OurTupelo

Health professionals and emergency responders participated in a training called STORK, Stabilizing OB and Neonatal Patients, Training for OB/Neonatal Emergencies, Outcome Improvements, Resource Sharing, and Kind Care for Vulnerable Families, at Mississippi Center For Emergency Services in Jackson, Miss. 

With delivery services becoming more scarce, rural hospitals struggling to stay open and the state’s infant and maternal mortality rates ranking among the highest in the country, those in the medical industry without special obstetrics training are in demand to help recognize and handle obstetric emergencies. This training, which was open to all medical professionals and first responders, was created by University of Mississippi Medical Center doctors and staff. It equipped participants with the knowledge to handle emergencies like high blood pressure and hemorrhage to save lives.

The post Photo gallery: First responders trained on how to deliver babies appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Matt Greer of Brookhaven was driving home from his shift at the Mississippi Center for Emergency Services, where he works as a flight nurse, when he got a call from his younger sister. A few days earlier, she had given birth to a healthy baby girl after an uncomplicated pregnancy. Now, she told him she had a headache. 

He asked her to check her blood pressure: 140/90. 

For most patients, that reading isn’t concerning. For a pregnant or postpartum woman, however, it’s an indication of preeclampsia. Greer told her to go to the hospital and eventually she did, getting treatment to prevent seizure and stroke. 

But Greer thinks things might have gone very differently had he not completed a new training run by the Mississippi Center for Emergency Services just a few weeks before his sister called. 

The STORK Program equips first responders and medical professionals without specialized obstetrics training – including emergency room doctors and nurses – to handle pregnancy and delivery complications like hypertension and hemorrhage. Doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center recognized that in a rural state with dwindling options for obstetrical care, women are likely to deliver outside of dedicated labor and delivery wards, and to need care from people who don’t see pregnant patients every day. So they created the STORK training. 

Greer has years of experience as a nurse, and his sister is a nurse, too. But without STORK, he would not have known how to interpret her blood pressure reading. 

“I would have blown it off,” he said. “Without that fresh on my mind … I would have said, ‘that’s not too bad. You’ll be alright.’”

Chronic health conditions like obesity and diabetes plus poor access to prenatal care contribute to Mississippi’s worst-in-the-nation outcomes for moms and babies, and can’t be treated during a single interaction with a health care provider. But potentially lethal hypertension and hemorrhage are not complicated to manage – if a provider knows what to watch for and what to do. 

And even inside hospitals, that can be a big “if.” 

“Obstetrics is most people’s kryptonite,” said Dr. Rachael Morris, associate professor of maternal fetal medicine at UMMC, who created and leads the training. “Unless you’re an obstetrician, even a well-trained E.R. physician or mid-level provider is going to tell you that you bring a pregnant lady into my E.R., and everyone’s going to freak out.”

The STORK Program’s half-day training includes lectures and simulations to change that dynamic. (STORK stands for Stabilizing OB and Neonatal Patients, Training for OB/Neonatal Emergencies, Outcome Improvements, Resource Sharing, and Kind Care for Vulnerable Families.) The training is funded with a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which also allows participants to receive a bag of supplies they can use during deliveries. The program is run by MCES, a division of UMMC that houses critical care transport services – including helicopter teams – and the state’s communications system for hospitals and first responders, Mississippi MED-COM.

“In Mississippi, infant and maternal mortality rates for people of color are among the highest in the nation and many families have to travel considerable distance to access care, creating obstetric emergencies,” said Wesley Prater, Kellogg Foundation program officer. “Our support of UMMC ensures providers across the state have the proper training to stabilize mothers and babies who need critical care.”

So far, about 150 people from around the state – a mix of registered nurses, physicians, medical residents, firefighters and paramedics – have completed the training over 11 classes since it launched in June. The team has 18 more trainings on the calendar.

With the state likely to tally an additional 5,000 births annually thanks to the abortion ban that took effect in July, obstetric services in the state are actually shrinking. The labor and delivery ward at Greenwood-Leflore Hospital closed in the fall. The Delta lost its only neonatal intensive care unit this summer. The NICU at Merit Health Central, which serves predominantly Black and low-income Jackson neighborhoods, also closed. 

Already, more than half of the state’s counties are maternity care deserts: No labor and delivery ward. No OB-GYNs. No certified nurse midwives. 

Women in rural areas face long drives to the nearest labor and delivery ward. Sometimes, that means they can’t make it there at all. Instead, they may give birth in an emergency room, at home while waiting for first responders to show up, or on the side of the road. 

The STORK program staff hope training participants will be able to handle those situations effectively, saving lives along the way. 

“These patients are going to be coming into really small hospitals and delivering or having problems,” said Dr. Tara Lewis, assistant professor of emergency medicine at UMMC and a former labor and delivery nurse.

Lewis joined the program to help tailor it to the needs of emergency room staff in small, rural hospitals. 

“If providers don’t know how to make the diagnosis of what problem is going on, then they’re not going to know how to take care of them.”

PHOTOS: First responders trained on how to deliver babies 

“You look like a really good uterus,” Morris told a burly Flowood firefighter and paramedic who had joined three of his colleagues to attend a STORK training at MCES on a recent Wednesday morning. 

She had just given a presentation on managing hypertension and hemorrhage, and now it was time to demonstrate how to assist during a delivery.

The paramedic held a rubber baby as Morris demonstrated how a baby’s head will generally turn to one side as it leaves the birth canal, and how to use a finger to gently loosen the umbilical cord if it has looped around the neck. 

In addition to the Flowood firefighters, attendees included a pediatric emergency room nurse at UMMC, a women’s health nurse in Meridian, and an emergency room nurse at Magee General Hospital who has assisted with three deliveries in the last year alone.

“That’s a lot considering it’s a small hospital with no labor and delivery resources,” she said. 

There are regular STORK trainings at MCES open to people from all over the state. But the free training is also conducted at hospitals, so participants don’t have to travel and can see how to apply what they learn where they work. 

