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When the Mississippi Legislature convenes at noon Tuesday, it will mark the final time for House Speaker Philip Gunn to gavel to order a regular session.

The 2023 regular legislative session will be the swan song for Gunn’s historic tenure as speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

The Clinton Republican has announced he will not seek reelection for a sixth term in the House in 2023. He will leave office as the first Republican speaker since the 1800s, as the third longest serving speaker in state history and as the guiding force of legislation in 2020 retiring the state flag that incorporated the Confederate battle emblem prominently in its design.

He also is one of the leading architects of a legislative rule that arguably gives the leaders of the House and Senate unprecedented power over the budgeting process.

The question is whether that rule — one of the Legislature’s most authoritative rules in recent history — will end with Gunn’s retirement.

That rule strips away nearly all, if not all, of the power for rank-and-file legislators to have a say in carrying out their most basic function: deciding how to appropriate state funds.

The rule requires a member wanting to offer an amendment to increase funding for a program or agency — such as the Department of Health to deal with the state’s ongoing litany of health woes — to specify from what agency the money will be taken.

On the surface, the rule seems logical and fair. After all, legislators should not be spending money the state does not have. But the rule, as it was crafted in 2012 when Gunn was first elected speaker by his colleagues, severely limits the pot of money a rank-and-file legislator can consider when making an amendment to increase funding for the Health Department, for education or for any other agency. The rank-and-file legislator, for instance, could not make the amendment to spend any of the $4 billion dollars in reserves the state currently has for a program the legislator believes needs more funds to deal with a crisis.

And to make the process more complicated, the money must be taken from a budget bill that is before the chamber at that time. It is important to understand that each chamber takes up and passes half of the more than 100 bills funding state agencies and commissions and then exchanges bills with the other chamber. The House will send their appropriations bills to the Senate and vice versa. If a member of the House wants to increase funding for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, for instance, and desires to take funds from the Department of Transportation to do so, the member cannot if the Transportation bill is in the Senate at the time instead of the House.

Republicans took complete control of the Mississippi Legislature in 2012. The budgeting amendment was incorporated into the joint rules of the Legislature that year by the two new presiding officers — Gunn in the House and then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves in the Senate.

Interestingly, when reporters told the late Terry Brown, at the time the new Senate president pro tem, about the House plan to enact the budget rule, the Columbus Republican who had plenty of conservative bona fides flashed his mischievous smile and said the rule would not be taken up in the upper chamber. He said senators would not support a rule to severely limit their say in the process. A day later, presumably after meeting with Reeves, Brown was advocating for the amendment.

It passed both chambers and since then legislators have acted basically like lemmings when it comes to the budget process, passing what legislative leadership presents to them during the waning days of each legislative session.

In 2024 there will be a new speaker of the House. The favorite to replace Gunn is House Pro Tem Jason White, R-West. Incumbent Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann will be the heavy favorite to win reelection as presiding officer of the Senate.

Hosemann was not lieutenant governor when the budgeting rule was enacted, and during his first term as the presiding officer he has at times displayed more of a willingness to let the members of the Senate have a say in the legislative process.

With Hosemann still in office and a new speaker in place, members could flex their collective muscle to demand a change to the rule.

But first, legislators will serve another year under a process where they have little or no say in how state funds are spent.

The post Gunn ushered in budget rule limiting influence of rank-and-file members appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The city of Jackson said Friday morning that pressure at both treatment plants has “largely recovered,” and that workers have started sampling for bacteria in some parts of the city.

A press release explained that the city will be able to lift the boil water notice — which went into effect Christmas morning — by zip code, meaning that some parts of Jackson may be able to drink straight from their taps again before others.

To lift the notice in specific parts of the city, the meters in that zip code have to show at least 20 PSI, or pounds per square inch, of water pressure. Then, the city has to test for bacteria from water samples in that area, and it takes 24 hours to get those results.

On Thursday, the city began sampling for well system customers and one zip code on the surface system side, although officials couldn’t say on Friday morning which zip code that was. If the results come back clean, those residents will have the notice lifted for them later on Friday.

Officials said they expect to have pressure restored for all parts of Jackson between Saturday and Sunday, meaning the earliest the city can return clean samples and lift the boil water notice for all residents is between Sunday and Monday. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said Wednesday that his goal was to lift the citywide notice by Saturday.

The press release added that the heavy rain Friday morning has made sampling difficult but that conditions are expected to improve later in the day.

The city continues to distribute bottled water to residents. Below are the times and locations for those sites on Friday:

West Jackson:

2 p.m.

