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ECRU – John Adam Nowlin wants the world to know what killed his cows.

Nowlin, a farmer who has spent the last four years trying to connect the dots between his dead livestock and a neighboring farm supplies store, is tired. The 39-year-old Ecru native believes the store allowed chemicals from its fertilizer to escape into a stream of water that his animals drank from. He is suing the business over the deaths of five cows and two buffalo. 

Having shopped at the store for years, Nowlin said he made the connection almost immediately, recalling a strong whiff of ammonia that hung over his family’s pasture the day of the incident in 2018.

While the business – Jimmy Sanders, Inc., now owned by J.R. Simplot – faced recent regulatory pressure from the state over water pollution, it denies liability for the deaths of Nowlin’s animals. 

The farmer admits that his fixation on the case has consumed other facets of his life. 

“Fighting is exhausting,” Nowlin said. “But it’ll be worth it. I believe that there’s always consequences for doing what I’m doing. I’m sure it took a piece of me when it happened, when I became passionate about it. 

“There is a trade-off, that’s just the way it is. And I can understand it pushing people away.”

While seeking recourse, Nowlin along the way found something bigger than his own case: a gap in clean water enforcement.

In 2014, about four years before Nowlin found the animals dying on his farm, Pinnacle Agriculture – Jimmy Sanders’ former parent company – sent a letter to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, requesting the state to terminate its permit status. At the time, most of the Jimmy Sanders facilities in Mississippi, including the one in Ecru, had a stormwater discharge permit. 

Established under the federal Clean Water Act, such permits allow a facility to discharge limited pollutants into public bodies of water. For the Ecru facility, that body of water was the Lappatubby Creek, a stream on the other side of Nowlin’s farm.

But a permit also means the business has to regularly test what chemicals it releases – often by paying a private lab – and report those numbers to the regulatory agency, which, in this case, is MDEQ. 

“No one wants to be subject to environmental regulations if they don’t have to be,” said MDEQ director Chris Wells.

Over the years, the Clean Water Act was amended to include certain industries with “stormwater discharge,” such as when rainfall collects and carries away chemicals left outside a facility. 

Jimmy Sanders fell into that criteria until 2014, when Pinnacle wrote in its letter to MDEQ that the stores were misclassified as farm product “storage.” In reality, the letter stated, the stores should be considered farm product “distribution.” The Clean Water Act doesn’t require the latter of the two categories to have a permit.   

Siding with the federal statute, MDEQ complied with Pinnacle’s request and agreed to terminate the permit coverage. As far as the state was concerned, the company would no longer be a source of pollution to public waters.

But not only did Jimmy Sanders already have a history of pollution before it received those permits, MDEQ records show, the company would go on to receive two violations for being a “possible source of pollution of state waters” after the state terminated the permits. 

Wells of MDEQ told Mississippi Today that neither the state agency nor the EPA has the resources to regulate every business. If a business doesn’t have a permit, it wouldn’t be on the agency’s radar, he explained. 

“If somebody is engaging in regulated activity without notifying us, there would be no reason for us to necessarily know that was going on, unless (an MDEQ) employee notices it or somebody lets us know about it,” he said. 

With Jimmy Sanders, both violations were a result of citizen complaints, including one from Nowlin about his dead cattle. 

One morning in January 2018, Nowlin was carrying a bag of feeding mix out to his family’s 300-acre farm.  

The Nowlins have a large footprint in Ecru, a town of about 1,000 people. Ken, John Adam’s father, owns about a dozen different businesses, from the farm to a Shell gas station to an insurance company. John Adam helps out however he can, including feeding the livestock.

But after bringing the food out to the field where the cattle and buffalo had gathered – near a ditch that, he recalled, the animals were drinking out of – Nowlin panicked.

“When I get out there, I see them all convulsing, half of them at least,” he said. “Convulsing on the ground, dying in front of me. We had a bull that was sick. It was violent, acting angry.”

A video he took shows the animals lying on their sides, legs twitching in the air. The footage shows blood near the skin around their stomachs, which Nowlin believes was from intestinal bloating. 

Scrambling for an explanation, he called a local veterinarian to take a look. Nowlin weighed whether to just shoot the cattle, but he thought that doing so would make it harder to discover what sickened them in the first place. Four cows and one buffalo died later that day, and another cow and buffalo died two days later. 

The local vet connected Nowlin with a Mississippi State University doctor who could conduct a necropsy – an autopsy for animals. Nowlin knew the sooner he could get the bodies there, the better. But he needed a way to transport the carcasses, which weighed a few hundred pounds each. 

So Nowlin and a couple of the other farm workers loaded two of the bodies onto a backhoe – a large, claw-shaped shovel used for excavation, like the ones attached to a Caterpillar – and dropped the carcasses onto a flatbed trailer. 

They covered the trailer with a tarp, hooked it to the back of a red Dodge pickup truck, and drove the hour and a half to the MSU campus Starkville. As extra evidence, Nowlin scooped a water sample into a plastic water bottle and, for good measure, a dead frog he saw laying in the ditch. 

At 9 p.m., they arrived at MSU’s veterinary school and left the bodies with Dr. Tim Morgan.

After a couple of months, Morgan recorded that there were high levels of ammonia in the rumens, one of the sections of a cow’s stomach. The findings, he wrote, were consistent with high levels of exposure to urea – a common ingredient in fertilizer – in a drinking source. Morgan’s official diagnosis was “urea toxicosis.” 

Having been a customer at Jimmy Sanders and knowing what other businesses were nearby, it didn’t take long for Nowlin to lay the blame for the incident on the farm shop.

“I knew they were responsible within a day for poisoning my cattle,” he said, explaining that there was nowhere else nearby he could think of that worked with chemicals.

In April 2018, Nowlin met with his lawyers and wrote a letter to Jimmy Sanders requesting $27,000 in payment for the damages incurred, including: $10,000 for two dead pregnant buffaloes, $10,000 for five dead pregnant cows, and costs for transportation and veterinary bills. 

