OurTupelo

Seth Petersen was at his grandmother’s funeral, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

Three hours away in the village of Luck, Wisconsin, where he served as director of public works, there was an emergency. Petersen was getting calls repeatedly, asking for his expertise.

Petersen and two other employees were responsible for drinking water, wastewater, street maintenance, park and cemetery maintenance and picking up stray dogs, he said. The job never stopped.

“Seth, what the (expletive) are you doing?” his brother-in-law said to him as he came back to the family gathering from another call. “Why are you living like this?”

Petersen left that job at the end of last year. Now, he helps train water operators in small communities for the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

Luck is not an outlier. In small and rural communities across the U.S., water system operators are stretched thin, covering around-the-clock responsibilities to keep water running safely and reliably despite aging and underfunded infrastructure.

The consequences of a water system falling behind have received the national spotlight, infamously in Flint, Michigan, and most recently in Jackson, Mississippi, where majority-Black communities bore the brunt of mismanagement and aging infrastructure.

Thousands of under-resourced systems risk a similar fate, and small water systems — defined by the EPA as serving fewer than 10,000 people, and making up more than 90% of the nation’s community water systems — are in a particularly precarious position.

Their staffing is often sparse and underpaid. Infrastructure, in many places, is crumbling and underfunded, and though there is a fresh infusion of federal money on the table, it’s a challenge to access.

The American Rescue Plan Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other programs represent a historic investment in the country’s water infrastructure, totaling billions of dollars.

But the total available funding, even after it’s all been doled out, still won’t be enough. One report from 2020 estimated that the U.S. would need to invest nearly $3.3 trillion in water and wastewater infrastructure projects between 2019 and 2039 to keep systems updated.

Many communities will also face increases in their water bills to keep up with infrastructure and staffing needs. Yet raising the price of water may prove unworkable in rural and historically-underinvested communities like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, some of the most impoverished in the country.

No one in the U.S. should have to worry about having safe drinking water, said Chris Groh, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

“But a town doesn’t take care of itself.”

Small community water systems falling behind 

Over the last two decades, water systems in the ten states bordering the Mississippi River violated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for drinking water more than 438,000 times.

That figure includes thousands of instances of heightened levels of harmful chemicals in water each year. Nitrates, trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which have all been linked to various cancers and other health hazards, were top contaminants in the EPA’s violation data in 2022.

Nitrates are an indicator of agricultural runoff, common in rural areas. And trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids appear as byproducts of the water treatment process, when chlorine reacts with organic contents.

Addressing these issues can require expensive treatment technology. But in the last two decades, small and large utilities alike have reined in the number of violations.

However, an Ag and Water Desk analysis of EPA Safe Drinking Water Act violation data nationwide found small water systems have been slower to reduce their violations than larger systems. And these violations only represented those reported; there could be many more incidences of unreported issues.

In the ten states along the Mississippi River, both small and large water systems saw increases in violations newly reported during 2022. For small water systems, that increase was more significant.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley on Thursday said Republican Gov. Tate Reeves should call lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special legislative session to abolish Mississippi’s sales tax on groceries, the highest such tax in the nation.

Presley, north Mississippi’s utility commissioner, believes the 7% tax on food should be eliminated because it’s a harsh policy that forces people on all ends of the economic spectrum to pay extra for a basic necessity like food.

“At a time in which Mississippians are struggling, we know that this cost is hurting folks, and particularly working families who are out there trying to make ends meet and meet that family budget,” Presley said.  

Both of Mississippi’s leading candidates for governor want to reduce state taxes. Reeves continues to advocate for abolishing the state income tax, and Presley wants to eliminate the state’s tax on food and cut fees on car tags in half.

Lawmakers are typically in the capital city for their regular session from early January to April. After lawmakers adjourn their session, they cannot reconvene at any point during the year to pass new laws unless the governor calls them back to Jackson for a special session. 

