Gov. Tate Reeves said he intends to call a special session to take up legalizing medical marijuana as soon as some final details are worked out between him and legislative leaders.
“I am confident we will have a special session of the Legislature if we get the specifics of a couple of items that are left outstanding,” Reeves said Tuesday during a news conference. “Again, we have made great progress working with our legislative leaders.”
Reeves said it is more important to get a bill to legalize marijuana done right than done quickly.
He cited as areas of concern:
The level of THC dosages. THC is the chemical in marijuana that produces the feeling of euphoria or a high.
The amount of marijuana that can be provided to people.
And who would be eligible to receive medical marijuana.
Legislative leaders have said they relied on industry standards in setting THC levels and amounts dispensed in their proposal.
In addition to the issues Reeves listed Tuesday, his office has also been back and forth with lawmakers adding language to ensure that marijuana businesses cannot receive state economic development incentives or credits.
While the governor said he wanted to take the time to ensure the bill “is right,” he did acknowledge the overwhelming vote in favor of a medical marijuana ballot initiative during the 2020 election. That vote, though, was ruled unconstitutional in May 2021 by the state Supreme Court because language establishing the initiative process references gathering signature to place an issue on the ballot from five congressional districts. The state has not had five districts since the 1990 census.
After the Supreme Court ruled the medical marijuana initiative vote unconstitutional, legislative leaders began drafting a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in anticipation of Reeves calling a special session. Legislative leaders said recently they had reached an agreement and were ready for Reeves to call a special session. The governor, though, has identified the areas of concern he wants addressed before the special session is called.
Even if an agreement between Reeves and legislative leaders is reached, that would not prevent it from being altered during a special session during the normal legislative process.
In addition, Reeves said he is considering other items that he might add to the special session agenda. Those included providing state death benefits for emergency first responders who died because of the coronavirus.
He also said he and legislators were beginning to discuss the spending priorities for $1.8 billion in COVID-19 relief funds approved earlier this year for Mississippi by the U.S. Congress.
Reeves said he is considering the proposal of Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Speaker Philip Gunn to use some of those federal relief funds to provide additional pay to nurses and other health care employees to address the worker shortage that has occurred during the pandemic.
“We are very interested in developing a plan to deal with the long-term challenges in the health care arena and health care shortages,” Reeves said.
When they learned last year that Hall of Fame NFL quarterback and Kiln native Brett Favre had taken $1.1 million in welfare money from the state, Mississippians were incensed.
Favre received the federal grant funds to sponsor a “family-stabilizing” initiative pushed by then-Gov. Phil Bryant and his wife called Families First for Mississippi.
The state auditor claimed Favre was hired for speaking engagements he didn’t attend.
Followers of the story were even more miffed when, as months went on after the revelation, officials would not accuse Favre of wrongdoing. Favre faced no charges or public repercussions, and recurring national headlines regarding the athlete in the last year (usually because of politically divisive things he’s said on his new podcast) barely mentioned the welfare scandal.
State Auditor Shad White, who uncovered the payment and a larger embezzlement scheme leading to six arrests, wouldn’t even say whether Favre had to pay the money back.
On Tuesday, Favre at last received a demand: He must pay the state $828,000 or face a civil lawsuit.
“The sum demanded represents illegal expenditures of public funds made to you or to entities or combines for which you are legally obligated to pay and/or the unlawful dispositions of public property, including public funds, made with you or with entities or combines for which you are legally responsible to pay,” the letter reads. “These illegal expenditures and unlawful dispositions were made when you knew or had reason to know through the exercise of reasonable diligence that the expenditures were illegal and/or the dispositions were unlawful.”
The auditor’s office sent out letters demanding repayment from Favre and 14 other individuals or organizations for a total of $77 million in misspent welfare dollars. These demands do not represent criminal allegations.
Favre had already promised to voluntarily pay the money back, claiming he did not know the funds came from a federal grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — the anti-poverty program known as welfare.
Favre paid $500,000 to the auditor’s office shortly after the news broke, but failed to pay the remaining $600,000. The athlete refused to answer any of Mississippi Today’s questions about why he received the contract, what he performed for Families First, or where the remaining money was. He offered a short explanation to his Twitter followers before blocking this reporter on the platform.
Favre’s longtime agent Bus Cook, who eventually told Mississippi Today he had nothing to do with securing the Families First sponsorship for his client, did not return calls on Tuesday.
