OurTupelo

Jackson was alive this weekend with happy JSU and Southern fans spending their money in Jackson’s beleaguered restaurants. It was a welcome pick-me-up.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Impact appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In this edition of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Extra Table’s Executive Director Martha Allen to talk about Extra Table’s mission, the many facets of hunger in Mississippi and how you can sponsor a TURKEY as a part of their Tackle Hunger Holiday Campaign for $15. A single donation will put a 10-12 pound Jennie-O turkey on the table of a family in need this holiday season.

Founded in 2009 by restauranteur Robert St. John, Extra Table has helped fight hunger by stocking food pantries across the state of Mississippi by lowering the cost of food — every dollar provides 5.9 meals.

The post Mississippi Stories: Martha Allen appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Supreme Court will most likely have an opportunity to rule on whether the state Constitution prevents the appropriation of public funds to private schools or explain why the Constitution does not mean what it says.

In recent years the nine members of the Mississippi’s highest court have sometimes adhered to the plain-reading-of-the-law principle in their decisions, while at other notable times they have not.

It has just depended on the issue and perhaps the mood of the court.

Plain meaning in legal parlance, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined “the language is unambiguous and clear on its face,” and “the meaning of the statute or contract must be determined from the language of the statute or contract and not from extrinsic evidence.”

Or, according to the Congressional Research Service, it is defined as: “The starting point in construing a statute is the language of the statute itself. The Supreme Court often recites the ‘plain meaning rule,’ that, if the language of the statute is plain and unambiguous, it must be applied according to its terms.”

On Oct. 13, Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin ruled, based on the plain reading, that legislation passed earlier this year providing government funds to private schools was unconstitutional. The state Legislature provided $10 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds to private schools. It was added to legislation late in the session. Gov. Tate Reeves, long a private school proponent, signed off on the proposal.

Parents for Public Schools filed a lawsuit saying the appropriation was not valid based on that aforementioned plain reading of the Mississippi Constitution.

Martin sided with Parents for Public Schools in the case, but her ruling most likely will be appealed. That appeal means the Supreme Court will again have the chance to decide whether the text of a law, a constitutional provision in the case, should be adhered to or ignored.

In 2017, in a unanimous decision, the justices ruled that just because a law said “effective with fiscal year 2007, the Legislature shall fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program” did not really mean the Legislature had to actually fully fund the program that provides the state’s share of the basics for the operation of the local school districts.

On the other hand, the justices did adhere to a law that said they “shall” receive a pay raise if recommended by the state Personnel Board. A little noticed section of a 2012 bill passed by the Legislature essentially gives the judiciary the authority to award itself a pay raise sans action of the Legislature. This judicial pay process seems in conflict with the fact the Constitution gives the Legislature the authority to appropriate funds. Plus, pay raises for elected officials normally are awarded based on the action of the Legislature not the judiciary.

Or to put it another way, when a law says local schools “shall” be fully funded, the plain reading is ignored by the Supreme Court. But when the law says the judiciary “shall” award itself a pay raise, the plain reading is followed.

The plain reading also was ignored in 2020 when the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s ballot initiative process was invalid. The court ruled unconstitutional the language approved overwhelmingly by the Mississippi electorate in the early 1990s that requires a mandated number of signatures to be gathered equally from five congressional districts to place an initiative proposal on the ballot.

The court found that because the state no longer has five congressional districts, the initiative process was unconstitutional. The court made that ruling without taking into account that the members of the Mississippi Community College Board, as well as other boards in the state, also are selected from the same five now defunct congressional districts. Perhaps the state Community College Board also is unconstitutional.

Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution reads, “No religious or other sect or sects shall ever control any part of the school or other educational funds of this state; nor shall any funds be appropriated toward the support of any sectarian school, or to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.” 

Hinds County Chancellor Martin said that language is clear. It says what it says — no public appropriation to a school “not conducted as a free public school.”

It will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court will adhere to that plain language or find a way to uphold language supported by the leadership of the Mississippi Legislature and Gov. Tate Reeves.

The post Will Supreme Court rely on literal reading when deciding legality of public funds to private schools? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

To quote Hamilton, JSU landed in the room where it happened.

The post Marshall Ramsey: At The Table appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A federal board has scheduled its vote on whether Amtrak’s service will return to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast with a route from Mobile to New Orleans. 