A lawyer from Baker Donelson representing Jimmy Sanders wrote back, saying they investigated the death of the cattle and “it is not mathematically possible that (the cattle) died from drinking storm water running off of the Sanders property.”

The letter explained that any urea at the facility in January – when the deaths occurred – would have been leftover and dried up from older supply, and that even if it did reach the stream where the cattle drank from, it would have been “far below any level sufficient to cause urea toxicosis.” 

The lawyer also said the urea could have come from hay the cows ate. But the water sample Nowlin collected, which Morgan sent to another lab, revealed urea and ammonia at the location Nowlin says the cattle drank from. The amount of urea in the water, Morgan later told MDEQ investigators, was more than four times the concentration needed to poison cattle. 

At the very least, chemicals from Jimmy Sanders clearly reached the stream where Nowlin’s animals were drinking from, a Mississippi State professor determined after visiting the farm. 

Padmanava Dash, a geoscience professor at MSU, specializes in water quality and has spent years analyzing dangerous toxins, such as those in algae blooms. 

Dash heard from a colleague about Nowlin’s situation, specifically that there were high levels of ammonia nitrogen found in the cows’ stomachs. The presence of nitrogen, a food source for algae, caught Dash’s attention.

He connected with Nowlin and agreed to visit the farm. Earlier, in June, Nowlin noticed a green layer of slime that blanketed a pond in the back of his property. When Dash visited a month later, he informed Nowlin that the slimy substance was an algae bloom. 

Specifically, they were looking at cyanobacteria, a substance familiar to coastal Mississippi. In 2019, the state had to close its beaches as a health precaution after spotting the algae near the shore. Research shows that agriculture runoff, specifically from fertilizer, is a direct cause of cyanobacteria. 

Dash brought samples from the pond back to his lab in Starkville, and found surprising results: the level of microcystins – a toxin produced by cyanobacteria – was higher than five parts per billion, the limit of what his equipment could measure. In drinking water, he explained, any amount over one part per billion can kill a human.

The ditch where Nowlin found his animals dying, and where he says they were drinking water from, connects the algae-covered pond and where he alleges runoff from Jimmy Sanders reached his property. 

Mississippi Today asked the professor about the source of the pond’s toxins. Dash, who reviewed satellite images of the area around the farm, said “we know what the source is.”

“The connection is there for sure,” he said. “The (Jimmy Sanders) parking lot directly drains to the ditch, and the ditch runs to the pond. So it’s a direct connection, there is no doubt about it.

“From what I have seen from the digital elevation models and satellite images, there is no point source in the area other than this for the high concentration of the nutrients.” 

In August 2018, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality received a complaint from Nowlin about his dead cattle. Following an inspection, MDEQ gave Jimmy Sanders a violation after finding fertilizer residue outside and exposed on the business’ lot, a potential source for water pollution. 

Nowlin filed a lawsuit against Jimmy Sanders a couple months later. He soon discovered that the state terminated the store’s discharge permit in 2014, and that regulators wouldn’t have known about the exposed fertilizer if it wasn’t for his complaint. He wondered whether, if the store still had its permit, his cattle would still be alive. 

Nowlin realized that most of the Jimmy Sanders stores in Mississippi also didn’t have permits, and thought maybe he wasn’t alone in his experience. After scouring satellite images on Google Maps, he found and contacted a family living next door to one of the stores in Slate Springs, a north Mississippi town of about 100 people. As it turned out, they had been complaining about Jimmy Sanders for nearly two decades. 

In 1999, after the family alerted MDEQ, a state inspector found that Jimmy Sanders was allowing chemical fertilizer to leave its property when it stormed, and that it didn’t have a discharge permit. The report mentions no punishment, only that MDEQ requested that the store get a permit. 

The family filed two more complaints about fertilizer runoff. After its last complaint in 2019, the family showed an MDEQ inspector patches of dead grass and the skeletons of two armadillos, all of which they said were killed by runoff. Afterwards, the state fined Jimmy Sanders $17,500, again citing the store as a possible source of water pollution.  

MDEQ records show another incident from 2004 in Ecru, where Jimmy Sanders spilled 13,000 gallons of liquid fertilizer, all of which “escaped” after heavy rain, the report said. MDEQ agreed not to pursue enforcement as long as Jimmy Sanders added a new containment unit. 

In each of the above incidents, Jimmy Sanders didn’t have a permit, and MDEQ only discovered the infractions after citizen complaints. Most of the company’s Mississippi stores first received permits in 2010, state records show. During inspections that year, MDEQ found deficiencies at almost every one of the facilities due to waste or chemicals being left exposed to stormwater. 

Mississippi Today asked Wells, the MDEQ director, about the state terminating Jimmy Sanders’ permits, and whether the company receiving water pollution violations afterwards represented a flaw in the regulatory process. He said he wouldn’t go that far, instead calling it a small gap in an otherwise effective system. 

“This is a narrow, specific scenario that may be a perfect storm situation, that I want to be careful that we don’t extrapolate that in a way that undermines the credibility of the entire program,” he said. 

Stephanie Showalter-Otts, an environmental law specialist at the University of Mississippi, disagreed that this was a rare situation, saying “it’s not uncommon to find these gaps in the framework” of the Clean Water Act. 

She was surprised, though, after being told that Jimmy Sanders no longer needed a permit after changing its industry from farm product “storage” to farm product “distribution.”

“That is a tiny distinction that I wouldn’t have thought would have really changed if they needed a permit or not,” she said, adding that “it can seem arbitrary sometimes” which businesses are required to have a permit.  

When asked about a business switching its industry classification, Wells said MDEQ does require the company to submit documents as proof. But, to some extent, the agency has to rely on the company’s honesty, he said. 

“If part of what you’re asking me is, did we just take these people at their word that they were this (industry) code instead of the other, to some degree the answer is yes,” Wells said.