After Morris finished her presentation, Emily Wells, a nurse practitioner and member of UMMC’s neonate transport team, explained how to care for newborns in the moments after birth. Since Jan. 1 of this year, the team has transported 390 babies to higher levels of care, and participated in 20 emergency room deliveries. 

She described the recent delivery of a “rest stop baby,” who was born in a Toyota Camry en route to a hospital during a cold snap. 

“Cold babies die,” she said, so the team had cranked up the heat inside the car and done everything they could to keep the baby warm.

In a hospital, the baby would be placed in an incubator. But in a pinch, any kind of plastic bag – maybe one that had been used to hold supplies now in use – could be placed around the baby’s body to conserve heat. 

A woman had just delivered a baby at 26 weeks in her car, and now both had made it to the emergency room of their small-town hospital. She had delivered the placenta, too, but was still bleeding. 

What should happen next? Half of the training participants gathered around their patient – a life-size mannequin lying on a hospital bed shouting “I’m bleeding” – and discussed what to do.

“At 26 weeks, I think the placenta abrupted,” Morris explained. 

Blood trickled from the mannequin’s vagina, soaking a pad underneath her body. This was an important lesson, Leslie Cannon, now an educator with STORK after 25 years as a labor and delivery nurse, pointed out: In patients who aren’t pregnant, life-threatening hemorrhage often looks like a dramatic gush. 

“Hemorrhage postpartum, it’s this trickle,” she said. “It’s a huge deal, because that trickle just keeps going.”

That’s important to keep in mind especially because it’s often not obvious when a woman is at serious risk because of bleeding. 

“A young, healthy pregnant lady is going to look really good — until she’s about dead,” Morris had warned of hemorrhaging patients. 

The students administered tranexamic acid to slow the bleeding. 

As Morris had explained during her lecture, a student reached an arm into the uterus to sweep for pieces of retained placenta, which can cause life-threatening bleeding. (“It’s not a comfortable thing to do,” Morris warned.) Another student massaged the mannequin’s belly to cause the uterus to contract. 

Eventually, the trickle slowed and stopped. Morris estimated the patient had lost a liter of blood.

Before everyone left, Morris and Wells gave out their cell phone numbers. Kace Ragan, project manager for STORK, explained that participants get supply bags that include QR codes they can scan to request refills — as long as the grant funding holds out — and report their experiences during deliveries. 

Morris urged the attendees to text or call her with questions any time. Morris treats some of the most challenging pregnancies in the state and serves as obstetric COVID director at UMMC, meaning she’s spent the last two years witnessing devastating loss. 

And yet, she told the training participants, she has “the luxury” of working in a hospital with plenty of resources and specialized training. 

“Y’all are in the trenches doing things that I have to do, too, but with so much less,” she said. 

The post Mississippi moms and babies are dying. This training teaches first responders how to save their lives. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Rep. Trey Lamar, who plays a pivotal role in setting tax policy as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, tells Mississippi Today political reporters Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender that he would prefer eliminating the income tax instead of providing a tax rebate during 2023 session.

READ MORE: Phase out income tax or cut taxpayers checks? GOP lawmakers, governor disagree

The post Podcast: Ways and Means Chair Lamar wants to use surplus to phase out income tax appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A majority of the members of the Mississippi Ethics Commission said they were required to ignore what the state constitution said when they made their ruling that the Legislature is not bound by the open meetings law.

“We are not allowed to interpret it,” Commission Chair Ben Stone of Gulfport, who has served on the Ethics Commission since 1997, said of the Mississippi Constitution.

Yet Stone and the other seven members of the Ethics Commission when taking their oath of office swore to “faithfully support the Constitution of the United States and of the state of Mississippi and obey the laws thereof.”

Can an Ethics Commission member ignore the constitution and support it at the same time?

The ruling of the Ethics Commission that the Mississippi Legislature, the most high profile and in terms of influence, the most consequential public body in the state, is not bound by the state’s decades-old open meeting law is a head scratcher.

The Ethics Commission says legally it is bound in its rulings by the law that does not list specifically the Legislature among the public entities that must meet in the open.

The commission goes on to explain that it does not matter that the Mississippi Constitution, which preempts all state law, says “the doors of each house, when in session, or in committee of the whole, shall be kept open.” Commission members say they statutorily cannot interpret the constitution they swore to uphold.

It gets even more contradictory. The open meetings act that the commission says it must adhere to requires the ethics commissioners to refer to the constitution when enforcing the law.

“All official meetings of any public body, unless otherwise provided in this chapter or in the constitutions of the United States of America or the state of Mississippi, are declared to be public meetings and shall be open to the public,” the open meetings law reads.

It appears the Legislature is saying in the law to check with the constitution to determine if a public body is exempt from meeting in public. How can the Ethics Commission, which is tasked by the Legislature with enforcing the open meetings law, do that if its members cannot interpret or, more simply, read the constitution?

The Ethics Commission finalized its ruling responding to a complaint filed by the Mississippi Free Press. The complaint said House Speaker Philip Gunn is violating the open meetings law when the Republican Caucus, which includes 75 members of the 122-member House, meets routinely behind closed doors. The constitution mandates that a majority of either the House or Senate is a quorum.

Mississippi Today has documented, based on multiple accounts, that the House Republican Caucus often discusses policy issues and legislation during the closed-door meetings. When other public bodies have met behind closed doors to discuss policy issues, it has been deemed to be a violation of the open meetings law by the courts.

The ruling of the Ethics Commission will be appealed to the courts. A judge, most definitely, can consider what the Mississippi Constitution says when hearing the case.

And no doubt the judge will study what the open meetings statute actually says. By a 5-3 vote, the Ethics Commission said the Legislature is not covered because the law does not specifically list the Legislature as a public entity that had to meet in the open. Those five commissioners said the law is at the least, ambiguous, and prevents them from ruling that the Legislature is bound by the law.

The law does cite legislative committees as being covered.

The law reads in part, “public body” means any executive or administrative board, commission, authority, council, department, agency, bureau or any other policymaking entity.

Commission members argued that “any other policymaking entity” is referring to the entities that precede that phrase and is not meant as a catch-all phrase that would include most public bodies.

