a 30-day notice for those “delinquent” on their bills, and then another seven-day notice before actually turning the water off. He added residents can negotiate a payment plan if they’re having trouble affording their bills.
The public has until Aug. 31 to submit comments on the sewer order, and Wingate, as WLBT reported, will consider changes to the order based on that input. Information on public meetings and how to submit comments can be found here.
Mississippi received over $2.5 billion from the federal government in pandemic relief money in 2020 and 2021 to improve education and to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a little over a year left to use the money, schools have made progress but still have over a billion dollars left to spend.
The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund was created initially by the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020 and then subsequently replenished in two other pieces of federal legislation, creating three separate pots of money for states and districts to spend.
Each pot of money has its own spending deadline – Sept. 30 of 2022, 2023, and 2024 respectively. A built-in grace period gives schools a few extra months to disburse final payments, but the U.S. Department of Education also allowed states to request extensions. The Mississippi Department of Education confirmed it received an extension for ESSER I, the first pot of money, with a new deadline of March 30, 2024.Extensions on the second pot are also available, but a state education agency spokesperson said Mississippi has not applied yet.
School districts in Mississippi have spent nearly all of the funds from the first pot, but progress spending ESSER II and III varies significantly by district.
There are a wide variety of allowable expenses under the ESSER guidelines, but the U.S. Department of Education instructs school districts to prioritize efforts to “safely reopen schools for full-time instruction for all students, maintain safe in-person operations, advance educational equity, and build capacity.”
A Mississippi Today analysis of the spending plans in three school districts found that ESSER I funds went primarily to reopening schools — covering sanitation, masks and new technology. Districts focused on addressing learning loss and infrastructure investments when budgeting ESSER II and III.
FutureEd, an education policy think tank at Georgetown University, found that the higher the poverty rate in a district, the more likely administrators were to allocate money to heating, venting and air conditioning (HVAC) updates and to purchase new instructional materials.
Patrick F. Healy was inaugurated as president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Healy was the first African American to become president of a predominantly white university.
In 1834, he was born into slavery in Macon, Georgia, the son of a slave owner and an African-American woman named Mary Eliza Smith, who became the owner’s common-law wife. He fought discrimination as an elementary school student, both for his African-American and Irish Catholic roots.
In 1850, he became the first African American to enter the Jesuit order and, eight years later, was sent to Europe to study, earning a doctorate at Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
In a letter, he referred to the racist remarks, “which wound my heart. You know to what I refer.”
After the Civil War ended, he returned to the U.S. and taught philosophy at Georgetown before becoming president. He helped transform the small college into a major university, upgrading the law school and modernizing the sciences. His influence became so profound that many refer to him as the institution’s “second founder.” He was buried in the Jesuit cemetery on the university grounds, and Georgetown’s Alumni Association now has an award in his name.
Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender, Bobby Harrison and Taylor Vance break down the candidates’ strategy, presentation of their speeches and the crowd’s reaction to those speeches at the just-completed the Neshoba County Fair.
Mississippi continues to rank first in the nation in fetal deaths, according to 2021 data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week.
The report examined deaths of fetuses in utero that occurred after 20 weeks’ gestation, also known as stillbirths, in the United States. Mississippi led the nation with a rate of 10 deaths per 1,000 live births, almost twice the national rate of 5.73.
Mississippi has also long led the nation in infant mortality, or the death of babies up to one year of age.
State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney said “the time for study and evaluation has passed,” and it is time for action.
“We’ve been working for the past year to implement the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies program for high-risk moms and babies on Medicaid,” Edney continued. “We’ve also just been given the endorsement of the state Board of Health to develop the best OB system of care that we possibly can, following the models of national organizations and the other 10 states that have mandatory maternal levels of care for hospitals.”
Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies is a partnership between the state’s Health Department and the state Division of Medicaid that places registered nurse case managers in the homes of mothers undergoing high-risk pregnancies and who have recently given birth.
Similar to the Mississippi State Department of Health’s trauma, ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction, and stroke systems of care, the OB system will facilitate transferring high-risk pregnant women and their babies to the right level of care at the right time. The system of care is not yet in place — the state Board of Health just authorized staff to start working on it at its board meeting earlier this month.