Wells declined to comment on the Jimmy Sanders situation specifically, only saying that the agency employees who made the decision to terminate the company’s permits in 2014 no longer worked there. Wells did say that MDEQ can re-evaluate if a company needs a discharge permit. 

The scope of what industries are required to have permits is part of the Clean Water Act’s limitations, Showalter-Otts said.  

“I think that this just identifies … the flaw in the system, because the federal framework exempts a very large category of pollutants from the permitting system, then that creates loopholes,” she said. 

A spokesperson for J.R. Simplot, the company that now owns Jimmy Sanders, said it couldn’t comment on the pending lawsuit with Nowlin, but gave Mississippi Today the following response: 

“Since Simplot’s purchase of this facility in 2020, we have taken steps to ensure all of the processes meet or exceed the state and federal guidelines for safe water and other health and safety standards at this and all of our locations. This includes implementing a stormwater pollution prevention plan, and enhanced storage and containment of products at the location.”

Simplot added that it now conducts monthly inspections of the stormwater runoff from the Ecru facility.

Nowlin describes himself as obsessed. Learning about the other complaints against Jimmy Sanders only raised the stakes. He sees himself as a catalyst for a battle bigger than just avenging his cattle. 

“Whenever you do something, you’re going to sacrifice some other part of your life,” Nowlin said. “But I feel like people are dependent on me.” 

His sacrifice, Nowlin described, was his mental health and close relationships. He says that people around him can’t understand why this is so important to him. 

“I’ve just been swinging my fist, and I’ve not looked up to breathe,” Nowlin said.

In 2019, Nowlin and his wife, who knew each other since childhood, got divorced. He believes his time spent on the Sanders case had something to do with it.

“My stress level is really kind of high at times,” he said. “You spend time with something and you want it to work out and you don’t want it to affect your relationships but it does.” 

Despite his lawsuit treading in uncertainty, and despite at times feeling isolated in his venture, he takes comfort in knowing his case is part of what’s recently become a national environmental priority. 

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced in a memorandum that it was taking new action to reduce pollution from agricultural runoff. Clean water advocates have pointed to the issue for years, citing effects like the growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The agency wrote that “nutrients are the most widespread stressor impacting rivers and streams,” adding that “about two-thirds of the nation’s coastal areas and more than one-third of the nation’s estuaries are impaired by nutrients.”

As part of the initiative, EPA said it plans to “deepen and expand” its partnership with the agricultural sector. 

In Ecru, Nowlin still takes care of his family’s cattle and buffalo after moving them to a new part of the farm, away from the ditch where it all began in 2018. Weathered from the many hours trying to prove what feels obvious to him, he still has hope. 

“I do think things will turn out okay and justice will come,” Nowlin said.

The post Avenging his cattle’s death, Mississippi farmer discovers a pollution loophole appeared first on Mississippi Today.

July marked the end of Pride month, but in Mississippi, Pride is just getting started. In this episode of MT Speaks, Mississippi Today talks to Jason McCarty, executive director of Capital City Pride, and Robin McGehee, a Mississippi expat who now lives in California. Jason tells the story of how the organization began, and Robin talks about why staying connected to her home state is important.

The post VIDEO: Capital City Pride’s Jason McCarty talks Pride in Mississippi with Robin McGehee appeared first on Mississippi Today.

David Dennis Jr. grew up with two versions of David Dennis Sr.: one, an activist at the very center of the civil rights movement who skirted death countless times; the other, his father, the man whose approval and attention he desperately wanted. 

He remembers wondering as a child how his father “could fight for strangers while the people you said you loved the most fell apart,” he described in a letter written to his dad. 

It was only through writing “The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride” that Dennis Jr. was able to fully reconcile the two. 

“(Writing this book) really brought the two together and helped me understand how one informed the other, and how both created this complete person who led to me, and then to my kids, and all of that,” Dennis said in an interview with Mississippi Today.

“The Movement Made Us” is at once historical and intimately personal – the story is of a father and son, through whom the reader gets a glimpse into an entire lineage. It is also a deeply moving account of the civil rights movement in the South by a man who was in the eye of every storm: the Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, the murder of Medgar Evers and the Harlem riot of 1964. 

The book begins with his father as a college student at Dillard University in New Orleans who was initially more interested in ensuring he got his degree and dating an attractive activist than protesting and being arrested. That changed at a meeting following attacks on Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham who were traveling the South in protest of segregation on buses. The meeting was to discuss whether the rides would continue and was attended by Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Andrew Young and other civil rights giants. 

It was there that Dennis Sr. heard something that changed the trajectory of his life forever: “Okay, now make your choice, because there’s not enough space in this room for both God and fear.” 

After that, all hesitation fell away: he was wholly and completely dedicated to the Movement. 

Dennis Sr. went on to serve as field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Louisiana and Mississippi from 1961 through 1965 and as co-director with Bob Moses of the Voter Education Committee of the Council of Federated Organizations. He was part of organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and worked with Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and James Cheney. 

He helped find Hamer safety and care after she, along with other activists, were brutally beaten in the Winona jail. He delivered Evers’ eulogy and, if not for a bout of bronchitis, would have been the fourth passenger in the car with Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner that fatal night in Neshoba County.    

Dennis Jr. writes his father’s stories as if his father were telling them himself – he successfully uses in-depth interviews with his father and other civil rights workers, CORE files and correspondence and historical research to write an account that makes the readers feel as if they are Dennis Sr.’s very mind in the middle of these harrowing events. 

He masterfully fills in gaps in his father’s memory in ways that are just as telling as if Dennis Sr. had remembered each detail. The two had planned to visit Bogalusa to revisit the stories of the Deacons for Defense and Justice and the site of Bloody Wednesday, but Dennis Sr. came down with a stomach ache before they left. Bloody Wednesday refers to the events of May 19, 1965, when a mob of white people joined by police officers attacked and brutalized Black men, women and children at whites-only Cassidy Park. 