Metro Center Mall near old Dillards Loading Dock

South Jackson:

5 p.m.

Candlestick Plaza off Cooper Rd, Jackson, MS

Northwest Jackson:

5 p.m.

Corner of Northside Drive and Manhattan Road near Smillow Prep

Elderly or disabled residents seeking water delivery can call 311 or 601-960-1875.

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The post Marshall Ramsey: Out With The Old appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Health professionals and medical students gathered at the Hilton in Jackson to attend the first day of the 27th annual Mississippi Rural Health Conference 2022 on Nov. 17.

The first day of the two-day event included sessions with topics such as strategies for marketing and improving communication with hospitals and utilizing holistic approaches to improve rural health care in the Delta. 

“I am attending the conference because I really believe that this is an important part of our health care system,” Dr. Loretta Jackson-Williams, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said. “With so many of our patients being in rural areas and the number of rural hospitals that are experiencing financial difficulties, this event highlights those issues even more. I think highlighting opportunities and joys of living in smaller communities is really important.”

Recipients of the Mississippi Rural Physicians Scholarship Program from colleges around the state were also in attendance to present needs assessment posters of their hometowns. 

“The job of a rural physician is to take into account what a community needs and go from there,” Will Sutton, a junior biology student at the University of Southern Mississippi, said. “If you want work in these communities, make relationships and help people, you have to know where you are going. So this helps us understand where we are from, so we can use that in future if we go back to work in our hometowns.” 

Several awards were giving out during the event’s annual business meeting and lunch. U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was not in attendance, was awarded with the national legislator of the year award, and Sen. Ben Suber, R-Bruce, was awarded as the state legislator of the year. 

The event wrapped around noon the following day with plenary sessions on the organization Mississippi Thrive!, foreign medical graduates in medically underserved areas in the state, hot topics in health care and networking breaks between sessions. 

The post Photos: Mississippi Rural Health Conference 2022 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi’s rape and sexual battery laws still provide a spousal defense that can protect those who commit marital rape, and contain archaic and misogynistic language from the 1800s.

In the 2022 legislative session, Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus, authored a bill that would have clarified the definition and elements of rape and sexual assault, replacing passages such as “assault with the intent to forcibly ravish a female of previously chaste character.” It also would have removed the spousal defense from the books.

The bill passed the House overwhelmingly, 119-1, but died without a vote in the state Senate.

McLean said she plans to file her bill again in the 2023 session that starts in January. She said she authored it originally at the request of victims’ rights advocates.

“It’s archaic,” McLean said. “The language is specific to females, which it should not be. It’s also important to me that we remove the spousal defense. It’s still illegal to rape anyone, but that provides a threshold offense, which regardless of the other statutes really needs to be revised.”

McLean’s bill would delete language in the law that says a person would not be guilty of rape or sexual battery if the alleged victim was the defendant’s legal spouse at the time of the offense and the couple is not separated and living apart. It would also change law that said a legal spouse may be found guilty of sexual battery if the spouse engaged in forcible penetration without the consent of the alleged victim. McLean said because current law uses language such as “forcible” and “consent,” this could be used as a defense if a spouse was incapacitated, such as passed out drunk or on drugs.

Although since the early 1990s every state recognizes marital rape as a crime, some including Mississippi still have laws on the books that either provide protection for the perpetrator or lesser penalties. McLean said she believes a lot of prosecutors use the state’s sexual battery laws instead of the rape statute with harsher penalties because the latter’s language is so antiquated.

The bill would also change references to “a female” in the law to person. It would also remove language such as: “It shall be presumed that the female was previously of chaste character and the burden of proof is on a defendant to prove she was not of chaste character.”

The post Lawmaker continues bid to remove archaic, misogynistic language from state rape, sexual battery laws appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This year saw no shortage of news in Mississippi. It began with a pandemic still raging, and summer saw our home state become the focal point of a national conversation about abortion access. From text messages pulled from the state’s largest embezzlement scandal in history to a water crisis that left the capital city without running water, there was a lot to write about.

Through it all, our journalists were there.

This year we kicked off “The Backchannel,” Anna Wolfe’s investigative series which revealed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the state’s sprawling welfare scandal, which continues to put pressure on the state’s power players.

When a Mississippi law became the center of a landmark legal case about the constitutional right to abortion, our team was there to help Mississippians make sense of it. Our reporters rode in vehicles with one of the last doctors performing abortions in the state days ahead of the Dobbs decision. We published an extended Q&A on the day the decision came down with the author of the 2018 bill that led to the fall of abortion access for much of the nation. 

