Jackson officials announced Saturday that the city had lifted the boil water notice for all customers.
The advisory lasted 13 days after freezing temperatures caused the city’s water lines to break and led to a decrease in water pressure in the distribution system. Jackson issued the citywide notice on Christmas morning.
A spokesperson from Jackson State University confirmed that water pressure at the school’s campus was back to normal and classes began Monday as scheduled. JSU had asked students last week to delay moving into dormitories while pressure was low at the school’s facilities.
Jackson Public Schools announced it would resume in-person learning on Monday. The school district had students take classes virtually from home last week after over 30 schools saw little to no water pressure.
The city lifted the boil water notice a couple days after announcing a historic federal investment in the drinking water system.
Los legisladores de Mississippi, que viajaron a Jackson desde todos los condados y rincones del estado, convocaron la sesión legislativa de 2023 el 3 de enero al mediodía.
No importa cómo lo haga, lo que los legisladores logren en los próximos 90 días podría afectar al estado en los años venideros. No es exagerado decir que la transformación generacional es posible para nuestro estado en esta sesión. Los periodistas de Mississippi Today estarán en los pasillos del Capitolio todos los días, haciendo preguntas duras pero justas a nuestros funcionarios electos y haciéndoles saber lo que sucede
A pesar de todos los problemas que enfrenta el estado, los legisladores tienen un superávit de ingresos de alrededor de $ 4 mil millones, más dinero libre de gravámenes del que el estado ha tenido disponible para gastar. Los legisladores tienen amplia flexibilidad sobre cómo gastarlo, y muchos líderes no están de acuerdo con vehemencia en los detalles. Esto ciertamente genera un debate dramático y unas cuantas semanas salvajes en el Capitolio.
Ya sabemos que esta es la última sesión legislativa del presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Philip Gunn, después de cumplir tres mandatos completos, y ya hay señales de que su poder de larga data puede estar disminuyendo. Del lado del Senado, el Vicegobernador Delbert Hosemann enfrenta algunos obstáculos políticos dentro de su propio partido que se desarrollarán desde ahora hasta el 1 de febrero, la fecha límite para calificar para las elecciones de 2023.
Aquí hay algunos otros temas clave, entre muchos otros, que estamos observando de cerca en esta sesión:
Mississippi está en una crisis de atención médica. Docenas de hospitales rurales en todo el estado están a punto de cerrar o reducir significativamente los servicios de salud, y cientos de miles de residentes no pueden pagar la atención médica básica. Una solución potencial que está cobrando impulso en las últimas semanas es expandir Medicaid bajo la Ley del Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio, como lo han hecho otros 39 estados. Durante más de 10 años, los líderes legislativos han rechazado el programa que enviaría decenas de millones de dólares federales más a las arcas estatales y brindaría atención médica a los trabajadores pobres de Mississippi.
Varias ciudades y condados luchan por mantener el flujo de agua para los residentes. Jackson, la capital del estado, en particular, ha estado en el centro de la cobertura de los medios nacionales ya que los residentes de la ciudad más grande del estado continúan sin tener servicios de agua confiables en sus hogares o negocios.
Mientras tanto, varios líderes legislativos clave quieren eliminar por completo el impuesto estatal sobre la renta, que representa más de un tercio de los ingresos que recauda el estado. Los que se oponen a la medida, incluidos varios republicanos, dicen que el estado no puede darse el lujo de perder tanto anualmente con tantos servicios gubernamentales que ya no cuentan con fondos suficientes. Algunos de los que se oponen a la reducción de impuestos quieren, en cambio, enviar cheques de devolución de impuestos directamente a los habitantes de Mississippi.
Una amplia coalición de votantes de Mississippi quiere, pero aún no tiene, un proceso de iniciativa electoral después de que la Corte Suprema del estado lo anulara en 2021. El proceso, que tienen los residentes en la mayoría de los estados, permite a los votantes eludir a los legisladores al aprobar leyes o políticas específicas.
Para dedicar especial atención a esta sesión legislativa potencialmente histórica, estamos lanzando nuestra sección especial anual llamada Guía Legislativa de Mississippi. Allí encontrará los conceptos básicos, como cómo un proyecto de ley se convierte en ley, los plazos legislativos clave y cómo encontrar y contactar a sus legisladores. La pieza central de la guía, por supuesto, será la cobertura integral de nuestra sala de redacción de la sesión legislativa de 2023.
Esperamos que este sea un recurso útil mientras navega en las próximas semanas, pero queremos saber cómo podría mejorarse. Si tiene preguntas o sugerencias para nosotros, no dude en comunicarse.