Nationally, more than 21,000 stillbirths occurred in 2021, or about six for every 1,000 live births.
For Black women nationally, the fetal mortality rate declined by 4% from 10.34 (2020) to 9.89 (2021). However, Black women still had the highest fetal mortality rate compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S – nearly double the national rate of 5.74 per 1,000 live births.
According to the report, most fetal deaths were associated with an “unspecified cause.” Other common causes were complications of the placenta, cord and membranes; maternal conditions unrelated to pregnancy; maternal complications of pregnancy and congenital malformations.
The fetal mortality rate for women who smoked during pregnancy was almost twice that of nonsmokers – 9.62 compared to 5.08, respectively.
“The latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics confirms what we currently know, stillbirth prevention needs to remain a priority. While the stillbirth rate from 2020 to 2021 essentially remained unchanged, any fetal deaths that could have been prevented are unacceptable,” Dr. Christopher Zahn, interim CEO and chief of clinical practice and health equity and quality for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told Mississippi Today.
Samantha Banerjee, executive director of PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy and a mom whose daughter Alana was born still in 2013, said the “numbers are shameful” but “not shocking to those of us in the stillbirth community.”
“We have fallen far behind our international peers when it comes to ending preventable stillbirth, and averting these tragedies has never been made a priority in the U.S. It is beyond time for change, and we hope that the recent CDC report serves as a wake-up call to our medical and public health leaders,” Banerjee told Mississippi Today.
PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy, a national nonprofit dedicated to reducing the rate of stillbirth in the U.S., empowers pregnant women and their providers to recognize warning signs of stillbirth. PUSH also closely coordinates with Black maternal health and maternal mortality communities on patient-centered solutions addressing stillbirth.
Ana Lepe Vick, co-director of communications at PUSH and the mother of Owen, who was stillborn in 2015, told Mississippi Today that it is critical that the organization raise awareness about stillbirth and share known preventive methods.
“Unacceptably, the rate of stillbirth remains stagnant because there has been no national sense of urgency or investment in addressing the failures of our healthcare system which allows even healthy, ‘low risk’ pregnancies to end is this catastrophic outcome,” Vick said.
Several years ago, the South Jackson native, a registered dietitian, was working a traditional job in her field and realizing that there was a disconnect between the information she wanted and needed to provide to patients and their receptiveness to it.
One day she and her grandmother, who is now 101 years old, were eating grits at her grandmother’s kitchen table in Yazoo City when her grandmother began to fondly tell Meeks about her garden. Meeks’ grandmother grew everything she needed in her own garden and fed her eight children in the process.
Her grandmother’s story served as a contrast to the narrative she learned in school about Black people’s relationship with food, and it encouraged her to create GRITS. Instead of combating the rise in food-related chronic disease through opaque materials, Meeks realized she can do so by connecting people and their communities to “food, improving their food literacy skills and bridging the gap between culture and nutrition.”
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mississippi Today: What led you to create GRITS?
Meeks: I was working a traditional role at the public health department, and I felt limited and boxed in, like I couldn’t really reach people in the way that I wanted to … My grandmother had eight kids, so they grew a lot of their foods. The thing that got me was how positively (my grandmother) talked about food — cultural foods, at that. In research and in the media, I always saw Black people associated with bad eating habits, and that’s not our story. That might be part of someone’s story, but that’s not our whole story.
I kept seeing this one-sided story about what Black foods are to us. Hearing her talk was a lightbulb moment because I felt so empowered by her story. It was like, ‘These stories that I’m hearing aren’t true because my grandmother is sitting here, almost 100 years old, telling me all these things about food.’ It was empowering and refreshing to hear her talk about food in that way. I wanted to continue to tell stories about Black food and Black foodways, but also have them connected to our health, as well. That’s why I started GRITS, Growing Resilience in the South, to connect people to these stories. I also say the South is a metaphor because … the South is the genesis of Black America. I really want to connect all Black people to help them connect to food in a different way, but also a way that helps them improve their health.
MT: What programming are you most excited by?