The Surface Transportation Board, a federal body made up of presidential appointees, announced Friday it will vote on the future of the passenger route on Dec. 7. The contested route has been under the board’s review for over a year, with Amtrak and the track’s freight-company owners presenting their own cases about its viability. 

There will be a final set of November hearings ahead of the vote. 

“Amtrak is preparing for the next hearing, confident in our case for Gulf Coast access and optimistic our service will begin next year,” spokesman Marc Magliari said in a statement. 

Read more: Amtrak breaks ground for new Gulf Coast platform, though route still uncertain

Amtrak has maintained the route can handle the added passenger train traffic, while companies CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway Company say it could negatively affect businesses that rely on the Port of Mobile to move freight. 

The hearings, beginning Nov. 17, will focus on models that predict train traffic. 

Amtrak hasn’t run a Gulf Coast route since Hurricane Katrina. The proposed route would run two trains daily in the morning with stops in Bay St. Louis, Pascagoula, Gulfport and Biloxi. 

The post Vote scheduled to decide fate of Gulf Coast Amtrak route appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Joe Paul, the eleventh president of University of Southern Mississippi, walked onto the stage at the Thad Cochran Center on Thursday to a standing ovation, a scaled-down marching band and cheers of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” 

“Okay,” Paul exclaimed as he took in the scene. “Um, wow.” 

The celebration marked Paul’s first public address since the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees cut its executive search short earlier this week and announced that the longtime administrator was signing on to lead the university for the next four years. 

In an 11-minute speech, Paul told the audience – which included students, faculty, state and local elected officials and members of the IHL board – that he is committed to serving everyone on campus. He vowed to grow enrollment, expand USM’s beleaguered Gulf Coast campus, bring in more research dollars, improve student life and recommit to shared governance with faculty. 

“Together, we are mighty,” he told the crowd multiple times. 

Paul credited a number of people in his speech, including his wife; former USM president Aubrey Lucas; high-dollar donors Chuck Scianna and Joe Quinlan; the mayors of Hattiesburg and Gulfport, who were his former students; and the IHL board. 

In particular, Paul shouted out Tom Duff and Gee Ogletree, USM alumni and IHL board members who co-chaired the presidential search. 

“All I can say to y’all is that Mr. Duff is one persuasive individual, okay?” Paul said. “These two Southern Miss alums, along with their fellow trustees, have displayed courage, conviction and integrity through this process. They have listened and they have acted. They love Southern Miss, as we do, and all of these servant-leader trustees are going to help us take Southern Miss to the top.”

Flanked by several trustees and the IHL commissioner, Duff, who is serving as the IHL board president this year, also received a warm welcome before he introduced Paul. He remarked that the board is not used to a positive reception. 

“I’ve got to admit, this is the eighth time we’ve stood up here to have a person selected as an institutional head,” he said. “Mostly, we’ve had folks jeer at us, not clap for us.” 

Duff thanked the 15 members of the Search Advisory Constituency for their feedback. The advisory group had been criticized by rank-and-file faculty and staff who worried a lack of representation would lead IHL to pick a president who did not support them. In the three days since IHL announced Paul’s selection, some faculty who were critical of the constituency have expressed support for the new president. 

Duff told the audience that during the listening sessions, the advisory group had taken notes during the listening session and provided the board with an eight-page summary of qualities they wanted to see in the next president. 

“Not only did they write up the profile, they pretty much told us who it needed to be, and we appreciate that,” he said. “We’ve listened.” 

IHL hired a headhunting firm, Academic Search, for $130,000 to aid in the presidential search with the scheduled conclusion of spring 2023, according to the contract inked on Sept. 21. But IHL and Academic Search did not post formal advertisements for the position, IHL’s spokesperson Caron Blanton told Mississippi Today. She added that the board is now in the process of amending the contract.

Duff sought to assuage any criticisms of IHL expediting the search. 

“Oftentimes even though we have a path, we have to take responsibility and say no, that choice needs to be this, that decision needs to be that,” he said. “This is one of those situations. And we’ve probably been written up a couple times in the paper, I noticed, as not following our blueprint. But our blueprint is finding the best leader, it’s not following the blueprint.” 

