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Tens of thousands of residents in south and northwest Jackson woke up without running water Christmas morning after several days of sub-freezing temperatures burst water lines and strained the capital city’s main water plant.

Leaders announced late Christmas morning that crews were searching for multiple water line breaks but had not yet identified them all. The water pressure could be remain low or zero, they said, until more breaks were identified and repaired. They gave no timeline for this work.

Officials on Sunday also implemented a citywide boil water notice.

“We understand the timing is terrible,” the city said in a press release on Christmas morning. “Please hate that we hate to issue the notice during the Christmas holiday.”

FULL COVERAGE: Jackson water crisis

Management of the aged, crumbling Jackson water system was taken over by the federal government in late November after the system collapsed in late August. The current Jackson water woes come after decades of deferred maintenance, gutted funding from the federal and state levels, and an exodus of taxpaying residents and businesses in the city.

The current crisis is most directly attributed to problems at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility, which provides running water to a majority of the city’s residents. Late Saturday night, crews slowed production at the plant in order to identify many of the leaks that are causing the loss in system pressure.

The city’s residents, forced for generations to struggle through water outages and boil water notices, got good news last week. Congress, in their stopgap budget measure, appropriated $600 million to the city for water system repairs. Those needed repairs, overseen at least in the short-term by the federal government, could take years.

READ MORE: Why Jackson’s water system is broken

The post Thousands in Jackson lose running water on Christmas after freezing temps strain system appeared first on Mississippi Today.

For the first time in more than 68 years, the statue of Theodore Bilbo will not be in the Mississippi Capitol when the Legislature convenes its 2023 session on Jan. 3.

The bronze statue of the diminutive demagogue who ran for and won two elections for governor and three for U.S. senator by spewing racial rhetoric and opposing anti-lynching laws has been banished from the Mississippi Capitol.

Some believe the monuments of two other racist figures from Mississippi’s past should be the next to be removed — but not from the state Capitol, but from the U.S. Capitol.

Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, the Mississippi Senate minority leader, has requested legislation to be drafted that he will author in the upcoming 2023 session to remove the statues of Jefferson Davis and James Zachariah George from the U.S. Capitol. Davis, of course, was president of the Confederacy. The lesser known George was one of the architects of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution that was a blueprint for other Southern states to follow on how to discriminate against African Americans and prevent them from voting.

While George and Davis represent Mississippi in the U.S. Capitol, interestingly neither are native Mississippians. They were selected by the Mississippi Legislature in 1924 to represent the state in the nation’s Capitol.

Each state is allowed to select two monuments to be displayed in the U.S. Capitol. Mississippi is the only state where both of its statues, supposedly representing its people and its beliefs, are so directly linked to a racist past and the Confederacy.

The mothballing of the supposedly life-size bronze statue of Bilbo continues a trend that Simmons hopes to continue with the removal of Davis and George. The trend began in 2020 when the Mississippi Legislature surprised onlookers by voting to retire and replace the state flag that incorporated prominently in its design the Confederate battle emblem.

Legislators did not vote to remove Bilbo, but in a sense acquiesced in the mothballing. In late 2021, House Clerk Andrew Ketchings, who was elected by House members to oversee the day-to-day operations of the chamber, took it upon himself to quietly remove the statue from a key House Committee room where it has been exhibited since the early 1980s.

“Because of everything he stood for, I think this should have been done years ago,” Ketchings said in February 2022.  “It was way past time to do it.”

The Mississippi Legislature passed a resolution in 1948 soon after Bilbo’s death to place a statue of him “in a prominent place on the first floor of the new Capitol building.”

PHOTOS: Segregationist’s statue leaves Capitol for Two Museums’ basement

The statue was unveiled in April 1954, according to newspaper accounts. In the early 1980s then-Gov. William Winter had the sculpture removed from the 1st floor rotunda to what was then a little-used room in the Capitol. But in more recent years the room — 113 — has been used for House committee meetings, including by the Legislative Black Caucus. Members would use the outstretched arm of Bilbo as a coat rack.

Ketchings hid the statue, estimated to weigh about 2,000 pounds, in a Capitol storage room. It was recently moved to storage underneath the Two Mississippi Museums. Archives and History Executive Director Katie Blount said recently there is no plan to exhibit the Bilbo statue.

Simmons said he is filing legislation to remove the monuments from the U.S. Capitol because “we should continue the progress we made in 2020 when we replaced the state flag by removing symbols that divide us.”