Gracias, como siempre, por leer. Agradecemos su apoyo como siempre.
Andrés Fuentes
Andrés Fuentes es periodista de FOX8-TV en Nueva Orleans y traductor de Mississippi Today. Antes de que el nativo de Nueva Orleans regresara, era periodista para WLOX-TV en Biloxi, Mississippi.
Sally Doty, director of Mississippi’s broadband expansion office, stresses the importance of people logging on to www.broadbandms.com, or calling or texting “Internet” to 601-439-2535 to report inadequate or nonexistent internet service. The data collected from this will be used to determine how much federal money Mississippi receives to expand broadband internet service.
In terms of political theatre, there is nothing like a speaker’s race.
That drama has played out in the nation’s capital this week with seemingly endless roll call votes of the current 434 members of the U.S. House as they attempt to elect a speaker.
While general elections play out on a macro level through media advertising and stump speeches, speaker’s races are bare-knuckled, closed-quarter campaigns that pit colleague against colleague. It is a race where one vote can determine tremendous power and where brazen deal making is often carried out in the cold light of day.
This could very well be Mississippi’s reality in 2024. Philip Gunn, the three-term speaker of the Mississippi House, already has announced he will not seek reelection. There is a strong possibility that one of Gunn’s closest allies, House Pro Tem Jason White, R-West, will be elected speaker with little or no opposition.
Presumably, the Mississippi speaker election in 2024 will follow the same procedure used when Gunn was first elected in 2012. After the 2011 November election, when Republicans gained a narrow majority in the Mississippi House for the first time since Reconstruction in the 1800s, the new majority met behind closed doors to select a speaker from five candidates. There was an agreement among the Republican House members elected in November 2011 that the winner of that closed-door meeting would receive the unanimous support of the new Republican majority when the 2012 session began in early January.
Then-Rep. Herb Frierson of Poplarville placed second in that closed-door vote. It is possible that Frierson could have developed a coalition of some of his Republican supporters and House Democrats, with whom he had a much more collegial relationship than did Gunn, and won the speakership when the official vote was taken at the start of the 2012 session.
But Frierson, like all Republicans, honored the agreement to support the winner of the closed-door vote, leading to the election of Gunn, a two-term Clinton Republican. Gunn, perhaps recognizing Frierson’s commitment, gave him a plum committee assignment as Appropriations Committee chair.
The 2012 speaker’s election was the first selected in such a closed-door process. Before then, candidates for speaker would individually go to each member campaigning for votes. If a member agreed, his or her name would be added to a list of supporters compiled by the candidate for speaker.
Once that list contained a majority of the House membership, it would not be uncommon for the candidate to announce his supporters, trying to convince the other candidates to drop out.
That is how Billy McCoy, a Democrat from Rienzi, was unanimously elected speaker in 2004. Both Steve Holland, D-Plantersville, and Bobby Moody, D-Louisville, dropped out and threw their support behind McCoy when it became apparent he had the votes.
The waters were not as smooth for McCoy in his second campaign for speaker. The 2008 election was the first partisan election for speaker in the state’s history.
In the preceding 2007 general election, Democrats maintained their majority. But Republicans, seeing McCoy as the primary obstacle to much of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour’s legislative agenda, rallied behind conservative Columbus Democrat Jeff Smith as an alternative to McCoy.
Smith, who at one time was a close McCoy friend, ran for speaker in part because he was upset that he was not appointed by McCoy to chair the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Smith garnered the support of a handful of rural Democrats, who were fearful of supporting McCoy in such a high-profile election in a state where the march toward the Republican Party was quickly occurring.
The race was one of the most contested and most contentious in the state’s history. Some House members changed their allegiance in the race multiple times. On the opening day of the 2008 session, both sides literally believed they had the votes to win. The tension in the air was palpable.
On the third vote, McCoy eked out a 62-60 victory in what may have been the most dramatic day in the Capitol in recent history.
Conventional wisdom was that with the advent of partisan politics in Mississippi and the commitment of party members to coalesce behind one candidate that such a dramatic floor vote in the election for speaker would not occur anymore. The party that won the most House seats would elect the speaker candidate who won the closed-door caucus meeting and that would be the end of that.
But the 2023 U.S. House has proven that sometimes party members even disagree on candidates for speaker. And when that happens, dramatic public roll calls still occur to elect a speaker.
Incarcerated women are being moved from the state’s designated women’s prison in central Mississippi to a formerly decommissioned prison in the Delta more than a hundred miles away.
Nearly 300women at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl have been relocated to the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood. The Mississippi Department of Corrections plans to move all the women to Delta Correctional by March 1.
Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said the goal is to get them into a better environment with school, skills training and treatment.
“We were running short of beds for women,” he told Mississippi Today. “So by moving 300 to Delta, it helped expand the population. It’s about beds and how we use beds.”
The relocation comes months after the women were told about MDOC’s plans to move them from their longtime housing in the 1A Yard at CMCF to 720, a men’s unit near the back of the prison. Some objected to the decision and wrote letters circulated in the prison and delivered to state senators with the help of their families.
Another reason for the move to Delta Correctional was to keep women and men separate at CMCF.
Some advocates see the move to the Delta as harmful for women and their families.
Pauline Rogers, president of religious reentry nonprofit the RECH Foundation, said she started receiving phone calls before Thanksgiving from women who were moved to Delta Correctional.
Family members of the incarcerated women she has spoken with aren’t happy about the move either.
“It’s pushing families far away and women far away from their children,” Rogers said.
For those who are upset about the change, Cain said there is going to be an adjustment period. To those who have called in, he said MDOC has explained how the move is for the women’s benefit and plans for programs and education at Delta Correctional.
Burl Cain responds to a reporter’s question after being introduced by Gov. Tate Reeves as the new commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections during his daily coronavirus update for media in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, May 20, 2020. Cain was warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is commonly known as Angola, for 21 years. Credit: Rogelio V. Solis / Associated Press
When he visited the Delta prison this week, Cain said the women can see that MDOC cares about teaching them skills and trades to help when they leave prison. He also said he spoke with women still at CMCF and they seem ready for the move.
“I think there’s pride in them having their prison and own place,” Cain said.
Family members have also said their incarcerated loved ones have had items such as personal hygiene taken away, Rogers said.
Cain said as long as the items were on the list of allowable items, they could be taken to Delta Correctional. The canteen will be available to supply any other goods if needed, he said.
All MDOC prisons have a medical provider on site, but if someone needed to be transported to a hospital, the closest would be Greenwood Leflore Hospital – which is on the brink of closing.
Cain said the women’s medical access would be the same as the residents of Greenwood. About 50 women with medical issues that the prison medical services couldn’t handle were moved back to CMCF, he said.
Delta Correctional closed in 2012 after operating as a private prison. It reopened as a community work center to house probationers and parolees who violate supervision terms under an alternative sanction program, according to an MDOC press release from 2018.
The restitution and work center services will be relocated elsewhere, Cain said. Staff from the center now work at the prison, and he hopes to hire people from the Greenwood area, including people who can supervise prison programming.
Cain has plans for Delta Correctional.
“It’s going to be focused on reentry, skills and trade and they are going to be busy as they can be going to school,” he said.
Culinary arts and landscaping programs, cleaning service training and a greenhouse are expected to come to Delta Correctional along with alcohol and drug treatment, clubs and services such as a hair salon.
There will also be air conditioning, which Cain said isn’t yet available at CMCF. The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman was the first prison to have air conditioning installed this past summer.
Before the women arrived, the roof at Delta Correctional was repaired and the kitchen and showers received updates, Cain said.
Despite plans for what MDOC plans to do at the prison, Rogers worries that putting women in a distressed environment like the Delta will move them away from resources like programming, activities and treatment programs and access to those resources.
“It’s hard to move a population with nothing,” she said. “You’re moving them from everything to nothing.”
The 13 Black farm workers who sued two Delta Farms — accusing the farm operators of racists hiring practices and paying white visa workers from South Africa more per hour — have reached a settlement outside of court, their attorneys announced this week.
The terms of the agreement forbid the parties from disclosing the settlements’ dollar amounts.
“But it was a significant amount of money,” said Mississippi Center for Justice Attorney Rob McDuff, who represented the workers. “I think the settlements demonstrate it’s far better for these companies and these farms to pay people properly than to ignore the law.”
Both Sunflower County farms — Pitts Farms and Harris Russell Farms — were featured in a Mississippi Today investigation that found a pattern of misuse of the H-2A visa program in the Delta.
Pitts, a soybean, corn, and cotton farm, and Harris Russell, a catfish farm, brought in white South Africans through the visa program, which is intended to only be used when farms cannot find enough local workers.
The program requires farm owners to pay both local workers and foreign workers the same wage, but years of paystubs obtained by Mississippi Today showed Black workers made mostly the federal minimum wage of $7.25 while getting fewer and fewer hours each season. The H-2A workers took home upwards of $11 an hour.
Eventually, the local workers said they were told they no longer had jobs, according to the lawsuits and interviews Mississippi Today had with former workers.