Dennis Jr. went without his dad and visited with the organizers and family members of the Deacons for Justice. Valeria Hicks, one of the Deacons, told him it was Dennis Sr. who had sent them to Cassidy Park to desegregate it, having no idea it would turn into a bloodbath. 

“I know you’re reading this and laughing,” Dennis Jr. wrote in the letter to his dad in the book about his trip. “Because when I tried to tell you what Mrs. Hicks said, you said that calling for the people in Bogalusa to go to Cassidy Park was one of those memories that got closed away forever, and you still don’t remember doing it but ‘it sounds like something I would have done.’ You also swore your stomach ache came from something you ate or whatever. I believe you on both accounts.” 

He goes on to write about the lesson he learned when writing the book: sometimes the forgotten parts of one’s past are just as important as the remembered. 

“I’ve come to understand that your history is as much about what you don’t remember as it is about what you can recall with precise certainty,” Dennis Jr. writes in a letter to his father in the book. “… But you know that our bodies tell the stories our minds can’t.”   

Letters from Dennis Jr. to his father and children are peppered in between his father’s stories. They offer insights into his relationship with his father and show the unsettling parallels between what Dennis Sr. lived through in the 1960s and the events of 2018, 2019 and 2020, during which the father and son were writing the book, and Dennis Jr., a journalist, was covering the murders of Black men like Ahmaud Arbery and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement. 

“It was the summer of 2020. The summer of reckoning. The summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks and the largest protest in American history. I was tearing myself apart trying to cover as much of the American terror as possible, traveling to Brunswick, Georgia, to get the story of Ahmaud Arbery and chronicling every police killing because I felt like it was my responsibility to save these lives that had already been taken from us. I was burning out, breaking down, and falling apart.” 

At the same time, his father had gone off the grid. The killings of that year were too similar to the murders in the 1960s – it was more than he could take. 

Dennis Sr. had seen the video of George Floyd, screaming that he couldn’t breathe and asking for his mother. He had spent years wondering how it was when Chaney and Evers and all the others had died. Now, he saw.

“I’m seeing how they died now, Davy. George Floyd cried for his damn momma. I can’t stop hearing him screaming … For the first time I watched what it was like for white folks to kill us slowly,” he told his son over the phone. “… I hadn’t even considered if Medgar or James screamed for their mommas. Now I can’t stop wondering if they did.” 

Dennis Jr. said that was a very dark period for both him and his father. 

“You can feel like nothing has changed – you can let that despair take over, and I was letting that happen,” he said. 

The two “came out the other side,” though, he said. They finished the book, which has been met with well-deserved praise and described as incredibly timely and “one of the most important books about the Civil Rights Movement” by author Clint Smith. 

Dennis Jr. and his father will return to Mississippi, the scene of so much of the book, to the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 20. The father and son will join Dr. Leslie-Burl McLemore, a fellow civil rights activist and director of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy at Jackson State University, for a panel moderated by Pamela Junior, director of the Two Mississippi Museums.

“It’s special because there’s so much that’s happened there, and so many of the people are still there,” he said. “… I’m hoping we can go back to Mississippi as often as possible. There’s so much soul and spirit in the book (and its characters), and you can feel it when you’re there.”

The post In ‘The Movement Made Us,’ father and son reflect on the past, both remembered and forgotten appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant instructed his wife’s friend — whose nonprofit was receiving millions in subgrants from the welfare department he oversaw — to pay NFL legend Brett Favre $1.1 million, according to a new court filing.

Nancy New alleges Bryant directed this and other spending, resulting in a massive scandal and what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.

Nancy New, a friend of former First Lady Deborah Bryant, and her son Zach New have pleaded guilty to several criminal charges, including bribery and fraud. As part of their plea, a favorable deal which recommends they spend no time in state prison, the News have agreed to cooperate in an ongoing criminal investigation.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services is also suing Nancy New civilly, asking the court to make her repay $19.4 million. The department alleges New and 37 other defendants, including Favre, violated federal rules when they spent or received money from a federal block grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

But Bryant, who had the statutory oversight responsibility over the department’s spending, has remained insulated from official liability. Mississippi Today, in its investigative series “The Backchannel,” first reported the former governor’s role in the scandal based on a trove of text messages between Bryant, Favre and other key defendants in the case.

New’s filing marks the first time Bryant has been directly, publicly accused of wrongdoing by main defendants in the case.

“Defendant reasonably relied on then-Governor Phil Bryant, acting within his broad statutory authority as chief executive of the State, including authority over MDHS and TANF, and his extensive knowledge of Permissible TANF Expenditures from 12 years as State Auditor, four years as Lieutenant Governor, and a number of years as Governor leading up to and including the relevant time period,” reads New’s response to the MDHS civil complaint filed Monday.

New rejected the notion officials have made throughout the three-year investigation that John Davis, Bryant’s appointed welfare agency director who is also facing criminal charges, was a rogue state bureaucrat who independently chose to misspend tens of millions of welfare dollars.

The bombshell response from Nancy New, her sons Zach New and Jess New and her nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center, who are also defendants in the civil suit, argue that MDHS is more at fault than it has represented. The court filings name dozens of officials and state employees who acted alongside Davis to perpetuate the scheme — with Bryant named first in the list.

Bryant’s spokesperson Denton Gibbes denied New’s assertion. “She’s pointing her finger at everybody but the Easter Bunny,” Gibbes told Mississippi Today. “This is just legal hogwash.”

THE BACKCHANNEL: Phil Bryant had his sights on a payout as welfare funds flowed to Brett Favre

Bryant and the dozens of other state actors are referenced in the filing as “MDHS Executives.” New’s answer also claims that Davis and MDHS Executives directed her “to provide $5 million on behalf of the State of Mississippi to Prevacus, Inc. during a meeting with Jake Vanlandingham at Brett Favre’s home.”

The News ended up paying Prevacus, an experimental concussion drug company, and its affiliate PreSolMD a total of $2.1 million — payments that were pivotal to the criminal investigation and charges against the News.