The news never relented as the year unfolded.

In September as the Jackson water crisis worsened, our reporters sprang to action, even while most of them lived through it themselves. Every Mississippi Today staffer played a role in covering the crisis, from getting answers to commonly asked questions from you, our readers, and writing stories — so many stories — to document what was happening across the city. Our coverage spanned the gamut, from why immigrants were scared to go to water distribution sites to a profile about how local activists were frustrated with media coverage, both local and national. Our staff wrote countless stories with information to help Jacksonians navigate the crisis.

This fall, we launched a new project to squarely confront Mississippi’s health care crisis. Our stories probed the concept of Medicaid expansion — what it would do and what our leaders have to say about why they won’t embrace it — and seek to define the extent of the health care crisis in Mississippian’s hospitals, homes and lives. This work will continue.

Our stories provided readers with insight into what is actually happening in the state’s only critical race theory course. A monthslong investigation gave voice to Black Delta farmworkers who faced discrimination at the hands of their employers. We spoke to students in school districts where books are being banned to ask them how it feels to have representation taken away.

Not all our stories were about politics and policy either. Rick Cleveland covered the Ole Miss miracle in college baseball this summer, plus the state’s college coaching madness from all angles: Deion Sanders’ journey at JSU, all the way to the story’s end. The will-he-or-won’t he saga of Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss. The death of an icon at Mississippi State. 

As always, thank you for reading and engaging with us this year. We know that 2023 will be just as full of stories to tell, and welcome you to reach out with your ideas and suggestions. We are proud to report to you.

The post Editors’ note: Thank you for navigating 2022 with us appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Out with the old and in with the old.

The post Marshall Ramsey: 2023 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The list of applicants for the top job at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, included a familiar name to many Mississippians: Rodney Bennett, the recently departed president of University of Southern Mississippi. 

Bennett’s name, along with 20 others, was published by a local newspaper earlier this year on July 14, his second-to-last day in the Dome. The governing board in Arkansas had released the list under the state’s open records law which mandates that the names of all applicants for public office, even unsuccessful ones, are subject to disclosure. 

But in Mississippi, Bennett’s replacement was determined through a process that operated almost entirely in the dark. 

Here, applicants for the position of college president are considered confidential and therefore exempt from public records requests. At USM, the campus didn’t know who was being considered for the job until late October when the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees suddenly cut the search short and announced it was permanently hiring Joe Paul, the interim president, without advertising the position. 

Across universities in the Southeast, Mississippi and Arkansas represent two extremes – total secrecy and complete openness – in the often controversial search process for identifying leaders of public universities, according to a review by Mississippi Today of state statutes, governing board policies and news articles. Arkansas is the only Southern state that has a search process that is entirely transparent, while Mississippi is one of three states that keep secret all applicants but the sole finalist.

Judith Wilde, a professor at George Mason University who studies presidential searches, described searches like this: “It’s sort of like in the ‘Wizard of Oz:’ At the end they raise the curtain, and there is one person.”

The review found that of 16 Southern states, a plurality (7) have statutes or policies in place that permit universities to announce multiple finalists for president. In practice, however, universities often flout those rules by claiming they can only announce one finalist – because the others withdrew their names from consideration. 

Even though the University of Florida was supposed to name multiple finalists under a new state law, the board announced only one, saying that out of the dozen candidates interviewed, all “requested complete confidentiality unless they were named as the sole finalist,” according to the Tampa Bay Times and Open Campus. 

In Louisiana, applicants for public office are public record but in 2015, a judge ruled that Louisiana State University only needed to turn over the names of four applicants who were interviewed or withdrew their names from consideration.

And in some states, each individual university board can determine how secret the process is going to be. In Oklahoma, for example, Oklahoma State University’s board has maintained that it "must hold in strictest confidence the identities of applicants" while Northern Oklahoma College announced multiple finalists for president last year.

Wilde said that when university presidents are selected in secret, the community doesn’t get a chance to determine if they’re qualified for the job even though the position is among the highest paid in every state. 

“Many of them are making more than a $1 million now, and yet there is no other public executive who is hired in secret,” Wilde said. “The president of the United States – they go through sometimes as much as a year of being vetted.” 

At public universities, presidential searches are mainly led by governing boards – it is often considered a board’s most important function – but the process used to be more collaborative. Wilde said that in many states, boards used to form search committees of students, faculty and staff who would write and post ads, interview candidates, deliberate in public and invite finalists to meet the whole campus community. 