Ty Pinkins, a former attorney on the case, said the result of the lawsuits has pressured other farms with visa workers into following federal mandates over pay for their local employees.
“Many of the Black workers have expressed excitement and they’re happy that having the courage to come forward has caused a lot of farmworkers to receive a pay rate to the degree they were supposed to get in the first place,” Pinkins said.
Mississippi Today’s investigation found Pitts Farms had already been fined for paying its local workers less money than visa workers and not properly offering jobs back to local workers by the Department of Labor. But the DOL only audited the farm’s paychecks and bank statements for a two-year period — the standard for its investigations.
That meant most of the men in the Pitts Farms lawsuit, filed in 2021, didn’t receive any of the federally mandated backwages the farm had to pay. They had stopped working for Pitts before the audit period.
Harris Russell was investigated by the federal labor department after the lawsuit was filed and Mississippi Today’s investigation was published. The catfish farm, along with 10 other farms, were fined a collective $122,610. The string of investigations recovered wages for 45 workers totaling $134,532.
Neither Pitts or Harris Russell farms responded to a request for comment.
McDuff said he and his colleagues at the Mississippi Center for Justice and Southern Migrant Legal Services plan to file more lawsuits against other farms with pay discrepancies between Black local workers and white South African workers.
“Many other Delta farms are engaging in these unlawful practices and more suits will be coming against those who do not pay fair wages to the local workers,” said Amal Bouhabib, another one of the workers’ attorneys.
Editor’s note: The Mississippi Center For Justice President and CEO Vangela Wade serves on Mississippi Today’s board of trustees.
Jim Carmody, a renowned defensive football mastermind and a prominent figure in the football histories of Southern Miss, Ole Miss and Mississippi State, died Thursday after a brief illness. Carmody, a Madison resident, was 89.
“Big Nasty” was Carmody’s nickname given to him by his defensive players at Southern Miss, but the moniker had more to do with the way his defenses played. They swarmed to the football and hit hard, whether he was coaching at State, Ole Miss or Southern Miss — or in the NFL. At Southern Miss, where he was first the defensive coordinator (1978-1980) and then the head coach (1982-87), his defenses were called “The Nasty Bunch” — a nickname that endures to this day.
Rick Cleveland
Carmody served two different stints at all three of the state’s largest universities — and he was part of monumental victories at each. Perhaps the most memorable of all was in October of 1982 when he was the head coach of a Southern Miss team that defeated Alabama and the legendary Bear Bryant 38-29 at Tuscaloosa, thus ending Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak. It was the first time a visiting team had won at Alabama in 19 seasons.
Reggie Collier was the star quarterback of that USM team. “Coach Carmody demanded a lot of you, expected a lot out of you,” Collier said Thursday afternoon, shortly after learning of Carmody’s death. “He was very up front with his players. You knew where you stood. You wanted to do anything you could to please him. I loved the man. I loved playing for him.”
Southern Miss had winning seasons in five of Carmody’s six years as head coach, playing most of the more difficult games on the road. He was also part of program-defining victories at Ole Miss and State. A sampling follows:
In 1977, when he was the defensive coordinator at Ole Miss, the Rebels knocked off eventual national champion Notre Dame 20-13 at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. Carmody was the architect of a defensive game plan that stymied the heavily favored Fighting Irish in one of the signature football victories in Ole Miss history.
In 1989, two years after leaving Southern Miss, Carmody was the coordinator of a Mississippi State team that knocked off nationally ranked Southern Miss and Brett Favre 26-23 before a standing room only crowd at Hattiesburg. Southern Miss had defeated Florida State the week before and had defeated Mississippi State eight consecutive times. Said Rockey Felker, the head coach of that State team, “We were the tougher team that night in Hattiesburg and it was because of Jim Carmody. He taught toughness. He instilled toughness.” While Carmody was at Southern Miss, the Golden Eagles won eight of 10 games against State. When Carmody moved to State, the Bulldogs were 2-0 against USM.
In 1992, still later in his career, Carmody came back to haunt State, this time at Ole Miss. The Rebels won that Egg Bowl 17-10 when Carmody’s defensive front held State out of the end zone on three consecutive goal line stands, 11 plays, all from inside the 10-yard-line. “That was unbelievable, really,” Carmody once told me. “I have never seen anything quite like that sequence before then or since.”
Carmody was part of Mississippi sports history in other ways. In 1987, Carmody’s USM team was the first historically white university to play against one of state’s historically black universities. Southern Miss defeated W.C. Gorden-coached Jackson State 17-7 before an overflow crowd in Hattiesburg. Carmody had pushed for the game to be played and afterward had nothing but praise for the JSU Tigers, whom he said, “were well-coached and talented and could beat a lot of the better teams on our schedule.”