In his last year as governor, Bryant was heavily involved in discussions about luring Prevacus to Mississippi, specifically to a new development called Tradition that Bryant had touted. Bryant helped the company find investors, make political connections and he even agreed to accept stock in Prevacus in January of 2020, Mississippi Today first reported in its investigative series, “The Backchannel.” His deal with Prevacus was derailed when agents from the state auditor’s office made arrests shortly after.

The News’ recent filings are the first to reveal that state officials and employees actually intended to pay Prevacus $5 million through the nonprofit. The filing does not specifically say which “MDHS Executives” directed this investment.

Mississippi Community Education Center is also countersuing MDHS, claiming that the welfare agency breached their contract. The nonprofit asks that if it is required to pay back any of the funds as a result of the civil suit, it should be able to recoup the same amount back from MDHS, plus other relief.

An additional motion to stay discovery in the case asks the court to allow Nancy and Zach New to wait until their criminal cases have concluded before complying with discovery in the civil suit. Their April plea agreement suggests that investigators may have their sights on other co-conspirators that the News will be expected to help officials prosecute.

In the News’ motion to stay, their attorney finds several faults with MDHS’s allegations.

Primarily, the News argue that TANF rules have always allowed states to spend the block grant in a variety of ways, including on programs that serve people who earn up to 350% of the poverty line, which is currently $97,125. The state has even boasted in its official state plans about how it has taken advantage of the flexibility of TANF dollars.

Only now, the News argue, after many of these “absurd expenditures” have come to public light, has the state revised its interpretation of the TANF statute to be more narrowly tailored to activities that actually help the poor.

“MDHS has had a 25-year love affair with TANF’s extreme flexibility. MDHS cannot now divest itself of its contractual obligations simply because it is politically and financially expedient to do so,” the motion reads. 

The News have been targeted by investigators and law enforcement, the filings argues, without holding others who perpetuated this pattern of spending accountable.

“The New Defendants will be substantially and irreparably harmed if forced to participate in discovery amidst giants poised for what promises to be a no-holds-barred death match,” the motion reads. “…The New Defendants have taken responsibility for their roles, yet they continue to be thrust into the crossfire by powerful forces fighting over political futures and tens of millions of dollars. The State wants to avoid liability and embarrassment, the Feds want their money back, and the public wants answers.”

Read the entire motion below.

The post Gov. Phil Bryant directed $1.1 million welfare payment to Brett Favre, defendant says appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Gov. Tate Reeves has faced a litany of unprecedented problems in his first term as Mississippi governor: a bitter fight for power with legislative leaders, turmoil and scandal within multiple state agencies, consistent staff turnover, costly natural disasters, and a life-disrupting pandemic.

But thanks to a racially progressive update to the state constitution, Reeves could soon face another unprecedented problem: a crapshoot of electoral politics in which the majority party incumbent is in real danger of losing the Governor’s Mansion.

As the 2023 statewide election cycle revs up in coming days, here’s the scenario that should keep Reeves — one of the most unpopular governors in America — up at night.

The governor’s nightmare election scenario begins, of course, in the August 2023 Republican primary. Reeves’ allies have stalked every move of Speaker of the House Philip Gunn for years. Gunn, the third-term Republican leader, has been transparent about both his disdain for Reeves and his consideration of running against him in 2023.

Gunn, who has plenty of conservative bonafides and is well-known by the GOP donor class, has a name ID problem outside the Jackson metro area that he’d need to start addressing in short order. Still, many prognosticators believe a Gunn primary challenge could stretch Reeves thin both financially and politically.

Besides Gunn, these prominent Republicans have heard from advisers about how a primary of Reeves could play out:

• Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is fresh off a high-profile takedown of Roe v. Wade. Fitch, a former state treasurer who has coasted into both statewide offices she’s held, has spent tens of thousands of dollars to make sure voters know about her role in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case.

• Secretary of State Michael Watson, who hails from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which has traditionally been Reeves’ most reliable base of voters. Watson would certainly look to pick off voters to the right of Reeves who have been less than enamored, to say the least, with the incumbent’s leadership.

• Former state representative Robert Foster, who unsuccessfully ran against Reeves in the 2019 primary for governor. Foster, a far-right conservative who has been banned from Facebook and Twitter for his misinformation posts about the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, garnered 18% of the 2019 primary vote.

If one of these four candidates ran, Reeves would likely have to spend at least $1 million to lock up the primary victory. If two or three of these candidates ran, the GOP primary could be considered a toss-up.

But winning the Republican primary is the very least of Reeves’ concerns.

Next, of course, Reeves would need to size up the Democratic nominee for governor. The most notable Democrat considering a gubernatorial run is Brandon Presley, the longtime northern district public service commissioner.

Presley, who speaks with a deep country drawl and is an actual relative of Elvis, is a native of northeast Mississippi, the other region of the state where Reeves has performed well. Presley has established a long political career focused on common-sense, apolitical priorities like expanding broadband access across the state and keeping large corporations from jacking up utility bills.

A political moderate who self describes as pro-life and pro-Second Amendment, Presley also boasts a genuine, close relationship with the state’s top Black Democratic leaders — something most white Democratic statewide candidates have never been able to say. 

But Presley’s advisers believe he has legitimate crossover appeal, especially with rural white Mississippians — people who have lately voted Republican. Among the Grand Ol’ Party faithful who have recently written checks to Presley’s campaign committee is Amory businessman Barry Wax, who served on Reeves’ 2019 campaign finance committee but wrote his potential Democratic challenger a $25,000 check in 2021.

But even a strong Democratic challenger in Presley wouldn’t be Reeves’ biggest 2023 problem.

His biggest problem was not a problem four years ago. It wouldn’t have been a problem 132 years ago. That’s because in 1890, Mississippi political leaders wrote the state constitution and added a provision that required candidates for statewide office do two things: 1) win a majority of the popular vote, and 2) win a majority of the state’s House of Representatives districts.