The state Constitution grants the governor power to set the terms of a special session. Reeves did not respond to a request for comment about Presley’s Thursday comments. Reeves in his first term has only called one special legislative session, to approve $247 million in state incentives for an aluminum mill. 

Lawmakers last year significantly reduced the individual income tax, and once it’s fully implemented, Mississippi will have a flat 4% tax on all earned income over $10,000. But Reeves believes that tax should be gone entirely. 

“I pushed to eliminate our state income tax, and we’ve achieved the largest tax cut in state history,” Reeves said in Gulfport earlier this month. “And we can do more because this is Mississippi’s time.”  

The Republican candidate’s campaign, however, has said Reeves would be open to any type of tax cut the Legislature passes, including reducing the grocery tax. 

But Presley said that the governor’s willingness wasn’t enough and excoriated him for not openly advocating on abolishing the tax.

“Where have you been for 12 years?” Presley asked. “Have you been that busy at fundraisers that you didn’t know that people wanted their grocery tax eliminated?” 

The different tax cut policies come at a time when Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into law in the state that lowers its grocery tax from 4% to 3%. The legislation calls for the tax to decrease even further if specific growth metrics are met to offset the tax reduction, according to the Associated Press. 

Both tax cut plans from Reeves and Presley would reduce the amount of revenue the state collects each year. 

The state’s income tax accounts for over $2.4 billion in the general fund, roughly one-third of its total general budget. 

Reeves has said in previous remarks that if the income tax were abolished, the increase in economic investment and consumer spending would make up for the decrease in income tax collections.

It’s unclear how much money Mississippi collects from the grocery tax because the Mississippi Department of Revenue, the state’s tax collection agency, doesn’t precisely track that data. 

A spokesperson for the department previously told Mississippi Today there were over $6 billion in grocery sales during the past fiscal year, which they estimated to have generated around $424.8 million in taxes. Of that amount, over $305 million is believed to have gone to the state’s general fund. 

Presley did not substantively answer questions about how state government would make up the difference if the grocery tax were eliminated but believed state leaders could find necessary funds to plug the shortfall if they determined that tax cut was a legislative priority.

The post Democrat Presley urges Gov. Reeves to call special session on cutting grocery tax  appeared first on Mississippi Today.

We may be a friendly place for the unborn, but good luck if you are born.

The post Marshall Ramsey: 50th appeared first on Mississippi Today.

FLOWOOD — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley last week told reporters that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves can save his “hot air for somebody else” after Reeves insinuated the Democratic candidate was dodging questions about crime and law enforcement.

The remarks came after Reeves at the Mississippi Press Association’s annual conference on Friday said reporters have not asked Presley questions about a newly passed law that creates a new court system in the capital city of Jackson. 

“I sure think it’s a good thing to have more people working toward public safety in our state capital,” Reeves said to reporters. “But a lot of Democrats in the Capitol opposed it passionately. My opponent is just hoping that you won’t ask him the question.” 

Presley hammered back that Reeves shouldn’t cast doubts about Presley’s history of backing law enforcement officers, given that a suspected criminal killed the Democratic candidate’s uncle, Harold Ray Presley, while he was serving as sheriff of Lee County in north Mississippi. 

“I’ve got the badge he was wearing, I’ve got the gun that was on his hip and the flag that was draped over his coffin,” Brandon Presley said of his uncle. “So I don’t want to hear Tate Reeves open his mouth to me in this campaign about backing law enforcement because he’s never stood where I’ve stood.”

Harold Ray Presley served as Lee County’s sheriff from 1993 to 2001, and his life was cut short when the county officer participated in a manhunt for a suspected kidnapper. The suspect burst out of a building and shot the sheriff multiple times.

The remarks from the two leading candidates for governor were centered on questions about House Bill 1020, which creates a new court district within the majority-Black capital city of Jackson with judges who white officials would appoint.