The $828,000 demand, which also went to Favre Enterprises and business partner Robert Culumber, includes the $600,000 he failed to repay plus interest.
Favre isn’t the only retired athlete who has been ordered to repay welfare funds after they “did not completely fulfill the terms of their contracts” with Mississippi Department of Human Services, the auditor’s release said.
Ted DiBiase Jr., a retired WWE wrestler, must return $3.9 million — virtually all the money he earned as a motivational speaker for the welfare agency, plus interest.
His dad, former WWE wrestler dubbed “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase Sr., must pay $722,299 that his Christian ministry received, purportedly to help underprivileged teens. He told a sports reporter at the time that his church had been “selected by our governor” — then Gov. Phil Bryant — to “be the face of his faith-based initiative.”
His other son, Brett DiBiase, who is one of only two people to plead guilty within the alleged welfare scheme, must pay $225,950, according to the letter.
The Marcus Dupree Foundation, owned by former football player Marcus Dupree, received a demand for $789,534.
But the biggest demand comes to former Mississippi Department of Human Services director John Davis, who is on the hook for $96.313 million “for his role authorizing over $77 million in illegal TANF spending.” He is currently awaiting trial on embezzlement charges. Though Davis took his direction from his boss, the man who hired him in 2016, then-Gov. Phil Bryant, the auditors have not placed any culpability on the state’s top official at the time.
The nonprofits through which most of the misspending flowed — Mississippi Community Education Center, owned by discredited private school founder Nancy New, and Family Resource Center of North Mississippi — also received demand letters through their officers.
They must pay $68.2 million and $15.5 million, respectively.
The other demands included:
Davis’ nephew Austin Smith: $378,791
JTS Enterprises and Transformational Ventures, controlled by Davis’ brother-in-law Brian Jeff Smith: $674,715
Mississippi Community Education Center founder Nancy New, also indicted in the scheme: $2,589 (for payments received from FRC)
NCC Ventures, controlled by Nicholas Coughlin: $237,915
Warren Washington Issaquena Sharkey Community Action Agency: $75,261
Nancy New’s son Zach New, who was also indicted in the scheme: $74,118 (for payments received from FRC)
“After our first DHS audit, I told the public we would have to consult with our federal partners at the Department of Health and Human Services before coming to final conclusions about who owed what money back,” White said in a release Tuesday. “Those partners were waiting for this forensic audit. Now that it’s complete, we are in a position to demand the illegally spent welfare funds be returned to the state.”
The people who received letters must repay the funds within 30 days. If they do not, the Attorney General’s Office is responsible for pursuing the case in civil court. These proceedings are not the same as criminal charges.
Dozens of students at Alcorn State University stood in silence on the campus lawn. They wore black shirts emblazoned with raised fists and held signs that summarized the mood on campus toward the president, Felecia Nave.
“We are brave.” “Talk to us.” “Nave doesn’t care if we live or die.”
Protests are rarely seen at Alcorn, the nation’s oldest historically Black land grant university, where students face pressure to resolve issues with administration internally. But after two years of increasing unhappiness with Nave’s leadership, students and faculty say they no longer trust the president.
Jaquerius Howard, the student government president, even took the extraordinary step of writing to the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, calling on Nave to resign because of her ineffective leadership.
“She has continuously shown a lack of empathy, transparency, and communication,” Howard wrote in a letter signed by members of the Royal Court, student government and senate.
Since the student protest at the end of September, Mississippi Today spoke with more than a dozen students, faculty and alumni. They say that since Nave became president in 2019, she has made Alcorn a tougher place for low-income, marginalized students.
Their grievances are wide-ranging. Some are systemic and ongoing: An increased workload without extra pay for faculty. Spotty WiFi, and outdated technology in classrooms. Others are focused on specific incidents, like an ice storm that left students without food for days.
The university has disputed many of these assertions in statements to Mississippi Today and the campus. In a letter to the student body addressing the protest, Nave wrote that a lack of resources has required Alcorn to take an “incremental approach” to remedying student concerns.
“Students have been my number one priority since I arrived, and they continue to be my priority,” she wrote. “At Alcorn, we remain committed to ensuring that all students have the resources to succeed.”
Unless otherwise noted, students and faculty spoke with Mississippi Today on the condition of anonymitybecause of fear of retribution. At a university that is isolated in rural Claiborne County, where the community cares intensely for it and feels like no one else does, it can be hard to speak up.