Federal guidelines give the authority to each state Legislature to determine the statues to be exhibited in the U.S. Capitol.

In 2021, an effort was made to pass federal legislation to remove the two Mississippi monuments from the U.S. Capitol. All members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation opposed the federal legislation except 2^nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s lone Democrat and only African American member of Congress.

Thompson said he voted for the legislation because “statues of those who served in the Confederacy or supported slavery or segregation should not have a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol.”

Mississippi’s Republican members of Congress said they believe it should be up to states to decide the monuments representing them in the U.S. Capitol.

Simmons said he intends to give Mississippians, through their elected representatives, an opportunity to vote on the removal of the two statues.

Simmons said his legislation would reassemble the board that was put in place in 2020 to lead the effort to select a new flag for the state and give it the responsibility for selecting who would represent Mississippi in the U.S. Capitol.

If Simmons is successful, perhaps Bilbo would have company from Jefferson Davis and J.Z. George in the bowels of the Two Mississippi Museums.

The post Could Jefferson Davis, J.Z. George follow Bilbo to storage? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As a kid, Peter Kelly says he dreamed of becoming an astronaut. As fate would have it, the explorer in his heart chose another frontier for him, as a diver.

Or, if you will, an aquanaut.

Thanks to a scuba diving class offered at Ole Miss, Kelly thought it sounded like fun. He signed up for the course and discovered he loved it.

“The majority of our planet is water. I love diving because it’s my ticket to experience our world fully,” said Kelly. “Being able to engage in a completely foreign environment and be totally outside of my element gives me the opportunity to see what others only dream of,” he mused.

Currently, Kelly is an “enriched air nitrox diver” working toward his dive guide certification. He’s also one of the divers who hand feed a variety of aquatic life on display in aquariums at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science in Jackson.

“Working with the museum has given me the opportunity to support their incredible efforts to educate and create stewards for Mississippi wildlife,” says Kelly. “Plus, museum staff is incredible, and getting to help inspire kids through interpretive diving is such a cool way to promote the protection of wildlife and ecosystems.”

The post Photo essay: How one diver hand feeds fish at Jackson’s natural science museum appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Two thousand fewer students are enrolled in Mississippi public education than last school year, according to data from the Mississippi Department of Education. 

This change is smaller than the pre-pandemic annual change, where the state was losing about 5,500 students each year. However, between the 2019-20 and the 2020-21 school years, the state lost over 23,000 students, which education officials attributed to the pandemic. Enrollment numbers have not rebounded since that significant decline. 

National data for this fall is not available yet, but previous national data showed stagnation between the fall of 2020 and 2021. The fall of 2021 did show increased enrollment in pre-K and kindergarten nationally over the prior year, but not enough to overcome the significant declines seen at the start of the pandemic. 

A similar trend can be seen in Mississippi, where kindergarten and first-grade enrollment have improved, but not to their pre-pandemic levels. 

In terms of demographics, the numbers haven’t changed much over the last four years. 47% of students are Black, 5% are Hispanic, and 43% are white. In terms of gender, it is nearly evenly split, as 49% of students are female and 51% are male. 

The post Charts: See Mississippi’s K-12 enrollment trends since the pandemic started appeared first on Mississippi Today.

ProPublica has selected Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today’s community health reporter, as a Local Reporting Network fellow for 2023. Taft will spend the next year in collaboration with the award-winning, nonprofit investigative newsroom on a special project.

She will begin her investigative project on Jan. 3.

While at Mississippi Today, Taft has covered abortion, maternal and infant health, mental health and the operations of the state Division of Medicaid. She previously reported on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at the Biloxi Sun Herald, where she won the 2020 Bill Minor Prize for Investigative Journalism from the Mississippi Press Association.

Taft and Mississippi Today will join four other partner newsrooms and local journalists from New Mexico, Louisiana and Mississippi in the network next year.

“Isabelle is an incredibly talented, passionate and hard-working reporter who has worked in the state for several years,” said Community Health Editor Kate Royals. “We at Mississippi Today are thrilled to partner with ProPublica on Isabelle’s important and impactful project, and we are looking forward to a year of close collaboration with one of the best newsrooms in the nation.”

ProPublica launched the Local Reporting Network at the beginning of 2018 to boost investigative journalism in local newsrooms. It has since worked with nearly 60 news organizations. The network is part of ProPublica’s local initiative, which includes offices in the Midwest, South and Southwest, plus an investigative unit in partnership with The Texas Tribune.