Conservative legislators and Reeves said the law is meant to curtail crime in Jackson, but Democratic lawmakers, many of whom are Black, believe the legislation strips power away from one of the Blackest cities in the nation. Reeves supported the legislation and signed it into law.

“When you take away the right of people to elect their officials who have traditionally been elected, how else are they going to see it?” longtime Democratic Rep. Ed Blackmon of Canton said earlier this year. 

Presley said he was against the intent of House Bill 1020 because it usurps the authority of local officials and prevents Hinds County voters from electing their own judges like nearly all other types of judges throughout the state.  

“I was a small-town mayor,” Presley said on Friday. “I wouldn’t want the state Legislature coming to tell me how to run my police department. Simple. I do not agree with unelected judges.” 

READ MORE: Mississippi’s racial divides were on full display as HB 1020 got its final debate and passing vote

Federal courts have blocked the law from going into effect pending litigation. U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate issued an order last month barring state officials from appointing temporary judges in the new court district, and attorneys for the NAACP have filed a motion asking the judge for an injunction to block the entire law from going into effect on July 1. Attorneys for the state oppose the request.

But the legislation has still sparked questions during the campaign cycle about crime, race and voting rights. 

Presley, the current utility regulator in north Mississippi, told reporters that if he were elected governor, he would work to find a solution that legislative leaders and local officials can agree on instead of dragging litigation out in court. 

“As governor, I want the ego to go out the window,” Presley said. “Out the window because the future of the city of Jackson is important to the citizens in all other 81 counties in this state. Call me naive if you want to; I still believe an attempt at personal relationships in politics matters.”

The post ‘He’s never stood where I’ve stood’: Brandon Presley and Tate Reeves trade blows over police, public safety appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Editor’s Note: This story includes a graphic photo of Damien Cameron in the hospital before his death.

Two years after a Rankin County man died at the hands of sheriff’s deputies, family and community members are frustrated by a lack of accountability and answers. 

On July 26, 2021, Monica Lee witnessed her son, Damien Montrell Cameron, die on the front lawn of her Braxton home after two deputies allegedly chased, beat and tased him and knelt on his neck. The deputies said they were responding to a vandalism call reported by a neighbor who accused Cameron, according to an incident report obtained by Insider.  

“That was my child and I feel like I deserve justice for him,” Lee said during a Thursday morning press conference in Jackson. 

She said the deputies, Hunter Elward and Luke Stickman, have not been held liable for their use of force, which is a reason why she is calling for a renewed focus on her son’s case and demands to ensure justice. 

The family wants all officers involved in Cameron’s death to be charged, including Elward, Stickman and Sheriff Bryan Bailey, and for a criminal investigation to take place. 

The district attorney and attorney general’s offices did not find evidence to prosecute the deputies, the family says, and last year a grand jury declined to indict the deputies. 

Cameron’s family continues to ask for information such as the original police report and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation’s investigation report, dashcam footage and coroner and autopsy reports. 

Not having these critical pieces of information make it difficult for the family to understand what happened to Cameron, to build a case and fight for justice, said Chloë Cheyenne, CEO of COMMUNITYx, which is working with the Cameron family. 

Representatives from the Rankin sheriff’s department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Because the family says there has been no accountability at the local or state level, they are appealing to President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland and are asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the sheriff’s department for civil rights violations. 

These demands come as Cameron’s case has been mentioned alongside recent allegations of misconduct by Rankin sheriff’s deputies. 

A $400 million lawsuit was filed last week on behalf of two men allegedly beaten and tortured by deputies, showing a pattern of excessive force against Black men. The lawsuit cites Cameron’s death as part of that pattern. Elward is also named as one of the deputies that participated in the alleged misconduct against the two men. 

Cameron’s family is working with COMMUNITYx, an online activism tool, and has a website to raise awareness, share information and give people a way to show support through signing a petition or donating to a fundraiser. 

“Everyone in this room clearly understands that this (excessive force by police) is a systemic issue across the country and it’s a deeply-rooted issue clearly here in Rankin County,” Cheyenne said. 