Paul’s contract has not yet been finalized; in an email, Blanton said she would provide it to Mississippi Today once it is executed. 

The post ‘We’ve listened’: IHL welcomes Joe Paul as next USM’s president at campus event appeared first on Mississippi Today.

HATTIESBURG — The sport wasn’t baseball, but Southern Miss swept a doubleheader Thursday.

At 3 p.m., an overflow crowd gathered in USM’s Thad Cochran Center and cheered as if attending a football pep rally, as Joe Paul was introduced as the 11th president in history of the 112-year-old university. It was an almost surreal atmosphere. I mean, I’ve often heard similar cheering when a football coach or basketball coach was introduced, but never for a university president. As Thomas Duff, who led the Institutions of Higher Learning search, commented, “These kinds of announcements are usually jeered, not cheered.” This one was cheered thunderously.

Then, three or so hours later, Will Hall’s surprisingly proficient football team jumped out to a 20-2 first quarter lead and then held on for a 39-22 victory over the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns, a team that has won 41 games and four Sun Belt West Division championships over the past four seasons. Don’t look now but the Golden Eagles are 3-1 and a half game behind Troy in the Sun Belt West standings. Hall’s Golden Eagles have now won five of their last six games and seven of 10 over the past two seasons.

As Hall put it afterward, “We’re not a finished product. We’re really young. We’ve got 71 players who are freshmen and sophomores. We gotta go to work again tomorrow. We got to pick up the shovel and dig some more. We’re not there yet, but, man, are we coming and doing it the right way.”

Hard to say which cheers were louder: Was it when wide receiver deluxe Jason Brownlee scored on a 76-yard pass from true freshman Zach Wilcke to give Southern Miss a 20-2 lead? Or was it a few moments later, during a TV timeout, when Paul was introduced to the football crowd as the university’s new president? Paul received a standing ovation – and the loudest cheers were from the student section. You just don’t see and hear that every day on a college campus.

Those students apparently have been paying attention. The plan for hiring a new president had called for a nationwide search that probably would last into next year. Dr. Paul, who will turn 69 on Halloween, changed that plan. During his three months as interim president, Paul worked with such energy and accomplished so much in terms of fund-raising, recruitment and campus-wide goodwill, it became clear to all that the right person already was in place. Paul, of course, has a much, much longer history at the school, having graduated from USM in 1975 and having served the school in varying capacities for nearly all his adult life. As Will Hall put it later Thursday night, “Joe Paul bleeds black and gold. He knows everybody, everybody knows him.”

Hall is right. Indeed, this column should come with a disclaimer. I’ve known Paul for 50-plus years. We graduated in the same class. His motto is “leave it better than you found it,” and he always does. My opinion: Southern Miss hit a home run with this hire. 

And it is becoming increasingly apparent that athletic director Jeremy McClain knocked the ball out of the park on Dec. 2, 2020, when he hired Hall as football coach. Despite a remarkable string of injuries – particularly at the all-important position of quarterback – Hall’s team has made steady progress in not quite two years time. You could see it coming last November when Hall installed a “super back” offense with running backs playing quarterback and won the last two games in decisive fashion.

This season, despite losing their starting quarterback, two starting inside linebackers and several others to injuries, the Eagles clearly improve with each and every outing, Defensively, the Nasty Bunch has become nasty again. They swarm to the football. They hit. Hard. The special teams are excellent. Punter Mason Hunt isn’t Ray Guy, but some of his kicks will remind you of the greatest punter in the history of the sport. Offensively, the Eagles piece it together, depending mostly on Brownlee and running back Frank Gore Jr., who puts every ounce of his 5 feet, 8 inches and 195 pounds into every play. Thursday night, Gore ran for 87 yards and threw a beauty of a 52-yard touchdown pass to talented and speedy freshman Tiaquelin Mims, another mite-sized dynamo.

Late Thursday night, someone asked Hall if was time to start dreaming of a conference championship.

“Dude, man, I’m the biggest dreamer in America,” Hall said. “I’m a 5-foot-7 dude who played quarterback. I dream all day long. But right now we have to figure out a way to win each week. We’re growing and we’re getting better and I hope everybody sees it.”

Southern Miss students appear to see it – and more. In the student section Thursday night, some students held up big posters with photos of both Hall and Paul.