“In all honesty, there are already a lot of negative stereotypes about HBCUs and the African Americans who run them,” a student majoring in liberal arts said. When students speak out, he said, “we’re often met with the criticism that we’re helping to perpetuate that.”
But addressing the way Nave is leading the school is too important to stay silent.
“It’s almost like, ‘what happens in this house stays in this house,’” he said. “But that can’t really happen when what’s happening in this house is hurting me.”
When Nave was selected as president in 2019, the campus was excited. Not only would she be the first Black woman to lead Alcorn, many thought her presidency would be a turning point. Enrollment had been declining for the last two years. After decades of underfunding by the IHL board and state Legislature, Alcorn was now facing a new budget challenge as funding from the Ayers v. Fordice settlement was set to end.
Felecia Nave answers questions after the IHL board announced her appointment in April 2019. Credit: Mississippi Public Universities
Nave, herself a graduate of Alcorn, seemed poised to address these challenges.
“We thought that she was more than capable of thriving in this environment,” said Calvert White, who was a sophomore at the time. “And then we were met by lackluster policy.”
For many students, the first sign that Nave would not live up to expectations came shortly after she started at Alcorn. For years, students had participated in a weekly dance in the Clinton J. Bristow Dining Hall called “Club Cafe.” It was a tradition, a safe way for students to have fun at the isolated campus. But the summer Nave came to campus, Sodexo, Alcorn’s food-service provider, and campus police “reported increasing behaviors unbecoming of college students,” Alcorn’s spokesperson told Mississippi Today. Nave stopped allowing music.
To students, it felt like Nave didn’t understand the culture of the community she had agreed to lead.
“Students are gonna party,” said Shanique Strickland, a senior criminal justice and social work double major. “If anybody knows anything about Alcorn, from way back when we have been able to do Club Cafe. That is part of Alcorn’s culture. I would rather she cultivate an environment where we can have our fun safely instead of us having to drive far away or off campus to a house party.”
Before long, students started to lose faith. In March 2020, the pandemic hit, and Alcorn’s campus shut down. At home, many students did not have laptops or reliable WiFi. Online learning was a challenge. The liberal arts major said he had to complete homework on his phone; due to the stay-at-home order, he “couldn’t even sit outside the public library and get WiFi.”
He felt like Alcorn could have done more to help. The university partially refunded room and board in April, and allocated federal stimulus money to students in May. But Alcorn did not offer a pass/fail grading option, which made this student feel like he was “expected to perform at the maximum capability with no resources.”
“I think that definitely decreased motivation, because my GPA took a hit for something I couldn’t control,” he said.
For faculty, distrust quickly turned into animosity after Nave’s office made a series of policy changes that led to critical classes being canceled for students and higher course loads and less pay for professors.
To help teach students, Alcorn relies on instructors and adjuncts. Prior to Nave, most instructors were required to teach four courses a semester. If they taught additional courses, they would receive extra “overload” pay.
During Nave’s first semester as president, faculty were informed that classes that didn’t meet a new minimum enrollment would be cancelled, and instructors would be expected to teach five courses a semester, without extra pay.
Faculty felt blind-sided. One instructor who makes $35,000 a year said he did not know how he would afford his bills without overload pay, which had amounted to about $3,000. He also did not have enough students to teach five classes, which led him to worry about losing his job.
Faculty asked Nave to delay the new policies, but she refused, saying declining enrollment made these changes necessary “to ensure the overall stability and financial standing” of Alcorn.
“The University may not — and will not — overspend its IHL budget,” Nave wrote in a letter to faculty.
When the policies went into effect in January 2020, they also created problems for students. The liberal arts student, who attends Alcorn on a scholarship, said that courses he needed to graduate were cut due to low enrollment. His professors had to spend the first couple weeks of the semester trying to get the registrar’s office to re-offer the classes.
The new policies left “us low-income, first generation students in a pretty bad situation,” he said. “A lot of us don’t have parents that can pay tuition. We need to get out of here on time so we don’t have to pay any more than we already are.”
In response to those concerns, the university said that if a course was not offered during the year that a student was set to graduate, the university has “accommodated the student to ensure that they were able to graduate on time.”
By fall 2020, discord over these policies had reached its peak. The faculty senate requested a meeting with Nave and the provost in the auditorium to discuss their concerns that the new policies made it harder for instructors to deliver high-quality instruction. Many faculty attended.