There are two issues with that interpretation. First, later, the law does list specifically public bodies that are exempt from the law, such as law enforcement and juries. It does not mention the Legislature as being exempt.

Plus, many of the entities cited in the law as being mandated by the public meetings law are executive agencies.

Basic civics teaches that executive agencies are not policymaking entities.

On the other hand, in any state and on the national level, the Legislature is the primary policymaking entity.

In Mississippi, the policymaking Legislature spends more than $20 billion in taxpayer funds each year and passes laws (enacts policies) that impact all citizens.

While doing those important things, the Mississippi Ethics Commission says the law contemplates lawmakers are able to meet behind closed doors.

The post Ethics Commission contradiction: Members take oath to constitution, but can’t consider it in rulings appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Special Delivery appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A first floor storage room at the state Capitol was opened Friday, and the Art Logistics International moving company crew from Memphis, Tennessee, got to work building a protective scaffolding-like hoist. 

The protective contraption was constructed to safely lift the statute of former Gov. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo, one of the state’s most notorious racists, onto a forklift and then to a waiting flatbed. 

The curious stopped for a closer look, chatted amongst themselves and snapped a few cellphone images.

“It’s been 75 years. I think the old goat would be tickled he’s still causing this much of a fuss,” said one onlooker.

“Long time coming, and way past time,” said another.

Bilbo served two terms as Mississippi governor in the 1920s and 30s and was later elected three times as U.S. senator. Among his many egregiously racist actions, he advocated for the deportation of Black Americans to Africa and fought national efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation.

After stints in the Capitol Rotunda, Room 113 and out of sight behind the closed doors of a storage room, the Bilbo statute was transported from the Capitol to its new home in the basement of the Two Mississippi Museums.

The post Statue of former Gov. Bilbo removed from Capitol appeared first on Mississippi Today.

After months of negotiations during which tens of thousands of Mississippians were unable to access services at the state’s largest hospital, Blue Cross and the University of Mississippi Medical Center have reached a contract agreement. The terms of the agreement are confidential. 

“Effective December 15, 2022, all UMMC facilities, physicians and other individual Professional Providers are fully participating Network Providers for all Blue Cross commercial health plans,” the parties wrote in a press release Friday afternoon.

The state’s largest hospital had been out of network with its largest commercial insurer since April 1, meaning patients with Blue Cross insurance couldn’t see their doctors at UMMC unless they were prepared to pay significantly more out of pocket. Some patients – including people in the middle of chemotherapy or late in their pregnancies – benefitted from continuity of care provisions until July 1. 

UMMC offers the state’s only Level I trauma center, Level IV neonatal intensive care unit, and children’s hospital. About 30 to 40 patients are transferred from other Mississippi hospitals to UMMC every day. 

The two parties disagreed over reimbursement rates and the insurance company’s quality care plan. UMMC, the state’s only academic medical center, has maintained it was being underpaid relative to other such centers in the Southeast. It sought a 30% increase in overall reimbursement rates from the insurer, and in some areas an increase of 50%. Blue Cross said that would force it to raise customers’ premiums. 

The hospital also wanted changes to the insurer’s quality care plan, which measures hospital performance across metrics like readmission rates and blood clots after surgery. It claimed the complexity of some services it offers means it should have its own individualized plan, while Blue Cross said it should be evaluated the same as other hospitals. 

The contract dispute forced thousands of patients to miss appointments with specialists or fine new doctors farther away. Heather Tanner, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, which requires regular appointments, tests and infusions, said the resolution can’t undo the months of frustration, expense and delayed appointments she’s dealt with.

“During this mediation my past neurologist was available to continue prescribing my medications but, after waiting for months on an agreement to be reached, I had no choice but to seek a neurologist elsewhere to obtain the tests that have been delayed,” she said in an email to Mississippi Today. “At this point I do not know if I will go back to see the doctors at UMMC because it is already hassle enough to switch everything over. I am very disappointed that the dollar to both the hospital network and insurance companies is more important than my health and wellbeing.”

Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney said the announcement is an early Christmas gift to Blue Cross’ more than 750,000 policyholders.

“While this matter drug on far too long and resulted in undue hardship and disregard for many patients and over 750,000 BCBS enrollees, I am thankful that the parties were able to overcome their differences and find common ground,” he said in a statment.  “UMMC is in the process of informing its patients that the hospital and Methodist Rehab are back in network. Children and patients in need of specialty medical now have access to UMMC.”

Chaney said in an issue unrelated to the UMMC dispute, Blue Cross last week removed Monroe and Pontotoc County public school health providers from the state health plan networks without notifying the state.  All the public school providers are back in network as of today, he said. 

I will be pursuing legislation in the 2023 Session to protect consumers and policyholders in the future from getting caught in the middle of these types of contract disputes.”

Blue Cross is by far the biggest private insurer in the state, with market share of 55%. The next-biggest, United, holds just 17%. 

That gives hospitals little leverage to negotiate with the insurer to get more payment, because if Blue Cross kicks them out of their network, they’ll have very few other patients with commercial insurance. And the hospitals can’t negotiate with Medicaid and Medicare, because reimbursement rates for those programs are set by the federal government. With labor and supply costs rising, Mississippi hospitals have few opportunities to increase their income. 

Blue Cross in July sued Dr. LouAnn Woodward, UMMC’s CEO, and several other top administrators for defamation and civil conspiracy over the hospital’s public relations campaign. The campaign featured billboards and signs that said the insurance company “excluded” UMMC from its network, which it believed was misleading since UMMC was the one to end the relationship between the two.

After encouraging the two parties to enter into mediation to resolve the dispute, Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney called off mediation in October. He said he had not received communication about any progress for six weeks.

Chaney would go on to publicly accuse both UMMC and Blue Cross of wrongdoing and took a strong stance against the nearly yearlong dispute: “It’s deplorable that the citizens of our state are being used as pawns to settle this dispute,” he said. 

Earlier Friday, Chaney told Mississippi Today that one option he had to increase pressure to settle was threatening to prevent Blue Cross from issuing new policies unless it expanded its network for policyholders– meaning reinstating UMMC. 