The post ProPublica selects Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today as Local Reporting Network partner appeared first on Mississippi Today.

BILOXI — Geneva Dummer’s vision is a decade in the making. The Gulf Coast entrepreneur realized what her business community needed before they did.

By 2016, Dummer was one of Mississippi’s earliest leaders in flexible workspaces, virtual offices and co-working when she opened The Meeting Space in Biloxi. Four years later, the pandemic upended work habits across the country, making work-from-home more acceptable and got even the most traditional corporate leaders seeing the benefits of less traditional office setups. 

Dummer’s business helped fill in the blanks — and is growing fast with a second recently opened space in downtown Biloxi and a third soon to open in Gulfport. 

“Mississippi has co-working spaces and the demand is there,” Drummer said, “we’re still behind, but growing.” 

Mississippi’s flexible offices and co-working spaces — turnkey commercial offices and desks for independent remote workers, businesses and startups — are mainly clustered on the coast and near Jackson with a couple scattered in Oxford and Tupelo. They may not be as popular as they are in other states and bigger cities, but those creating the office spaces see an increasing demand.

“I think people are realizing work-from-home is great but work-from-home presents its own challenges and does not solve every problem,” said Adam Horlock, the center manager at Office Evolution in Flowood near Jackson. “Businesses are realizing: ‘We do not need a large lease or a large space somewhere, but we need something.’” 

The nation’s number of remote workers tripled to nearly 18% between 2019 and 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s community survey. Meanwhile, 6.3% of Mississippians work from home, according to the same set of data. It may be lower than the national average, but it’s still about three times more than what it was in 2016. 

Dummer and Horlock see remote workers who want an office to go to a couple times a week or few times a month and small businesses that need designated workspaces for employees without the headaches of renting a massive office space. 

Startups and small companies, especially for the state’s fledgling medical cannabis business, have gone to the flexible office spaces. There’s marketing firms that have workers who spend most the week at home but need a conference room for scheduled meetings a few times a month. There’s the independent behavior therapist who meets with patients for sessions in a private one-desk office and an accountant that needs a rented desk to get some quiet while the kids are home from school. 

“I knew I wanted office space,” said one of The Meeting Space’s members, Burl Barbour, from a private suite.  “I knew I wouldn’t be disciplined enough if I stayed home.” 

Barbour and his wife recently moved to Mississippi after years nearby in Mobile. Rather than leave his job working as a project manager for an Alabama-based commercial door company, he became a remote worker in Biloxi.

Before the move, he hadn’t heard of co-working spaces. Now, he’s a fan of his “own little world” at the shared office — just a 15-minute drive from his home. 

Dummer said the expansion of co-working spaces as an integral part of growing Mississippi’s economy. Folks need spaces to network, a hub to innovate with one another, and access affordable services without multi-year lease commitments. She seeks out downtown real estate, taking advantage of a metro area’s walkability.

Dummer said most often she’ll get a remote worker for about three months — maybe they just moved to the area and are still setting up their at-home office. Some opt for the open co-working spaces, where folks mingle and work, while other, like Barbour’s company, pay up for private offices.

Nearby in Jackson County, economic development leaders have isolated attracting more remote workers to the Gulf Coast as a way to diversify the region’s economy and attract wealthier people to the state. They’re now planning ways to market the county as a destination for remote workers not tied to any one location but want to see their salary go farther. 

“We have got five generations of people right now currently in our workforce,” said Mary Martha Henson, deputy director of the Jackson County Economic Development Foundation. “This remote working concept was already going on before COVID, but then in a COVID environment and a post-COVID environment, more people are in a situation where they can live where they want to and still be a productive employee.” 

While the county advertises Mississippi’s affordability compared to other coastal cities that are well-established destination cities, they still need to have the features millennials seek out — things that allow them to live, work and play in the same area.

“Some of the younger generation really care about quality of life features,” Henson said. “If we want to remain competitive, we really have to think about these things.” 

Among the hip coffee places, restaurants and local shops, co-working offices are keeping up  with the tastes of the millennial and up-and-coming Gen Z workforces. 

“We’re filling a need that traditional office spaces just can’t fill,” Horlock said. “We’re flexible, turnkey and the cost is low. We provide everything – even free Starbucks. Bring your laptop and you can usually set up that same day.” 

Dummer’s two Biloxi locations are a short walk from one another on Water Street and Howard Avenue, where parts of the historic downtown are closed off to cars. 