If no candidate checked both boxes, the state House of Representatives would vote to seat a winner. This happened at least once in state history — in 1999, when the majority Democratic House seated Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ronnie Musgrove over Republican candidate Mike Parker.

The provision was written in the early days of the Jim Crow era as a way to keep Black Mississippians from being elected to statewide office. But in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and as the Black Lives Matter movement gripped the nation, an overwhelming 79% of Mississippi voters elected to remove this provision from the constitution.

Beginning in 2023, all statewide candidates must do to win is garner a majority of the popular vote. That’s it. If no candidate garners 50% of the vote on Election Day, the top two vote-getters advance to a late November runoff.

This means that for the first time in 133 years, an independent candidate will have an absolutely real shot at winning statewide office. This is where the 2023 scenario really turns nightmarish for Reeves.

There are a number of political moderates with popularity and some name ID who, if they ran for governor in 2023, could make a splash:

• Bill Waller Jr., the former state Supreme Court chief justice who forced a runoff with Reeves in the 2019 Republican primary for governor. Waller, whose late father Bill Waller Sr. served as governor in the 1970s, considered running as an independent in 2019, but opted to run as a Republican because of the now-defunct constitutional provision. Despite an eleventh-hour entry into the 2019 primary and little time to raise money or garner much momentum, Waller came within 8 points of defeating Reeves.

• Toby Barker, mayor of Hattiesburg and former Republican state representative. Barker, a millennial, is an impressively popular figure among Hattiesburg’s Republicans and Democrats alike. Here’s how Barker spoke of his independent political label in 2021: “I think it started with my generation — people identifying more with causes or people rather than a set, rigid partisan ideology. I think people understand that there’s a lot of gray out there… If you care about your community and seek to take care of needs and lead everyone equitably, I think being an independent is the best way to do that.”

• George Flaggs, mayor of Vicksburg and former Democratic state representative. Flaggs, who is close with Reeves and served on his 2019 campaign finance committee, told Mississippi Today last year he was praying about running for governor in 2023. Flaggs, who is Black, said this of a possible 2023 bid: “People are looking for people that represent people. I believe (changing the constitution) creates an opportunity to where an independent candidate — particularly an African American candidate — can be elected at the statewide level.”

• Robyn Tannehill, mayor of Oxford and newly-declared independent. Tannehill, who has gotten plenty of statewide press during the pandemic, has developed a close relationship with Gunn and other statewide political brokers. Here’s what she said when she announced she would run for reelection as Oxford mayor as an independent: “I believe with all of my heart that at the local level we need to be as bipartisan as possible to be able to achieve our greatest potential. I’m not representing the Republican Party or the Democratic Party as mayor. I’m representing Oxford, Mississippi.”

Mississippi Today spoke with several political data analysts who have worked dozens of election cycles for both Republicans and Democrats. No analyst could definitively say who would win in a hypothetical three-way race between Republican nominee Tate Reeves, Democratic nominee Brandon Presley, and a strong independent candidate.

Without exception, though, the analysts all predicted no candidate would garner 50% of the vote on Election Day. As for guesses on who the top two vote-getters would be, no one could confidently predict that Reeves would even land in the top two.

The lowest percentage any modern Democrat has pulled in a governor’s race was Robert Gray in 2015, who garnered 33% despite no political experience and virtually no name ID. Presley, theoretically, would earn at least that 33% floor and could lead the field of three candidates on Election Day.

That leaves 67% of the remaining vote for Reeves, whose unfavorability in recent polls has been in the mid-30s. It’s difficult to envision that a decent independent candidate wouldn’t pull at least 17% of the remaining vote from the incumbent governor. Waller, if he performed similarly to 2019, would earn closer to half of that remaining vote, putting both Reeves and Waller in the high 20s or low 30s.

Even if Reeves ran first or second on Election Day, a runoff with the other top vote-getter would be far from a guaranteed victory for the incumbent. The unsuccessful third candidate’s supporters would undoubtedly flock to Reeves’ opponent in a runoff.

Had Reeves had his way in 2020, this nightmare scenario would be a distant pipe dream for his political opponents.

Before voters decided in 2020 to get rid of the constitutional provision, Mississippi lawmakers first had to place the issue on the ballot. The issue was, of course, blessed by Gunn, the leader of the House, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the leader of the Senate. 

But at the time, Reeves refused to endorse the idea, saying it was designed “to help elect Democrats” to statewide office.

The governor’s stance then was certainly outside the mainstream and clearly not shared by a vast majority of Mississippians. Now, as we clearly see how the constitutional change could affect Reeves’ political life, that stance is starting to make a lot more sense.

The post Tate Reeves’ worst 2023 nightmare appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Five new charter schools could open across the state as early as next year if the state approves their applications later this fall. 

On Monday, the Charter School Authorizer Board voted to advance the proposed schools, and voted against the remaining five that did not meet a majority of the required application criteria. 

This round of the process allowed all applications to be reviewed by an outside evaluator, which recommended only four of the ten proposed schools advance to the next round. Those schools are:

• Columbus Leadership Academy, grades K-8 in the Columbus Municipal School District
• Instant Impact Global Prep, grades K-8 in the Natchez Adams School District
• Resilience Academy of Teaching Excellence, grades K-5 in the East Tallahatchie School District
• Resilience Academy of Teaching Excellence, grades K-5 in the North Bolivar School District

The board also approved Clarksdale Collegiate Prep, which would serve grades 7-12 in the Clarksdale Municipal School District, despite the independent evaluator recommending against it due to issues with the plan that was submitted and concerns regarding test scores. The test scores referenced were from Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School, a currently operating charter school serving students K-5. 

Board members pointed out that the lower test scores occurred during the pandemic, and said the applicant should be granted leniency due to the extenuating circumstances. The board ultimately voted 4-3 in favor of moving the school to the final step.

Final decisions on each school will be announced in September. 

Charter schools are free public schools that do not report to a school board like traditional public schools. Instead, they are governed by the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board, which oversees the application process to open a new charter school. They have more flexibility for teachers and administrators when it comes to student instruction, and are funded by local school districts based on enrollment. 