“Blue Cross and UMMC remain focused on their missions of serving Mississippians’ health care needs,” the release said.

The post Blue Cross, UMMC reach contract agreement after months of negotiation appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The state of Mississippi was entering a new day in the fight against poverty. 

At least that’s what conservative talk radio station SuperTalk would have you believe.

It was the summer of 2018, and radio host Paul Gallo was visiting with John Davis, then-director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, and nonprofit founder Nancy New on site during a government summit at the Westin luxury hotel in downtown Jackson.

New and Davis were hyping their ill-conceived welfare delivery model, Families First for Mississippi, which resulted in the theft or misspending of nearly $100 million. The pair would later plead guilty to several felonies after perpetuating what officials have called the largest public fraud scheme in state history.

“Sometimes it just takes people like Nancy New and John Davis … to say, … ‘We’re going to take the lead on this,’” Gallo boasted.

“Please pay attention,” Gallo said at the same event, “because number one, this will change lives.”

SuperTalk consistently boosted the work of Families First to its statewide audience, broadcasting the organization’s original ribbon cutting, the opening of its generously renovated new center, events featuring free homemade ice cream, massive high school rallies, “exclusive” behind-the-scenes reports on its services, and the infamous Brett Favre radio ad that caused the athlete to be sued.

And for all its promotion over the years, SuperTalk received more than $630,000 in welfare funds.

The money came from MDHS, the welfare agency, which previously employed SuperTalk’s own CEO Kim Dillon and, at the time of the welfare scandal, her son.

With 26 radio stations in its operation, and 45 more to which it distributes the news, Supertalk’s traditionally conservative, older white audience is far from the population needing welfare services. But the media company, officially called TeleSouth Communications, founded and owned by Steve Davenport, had access to the innards of Mississippi’s political machine – and therefore taxpayer funds – because of the platform it gives GOP leaders to promote their agenda.

Now SuperTalk is at the center of two subpoenas and allegations of contract steering as lawyers in the state’s ongoing civil suit attempt to unravel the radio network’s larger role in Mississippi’s good ole boy club.

“Steve (Davenport) and I had drinks with the Gov (Phil Bryant) on Wed night,” Kim Dillon texted Davis in May of 2019, just one month before Davis was kicked out of office for suspected fraud. “He was very complimentary of you. We had the best time!” 

At the Westin that day, leaders including then-Gov. Bryant declared that the state did not have to separate families in order to prevent neglect; that neglect was a product of poverty, and it could be eliminated by placing resources directly into the homes of needy families.

Gallo put it best: “Every single day across the state we have the justice court system tearing these kids away from the family, and if they just had one hand to reach out. And if that’s a possibility, why hasn’t somebody done this before? Because, I mean, it’s one of those things that could have saved a lot of families,” he said.

With a faraway stare and her mouth slightly open, Nancy New looked over to the camera, then down at her fidgeting hands.

“Instead of taking the kids out of the house, put them in the court system, and you have to deal with them,” Gallo continued, “and ultimately, if there’s a possibility of a foster family getting some financial help, what if that financial help went to the mom?”

Gallo was describing welfare.

Behind the scenes, though, Davis, New and others were diverting tens of millions of these dollars away from the needy – including, notoriously, $8 million to the pet projects of former NFL legend Brett Favre.

Favre himself received $1.1 million in welfare funds from Nancy New’s nonprofit to cut a radio ad at SuperTalk promoting Families First. The ad ran several times in the fall of 2018, according to an invoice obtained by Mississippi Today, nearly a year after he received his first payment. Favre has since returned the funds.SuperTalk itself was one of those welfare recipients cited in State Auditor Shad White’s explosive 2020 audit report. “Due to the unreasonable cost of the advertising,” the audit found, “… and the lack of any correlation to how the advertising benefited the programmatic nature of the TANF program, these costs are questioned.”

Kim Dillon, Gallo and Davenport declined or did not respond to interview requests from Mississippi Today. Davenport, a major Gov. Tate Reeves donor, did provide a canned written statement saying his company “fulfilled its contractual obligations.”

He did not address the characterization of SuperTalk as a campaign tool.

Of the $632,388 cited in the audit, most ($435,000) was paid during fiscal year 2019, the year Gov. Reeves ran for governor. 

“It looks like they kicked their spending with TeleSouth into overdrive in FY 2019,” said Logan Reeves, a spokesperson for the auditor’s office. “… They (Families First) were advertising left and right, doing all kinds of stuff, as I think the audit makes clear.”

About half of the funds came from New’s nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center and the other half came from Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, the other nonprofit helping to run Families First. 

The two nonprofits paid significantly more than any state agency paid SuperTalk in those years. 

While the auditor questioned the payments, these expenditures were not listed as a fraudulent or unallowable expense in a separate forensic audit MDHS commissioned and released in 2021. Because TeleSouth conducted the work it was hired to do, Logan Reeves said, the auditor’s office did not issue a demand for repayment to the network.

TeleSouth is not one of the vendors MDHS is targeting in its ongoing civil lawsuit to recoup the misspent money. MDHS initially filed its complaint in May, mostly targeting individuals and companies that were cited in the forensic audit, but it amended its complaint in early December to include several additional vendors.

The welfare department, an agency under the governor’s office, has not provided the public a full explanation for the standards they used to determine which of the dozens of vendors listed in the audits to target for repayment.

Some of the entities newly added as defendants to the lawsuit, such as Lobaki Inc., a Jackson-based virtual reality company, were added to the suit even though they completed the work for which they were hired. In Lobaki’s case, the attorneys argue that the company’s agreement with the nonprofits required them to follow MDHS grant policies and applicable state and federal law – which is why they’re allegedly on the hook for those misspent funds.

The contracts between the nonprofits and TeleSouth – which were not originally public records since they did not include a state agency – have still not been made public, nor has a breakdown of the purchases under the contract.