She’s seen other co-working spaces in the area fail — one tried making use of vacant spaces in a shopping mall. The location, she said, wasn’t ideal for a lot of young workers who want to feel connected to their communities and in hubs of activity.

She said for those seeking to start a coworking space of their own, the margins are hard to make work if the business operator doesn’t own their real estate outright. 

Her new location in Gulfport is on the edge of downtown, but she was able to partner with Omni Technologies – an IT support company – that will be a member of the new space. 

Nearby in Waveland, WorkWise’s primary business is providing administrative services and support to small businesses. But rather than let part of its office space sit vacant, the company offers private offices and coworking spaces similar to Drummer’s. 

Dummer wants to see flexible offices and coworking spaces spread across the state.  She has fielded calls from out-of-state companies seeking locations similar to hers for their remote employees in parts of the state where the options aren’t available — like Columbus and Natchez.

She has expansion on her mind, but one location at a time. After Gulfport is up and running, she may turn her attention to Hattiesburg.

The post Mississippi isn’t known for remote workers, but local entrepreneurs say demand is growing appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The gap between pay for faculty and staff and the salaries of college presidents in Mississippi is widening, according to data analyzed by Mississippi Today. 

While the average faculty and staff member at the state’s eight public universities have barely seen their pay, in nominal dollars, increase since the 2012-13 school year, the average salary for presidents has shot up by more than $150,000.

Several factors are driving this trend: In Mississippi, private university foundations supplement presidential pay, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, while faculty and staff salaries are generally more dependent on legislative appropriations. As the state funding for the Institutions of Higher Learning has not recovered from the Great Recession, pay for faculty and staff has struggled to keep pace with inflation. 

The respective presidents of University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University now make $850,000 a year, $400,000 of which comes from the schools’ private foundations. That’s about double the supplemental salary the presidents in 2008 received, according to records Mississippi Today obtained last year. According to that same data, USM’s Foundation paid its president $125,000 in 2008; it now pays recently appointed Joe Paul $200,000.

Foundation supplements used to comprise a significant chunk of presidential salaries at Mississippi's other public universities, too, but this year, IHL limited the additional amount that presidents at four out of the five schools can receive in foundation supplements to $5,000. 

The Board of Trustees increased the state-funded salary for all five presidents in this group, who had previously been making varying amounts, to $300,000. 

If the average faculty salary in Mississippi in 2012 – $58,896 – had increased with inflation, it would have been about $66,300 in 2020, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, about $475 more than the average faculty actually made, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). 

That shows the raises IHL has procured for faculty since 2012 — including this past year —don’t result in more money in pockets on average or even keep pace with buying power. 

For staff, the average salary in Mississippi – $47,612 – is actually a little more than $1,000 over the inflation-adjusted salary for 2012 ($46,234.89).

This analysis does not take into account variations in occupation or seniority among staff or faculty tenure status, both of which can contribute to vast differences in salaries. At the University of Mississippi, the average tenured professor made far more than the average salary – about $115,000 during the 2020-21 school year, according to IPEDS. (The salary data from IPEDS includes the University of Mississippi Medical Center.)

Through a public records request last year, Mississippi Today obtained salary data for the presidents at all eight public universities going back to 2008. We've updated that data to include the raises that IHL granted this year in the searchable table below.

The post Data: Salaries for Mississippi college presidents ballooned as pay for faculty, staff barely kept pace with inflation appeared first on Mississippi Today.

With extremely cold temperatures expected to hit this week, the City of Jackson is working with community organizations and the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department to provide shelter for those in need.

The city’s Office of Housing and Community Development is partnering with Stewpot Community Services, Central Mississippi Continuum of Care, the Sheriff’s Department, Shower Power and Mississippi Housing Partnership to provide emergency responses.

The National Weather Service is forecasting very cold weather Thursday night through Saturday night for the metro Jackson area with low temperature in the single digits and highs near or below freezing for much of the area Friday and Saturday. Strong and gusty winds will likely result in wind chill readings below zero, especially from late Thursday night through Friday.

The Shephard’s Gymnasium at 1355 Hattiesburg St. in Jackson will serve as a temporary shelter from 3 p.m. Thursday through Tuesday. The city says it will be open 24 hours a day and be properly staffed and monitored. Cots and blankets will be provided with at least two meals a day. Pets will not be admitted. 

A limited number of hotel rooms also are available for families and elderly individuals in need of warm shelter during these days. For more information, contact Freddric Brandon, homeless coordinator for the city. 