Said Hall, “I’m a big Joe Paul fan and I was before this president thing ever came about. Me and Joe are alike in a lot of ways. We’re not afraid to dream. We’re not afraid to create a big vision and then be the first to jump out in front of everybody and start digging.”

At Southern Miss, there was a lot of digging going on Thursday. The future appears bright.

The post Thursday at Southern Miss, we saw the Joe Paul and Will Hall Show appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The city of Greenwood and Leflore County have put up a total of $9 million in a last-minute effort to save Greenwood Leflore Hospital, a key health care provider and economic engine for the Delta.

The financially struggling hospital has been negotiating with the University of Mississippi Medical Center over a lease agreement since the summer. A key sticking point in the talks was Greenwood Leflore’s outstanding debts to Medicare and the funds necessary for deferred maintenance on hospital facilities. UMMC did not want to be responsible for those costs after any transition. 

But now, Greenwood and Leflore County have each approved a $4.5 million letter of credit, for a total of $9 million in local financial support to pave the way for UMMC to take over hospital operations. 

With negotiations stalled, UMMC told Greenwood Leflore they would not be able to complete lease agreement documents in time for the year’s last scheduled meeting of the Institutions of Higher Learning, which needs to approve any agreement, the Greenwood Commonwealth reported earlier this week. Interim CEO Gary Marchand told hospital employees in a memo Tuesday that the hospital will need to make additional cuts in order to stay open through the end of the year, and it still may have to close its doors before then. 

The funding from the city and county doesn’t on its own speed up the timeline for a resolution, but it does appear to remove a barrier to an eventual agreement. 

Leflore County Supervisor and Board President Robert Collins told Mississippi Today that hospital leadership had made bad decisions for years, like excessively expensive contracts with physicians, redundant administrative positions, and too many staff for the number of patients they were serving. 

“We just could never get a meeting with them to sit down and talk about it,” Collins said of the hospital. “The situation’s been going down here for the last 10 years or more … We had a consultant come and tell us four years ago, if we stayed on the course that we was on, we’d be broke in four years, and they were right.”

But the hospital is so critical to its community that Collins said his support for the funding was an obvious choice. People who don’t have transportation need a health care facility nearby, and people without insurance can rely on the hospital for critical care. If the hospital were to close, people might wind up being airlifted to Memphis. 

“And if they do have to have a helicopter ride, they’ll be in debt the rest of their lives,” Collins said. “It’s just so important that we have health care here in Greenwood, Mississippi.”

Marchand told hospital employees in a memo Friday morning, before the county supervisors met and approved a letter of credit for the hospital, that the city had approved “a funding commitment” to support the lease agreement with UMMC.

“With sufficient funding in place to resolve several key challenges, we will be meeting with UMMC’s Executive Leadership to assess the status of our negotiations and the potential for a transaction date in early 2023,” he wrote. 

The hospital said it would make decisions on service cuts and other potential cost-saving measures by next week. 

Though the last scheduled meeting of the IHL board in 2022 is Nov. 17, UMMC could ask the board to hold a special meeting to approve any agreement with Greenwood Leflore. That would allow the board to vote as soon as the agreement is ready, rather than waiting until January. But Patrice Guilfoyle, communications director for the hospital, said there are no plans to do that. 

When Mississippi Today followed up to ask why not, spokesman Marc Rolph said, “We have no comment on that question.”

Collins said he wants to make sure local leaders understand what services UMMC plans to maintain if it does take over Greenwood Leflore. County leaders have a Zoom call scheduled with UMMC next week, he said, the first time they’ll talk directly with the prospective new operator. 

“We welcome UMC,” he said. “We welcome them to come. We just want to make sure that we have an opportunity to sit down and talk with them.”

The letter of credit approved by the county does not specify that UMMC must be the entity that takes over Greenwood Leflore and could be used to support an agreement with any partner.

The post County, city commit $9 million for Greenwood hospital, but cuts still loom appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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The United States Supreme Court is being asked to find unconstitutional Mississippi’s lifetime ban on people convicted of many felonies being able to vote.

“The justices normally take about 1% of the cases they are asked to hear, but I think the odds are higher here,” said Rob McDuff, one of the attorneys who filed the case and director of the Impact Litigation Project at the Mississippi Center for Justice. “This is an important and interesting case.