“SuperTalk entered into contracts with the Mississippi Community Education Center and the Family Resource Center of North Mississippi to provide advertising services,” SuperTalk general counsel Ashley Tullos Fortenberry said in a short statement to Mississippi Today for this story. “The services outlined in those contracts were performed and SuperTalk was qualified to provide the services—which were intended for a state-wide reach—as it operates 26 radio stations (consisting of both talk and music formats) that cover the state and a news network that distributes news and advertising to over 45 radio stations throughout the state.”

TeleSouth isn’t the only statewide radio network; both Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Owned Radio (MOR) Network provide statewide radio coverage. MPB, a publicly funded agency, could even provide services to the state for free.

Within the larger political landscape of Mississippi, though, taking public funds and providing favorable coverage to political leaders and their ideas isn’t an unusual arrangement for SuperTalk.

SuperTalk’s parent company TeleSouth Communications has received at least $6.2 million in public funds from the state since 2009, according to Mississippi Today’s review of public expenditures, while giving politicians and agency heads ample airtime for braggadocious dialogues without the risk of facing pointed questions about the consequences of their policy decisions.

“Where they have built their little empire is access. If that’s who’s in charge, then that’s who they want to be next to,” said longtime politico and professor Marty Wiseman.“… I guess you would describe it as a transactional thing, you know, ‘You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours.’”

SuperTalk bills itself as a news program, but “I don’t think the average person who listens every now and then realizes the pipeline that SuperTalk has into government,” Wiseman continued. “They just take it at face value that who they’re having on there is probably telling the truth.”

SuperTalk’s tie into government is possibly best illustrated through the Families First debacle.

SuperTalk CEO Kim Dillon’s son Logan Dillon, for example, worked as a lobbyist for MDHS during the scandal while his then-wife Alyssa Dillon worked for Families First. 

A former Bryant staffer and accountant executive at SuperTalk, Lynne Myers, left the radio network to become MDHS’s communication director in 2018. Right before Davis left office, she sought his permission to extend the agency’s contract with SuperTalk. Her husband, Kevin Myers, and their daughter also worked for Families First. 

SuperTalk’s former digital marketing director Dawn Dugle is the one who introduced Davis to fitness instructor Paul Lacoste, who then secured a $1.3 million contract with Families First – one of the first red flags during the start of the auditor’s investigation.

But SuperTalk’s connections went much higher than the welfare office.

In 2020, members of Bryant’s inner circle allegedly directed Austin Smith, Davis’ nephew who was overseeing a federal preschool grant for the state, to enter an expensive advertising contract with SuperTalk, Mississippi Today first reported. 

Smith, who is facing civil charges over the $430,000 in welfare contracts he received, said he refused to contract with SuperTalk because the grant period for expending the funds had expired, he explained in a civil court filing. Expenditure records obtained by Mississippi Today do not reflect payments to SuperTalk under this grant, but Smith did appear on the radio program to promote the grant. 

While Smith was employed by the Mississippi Community College Board, the state agency that administered the preschool grant, he was also working on a contract for Families First. Smith has not been charged criminally.

Bryant frequently gloated about Mississippi’s success in securing the $10 million grant.

“Just think, if you’re a single mom in the Delta trying to pay for child care and go to school, it’s nearly impossible,” SuperTalk quoted Gov. Bryant as saying. “This grant will help bridge that, and we will be able to find more young ladies that will be able to go to work, find a job, have a career and live the American dream right here in Mississippi.”

But Bryant was unaware, when asked during an interview with Mississippi Today in April, that the state only ended up spending 60% of the funds, mostly on equipment and materials for the centers, not on more vouchers for kids. About $190,000 of those funds went to New’s nonprofit. The state had to give $4 million back to the federal government. The grant didn’t result in any more kids in child care. The program was a flop.

“I could sit here and talk to you for a very long time about that grant in childhood and things that should have been done differently,” Smith told Mississippi Today in an exclusive interview in November. “... It did not accomplish what it needed to accomplish because before we ever got the grant, it was already spent. It was already decided where it was gonna go, who it was gonna go to, and what it was gonna go for.”

Smith alleges that after the grant ended, he was the only employee working on the grant to be fired.

“Among the PDGB5 Grant employees retained were Austin Smith’s secretary, the niece of SuperTalk’s prominent host, Paul Gallo,” reads Smith’s civil court filing.

Generally, Smith feels that in the course of the welfare case, “there's only a certain number of people that's been handpicked and targeted.”

“There's so many more people involved in this,” he added.

Smith’s attorney Jim Waide has subpoenaed TeleSouth for several items, including any communication regarding receiving payment for providing interviews to Smith, New, Davis, Favre, Bryant, White and others.

The attorney MDHS originally hired to craft the civil suit, former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott, also subpoenaed TeleSouth back in July, but within days of that filing, Gov. Reeves’ office chose to fire Pigott. The legal team that took over the case, from the firm Jones Walker, appears to have abandoned that subpoena.

Waide similarly subpoenaed Gov. Bryant for any of his communications related to paying TeleSouth for advertising while he was governor, as well as communication with Davenport specifically. Bryant confirmed in a following motion that he possesses communication about paying TeleSouth, but he objected to turning it over, citing executive privilege. Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson isn’t expected to rule on whether Bryant must comply with the subpoena for several weeks.

While Gallo used his show to elevate the anti-poverty programs he said would “change lives,” Mississippi was actually turning away most poor applicants for the cash assistance, formally called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. 

Only about 4,000 families were receiving the benefit, a monthly check of, at the time, no more than $170 for a family of three. 

When pressed in April about the lack of resources reaching families during his administration, Bryant told Mississippi Today, “I did not know that was not happening. John reported to me one time that a number of people had dropped off, and I said, ‘Tell me why.’ And he told me that they had not reapplied.”

The low approval rate was publicly known and reported on by news outlets as early as 2017 – but not on SuperTalk’s website.

“... (W)hat if that financial help went to the mom?” Gallo asked the welfare officials.

Ignoring the progressive logic in the host’s rhetorical question, Davis responded with a winding answer about his boss Gov. Bryant’s desire to create a “holistic collaborative approach” to delivering social services in the challenging environment of “siloed” government bureaucracies. 