Early in his career, Carmody coached on Paul Davis’s staff at Mississippi State (1964-66) and helped the Bulldogs to their first victory over a John Vaught-coached Ole Miss team 20-17 at Oxford in 1964, “Man, that was a big deal back then,” Carmody once told me. “It was on national TV and Coach Vaught had just dominated State for years and years. I remember they let classes out at State the following Monday.”
As it happens, Paul Davis was on Bear Bryant’s last staff at Alabama. In the photo that accompanies this column, you can see Steve Carmody shaking hands with Davis in the background, while Jim Carmody and Bear Bryant shake hands in the foreground.
Jim Carmody coached the late, great Ben Williams both at Ole Miss and then with the Buffalo Bills of the NFL. “Jim came to Ole Miss in my junior year (1974) and we got better real fast,” Williams once told me. “He knew how to motivate and he knew so much about technique. He made me a better player.”
Years later, when Williams was playing for the Bills, the team had an opening for a defensive coach. Williams said he told Buffalo head coach Chuck Knox, “You hire Jim Carmody and we will win our division next season.”
Knox hired Carmody away from Southern Miss. And the Bills led the league in defense and sacks and won their division. Ben Williams made All-Pro.
Jackson lawyer Steve Carmody (the oldest of Jim and Noonie Carmody’s four sons) was a fine center on the Southern Miss team that knocked off Bear Bryant and Alabama.
“He was tough, but fair. He treated me the way he treated all his players,” Steve Carmody once said of his father. “It was really neat to see your dad at work every day. Not everybody gets a chance to do that. I thought he was so successful for two reasons. One, he was so smart. And, two, he always was so thoroughly prepared. Nobody was going to out-work my dad.”
Jim Carmody was once asked about his working two different times at the three Mississippi universities, surely something nobody else has ever done. Carmody laughed before answering, “I guess that says that I didn’t burn any bridges.”
•••
A memorial service for Jim Carmody will be held Jan. 12 at 3 p.m. at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in Jackson. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame or the Jim Carmody Scholarship Fund at Southern Miss.
Jackson and Hinds County law enforcement agencies are partnering with the U.S. Marshals Service to address violent crime in the city.
Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis visited Jackson on Thursday and, during a forum, asked the mayor, local law enforcement and community members what kind of resources and support they need.
“We will partner with our local partners and be very strategic,” he said. “I think a lot of this, for me. is that I never took it that we’re here to solve problems, but better understand the challenges you’re facing because you’re facing it, and I think many communities across the country are facing the same.”
Jackson reached a record-high 153 homicides in 2021, and had 130 homicides in 2022.
Davis, a former police chief and head of the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, wants to take a holistic approach to addressing crime that is driven by community input and built on trust.
He said he doesn’t want to bring in Marshals Service deputies as a new police force that patrols the streets and acts like it knows the community’s needs.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said multiple parts of the criminal justice system are overworked, which is seen in policing and investigations and a backlog in the state crime lab to process evidence for cases.
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens (right) addresses a question as Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (left) and Jackson Police Chief James Davis, during a Violent Crime Prevention Summit held at the Two Mississippi Museums, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023, in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens said he would like to see more collaboration to help with prosecution and investigations.
“We’re having far too many individuals we have in custody in our jail that we’re not able to move their cases fast enough,” he said.
Forum participants said they want to see root causes of crime such as socioeconomic challenges, trauma and mental health addressed and for incarceration not to be the answer.
Lumumba said the city will launch an office focused on violence prevention and mental health.
Community members also want to be part of violence interruption. Terun Moore of Strong Arms of Jackson asked for financial support to continue the work of going into the community and working with people impacted by violence, including young people.
Police, judges and city officials in attendance highlighted juvenile violent crime as an issue.
In 2021, Jackson police arrested a group of young men for several violent crimes around the city. One of them, a then-17-year-old Joseph Brown was linked up to several homicides, including the death of a pregnant woman.
As a Hinds County Youth Court judge, Carlyn Hicks hears cases for offenses juveniles commit, but not cases such as homicide when they are charged as adults.
She wondered what kind of impact addressing underlying trauma and earlier intervention can have in the life of a child like Brown and prevent youth from going on to commit violent crimes and go into the adult criminal justice system.
Through Youth Court, Hicks has implemented diversion programs and support for children and families, but she wants to see gaps in support sustained.
“We have to have some sustainability across our systems,” she said “Otherwise I’m putting Band-Aids on fire hydrants.”