The post He died from injuries sustained during his 2021 arrest. Family wants Rankin County deputies held accountable. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

During a wide-ranging discussion of the next steps for Jackson’s water system in federal court Wednesday, the attention zeroed in on a document familiar to many Jacksonians.

Since 2016, after Jackson failed to meet federal standards for lead in drinking water, the city has sent out regular notices to residents warning them of potential contamination.

“Our water system violated a drinking water standard and a drinking water requirement,” the notice starts. “Although this is not an emergency, as our customers, you have a right to know what happened, what you should do, and what we are doing to correct this situation.”

The letter specifically warns pregnant women and children 5 and younger to take extra precautions — including running cold water for a minute before use, and not using unfiltered tap water for baby formula — because of potential lead contamination.

During Wednesday’s status conference updating Judge Henry Wingate on the ongoing rebuild of the water system, federally appointed third-party manager Ted Henifin argued that the notices are unnecessary, especially because the city hasn’t shown lead levels above the federal action level since 2015.

The Mississippi State Health Department, in enforcing the federal rules, requires the city to send out the notices until it completes a “corrosion control plan,” which would help ensure lead doesn’t leach off of old pipes into the drinking water. The latest notice says the city’s plan will be operational by August.

Both Henifin and Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba have questioned the impact of the notices on residents and their willingness to drink from the taps, given the decades of instability from the water system.

Last week, while unveiling $100,000 worth of water filters donated to the city by United Healthcare, Lumumba said the filters may help restore confidence in the system lost because of the lead notices. Local advocates have called for the government to provide filters out of concern for residents living in older homes, where there’s a higher likelihood of lead being in the home’s plumbing.

But Henifin, as he told the court Wednesday, took issue with Lumumba’s wording, arguing it could cause residents to think the water is dangerous to drink. Henifin repeatedly said that the water is safe for everyone, including pregnant mothers and young children. If anything, he said, the filters could make the water less safe if residents don’t change the filters out every four months, which could cause bacteria to build up.

His statement contradicted advice that Health Department has given Jacksonians for years. The agency’s website says: “Any child five years of age or younger and any pregnant woman should use filtered water (NSF53 certified filter) or bottled water for drinking and cooking.”

Lumumba, defending himself, pointed to other comments he made at last week’s event, when he said, “It hasn’t been demonstrated that the water is in fact dangerous.” The mayor made the clarification after a local doctor, John Patterson, said unfiltered water could be dangerous for those vulnerable populations. During questioning from Wingate, Lumumba said it’s his personal belief that the water is safe to drink.

Wingate called Wednesday’s conference to clear up the public messaging around the city’s water system. He said it’s not only the court’s duty to help repair the water system, but also to “instill confidence in the public” that the water is safe to drink.

When called upon by Wingate, an attorney representing Health Department said that the agency requires the notices to comply with federal standards, and that the notices are only meant to provide information to residents.

Both the Health Department and the City of Jackson are defendants in an ongoing lawsuit alleging a coverup of the city’s lead contamination dating back to 2013.

The post At Jackson water update, Henifin pushes back on state health guidelines appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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

Recent storms and resulting power outages prompted a mini-vacation of sorts to New Orleans, not that I need a good excuse to head that way.

My Sunday morning walk took me by Tulane’s Yulman Stadium, where Southern Miss somehow beat the suddenly mighty Green Wave last season and where the Ole Miss Rebels will play Tulane on Sept. 9 at 2:30 p.m.

Trust me on this: You will not need a sweater or sleeves of any sort that afternoon. I suppose there could be a hotter, more humid place on earth than New Orleans currently, although I cannot imagine it.

My sun-broiled walk took me down Willow Street right by where grand, old Tulane Stadium used to stand in all its rusting glory. Yulman Stadium, a neat, modern 30,000-seat facility sits in what would be the afternoon shadow of the old Tulane Stadium, which hosted 38 Sugar Bowls and three of the first nine Super Bowls. Some of my grandest football memories took place in that old, iron and steel monstrosity which literally shook every time the New Orleans Saints scored a touchdown — which, come to think of it, never seemed quite often enough.