Few impoverished families were actually helped by the services Families First advertised, sometimes at lavish events with sophisticated commercials and an abundance of branded swag. 

But Supertalk helped prop up the facade.

“I’ll tell you, the governor never stops. I think he’s up from daylight ‘til way after dark making things happen for Mississippi,” radio host JT Williamson said during a 2018 interview with New and then-first lady Deborah Bryant at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum, where a Families First “Healthy Teens Rally” was taking place. 

The rallies, which happened a few times a year in different areas across the state, were a cornerstone of the Families First for Mississippi initiative and reportedly spearheaded by Gov. Bryant. 

“We’re trying to encourage them to make healthy choices – mentally, physically and every other way,” Deborah Bryant told SuperTalk, “so that they can handle the hard knocks when they come that they don’t have any choice over, to stay away from drugs, to have children in a timely manner and not when, you know, just have them, just because it just, ‘oops by the way,’ you know? These children deserve better lives than that.”

The conference brought thousands of high school students together to hear lectures that bordered on self-promotion from sports celebrities like retired WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase Jr. – who received $3 million in welfare funds – and former running back Marcus Dupree. Both athletes appeared on SuperTalk during this time to promote the welfare programs. DiBiase and Dupree are targets in the welfare agency’s ongoing lawsuit that attempts to claw back the funds.

“In talking about the governor … like this thing right here, to put back into these kids,” Williamson said as the crowd of teens roared in the background. “And we all know that this is the future of Mississippi, and when you see the future is here, and we see these young people that are here today that are listening right now to Ted DiBiase Jr., who are taking all this in, and soaking in all this information, and to understand this is where it starts. And this is where we have to go back and fix things, with education and employment opportunities and different things to keep people from going down the wrong path.”

Mississippi lawmakers, including under Bryant’s leadership as lieutenant governor from 2008-2012, have underfunded public schools almost every year since they created the funding formula in 1997 to determine how much money schools need to provide adequate education to Mississippi children. Mississippi also typically maintains the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation and the lowest median earnings.

Emma Briant, an author and British researcher at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs specializing in propaganda and political communication, likened Mississippi’s relationship with SuperTalk to the tactics of Cambridge Analytica, a British data-mining firm accused of manipulating multiple elections across the globe. Briant was the expert called to testify in Fair Vote Project’s lawsuit in Hinds County against architects of the Brexit movement, who attempted to launch a data firm in Mississippi.

“Using state resources or government resources to essentially, by proxy, finance your own political advertisement and reputational enhancement is something you see in a weak democracy,” said Emma Briant, “It’s the sort of thing that we saw in some of Cambridge Analytica’s campaigns in Africa, and it’s not the sort of thing you would wish to be happening in the U.S. in 2022.”

Davenport, who introduced Bryant at his election night party in 2007, donated a total of $10,800 to Bryant from 2007-2015, according to FollowTheMoney.org. He donated a couple grand to current Gov. Tate Reeves in his previous campaigns, but a few months before the 2019 gubernatorial election, Davenport and his wife each gave Tate Reeves $15,000.

“I told him (Bryant) he needed to help Tate with his commercials,” Dillon texted Davis in May of 2019. 

TeleSouth has contributed at least $3,000 to Bryant from 2011-2015, according to FollowTheMoney.org, and $6,000 to Tate Reeves from 2004-2011.

TeleSouth has received advertising work from Mississippi Department of Human Services for many years, and even caught heat from PEER, the legislative watchdog committee, during the 2000s for raking in hundreds of thousands under sole-source, no-bid contracts.

Criticisms about using public funds to prop up a political apparatus are nothing new.

"Supertalk and Paul Gallo and JT & Dave and all that pounded me into the ground every single day during the lieutenant governor elections,” former Democratic Rep. Jamie Franks of Mooreville told the Jackson Free Press in 2008. “They've basically used these advertising dollars to make TeleSouth Communications a tool of Gov. Haley Barbour and the Republican Party.”

The relationship continued into Gov. Bryant’s administration.

The welfare agency continued to contract with the radio network, such as in 2016 to advertise things like iPay, the program that allows fathers to pay child support online, or in 2018 to tell people how to apply for the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. The contracts at this time went through a Request for Proposal, or RFP process, according to records obtained by Mississippi Today.

MDHS directly paid TeleSouth almost $780,000 from 2009 to 2019, with amounts varying greatly from year to year, according to Mississippi Today’s review of public expenditures on the state’s Transparency website. While the spending mostly declined over the decade, it did spike to $141,290 in 2016, John Davis’ first year as director.

A Mississippi Today review of MDHS expenditures labeled under the TANF Work Program shows the department did not use welfare money to pay for its TeleSouth contracts, except for $15,262 in 2018. This payment has not been analyzed in any audit.

The Division of Medicaid – the agency that provides health insurance to very poor Mississippians, including many pregnant people, and often fails to get the word out about their services – has also spent at least $380,000 over the years advertising with SuperTalk.

"I would assume that if you're out here advertising for Medicaid benefits or for mothers of dependent children, the audience of SuperTalk — which usually advocates for cutting Medicaid — is probably not the place you should be advertising," Franks told the JFP.

It seems to have taken a scandal for this long-running trend to end. The Mississippi Department of Human Services, which experienced a vast leadership turnover after the arrests in 2020, has not paid the radio network since the arrests. Medicaid’s last payments to SuperTalk were in 2018.

When asked why MDHS ended its advertising with SuperTalk, the agency plainly said in a statement that “MDHS is committed to utilizing taxpayer funds in matters guided by and in compliance with all federal and state policies … MDHS takes seriously the stewardship of the message and resources entrusted to the agency by the taxpayer.”

The agency also said its current strategy is to focus on “earned media,” a term that refers to promotion it can acquire for free, such as traditional news articles or social media mentions.

The Mississippi Department of Rehabilitation Services recently contracted with SuperTalk to run ads about prom safety. Though, Gallo once admitted on his show, “I do understand that we don’t have a large audience of 13- to 18-year-olds in talk radio and that’s a shame and that’s their loss.”