Meeks: The book club … The book club wasn’t something I had been planning to do for a while. I’ve been reading so much since I became a dietitian. Before I became a dietitian, I got interested in books about food and foodways, and that’s how I began to dismantle narratives about Black food stereotypes — it was by reading. I kind of built this library, and I posted some of my books on Instagram. Someone asked me if I was starting a book club. I was like no, but that’s a good idea and I went with it … I was surprised by the feedback and the response I got.
The first day I posted about it, I had 40 people sign up and I didn’t do much promotion. It’s (up to), like, 70 people now. I got the mini grant right before I made the announcement, so I was able to help purchase books for people who couldn’t afford it. It’s just been a really great experience, the response and also the conversations. Sometimes I’ll read books and just want to talk about these things, but I don’t have anybody to talk about it with. Now we’re having these discussions about food equity, food sovereignty and reconnecting with foods. These are really valuable conversations that are part of the work. Part of GRITS’ work is narrative change, so when we’re having these conversations about changing the narrative with food and helping people connect with food, that’s helping the community do the work for themselves as well.
MT: What has been the most interesting or exciting text you all have read so far?
Meeks: Our first book was called “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America” by Psyche A. Williams-Forson. She recently won the James Beard Award for food issues and advocacy for that book. I’m glad we started the book club off with that book because it requires you to really unlearn some things about anti-Black racism, especially when it comes to what we eat. The book mentions how so many cultural foods have these ‘unhealthy’ parts of their food, but Black foods are the only foods that really get surveilled and criticized, and it’s not because of the food, it’s because of our race. It was really helping us unpack a lot of things about food and food shaming. Sometimes as Black people, we might food shame and not even realize it, so it was a very informative book that made you be more aware of how you think. Sometimes that can be hard conversations to have, so I’m happy GRITS was able to cultivate this safe space to have these hard conversations.
No one wants to think that the way they think is wrong or biased or anti-Black, but in reality, we all can fall victim to that in some sense. Creating a space where we can talk about that and unlearn some things has been really good. The next book is ‘Catfish Dream,’ about a farmer in the Mississippi Delta’s fight to save his family farm.
MT: Why do you think an organization like GRITS is important, specifically in Mississippi?
Meeks: I know we hear a lot about health sometimes. I didn’t want to just preach health because a lot of times when people hear health, the two things they may do are kind of shut down because they don’t feel like they can be or fit that idea of ‘healthy,’ or, two, they go to an extreme … I feel like health can look so many different ways, and GRITS’ approach to health and nutrition education is so different. Even though I am a dietitian and I do promote healthy ways, I don’t approach it with nutrition education; I approach it with stories and connecting people with culture. I think the way that I use stories and cultures as a bridge to understanding our health is unique, and I think that that’s important because of the connection it’s building.
I would be in the health department and sometimes I felt like what I was doing wasn’t as effective because the patient wasn’t connecting to what I was saying. You can preach and you can give someone all this nutrition information, but if they’re not connected to what you’re talking about, it’s not effective. Being in Mississippi is a powerful thing for me. I feel more connected to my state and to the people here than I ever have … and I think it’s because I built connections with people and there’s something powerful about that. Through GRITS, I want to help people not just build connections with food, but build connections with their community, with Mississippi, and be proud of their roots. There’s so much culture, there’s so much history, there are so many things about where we live that can empower us and I want people to feel that.
I want people to hear Mississippi and be proud because they know their history, they know how connected they are to this place. I can say I am proud. Growing up, I don’t know if I would’ve gone somewhere else and be proud to tell someone I’m from Mississippi. But I love telling people I’m from here because I know what this place has. I know how valuable Mississippi is, and I think GRITS is just another way to connect people to the state and connect them to different parts of their heritage and culture.
In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large and Cartoonist Marshall Ramsey continues his series of author interviews leading up to the Mississippi Book Festival on August 19, 2023 at the State Capitol.
This week’s book is Josiah’s Big Day by 2023 Miss Mississippi, Vivian O’Neal. Josiah’s Big Day, based on her brother, Josiah, is a book that teaches students and teachers acceptance of students with special needs. O’Neal, whose capABLE platform is an inclusion curriculum for kids with disabilities, talks about winning Miss Mississippi, her book, and how she is preparing for Miss America.