Charter schools can apply directly to the authorizer board if they’re planning to open in a D or F district. If an operator wants to open in an A, B, or C district, they need to get approval from the local school board. All proposed schools being reviewed this cycle would be opening in D or F districts.

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A three-judge panel of the state Supreme Court has rejected the petition of Jackson Women’s Health Organization to allow the resumption of abortions as early as this week.

The Supreme Court justices have said that instead they will wait for arguments from Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office to be submitted before ruling on the petition of the abortion supporters. The three-justice panel of James Kitchens, Dawn Beam and Kenneth Griffis has given Fitch’s office until July 25 to respond to a petition requesting that the Supreme Court rescind the abortion ban.

The abortion ban was put in place after Fitch’s office successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for the reversal of Roe v. Wade, a decades-old decision that provided a national right to an abortion.

The abortion ban went into effect in Mississippi on Thursday. At the time the ban went into effect, Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the only abortion provider in the state. The clinic had filed a lawsuit asking that the ban been postponed based on a 1998 state Supreme Court ruling saying that there was a right to an abortion in Mississippi’s constitution separate from the right granted under the U.S. Constitution in Roe v. Wade.

Despite the state Supreme Court saying the right to an abortion existed in the Mississippi Constitution, Chancery Judge Debbra Halford of Franklin County refused to stop the ban from taking effect.

Now the clinic is asking the state Supreme Court to rule on the issue and is requesting a quick decision.

In a motion, attorneys for the clinic said, “By July 25, Mississippians will have been without abortion access for over two weeks. They will have been denied their rights under the Mississippi Constitution to privacy and bodily autonomy, as they are compelled by the state to endure the risks of pregnancy and bear children against their will. The deprivation of constitutional rights, and the harms of forced pregnancy and childbirth, are substantial and irreversible. Absent relief from this Court, the harm will continue.”

The three-judge panel rejected that argument, opting instead to wait for arguments from the AG, due July 25.

The abortion ban is in effect in Mississippi because of a trigger law passed in 2007 that went into effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned. Attorneys for the abortion clinic say the 1998 state Supreme Court ruling recognizing a Mississippi constitutional right to an abortion supersedes the trigger law and another Mississippi law banning abortions after six weeks.

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In preparing for the next phase of the “pro-life agenda” following the fall of Roe v. Wade, Gov. Tate Reeves boasted publicly that his staff conducted a thorough review of Mississippi law to find ways to improve the current environment for people expecting to give birth.

But there’s no written record of this analysis, according to documents Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.

Instead, records show the administration briefly consulted with four people by email — two anti-abortion advocates of Choose Life MS, a pediatrician and a local judge — and gathered template legislation written by Washington-based Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the most powerful anti-abortion lobbying groups in the nation.

A Reeves spokesperson said the “thorough analysis” the governor has discussed publicly was a verbal briefing, not a written document, which is why the office didn’t produce more to the news organization.

Last January, Reeves’ policy advisor Kristen Windham wrote an email to Janet Thomas, director of Choose Life MS, saying, “I enjoyed our meeting last week and appreciate the willingness to help Governor Reeves develop a plan going forward.”

Choose Life MS, led by its president and longtime anti-abortion lobbyist Terri Herring, is a private advocacy nonprofit that collects and disburses funding to crisis pregnancy centers — organizations known for persuading pregnant women against abortion. The Legislature has given Herring’s organization power over which pregnancy centers will be able to receive newly created tax credits by including in statute that the credits will be reserved for nonprofits that are eligible under Choose Life MS’s grant program.

Windham also corresponded with Hattiesburg pediatrician Anita Henderson, president of the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who had a different take on what a “pro-life agenda” would look like. Henderson recommended the state extend postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to a year — a proposal with bipartisan support that Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn killed in 2022.

“Not sure if he (Reeves) would be interested in meeting with her,” Windham wrote in an email, forwarding Henderson’s recommendation to another Reeves staffer.

Reeves has yet to meet with the pediatrician, Henderson told Mississippi Today. Plus, Henderson reached out to the governor’s office, not the other way around.

“Postpartum care is low-hanging fruit,” Henderson said. “It is a really easy option to show moms and babies that they’re supported.”

Henderson noted that after making abortion illegal, Mississippi could see an additional 3,500 babies born per year, and with a preterm birth rate of 14%, that could translate to 500 more babies in neonatal intensive care. Additionally, the number of children in Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services custody could likewise increase.

In recent State of the State addresses, Reeves promised to take action to “make Mississippi the safest and most supportive state in the country for mothers,” and “make it even easier to adopt … to ensure that these children are not twice-abandoned.” He asked his staff to work on a plan to accomplish this.

As a result of their efforts, the governor’s office has drafted a policy agenda which centers on directing an unspecified amount of public funding to crisis pregnancy centers, reforming the state’s youth court system and offering new cash incentives to adoptive parents.

The plan does not address extending postpartum Medicaid coverage — a policy supported by several advocacy groups and many Republican lawmakers — or providing direct assistance to low-income expectant mothers.

“One issue that needs constant attention, however, is the resources available to children of parents facing long-term incarceration or even those who are on probation but struggling to provide the care and attention needed,” Judge Toni Terrett, a circuit court judge in the western region of the state, told a Reeves staffer by email in January. “The answer may not always be adoption in those situations, but these children may need special attention to make sure they are not lost in the shuffle.”

Terrett told Mississippi Today that since offering her initial advice, she has not had any more conversations with the office.

In recent years, Mississippi has led the nation in reducing its notoriously backlogged CPS caseload, while promising to unify families instead of separating them. But at the same time, the state has failed to pull down available federal funding to help families in poverty care for their children through prevention services, while welfare officials misspent millions that could have been used for this purpose. Experts say an emphasis on incentivizing adoption and increasing CPS intervention could reverse the state’s progress and perpetuate trauma.