Faculty explained they wanted more input on policies that affected course offerings and pay. But Nave pushed back: “The president of the institution makes the decision,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting.
Instructors, she continued, only wanted to keep more courses because they wanted to get extra pay.
“It is not the norm that every department sets a different class size,” she said, “because you’re trying to split the class so you can get an overload and get $2,000 more dollars.”
Faculty interpreted this as Nave calling instructors greedy. The implication was particularly insulting, faculty said, because Nave makes $240,000 a year while the average instructor makes around $40,000.
One tenured professor said he’s never seen morale so low in 20 years at Alcorn.
“Our faculty are demoralized; our students are demoralized,” he said. “What good is this? In the effort to save money, you’ve turned the campus into a miserable place.”
Tensions were already high at the beginning of this year. Then in mid-February, the ice storm hit.
One professor was sitting next to her fireplace on the night of Feb. 15 when she started getting frantic text messages from students: “They’re like, ‘we don’t have food.’”
The roads had become slick with ice, preventing dining services from getting to campus. Before long, students started trading food. Eventually, students banded together and bought meals from Pattons, a takeout joint in Lorman, to serve in the cafeteria. All the while, they heard nothing from the president.
Calvert White, burnt out by his experience at Alcorn, transferred to Jackson State University after the spring 2021 semester. Credit: Calvert White
“You would’ve thought that we did not have a president running the university,” White said. “I‘ve never seen a situation where it’s literally every student for themselves.”
Students’ disappointment with Nave’s leadership turned into anger. They questioned why the university had not adequately prepared food services for the storm.
Students also wondered why they hadn’t heard from Nave herself. Campus news and the vice president for student affairs had sent emails to students throughout the week, but Nave did not write to students directly until Sunday, Feb. 21, when she sent an update that classes would be resuming the next day.
“In our minds, we’re thinking, ‘well where is she? Is she okay? Is she somewhere comfortable and warm while we’re freezing?’” Strickland said.
In a statement, Alcorn said that Nave was communicating to students through the campus news and that the campus was informed “of revised hours of operations due to the inclement weather” at the cafeteria.
The anger about the storm carried over into April, when Nave was formally inaugurated in the chapel on campus. Prior to the ceremony, banners with Nave’s face on it were strung up across campus, and Strickland noticed that some roads were repaved and lined with flower beds. Alcorn said these changes were part of “the continual beautification of campus.”
When White walked into the cafeteria that week, he was shocked at the bounty compared to what it was like during the ice storm.
“It was like wonderland: We had a popcorn machine, there was snow cones, we had f—in’ crawfish,” he said.
Burnt out and traumatized by the ice storm, White transferred to Jackson State University to finish his studies at the end of the spring semester.
Not long after students gathered outside Nave’s office for the protest in late September, she asked them to meet her inside the Old Gym for a town hall. For two hours, students questioned her about the longstanding issues they wanted to see addressed.
The tenured professor watched a Facebook livestream of the town hall in astonishment. He told Mississippi Today he could remember just one other time students protested the administration.
“There’s no tradition of challenging authority here with just a few exceptions,” he said. “I’m frankly surprised the Student Government Association led a protest and requested the president resign. It’s unheard of for Alcorn.”
Nave sent out a letter to students after the town hall. She wrote that the protest had “deeply saddened” her, and she pledged to be more visible on campus, to “enhance student engagement,” and to “strengthen the technology infrastructure.” Then she listed her accomplishments during her last two years as president.
“As I said when I arrived,” Nave wrote at the end of the letter, ‘We are Alcorn. I am Alcorn.’”
The words rang hollow to many students and faculty. They want real change. And now, alumni are involved. Several concerned graduates have come together to create a group called Alcornites for Change. They have posted a survey on their website to gather feedback, the results of which they hope to use to hold Nave accountable.
“The day those kids protested … it opened a vast majority of people’s eyes,” said Jared Gilmore, one of the alumni group’s organizers.
Ultimately, many no longer see the president as synonymous with the university. That’s the central frustration for the tenured professor who spoke to Mississippi Today — that Nave has convinced some on campus she is “the brand.”
“Any university that understands its mission understands the students are the brand,” he said, “not the freaking buildings, not the administration and certainly not the president.”