The state agencies that have paid SuperTalk the most since 2009 are Mississippi Department of Transportation ($2.3 million), Mississippi Department of Public Safety ($1 million) and Mississippi Department of Human Services ($780,000).

Public service announcements are one thing, but in some cases, public agencies are actually paying for the talk radio interviews themselves. That was true in the case of a package SuperTalk put together in 2020 with the Mississippi Community College Board, which included three interviews with Gallo as part of the contract. In broadcasting, these promotional deals are called “remotes” because the radio hosts visit the paying client on site, but in the case of SuperTalk, it’s not always clear the station is getting paid for the coverage.

Ironically, the community college board is located inside the same complex as Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

Bob Sawyer, a financial advisor in Gulfport and former chairman of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s board, has long lamented that the advertising TeleSouth has provided could be done for free at the publicly funded station.

Sawyer said state leadership only had one issue. “The only thing they had issues with is they felt like it (MPB) was a little too liberal,” he said.

State agency payments to Supertalk have steadily declined since the 2000’s, from $831,637 in 2009 to $609,473 in 2016 to $228,722 in 2022. This does not account for money SuperTalk receives through state contracts with other ad agencies that buy placements at the network.

These figures also do not include the public funds SuperTalk may receive through other passthroughs, such as it did through Families First.

The private nonprofit structure of Families First, plus a breakdown of internal controls at the welfare agency, meant that much of the public TANF money they spent, including at SuperTalk, was not public record until the auditor included it in his audit report.

“The funneling of this kind of money that was taxpayer funded for welfare, for helping the most marginalized and vulnerable people,” Briant said, “the fact that that was being funneled into a political campaign that was all about image management and branding and trying to sell these elected officials to their own audience, not to the people who most need this welfare is just very blatantly a disgusting misuse of resources to fuel political propaganda.”

Compared to other vendors providing advertising services to the state from 2015 to 2022, according to Mississippi Today’s analysis of public expenditures, Supertalk is the fifth highest paid, behind Maris West & Baker ($24.3 million), Mann Agency ($4.1 million), Godwin Advertising Agency ($4.1 million) and Frontier Strategies ($3.5 million) – owned by Bryant’s close ally Josh Gregory.

But the $2.2 million TeleSouth received in that same time period dwarfed what the state paid other radio broadcasters, some of which have broader audiences, such as iHeart Media ($110,000), New South Radio or MIX 98.7 ($111,000), The Radio People or Y101 ($3,000), or even American Family Association ($31,000).

The state also paid nearly $700,000 to Snapshot Publishing, the ad firm owned by Gov. Reeves’ sister-in-law Leigh Reeves.

Several agencies continue to pay SuperTalk in the current fiscal year, including the Board of Contractors ($20,000), Department of Rehabilitation Services ($10,500) and the Mississippi Development Authority ($12,500).

SuperTalk is not a cheerleader for every state agency, though. In mid-2019, the network interviewed State Superintendent of Education Carey Wright, blasting the Mississippi Department of Education for not being able to calculate how many teachers would receive a proposed pay raise.

“Her interview on Gallo was a train wreck. She blamed it on their computer system,” Dillon remarked to Davis, referring to Wright. “... Gallo compared her to Hillary.”

Wright, who was appointed by the department’s board, not the governor, often found herself in the crosshairs of Republican politicians. 

And the Mississippi Department of Education hadn’t paid SuperTalk since 2009.

Texts gathered so far in the welfare case make SuperTalk seem like the water cooler for Mississippi’s most powerful. 

And like many government programs, Families First was infected by gossip, backstabbing and politics.

In the last months leading up to Davis’ ousting, the welfare program was consumed by infighting between the two nonprofits selected to run the program. 

Bryant allegedly directed Davis to cut funding to the nonprofit in the northern part of the state, Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, Mississippi Today first reported, because its director Christi Webb supported Democratic candidate Jim Hood for governor.

“Kim just called and said to hold firm,” Davis texted a colleague in March of 2019. “Also had a lot to say about Christi and what the Gov said when he was in to talk to Gallo. CRAZY WORLD.”

The post SuperTalk radio was a powerful mouthpiece for welfare fraudsters — while raking in welfare funds itself appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Extending postpartum Medicaid, creating a foster care bill of rights and building a new website to help moms and families find resources are all among the policy priorities backed by the Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families, Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, told Mississippi Today.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann tasked the group with reviewing the needs of Mississippi families and children from birth to age 3, following the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that allowed the state’s near-total abortion ban to take effect.

The ban will result in an estimated 5,000 additional births each year, a 14% increase in the state with the country’s highest rates of infant mortality and preterm births; a foster care system in which children are often abused and neglected; and the most restrictive Medicaid policies for new moms in the country. 

The Senate study group held hearings in September and October, focused on maternal health; adoption and foster care; childcare availability and early intervention for kids with special needs. They heard from state and national policy experts, obstetricians and pediatricians, and leaders of Mississippi state agencies. 

“As we sit here today, we’re not ready,” committee member Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, told WLBT as the hearings concluded. “But I think that we can be there.”

Boyd told Mississippi Today that the committee is making recommendations in the following areas. 

• Extending postpartum Medicaid from 60 days to 12 months postpartum. The Senate passed this measure last session, but House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, did not let it come to a vote in his chamber. 
• Creating a website that will consolidate information for mothers about family planning, postpartum care, child care and more.
• Enacting a foster care bill of rights to address “the many concerns that foster parents have that we’ve heard from during this process.”
• Creating a study group to focus on foster care and the adoption system.
• Streamlining the foster care process by increasing judges’ discretion around regulatory requirements like the home study. 
• Creating a study group to help overhaul the early intervention program, which aims to offer services for children with developmental delays as early as possible. The state Department of Health-run program currently serves about 1,100 children, but could be reaching as many as 10,000. Boyd said that investment would not only help kids succeed in school but also bring a significant return on investment for the state. “The more intervention services that you do, the dramatically less service and help those children need later in life.”
• Restructuring the tax credit for employers that provide childcare for their employees. Boyd pointed out that the labor force participation rate among single mothers is 75%, compared to 55% for the state as a whole. 

