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In their final act of the 2023 session, in the wee hours of the morning April 1, Mississippi lawmakers passed a “Christmas tree” bill with $372 million in local pet projects.

It includes spending on parks, theaters, museums, city halls and courthouses, streets, volunteer fire stations, boat ramps and waterfront developments. From Adams County to Zama, nearly every hamlet — and every lawmaker — in Mississippi got a taste of the election-year spending.

Now the question is, will Gov. Tate Reeves veto some or all of the spending? He did last year, albeit selectively, nixing 10 projects worth about $27 million out of a similar $223 million local projects bill. This year’s bill even includes a re-try by lawmakers of some of the specific projects he vetoed last year.

But Reeves is up for reelection this year, facing Democratic challenger Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, whose knocks on Reeves include that he’s out-of-touch with rural and average Mississippians. Reeves may be reluctant to veto spending on projects with grassroots local support and anger lawmakers and their constituents during an election year.

FULL LIST: The pet projects lawmakers passed during the 2023 legislative session

Reeves called the projects he vetoed last year “wasteful” spending, but critics at the time noted that he approved most of the dozens of projects in the bill, including some that appeared very similar to the ones he vetoed.

For instance, he vetoed $500,000 last year for a green-space park around the federal courthouse in Greenville, but approved many other city beautification projects across the state.

Jackson bore the brunt of the governor’s 2022 vetoes, with four projects including upgrades to the capital city’s planetarium, a golf course and nature trail at LeFleur’s Bluff State Park. Reeves said the city had too many other problems, including crumbling infrastructure and crime, to be spending money on parks and a planetarium. But many other cities whose parks, museum and other projects he approved also have dire infrastructure and other major issues.

For this year, lawmakers re-upped $2 million in funding for Jackson’s planetarium in the projects bill. They also included in another bill money for LeFleur’s Bluff Park, although it is apparently not earmarked for golf course renovations.

Explaining his vetoes to reporters last year, Reeves said, “I vetoed some spending that is simply not state taxpayers’ responsibility.” He said this included city office upgrades. In this year’s bill, lawmakers funded numerous renovation projects for city and county government offices along with coliseums, amphitheaters, music halls and civic centers.

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves blocks state funding for major Jackson park improvement, planetarium

When asked for comment this week about his plans for the Christmas tree bill, Reeves’ spokesman Cory Custer said in a statement: “Mississippi Today is not a news organization, it is an unregistered Democrat PAC.”

Reeves has until April 22 to sign the bill into law or exercise his veto authority. The Mississippi Constitution gives governors the authority to issue partial or line-item vetoes of appropriations bills, though, there is debate about whether his vetoes last year were legal.

But since they never were challenged in court, the vetoes stood.

This year, if he vetoes any of the projects approved by legislators, there will be similar questions about whether the vetoes are legal.

In legislative parlance the bill containing most of the projects is not an appropriations bill. Another bill appropriates funds to the Department of Finance and Administration to fund the projects. But the projects themselves are in what is known as a general bill, which according to the constitution the governor must veto in whole or not at all.

House Speaker Philip Gunn said of last year’s vetoes, “… I am not aware of any provision under the law that allows the governor to veto partially a general bill. He has to veto all of it or none of it … That may be more than people want to understand but there are differences in the types of bills we have up here.”

And Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, who successfully won a lawsuit against former Gov. Kirk Fordice for his partial vetoes in the 1990s, said of Reeves’ 2022 vetoes, “We’re just transferring money from one account to another, or from one purpose to another. That is not an appropriation. That is a transfer. I understand that to be what they are arguing and will not be subject to the line item.”

But in the end, no one challenged Reeves’ vetoes last year.

Eash year the Legislature approves similar projects throughout the state, but the number approved during the 2003 session is historic. Legislators were able to expend such a large amount of funds on such projects because of unprecedented revenue growth in recent years.

Legislators have opted to spend those funds on such projects while not expanding Medicaid to ensure health care for primarily for the working poor and while not fully funding public education.

Also, for two years legislators have opted to leave a huge amount of revenue unspent.

Legislators submit their priority projects to the leadership early in the session. During the final days of the session, a small group of legislative leaders meet behind closed doors to determine how much money is available for projects and which projects will be funded.

Each year rank-and-file legislators learn late in the session whether their projects were funded. This year they learned soon after the clock rolled over to April Fool’s Day — April 1.

They will learn in the coming days whether their projects will survive Tate Reeves’ veto pen.

READ MORE: Latest Reeves vetoes could again expand governor’s power

The post Will Gov. Reeves break out his veto stamp on Legislature’s ‘Christmas tree’ bill of pet projects? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Director of Clarksdale Baby University Chelesa Presley talks about the eight-week program during the first class of the spring session in Clarksdale, Miss., Monday, April 3, 2023.