“I’m all for it. Give as much financial assistance as you possibly can. But if you’re stopping at wanting to give it to everyone but the biological family, then you have a flaw in your logic,” said attorney Kimberly Russell, who previously led child welfare efforts under the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Mississippi and the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Also absent from the governor’s agenda are any plans to improve access to education for young women and mothers, though Reeves recently said in an interview that providing educational opportunities would be “the best thing we can do for them.”

The three-page Reeves administration policy agenda, drafted before the U.S. Supreme Court decision and titled “Possible actions ahead of life-favoring Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs case,” proposes six measures. It is published here for the first time:

• Enact Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s “Support for Mothers and Babies Act”: Create a competitive grant for crisis pregnancy centers, which includes reporting requirements and auditing procedures
• Statewide judicial reform: Create a uniform, state-funded youth court and more rapid pathways for permanent placement; provide state funding for parent representatives; allow county prosecutors to terminate parental rights
• Increased adoption incentives: Create a multi-year grant award for parents who adopt children in CPS custody – $20,000 over four years, for example.
• Extended “Safe Haven” law: Increase the amount of time a mother is allowed to relinquish her child after birth, which Reeves’ agenda says is currently 72 hours (though state law actually says 7 days); the agenda doesn’t advocate for extending to a specific time period, but cites other states that allow up to seven days, 30 days, or even as long as a year.
• Roundtable discussions: Gather representatives from CPS, centers for pregnancy choices, pregnancy help organizations, adoption agencies, hospitals, clinics and Medicaid to communicate “about the overall process.”
• Address current CPS case backlog: Fund special youth court judges, prosecutors and caseworkers to reduce adoption and custody cases.

Reeves has touted a bill he signed this year, the Pregnancy Resource Act, which provides $3.5 million in tax credits to donors of eligible pregnancy resource centers and crisis pregnancy centers. Centers must meet requirements under Choose Life MS’s grant program to qualify.

Getty Israel, founder of community health clinic Sisters in Birth, which is in the process of opening a birthing center, said she met a dead end when trying to secure eligibility from Choose Life MS.

“You gotta get the blessing of the Mississippi pro-life people,” Israel said. “… You gotta be a part of this clique, this political clique, this so-called pro-life clique or anti-abortion clique, in order to take advantage of that tax credit. That sounds very, very much like discrimination to me.” 

In the past, Israel turned down a small donation from Choose Life MS because she said the process was too invasive – requiring her to add its logo to her website, for example.

Israel also met last year with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organizers, who represented that they were eager to provide services for pregnant women and asked her for a “wish list” of policies she’d like to see. Israel sent the list, but she said nothing ever came of it. 

This wasn’t a surprise to Israel, who said the Legislature has consistently turned down resources for the tangible services her organization provides.

“They (Republican leadership) are just not serious about improving health outcomes among women who are gonna become pregnant and making sure those babies are born full term, but with all their limbs and healthy, and that they can thrive. They just want babies to be born. That’s a political check,” Israel said. “I have never been able to get Tate Reeves’ office to even allow me to meet with him or anyone there. I’ve been trying for years.” 

As part of its work with the governor’s office, Choose Life MS also conducted a survey of 14 pregnancy help organizations to gauge their needs and shared the results. Some of the needs the centers identified included increased shelter capacity, transportation, fatherhood programs, mental health services, websites, mobile units, a washer and dryer and sonogram services.

Henderson said transportation and assistance in applying to Medicaid are two needs that pregnancy centers could consider meeting.

“Over half of the counties in Mississippi do not have an OBGYN. So moms are traveling significant distances to see their doctor, which costs gas money, time, and loss of work. Those are reasons that many moms delay care or miss GYN visits,” she said. “The other thing I see … moms who find out that they are pregnant, when they apply for Medicaid, it can take a month for their Medicaid application to go through for them to learn that they are eligible. So that is a month lost, in terms of prenatal care, prenatal vitamins, testing and treatment.”

Currently, Choose Life MS collects revenue from the sale of specialty car tags and distributes the funding to about 40 of these organizations – which are noticeably sparse in the Delta and southwest Mississippi, areas with higher Black populations. If the tax credits were evenly distributed, each center would benefit from $87,500 in tax exempt donations.

In 2016, Choose Life MS said it had exceeded $3 million in revenue from the car tags since 2002 and that number is now $3.5 million, according to its website. The nonprofit’s annual revenue, according to its 990 forms, is around just under $150,000 a year and has been on the decline.

In some states, governors have chosen to use funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, or welfare, to subsidize pregnancy centers. With its proposed legislation, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America aims to get more direct legislative appropriations to these organizations so they don’t rely on political whims from year to year.

“I have watched over the years, and it’s certainly not perfect by any stretch, but since 1973, since Roe, the social services delivery system, the smorgasbord of services available to families and children has grown tremendously,” said Susan Liebel, director of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “… The trick is to get, of course, the right services in the right places with the right people who need them in the time that they need them. That’s the trick.”

But some public health professionals, like Israel, are skeptical about the mission and capacity of the existing centers.

“I made it very clear that I wasn’t impressed with what the pregnancy resource centers were doing, simply discouraging women to have an abortion and not helping pregnant women,” Israel said of her conversations with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “They (crisis pregnancy centers) are not willing to refer their clients to me and I’m offering all these services and I’m right here in the city of Jackson. And this is my area of expertise. But they won’t refer patients to me because I don’t agree with their religious and political agenda.”

Herring, who has direct lines with Reeves’ office on crafting future plans, did not respond to Mississippi Today’s requests for an interview for this story.

Herring, a failed Gov. Phil Bryant nominee to the Mississippi State Health Department board and part of the “pro-life coalition” Reeves announced in 2019, appears to be a darling of Republican leadership.

In 2019, after the Senate passed another restrictive abortion ban under his leadership, Reeves called Herring out by name, tweeting, “Thank you to @Terri_Herring and other pro-life Mississippians who worked and prayed for this. Your work will save lives.”

See the entirety of the governor’s office response to Mississippi Today’s public records request below.

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