With the exception of technical changes that state agencies could make on their own, policy changes will take place through legislation that will flow through committees like Medicaid and Public Health and Welfare and then go to the House. 

Gunn has recently reaffirmed his opposition to extending postpartum Medicaid. His “Commission on Life,” the House’s analog to the Senate study group, has held no public meetings and Gunn’s staff will not say who the committee has met with. Several members told Mississippi Today they have heard from pastors and doctors, but declined to share their names. 

They have not announced any concrete policy proposals, though Gunn has said he wants to expand the tax credit for the state’s roughly 40 crisis pregnancy centers – which do not offer health care services and vary significantly in offerings and scale – from $3.5 million to $10 million. Extending postpartum Medicaid would cost the state about $7 million and provide greater access to health care for roughly 20,000 women every year. 

Boyd emphasized that the Senate group is not a one-session committee and expects members will continue to gather information and develop recommendations in the years to come. 

Beyond the hearings, Boyd said, the group members have held about 50 meetings with researchers, advocacy groups, industry representatives and state agency staff. 

The hearings were open to the public and live-streamed, and people were invited to share comments and feedback with the committee via email at WCFStudyGroup@senate.ms.gov. 

“It’s when we get that public participation that we can write the most effective legislation,” Boyd said. 

The post Senate study group backs changes to support moms and families appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As Amtrak plans for a 2023 start date, the freight companies and Alabama port that once said passenger rail’s return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast could be detrimental to business are now pledging millions of dollars in improvements to the tracks between Mobile and New Orleans. 

The freight companies and Alabama Port Authority have promised to pay a collective $15 million to improve the passenger train’s route in efforts to decrease the total time it will take Amtrak to go between New Orleans and Mobile, according to details obtained by a Mississippi Today records request.

Amtrak had been at odds with the freight companies for years — so much so it filed a complaint to a federal board that has spent the last determining if the freight-owned tracks could handle added passenger traffic. 

Arguments, at times, got ugly with Amtrak once posting a live video feed and snarky tweets about how often — or not — freight trains came through the corridor. 

Amtrak, the port, and freight companies CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern mediated an agreement over the once-contested route, rather than putting the dispute to a board vote. Since they announced that agreement last month, they have all been tight-lipped about its terms or specifics about the route’s future beyond saying it was moving ahead. 

READ MORE: Amtrak passenger route will return to Mississippi Gulf Coast

Mississippi Today has been able to glean some details of what the parties have planned after examining a copy of a grant application by the Southern Rail Commission that requests nearly $179 million in federal money to help pay for a “Gulf Coast Corridor Improvement Project.” The application also details $44 million in non-federal matching funds from the project’s partners. 

“What I can say is that once these improvements are made, it will result in a 3-hour-and-23-minute trip time,” Southern Rail Commission chairman Knox Ross told Mississippi Today. “At the beginning, you will have something longer than that.” 

The Southern Rail Commission was already awarded $33 million in 2019 through the same grant program — Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements Grant Program – for the Gulf Coast route. None of that money has been spent yet. 

Under the Biden Administration, there is $1.4 billion available to improve railways’ speed and safety this year through the program. That’s more than four times the amount allocated in 2021, according to the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association.

The improvement plans in this year’s application detail construction and track improvements lasting until 2026, but the route can still run while the bulk of the improvements are being made. 

Ross declined to comment further on the application or agreement. Amtrak referred any comments back to the information submitted in the hefty application.

In a letter supporting the project included in the application, CSX specified it would pay nearly $9.9 million in matching funds. 

“The Project will facilitate the introduction of a new twice-daily Amtrak service between New Orleans and Mobile, while simultaneously supporting freight service quality,” wrote the company’s Executive Vice President of Operations Jamie Boychuk.

In a similar letter, the Alabama State Port Authority promised to contribute $750,000 in funds to support the route. The Mississippi Legislature had already allocated just under $14 million in funding to support route improvements. The state of Louisiana has pledged roughly another $9 million. The Port of Pascagoula pledged $2 million. 

Amtrak has an existing $6 million in contributions. 

“Implementing a twice-daily service between New Orleans and Mobile would provide a huge economic lift to Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi and Pascagoula, and other cities along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast,” wrote U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker in a letter also included with the application. “It would serve as a culmination of Mississippi’s efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Since 2010, the population of the Mississippi Gulf Coast has grown steadily, and an additional transportation option would encourage further growth and improve quality of life for current residents.”

The application spells out 12 separate “components” within the overall project totaling about $223 million.

Among the listed improvements is a new station track in Mobile, which will not be funded by the grant but by CSX, according to the application. The improvements will allow for Amtrak trains to board and deboard passengers within the Mobile Terminal downtown. 

The proposed grant-funded improvements include extending tracks, installing new switches and turnouts, additional crossovers and improving stations, yard and crossings. Specifically, it calls for “significant station improvements” along the Mississippi stops.

That includes a new station building in Biloxi and platform canopies in Bay St. Louis and Gulfport. In Pascagoula, Amtrak may attempt to acquire the historic train depot, which was built in 1904 and registered as a historic place in the 1970s, or build a new building nearby. 

The plan also calls for improving railroad crossings at multiple points on the 85-miles of track that go through Mississisippi. 

Should the grant be awarded, project management would be coordinated by Ross and the Southern Rail Commission. 

In a note included in the application, the Southern Rail Commission explained it’s asking for more funds than it did in 2018 because the costs of construction and the available infrastructure dollars have increased, and because of the new public-private partnerships “bringing momentum.”

“This Project is the epitome of various parties joining together to commit resources to expand intercity passenger service while maintaining viable freight networks essential to the economic viability of the rural areas and ensuring the safety and efficiency of operations in the New Orleans to Mobile rail corridor,” the commission wrote. 

Ultimately, the commission hopes to make Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans a hub that connects Mobile — and its Mississippi stops in between — with routes to Baton Rouge and toward Texas. 

The post Details emerge over Gulf Coast Amtrak route from Mobile to New Orleans, as former enemies become funding partners appeared first on Mississippi Today.