Mississippi health news you can’t get anywhere else.

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The post The Pulse: Clarksdale Baby University appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi now requires physicians to test patients for syphilis during pregnancy as a response to the alarming rate in the state of children being born with the infection, according to a recently issued emergency order.

Mississippi was one of six states that did not require syphilis screenings by law. Meanwhile, the state in six years ending in 2021 had more than a 900% increase in babies born with syphilis – a sexually transmitted disease that can be passed to an infant during pregnancy and lead to developmental issues and sometimes death. 

On Wednesday, the Mississippi Board of Health issued a 120-day emergency order with plans to permanently change testing rules in the state during that period. The board  will vote on those rule changes during their July meeting. 

“This is a winnable battle for us,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Beyer told the Board of Health during Wednesday’s meeting. “We have seen a lot of ups and downs with syphilis over the years … we have shown before we can make an impact on the rates of syphilis.” 

The state’s order calls for physicians and practitioners offering prenatal care to test all pregnancies during the first trimester or during the first prenatal appointment and again in the third trimester and during delivery to ensure treatment for positive cases follows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and that cases found during pregnancy are reported to the state Department of Health.

Beyer said the repeated testing is to ensure “we’re not letting a case that can be treated … slip through the cracks.”

Without mandatory screenings, some mothers are shocked to learn they have the disease. Even if they don’t have symptoms, the infection can still detrimentally affect their child.

Penicillin treatments in the first trimester for someone with syphilis leads to the most positive outcome for the child at birth. Untreated, babies can be born with life-long complications and major malformations.

The post Emergency order: Doctors must test for syphilis in Mississippi pregnancies appeared first on Mississippi Today.

It was John Rahm’s wet and windy world at The Masters and nobody could keep up with him. In college baseball, Ole Miss and Mississippi State get ready for their annual three-game series that the Rebels haven’t won since 2015.

Stream all episodes here.

The post Podcast: Talking The Masters and Mississippi college baseball. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

APRIL 12, 1864

The Fort Pillow Massacre took place when 2,500 members of a Confederate cavalry attacked the fort held by less than 700 Union soldiers. Confederate Gen. Nathaniel Bedford Forrest led the attack on the fort, about 40 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, but the Union leader, Maj. William F. Bradford refused to surrender. 

Confederates overran the fort, killing as many as 300 Union soldiers, most of them Black. According to survivors’ accounts, Confederates massacred the Union troops even after they threw down their guns and surrendered. In response, many “madly leaped into the (Mississippi) River, while the rebels stood on the banks or part way up the bluff, and shot at the heads of their victims,” one survivor wrote. 

“I could plainly see this firing and note the bullets striking the water around the black heads of the soldiers, until suddenly the muddy current became red, and I saw another life sacrificed in the cause of the Union.” 

In his memoir, U.S. Gen. Ulysses Grant talked of the river being dyed with “the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.” Afterward, the massacre became a rallying cry for Black troops.

The post On this day in 1864 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Accumulating household waste continues to sit unbothered across the state’s largest city as local officials repeatedly fail to choose a garbage collector.

The city’s emergency contract with Richard’s Disposal, the company who the mayor and a minority of the city council are endorsing for a long-term contract, ended on April 1. Six days later, the state environmental department issued Jackson an official notice that the city was in violation of Mississippi pollution law.

The notice says that by not collecting garbage, “the City has caused wastes to be placed in locations where they are likely to cause pollution of the air and waters of the state,” violating state law, and opening Jackson up to $25,000 in fines for each day it doesn’t collect trash.

Jackson spokesperson Melissa Faith Payne said on Monday that, as far as she was aware, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality hasn’t yet levied any fines against the city. MDEQ spokesperson Jan Schaefer declined to comment on the agency’s enforcement.

While it’s unclear what punishments Jackson will face from MDEQ, the idle piles of garbage threaten local habitats as well as the creeks that flow through the city’s residential neighborhoods, a local conservation expert explained.

“When we do our cleanups, a lot of the trash that enters the (Pearl River) comes from our storm drains from our neighborhoods, not just Jackson, but from all our neighborhoods,” said Abby Braman, executive director of Pearl Riverkeeper.

During heavy rain events like Jackson saw last week, rainwater carries trash left on the street towards the city’s storm drains. The waste then either blocks storm water from getting into the drains, or it goes into the drains and flows out into the city’s creeks. Once that happens, Braman explained, the garbage not only goes into the wildlife habitat in the creeks and the Pearl River, but it also creates a flood risk for Jackson residents.

“We have, depending on where you count from, about 11 creeks that run straight through Jackson into the river. All of those run through neighborhoods” she said. “A lot of them, particularly Lynch Creek, that creek’s already clogged up with debris, including trash. It’s already overtopping its banks several times a year and causing a lot of problems in that community, and destruction of public and private property.”