The following overnight shelters will also remain open for residents:

• Billy Brumfield Emergency Shelter for Men, 1244 S. Gallatin St. 
• Matt’s House Emergency Shelter for Women & Women with Children, 355 Livingston St.
• The Opportunity Center, 845 W. Amite St. (Open 24 hours Thursday to Tuesday)
• Gateway Rescue Mission, 410 S. Gallatin St. (Open all day Friday and Saturday in addition to normal hours) 
• Salvation Army, 570 Beasley Rd.
• Mississippi Housing Partnership, 1217 N. West St. 
• REACH Jackson
• Anyone in need of warm shelter should call Stewpot at 601-353-2759 for assessment and referral, or email info@stewpot.org. 

Those who would like to help their neighbors in need over the next few days, here is a list of needed items:  

• Blankets
• Sleeping bags
• Jackets/coats
• Long Johns
• Handwarmers
• Socks
• Gloves
• Hats
• Lip balm
• T-shirts for layering 

Volunteers also bring donations to the Stewpot office (open until Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.), the Stewpot Community Kitchen (open from noon to 1 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1-2 p.m. on Sundays), or to another organization that serves people experiencing homelessness.

The post Jackson readies shelters ahead of extreme cold temperatures appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi State Department of Health has joined an investigation into a multistate outbreak of a contagious virus linked to raw oysters from Texas. 

So far, at least nine cases of norovirus have been reported in the state linked to raw oysters distributed to Mississippi restaurants. The Health Department says additional cases may be identified. 

The department says restaurants and food retailers should not serve raw oysters from harvest area TX 1, Galveston Bay, Texas, harvested from Nov. 17 to Dec. 7, and consumers should not eat raw oysters from these areas. The oysters were distributed to restaurants and retailers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas in addition to Mississippi.  Packaged oysters include harvest area information on the packaging.

Consumers who have purchased oysters from these areas are advised to throw them away. 

Norovirus infection can cause inflammation of the stomach and intestines. The most common symptoms are diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and stomach pain. Consumers experiencing symptoms of norovirus illness should contact their healthcare provider, who should report their symptoms to their local Health Department.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus can spread quickly and a person who gets norovirus illness can shed billions of the virus’ particles that can’t be seen. It takes only a few norovirus particles to make others sick. An infected person is most contagious when exhibiting symptoms, especially vomiting, and during the first few days after recovering, according to the CDC.

The post Raw oysters harvested in Texas linked to multistate virus outbreak appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann wants to send taxpayers rebate checks up to $500, increase education spending and push year-’round schooling and pre-K, and find fixes for the state’s health care crisis “not just for next year, but for the next generation.”

Some of his policy priorities for the 2023 legislative session that starts Jan. 3 already put Hosemann and the Senate he oversees at odds with his fellow Republican leaders in the House. For starters, House Speaker Philip Gunn and other GOP leaders said recently they want to eliminate the state income tax, not give one-time rebate checks. House and Senate Republican majorities are also expected to spar over extending postpartum Medicaid coverage for working mothers, which Hosemann and Senate leaders continue to support after it failed in the House last session.

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

“We did the largest tax cut ever last year, close to $500 million in income taxes cut,” Hosemann said. “We have an excess of $270 million this year from our estimate of taxes we’ve collected. We propose to send it back.”

Hosemann said his proposal will be to refund taxpayers “dollar-for-dollar” what they paid in state income taxes for the past year “from the bottom up, until we run out of money.” He said initial estimates are that refund checks would be capped at about $500.

Republicans Gov. Tate Reeves and Gunn still want to phase out the personal income tax, as a follow-on to the massive income tax cuts passed last year, which are still being implemented. They say this will give the state an advantage with economic development.

Hosemann and Senate leaders say the national and state economies are in turbulent, inflationary times with recession possible, and that much of the state surplus is from unprecedented federal spending that isn’t likely to continue or recur. They warn that fully eliminating the income tax in such uncertain economic times is foolhardy, and that the state’s current windfall should be viewed as one-time money and given back to taxpayers as a one-time check.

Hosemann said he has been meeting with hospital and other health care officials across the state, including Greenwood Leflore Hospital, which he called the “canary in the mine” of the financial crisis facing the state’s hospitals, particularly in rural areas. Hosemann said he foresees the state providing some temporary financial aid and increased Medicaid reimbursement to struggling hospitals, but said he wants to find more permanent, structural fixes.