Please bear with me, a few memories:

• This was Sept. 17, 1967. I was 14, brother Bobby was 13. Our dad surprised us that Sunday morning in Hattiesburg when he loaded us up in that blue Dodge Monaco and told us we were going to watch the brand new New Orleans professional football team, the Saints, play the Los Angeles Rams. The traffic was awful, and we parked all the way across Claiborne Avenue. We had no tickets, so Dad scalped three as we neared the stadium. Turns out, we were in the north end zone. Turns out, that was the place to be. Funny, my second most vivid memory of that day is of the beer vendors, with kegs on their backs trudging up and down those stadium steps, hawking draught beer and sweating through every fiber of their clothing. I don’t know how much they were paid, but I know it wasn’t enough. Unlike those hapless Saints, they earned their keep. Older readers probably have already guessed my more vivid memory of that day. The Rams kicked the opening kickoff away from the end zone where we sat. Far in the distance, rookie running back John Gilliam caught the ball at his own six-yard line and headed toward us. And he just kept coming and coming, growing larger and larger. When the wide-eyed Gilliam crossed the goal line for the first touchdown on the first play in Saints history, we could see his jaws trembling from the effort. Boy, we thought, this is going to be easy. Boy, it turns out, it was anything but…
• This was Sept. 19, 1971. By then, I was writing sports for my hometown newspaper, and the Saints were opening their fifth season, again against the Los Angeles Rams. Despite four years of abject failure, there was new enthusiasm. The Saints had a new quarterback, a redhead from Mississippi named Elisha Archibald Manning III, Archie. Trouble was, the Saints still lacked competent people to block for him. The Rams of that vintage featured a defensive line of man-eaters known as The Fearsome Foursome, led by Merlin Olsen and Deacon Jones. I remember thinking they might literally kill the rookie quarterback. But Archie scrambled away from them enough to keep the Saints in the game. The Saints, down 20-17, were driving toward the north end zone with seconds to play. With the time for one play and the ball on the one-yard line, they called timeout. Archie went to the sidelines to talk to Saints coach J.D. Roberts. They talked at length until the referee came over to break it up. Years later, Archie would tell me he never got a play call from Roberts. So he went back to the huddle and called what he figured John Vaught would have called at Ole Miss. Archie kept the ball around the left end and barely scored the winning touchdown before getting hammered one last time by the Rams.
• I have saved the best for last. This was Nov. 8, 1970. The Saints were suffering through another miserable season. They had just fired their first head coach, Tom Fears, and hired Roberts away from a semi-pro team in Virginia. Nobody else from my newspaper even wanted to go that day, so I took one for the team. My daddy, perhaps feeling sorry for his oldest, rode shotgun. It was a humid, gray day. The Detroit Lions, led by the great defensive tackle Alex Karras, were the opponent. It was a forgettable game until the ending. The Lions, a much superior team, seemed barely interested. The Saints somehow stayed in the game, until, again, there was time for just one play, the Lions holding a 17-16 lead. The Saints had the ball at their own 44. Remember, this was back when the goal posts were on the goal line. Roberts sent out the Saints placekicker, Tom Dempsey, who was far wider at his equator than any other part of his body. More to the point, he had half of a right foot. He was going to try a 63-yard field goal. Dad and I laughed. We were not alone. A couple nights later, Karras would tell Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show that he was laughing too hard to rush the kick. The ball was placed down at the Saints’ 37-yard line, which seemed like it might as well have been 50 miles away in Thibodeaux. But Dempsey swung his thick right leg and the ball exploded toward the goal posts 189 feet away. It crossed about a foot over the cross bar. At first, there was a split second of silence while people tried to comprehend what had just happened. And then grand old Tulane Stadium exploded. I remember people dancing down Willow Street. I remember people hugging strangers. I remember Dad saying, “Son, we can go on back to Hattiesburg or we can head to the Quarter. There’s gonna be a party.” We chose the latter. Of course we did.