Now, secrecy is the norm. In 2000, Mississippi was one of seven Southern states that allowed public universities to keep presidential applicants’ names confidential, according to an analysis by the National Association of College and University Attorneys. As of this year, that’s permitted by all but two states.

Wilde attributes this trend to governing boards’ increased reliance on executive headhunting firms that often require confidentiality in their contracts — to their benefit. 

“When things are secret, the search firm can use the same candidates over and over again,” Wilde said, “without having anybody know that.” 

Though headhunting firms often charge governing boards hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct searches, only about half provide background checks beyond the references that candidates provide, according to research by Wilde’s colleague at George Mason, James Finkelstein. 

Many universities say that confidentiality is necessary to attract the best candidates who won’t want to risk inviting ire at their current jobs by publicly applying elsewhere. But research by Frank LoMonte, the director of UF’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, found that closed searches didn’t result in more candidates from highly ranked universities than open searches. His research, conducted in 2017, compared Georgia’s secret process to those in Tennessee and Florida which had more open searches at the time. 

Rather, LoMonte found that closed searches tend to correlate with universities hiring from inside their system. 

“Excluding the public from participation in the hiring process appears to accrue primarily to the benefit of ‘insider’ candidates,” he wrote in an op-ed published by the American Association of University Professors. 

The post How does IHL’s secret presidential search process compare to other southern states? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Legislature will begin the 2023 session on Jan. 3 with a mind-boggling $3.9-billion surplus, according to information compiled by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee.

To put the surplus in perspective, it is little more than half as large as the overall state-support budget of $7.9 billion for the current fiscal year. State support refers to the funds derived primarily from general taxation, such as the sales tax on retail items and the income tax. The state also has other special fund agencies, which receive taxes or fees designated solely to run their agency, such as the fee barbers pay for their regulatory board or the motor fuel tax to operate the Transportation Department.

The state has an overall budget, including all state and federal funds appropriated by the Legislature, of $26 billion for the current fiscal year with 45% of the total funds being provided by the federal government.

By any metric, the surplus the state has is unprecedented.

These funds fall into different categories with different guidelines of how they can be appropriated by the 2023 Legislature. But it should be stressed that in most cases the Legislature can vote to change those guidelines and it is almost a certainty the Legislature will not appropriate all the surplus funds this session.

Here are the categories of the surplus and, in general, how they can be spent:

Capital expense fund: $1.6 billion. This is the accumulation of unspent revenue from past sessions. These funds are not considered recurring, meaning the Legislature will strive to spend them on non-recurring expenses, such as construction projects or major purchases, such as computer systems. Providing rebates to taxpayers as some have proposed also would be a one-time expense.

General fund: $1 billion. These are tax collections and other revenues collected above the amount projected at this time to be appropriated by the Legislature for the next fiscal year beginning July 1. These funds are considered recurring and can be used for any purpose.

Working Cash Stabilization Fund or rainy day funds: $579.4 million. These are funds that have been placed in reserves for emergencies, such as a downturn in state revenue collections. The rainy day fund currently is at its legal cap of 10% of the total general fund budget.

Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund: $298.1 million. These are federal funds provided to deal with COVID-19 related issues. The federal government places guidelines on how the funds can be appropriated. A portion can be used for recurring expenses, but for the most part must be spent on one-time items, such as water and sewer repair and construction, broadband and for pandemic relief.

The 2% set aside: $150.4 million. By law, the Legislature is only supposed to appropriate 98% of the projected state tax collections. The 2% rule is in place because projecting tax collections is an inexact science. In recent years revenue has significantly exceeded projections, resulting in the large reserves in the capital expense fund. In bad economic times, legislators have changed the law to spend the 2% set aside, but that will not be necessary this session.

Gulf Coast Restoration Fund: $124.2 million. Money from the settlement of lawsuits related to the 2010 BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. These funds are earmarked for Gulf Coast projects.

Education Enhancement Fund: $78.9 million. The state collects a 1% sales tax on retail items designated solely for education projections. Like with the overall tax collections, revenue, from the 1-cent sale tax has exceeded expectations resulting in the surplus in the Education Enhancement Fund

Health Care Expendable Fund: $43.1 million. The state receives a payment annually from the tobacco companies as a result of the 1990s-era lawsuit filed by former Attorney General Mike Moore against the cigarette-manufacturers. Money in the fund is normally designated for health-related issues.

BP Settlement Fund: $12.3 million. Money from the BP oil spill settlements reserved for one-time projects in areas outside the Gulf Coast counties.

The post A look at where state’s record surplus originated and how it can be spent appeared first on Mississippi Today.