Lynch Creek starts just past Interstate 220 in west Jackson, and runs south near Ellis Avenue and the Washington Addition neighborhood before meeting the Pearl River just below Interstate 20.

The section of the river near Jackson, as well as several of the city’s creeks, are under a contact advisory from MDEQ because of overflows from the city’s overwhelmed and depleted sewer system.

When residential garbage pickup will return to Jackson is up in the air.

On Monday, city council members were unable to vote on a new contract for Richard’s Disposal after the mayor pulled the item from the agenda, after learning that Richard’s was readying a lawsuit against Jackson. The company is arguing it won the city’s bidding process and that the city council has wrongly voted against awarding Richard’s the contract, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba explained.

Lumumba has argued for the last year that Richard’s deserves the contract. Through the blind bidding process, Richard’s received the best score for options that include twice-a-week pickup and a trash bin for residents. The company’s bid was also the cheapest of any offering twice-a-week pickup.

Opposing city council members have made a wide-range of arguments against the Richard’s option: They argue that the company is less experienced than the previous vendor, Waste Management, and also that Lumumba is trying to steer the council towards his preferred choice. They’ve also argued that the 96-gallon bins included in that option would be a nuisance for residents.

Despite the majority opposition to Richard’s, Lumumba has refused to present another contract for the council to vote on. The mayor argued that not picking the “winning” bid would open the city to a lawsuit, since the city is legally required to use the bidding process to pick its vendor.

On Monday, Lumumba said he was meeting with MDEQ on Wednesday to explain the city’s position. He also hinted at calling another council meeting this week to vote on an emergency contract for Richard’s to collect garbage in the interim while the dispute lingers on.

The city last week opened a site at the Metrocenter Mall for residents to bring garbage during limited hours. Officials have yet to announce any drop-off times for this week. Some wards have offered alternate sites to bring trash.

This most recent standoff over garbage pickup comes a month after Jackson officials launched its citywide cleanup campaign, called “Stop Trashing Jackson.”

The post How the Jackson garbage standoff impacts local environment appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The “blue slip” process Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is using to block the nomination of Scott Colom of Columbus to the federal judiciary began under a previous Mississippi senator who used the process to discriminate against Black Americans.

Starting in the 1950s, U.S. Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi was the first Senate Judiciary Committee chair to use the process to allow a single home-state senator to block a presidential nominee to the federal bench. Eastland used the process to block federal judges from being appointed in Southern states sympathetic to school desegregation, according to multiple accounts detailed in news stories and scholarly research articles.

A broad range of groups agree on Eastland’s role in the blue slip process.

In 2017, during his time as Senate Judiciary chair, conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wrote, “For the vast majority of the blue slip’s history, a negative or unreturned blue slip did not stop the Senate Judiciary Committee from holding a hearing and vote on a nominee. In fact, of my 18 predecessors as chairman of the committee, only two allowed home-state senators unilateral veto power through the blue slip. The first to do so, Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.), reportedly adopted this policy to thwart school integration after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.”

The progressive organization People for the American Way said Eastland’s actions “gave immense power to segregationist senators in Southern states to prevent judges who would take civil rights seriously.”

The process allows a single home-state senator to block the Senate confirmation of judicial nominees by not returning the “blue slip” voicing support. Under the current process, nominees to district courts, such as Colom to the Northern District of Mississippi, can be blocked but not nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The way Eastland applied the process, nominees to both were blocked.

Sen. Roger Wicker, Mississippi’s senior U.S senator, returned his blue slip for Colom.

Various progressive groups are calling for current Judiciary chair, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, to stop allowing the blue slip process to be used to block judicial nominees. A spokesperson for Durbin told Mississippi Today that the chair was “extremely disappointed” in Hyde-Smith’s actions and would be commenting “more fully” on those actions in the coming days.

Durbin, in the statement, called Colom “highly qualified.”

READ MORE: Senate chairman ‘extremely disappointed’ by Hyde-Smith’s effort to block judicial nomination

According to various accounts, starting sometimes in the 1910s, the blue slip process was initiated to give home-state senators more of a voice in the nomination and confirmation process. But it was not until Eastland in 1956 that the process was used to allow home-state senators to completely block the nominations. Under Eastland, if a blue slip was not returned, the Judiciary Committee normally would not even have a hearing on the nominee.

Under the process before Eastland, nominees opposed by a home-state senator normally still would receive a full vote before the Senate, but with a negative recommendation from the Judiciary Committee.