Thirteen years ago, at the direction of One Voice, a small group of community leaders and elected officials gathered with the MS NAACP in a roundtable discussion on leadership. This discussion evolved into a monthly meeting aimed at cultivating strategic alliances. As a result of these discussions, the first Mississippi Black Leadership Summit was held in 2008, convening members of the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, the Mississippi Association of Black Mayors, the Minority Caucus of Supervisors, MBC-LEO, the Black Sheriff’s Association, Partners in Education, Tax Assessors / Tax Collectors, Chancery and Circuit Clerks.
One Voice’s award-winning Mississippi Black Leadership Summit is coming to a community near you next month. Annually, this event convenes community leaders and elected officials for leadership development, hoping that this investment in these leaders will help build more sustainable communities and a Mississippi we all deserve. One Voice is excited to announce #MBLS2021 will uplift leaders in communities all over the state as we will be virtually traveling to every region in Mississippi for the summit.
Through the American Rescue Plan, Mississippi will receive the most significant direct federal funding in history to rebuild local economies over the next few years. As community advocates, One Voice and its partners should lead the charge, following the money and ensuring all communities can thrive. We must provide resources across the state that are not invested or funneled into systems that promote inequity. With this in mind, One Voice is using #MBLS2021 to examine what community investments should be prioritized in our state.
MBLS Workshop Titles, Locations, and Dates
From Crisis to Opportunity: Exploring Education Investments in the Mississippi Delta Delta – Wednesday, October 20, 2021, 5:30 pm
Who Pays, Mississippi? An overview of income, race, and economic development in Mississippi North – Thursday, October 21 at l1am
Making the Connection from Electricity to Broadband Southwest – Friday, October 22 at 11 am
Lifting Our Voices: Protecting our Voting Rights & Pushing for Fair Representation Gulf Coast – Tuesday,October 26 at 11 am
Criminal Justice in Mississippi; where we are and where we need to be East – Wednesday, October 27 at 11 am
Community Conversation: What’s On Your Mind? Central – Thursday, October 28 at 6 pm
MBLS is free to the public, but registration is required. Participants can register at onevoicems.org.
One Voice is a nonprofit organization specializing in training, leadership development, and network building in underserved communities. Our mission is to ensure an equal voice to traditionally silenced communities.
Legislators will be redrawing Mississippi’s four U.S. House seats and 174 state legislative seats as the state is undergoing some significant changes to its population.
The percentage of the state’s white population is shrinking faster than that of other demographic groups. The state’s white and African American population both decreased during the past 10 years, but the overall non-white population grew.
Additionally, Mississippians are moving from rural to urban and suburban areas of the state.
The state had a Black population of 1,084,481 as of the 2020 Census compared to 1,098,385 10 years earlier — a decline of 13,940 people. During the same time, Mississippi’s white population decreased at a much faster rate, shrinking 95,791 people the past 10 years to 1,658,893. Other minority groups experienced slight upticks during the past 10 years, though still making up a much smaller percentage of the state’s overall population when compared to the white and African American population.
The percentage of Mississippians identifying as other than solely white or African American was 3.85% in 2010 and now stands at 7.36%, according to Census data. Scott County in east central Mississippi is now about 15% Hispanic.
A growing non-white population in the midst of overall population loss is one of the puzzles members of the Legislature will have to figure out next year as they redraw the U.S. congressional and state legislative seats.
To further complicate that puzzle, the 2020 Census reveals that the areas of the state that have traditionally been majority African American — primarily counties touching or close to the Mississippi River — lost significant population the past 10 years. According to information compiled by Chism Strategies, a Mississippi-based polling and political consulting firm, the population of the Delta, which comprises a considerable amount of the river counties, declined 38,000 or 12% during the past 10 years.
Currently, there are 14 African American-majority districts in the state Senate and 42 in the House. Under federal law, it is difficult, though not impossible, for states to reduce the number of Black majority districts through a process called retrogression. So the Legislature will face the challenge of finding new Black majority districts to perhaps replace population loss in traditional Black population centers that are losing residents, such as the Mississippi Delta.
A joint legislative committee recently concluded a series of nine hearing across the state to garner public input on redistricting as they begin the task of redrawing the districts to match population shifts found during the 2020 shifts. The Legislature is expected to take up redistricting during the 2022 session, which begins in January.
Both the U.S. Constitution and state law mandate the redrawing of districts every 10 years after the Census is completed.