So I thought about all that and more on my Sunday walk down Willow Street. I thought about 80,000 people stomping and screaming and holding up a game for 19 minutes because they disagreed with the officials. I thought about beer-bellied Billy Kilmer, a perfectly competent quarterback, getting booed unmercifully while he took his weekly beatings with the Saints. I thought about Kansas City taking apart Minnesota in Super Bowl IV with dapper Hank Stram striding up and down the sidelines. (Joe DiMaggio sat one row in front of us that day and my mama never took her eyes off him.)

I thought about how Tulane Stadium was condemned on the same day the Louisiana Superdome opened in 1975. And I remembered how, four years later, workers took it down, section by section, selling all that metal for scrap.

Gone, but never forgotten.

The post A walk down Willow Street, and memories of old Tulane Stadium appeared first on Mississippi Today.

On Wednesday Georgianna McKenny finally got to share a secret she’d been keeping for weeks: she beat out more than 3,300 students across the country in a national podcast competition. 

The 17-year-old is the winner of National Public Radio Student Podcast Challenge, which gives students a chance to have their work featured on the daily national broadcast. Her episode exploring the impact of the Jackson water crisis on students was created in her University Composition class at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, a public boarding school located in Columbus. Her teacher, Thomas Easterling, created the project three years ago in an effort to revamp his coursework after the pandemic. 

“It forces them to get out of the classroom and it forces them to see how scholarship and citizenship really are tied,” Easterling said. 

The project begins with an essay at the beginning of the year where students describe a place that’s important to them, followed by a research paper, usually about a topic related to their home community, that provides the basis for the podcast episode. 

McKenny said her initial essay focused on her hometown of Crystal Springs but she ended up writing about the water crisis the more she researched the topic and talked to her family in Jackson. 

The drinking water system in Jackson — Mississippi’s largest city and home to more than 150,000 residents — has struggled with reliable water pressure for years. The city’s water system was on the brink of failure in late August 2023, leaving thousands of capital city residents with low or no water pressure and little information about when service would be restored. The governor declared a state of emergency which was not lifted until late November. The entire city was under a boil water notice for weeks.

The episode begins with McKenny describing the experience of her cousin waking up each morning and checking the tap to see if there was water. Her interviews with her cousin and friends provided the student context for the episode. Easterling connected her with a current Jackson Public Schools teacher who was able to put her in touch with an administrator who spoke anonymously in the episode. 

“Some of the stuff they would tell me, I was surprised,” she said. “Maybe it didn’t go exactly with my research, or it was just something I never thought about altogether.”

McKenny said she was interested to learn that some schools would combine when a campus had to close due to lack of water pressure, because she assumed the students just wouldn’t go to school that day. Her podcast explores the challenges that came with navigating school during this time, including the confusion of teachers and students outside their normal environments and the impact on lunch preparations.  

While the project is usually split into a scriptwriter and a producer, McKenny served as both for her project, something she said she enjoyed because it allowed her to fully realize her vision for the project. She said she particularly liked the process of audio editing, but didn’t like having to listen to the sound of her own voice.

“Sometimes I would talk too fast or too slow, that was frustrating to listen to it back again and again,” she said. 

The competition received over 3,300 entries at the middle and high school levels. Judges praised the creative introduction and personal connection in McKenny’s episode. 

McKenny said it feels “amazing” to have won, and encouraged others to pursue telling stories they are interested in. 

“If anyone is considering making a podcast, writing an article, or just publishing something, they should do it no matter how many people it impacts,” she said. “If they’re passionate about it, there’s going to be someone who wants to listen.” 

The post MSMS student wins NPR podcast competition for her reporting on Jackson water crisis appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Power Up appeared first on Mississippi Today.