“And it deals with issues that we are still grappling with in terms of race.”

The nation’s highest court is being asked to overturn the provision of the Mississippi’s constitution that places a lifetime ban on voting in most instances on people convicted of certain felonies — crimes that the framers of the 1890 state constitution said Black Mississippians were more prone to commit.

The framers did not disenfranchise people convicted of murder or rape, for instance, but did strip voting rights of people convicted of several “lesser crimes,” which the writers of the constitution falsely believed would be committed by African Americans.

The provision was one of many placed in the Jim Crow-era state constitution to keep Black people, then a majority in the state, from voting. Those other provisions, such as a poll tax and literacy tests, have been ruled unconstitutional.

But the U.S. 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the felony disenfranchisement provision in a split decision in August. The entire 17-member Court heard the case, and seven judges dissented from the majority opinion.

The majority opinion upholding the lifetime ban was unsigned. Circuit Judge James Graves Jr., who before being appointed to the U.S. 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals was only the third African American to serve on the Mississippi Supreme Court, wrote a blistering dissent, describing in sometimes graphic details Mississippi’s history of racial discrimination.

The office of Attorney Lynn Fitch defended the felony disenfranchisement provision before the federal judges. Even those who uphold the provision conceded that it was added to the constitution with the intent of keeping Black people from voting.

But the majority decision was based, in large part, on the fact that in 1950 the Legislature passed a proposal approved by voters to remove burglary as one of the disfranchising crimes. And in the 1960s, the Legislature and ultimately the voters approved a provision making murder and rape disenfranchising crimes.

Those changes, the majority found, removed the “racial taint” from the original 1890 language. But McDuff pointed out that those changes were made during an era of intense racial conflict and discrimination in the state. Perhaps, more importantly, the changes did not allow Mississippians to vote on whether to remove lifetime bans from voting on people convicted of other felonies.

Or as Graves wrote in his dissent, “Mississippians have simply not been given the chance to right the wrongs of its racist origins. And this court … deprives Mississippians of this opportunity by upholding an unconstitutional law enacted for the purpose of discriminating against Black Mississippians on the basis of race.”

The 5th Circuit is viewed as one of the most conservative federal courts in the nation. McDuff conceded the current makeup of the Supreme Court also is conservative, but he expressed optimism the justices would hear the case.

“Although the Supreme Court has become more conservative in recent years, we hope it will see that the continued implementation of this racist provision is an affront to the promise of the Equal Protection of the Law contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,”  McDuff said.  “This is another step forward in our lengthy legal battle to strike down the racially motivated provision in the Mississippi Constitution, which denies thousands of Mississippians the right to participate in our democracy.”

A decision on whether the Supreme Court will hear the Mississippi case most likely will be made sometime in the first half of 2023.

The Mississippi Center for Justice among other groups brought the lawsuit on behalf of two Black Mississippians who had lost the right to vote: Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, convicted of forgery and embezzlement, respectively.

Mississippi is one of fewer than 10 states where people convicted of felonies do not get their right to vote restored at some point after serving their sentence.

In Mississippi, people with felony convictions must petition the Legislature to get a bill passed by a two-thirds majority of both chambers to regain voting rights. Normally only a handful (less than five) of such bills are successful each session. There is also the option of the governor granting a pardon to restore voting rights, but no governor has granted pardons since Haley Barbour in 2012.

For a subset of those who lose their rights, the courts can expunge their record. In some instances that expungement includes the restoration of voting rights, while for others it does not. That outcome depends on the preference of the judge granting the expungement.

Those crimes placed in the constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary.

Under the original language of the constitution, a person could be convicted of cattle rustling and lose the right to vote, but those convicted of murder or rape would still be able to vote — even while incarcerated.

“Our country’s ideals of equality and freedom are swiftly undermined by Mississippi’s insidious practice of felony disenfranchisement, which is one of voter suppression’s most effective tools,” said Vangela Wade, chief executive officer of the Center for Justice. “Too many Mississippians, particularly people of color, face enormous hurdles to accessing the ballot box. We hope the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down this 132-year-old racist provision in the Mississippi Constitution.” 

Editor’s note: Vangela M. Wade is a member of Mississippi Today’s board of directors.

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