In a paper titled “The Collision of Institutional Power and Constitutional Obligations: The Use of Blue Slips in the Judicial Confirmation Process,” professors from Georgia, Michigan State and Wisconsin wrote, “When Senator Eastland took over as Judiciary chair (1956-1978), he significantly changed blue slipping policy. During his tenure, a negative blue slip or unreturned blue slip from a single home-state senator blocked any further action on the nomination. Why Eastland changed blue slipping policy is unclear, though racial politics likely had something to do with it, as Eastland could use committee rules to block pro-civil rights nominees from reaching the bench … While later Judiciary chairs would also alter their treatment of negative blue slips depending on political context, a single blue slip continues to impose a strong and negative effect on any nomination’s chance of success.”

Most Judiciary chairs since Eastland, including Democrats Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy and Republicans Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond, did not allow the process to be used as an absolute where one home-state senator could stop a nominee. Both political parties, though, have used the blue slip to prevent presidents from the other party from getting judicial appointments.

Hyde-Smith currently is blocking the nomination of Colom, the first African American elected as district attorney for the 16th District in north Mississippi. She cited Colom’s opposition to legislation to ban trans women from competing in women’s sports as a reason for opposing him.

While Colom has voiced general support for trans rights, he has never publicly commented on the issue of trans women competing in women sports.

Hyde-Smith also said she opposed Colom because a political action committee funded at least in part by billionaire George Soros spent funds on his first election to the office of district attorney in 2015. Soros, a New York billionaire, has supported criminal justice reform and other issues such as governmental transparency.

Colom did not receive any financial help from Soros in 2019.

The post Blue slip process Sen. Hyde-Smith used to block federal judge began as an effort to preserve Jim Crow appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Office of the State Auditor has asked public universities in the state to detail spending on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the latest attempt by officials to mimic Republican efforts across the country that take aim at “woke” policies. 

The request, obtained by Mississippi Today, was sent via email last week to public universities by Laura Gray, an employee in the office’s Government Accountability Division. Gray wrote that White’s office “is conducting a performance review of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs/ activities administered by Mississippi’s public universities.” 

In higher education, the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion” refers to a range of policies and programs that foster enrollment and retention of historically marginalized groups. 

Gray’s email instructed universities to fill out an attached spreadsheet, send it back to her and copy Casey Prestwood, an associate commissioner at the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), by April 20. 

IHL is the governing board for Mississippi’s eight public universities. Kim Gallaspy, IHL’s interim communications director, said IHL’s role is to provide the auditor’s office, which initiated the review, with information.  

Fletcher Freeman, a spokesperson for the auditor’s office, told Mississippi Today that the request was inspired by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s review of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities in Florida earlier this year. 

“After seeing Florida’s review of DEI spending, we have decided to use the same model to review DEI spending at universities in Mississippi,” Freeman wrote in an email. 

Mississippi Today obtained a copy of the request sent to Delta State University on April 6. The attached spreadsheet asks for spending from fiscal year 2020 to present. The columns ask for a “brief description” of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the total funding received from all sources, the number of full-time-equivalent employees and their titles, and how much in state funds was expended. 

It’s not evident from the request how White’s office plans to use this information, but the auditor, who is facing reelection this year, has become known for reports on topics like out-of-classroom spending or the economic impact of “fatherlessness.” White has denied these reports are politically motivated, though his office’s findings are often accompanied by conservative policy solutions, such as JROTC programs to combat “the dissolution of families.” 

White’s latest aim at diversity, equity and inclusion comes just a few months after similar efforts from Republican officials in other states. In January, DeSantis asked public universities in Florida to account for spending on diversity, equity and inclusion as part of his pledge to “eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies” in the state, POLITICO reported. The State University System of Florida — which is similar to IHL — has supported DeSantis’s efforts. 

A few weeks later, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott went a step further, issuing a memo to state agencies and public university officials that diversity, equity and inclusion policies in hiring violate state and federal employment laws. 

In Mississippi, lawmakers have yet to touch diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, so far only nominally banning the teaching of critical race theory in public K-12 schools and universities. 

Dan Durkin, a professor at University of Mississippi and the president of the United Faculty Senate Association of Mississippi, said the request caught him off guard but that he thinks the auditor should find diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are money well-spent because it improves recruitment and retention. 

“In Mississippi, it’s particularly important, and with our university’s history, I think that makes it even more important in our mission to reach out to African American students,” Durkin said. “We want to bring students here, but we want to make sure that they feel at home while they’re here and that they feel supported.” 

Durkin added that he had recently spoken to Chancellor Glenn Boyce about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and that Boyce was supportive of the initiatives. 

Universities across the state post on their websites statements about diversity, equity and inclusion. IHL has for years now given out an annual “diversity” award to faculty, staff and even House Speaker Philip Gunn in 2021 for his efforts to change the Mississippi state flag. 

The IHL Board of Trustees, a politically appointed body, recently asked applicants during the Delta State presidential search to submit a “written philosophy” of diversity, equity and inclusion.

The post How much are Mississippi universities spending on DEI initiatives? State auditor wants to know appeared first on Mississippi Today.