Hosemann said Mississippi’s health care infrastructure may have to change — particularly given population loss in the Delta and other areas. He said rural hospitals may have to shift to basic and emergency services, with more specialized care becoming centralized.

“I don’t want mommas having babies in the back of a car,” Hosemann said. “I think everyone should be within 30 minutes of care. But for that scheduled heart surgery, you may have to go to a larger hospital for it.”

Hosemann is one of few Republican leaders open to discussion of Medicaid expansion — pushed by many health care advocates and hospitals — but he said politically it’s not likely lawmakers will tackle that issue this year, and he said it’s not a cure-all.

“I don’t think that’s the answer,” Hosemann said. “Even if we had that expansion, (Greenwood Leflore) would not make it, it would still be short.”

Hosemann noted that the Senate has passed extension of postpartum Medicaid coverage for working mothers three times, with the House killing it. He said he expects the Senate to make the push to extend coverage from 60 days to a year again, as a way of helping the state address highest in the nation rates of infant and maternal mortality. He said a new study from Texas extending the coverage has shown numerous positive results.

In recent Senate hearings, numerous experts told lawmakers that Mississippi can spend about $7 million a year to keep mothers and newborns healthier, or continue to spend tens of millions more dealing with the fallout of having the worst infant and maternal mortality and morbidity in the country.

READ MORE: Extending postpartum coverage to Mississippi mothers ‘a no brainer,’ key lawmaker says

Hosemann said he has recently visited several school districts across the state, including in Corinth, Gulfport and Lamar County, that have started using a “modified calendar,” often referred to as year-around schooling. He said such schedules are already showing positive results here and nationwide, and he wants the state to provide incentives to districts that want to participate.

“We don’t need to just keep doing things the way they’ve always been done,” Hosemann said. He said the schedules of roughly nine weeks in school, two-to-three weeks off have been well received by parents and teachers. He said that for Lamar County, it cost about $200,000 to change the calendar and “that will be our measure to incentivize this with state grants for districts that want to do it.”

Hosemann said he wants to increase funding for pre-K public education. The Legislature has increased funding for early learning collaboratives to $16 million, funding about 30 programs across the state, plus another $20 million for other public pre-K programs, Hosemann said. But the state is still serving only about 6,000 of 20,000 eligible kids. Hosemann said he would like to increase that number to about 10,000 students in the coming year.

Recently House Education Chairman Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, said he also would like to expand pre-K in the coming session. He noted that the state should not only provide more money for the programs, but provide schools with capital funding to build facilities for pre-K classes.

Hosemann also said he wants to increase funding in the coming year for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. MAEP is the state’s school funding formula passed into law by the Legislature 25 years ago, but almost never fully funded, usually falling short hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Hosemann said Wednesday he wants to increase funding for MAEP, but declined to give an amount. He said it would likely still fall short of full funding, but “will be enough to make you smile.”

But Gunn recently said he was not for putting more money into MAEP. In the past, Gunn has unsuccessfully pushed to scrap the formula, which he said is flawed and continually calls for more money for schools that lawmakers can come up with. He called it “unattainable,” and has instead pushed for money going outside the formula to school programs lawmakers support rather than a formula that allows schools and districts autonomy on spending.

Hosemann said the state Legislature and federal government have pumped historic amounts of money into infrastructure in the last couple of years, and he plans to continue. He said the state will likely use remaining federal pandemic stimulus money to provide more matching water and sewerage money to cities and counties as it did last year. He said he also wants to provide another $100 million for the state’s Emergency Road and Bridge Program as it did last year. The state had recently faced closure of hundreds of roads and bridges, particularly in rural areas, due to lack of maintenance, but Hosemann said the state is well along in addressing the problem.

Hosemann said the state this year let about $963 million worth of road work contracts, “double what they normally would.”

Mississippi has seen huge budget windfalls since the federal government began pumping pandemic stimulus and infrastructure spending into the states. Hosemann said the state will have paid off about $600 million in debt during this time, increased its “rainy day fund” savings to about $700 million, and he proposes no state borrowing for the coming year.

“That means you don’t have to go out into the market to borrow at 6%-7%,” Hosemann said. “… We started a few years ago cutting our budget and getting things in order. We’re running Mississippi like a business and now we have the cash to address the issues we need to address.”

The post Session 2023: Hosemann proposes tax refund checks up to $500, increased ed spending, health care fixes appeared first on Mississippi Today.