Time and again during the series of hearings, legislators were urged to ensure Black representation grows in the state. But how to achieve that African American representation has evolved over the years.
Rep. Ed Blackmon, who has been a member of the state House since 1980 and played a major role in increasing the number of Black majority districts in the state, has said in past interviews that at one time there was a belief that super majority minority districts (Black populations of 75% or more) had to be drawn for Black candidates to win. Blackmon said that is no longer the case. He and others now oppose what they say are the efforts of Republican majorities “to pack” Black residents in a limited number of districts.
Now, Blackmon and others argue, Black residents should not be “packed” into super majority minority districts but instead spread into more districts to increase their influence.
“Stacking and packing and gerrymandering voting districts to make safe districts for any party should be avoided,” said Lynn Evans, a board member of Mississippi Common Cause, which promotes for various issues dealing with governmental transparency. She said “classic safe districts” have a tendency to elect candidates who often do not serve the best interest of the state as a whole.
Rep. Hester Jackson McCray, D-Southaven, whose narrow win in House District 40 in 2019 made her the first African American to represent DeSoto County in the Legislature, said, “DeSoto County has the 3rd largest minority population in our state, but I feel that our minority population communities have been successfully broken apart and gerrymandered so that our vote has been diluted, and it has been impossible for a person of color to win a seat at the legislative table where decisions are made until my House 40 victory in 2019.”
Evans said the Black population in DeSoto County has grown by nearly 20,000 residents since 2010.
To highlight the evolution of DeSoto County, one of the fastest growing counties in the state, look no further than Jackson McCray’s District 40. In 2010, District 40 had a Black population of 34%. Now its African American population is just under 50% and when "other" groups are factored in, the district's minority population is now a majority, according to the 2020 Census data. She said during one of the public hearings of the Joint Legislative Redistricting Committee that perhaps two African American majority House district and a Senate district could be drawn in the fast growing Memphis suburb.
Overall, six counties had growth of 10% or more while 12 more had growth of less than 10%. Those growing counties were mostly in urban or suburban areas. The other 64 counties, mostly rural, lost population. The most glaring exception to the trend of migration from rural to urban/suburban areas was Hinds, the state’s most populous county, which includes Jackson, the state’s most populous city. Hinds’ population declined 17,000, or 7%, according to Chism.
According to analysis done by Chism, only nine of the 42 majority Black districts had a population that was within 5% of the legally allowed ideal population. The rest were below that number.
The trick for the Legislature will be to draw districts to provide representation for the state’s African American population in light of the fact that traditional centers of Black population in the state are losing residents in significant numbers.
The state’s Black population in 2010 was 37.02%, with a black voting-age population of 34.7%, based on Census data. African Americans comprise 36.62% of the population in 2020, with a black voting-age population of 35.25%.
But during the same time period the decline in the white community was much more precipitous, dropping from 59.13% in 2010 to 56.02% in 2020.
These numbers reflect those who identify in only one demographic area. To further illustrate the growth in the state’s minority population, the percentage of people who identify in more than one demographic area also is growing.
Overall, Mississippi’s population declined slightly during the past 10 years — just over 6,000 people to 2,961,279. Most states in the Southeastern region had significant population gains.
A Hinds County judge has finally accepted a plea deal from a nonprofit accountant at the center of a multi-million dollar embezzlement scheme.
Ann McGrew, head financial officer for Mississippi Community Education Center and a potential star witness against the nonprofit’s owner, has pleaded guilty to both original charges against her.
McGrew first agreed to a deal with prosecutors more than eight months ago for her role in the “sprawling” scheme uncovered in February of 2020. But in a very rare occurrence, Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Adrienne Wooten rejected her guilty plea.
Details of that initial agreement were not public, but while another defendant in the scheme got his charges cut, McGrew is now saddled with both conspiracy to commit embezzlement and making fraudulent statements.
In exchange for her cooperation and testimony against co-defendants, the state will recommend remanding the count of making fraudulent statements at sentencing. McGrew faces up to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines on the first charge. Or, if Wooten does not take the state’s recommendation, she could face up to 10 years and $15,000 in fines. Wooten won’t sentence McGrew until after the other cases conclude.
In February of 2020, a Hinds County grand jury indicted McGrew, Nancy New, the owner of Mississippi Community Education Center, her son Zach New, John Davis, former director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, agency employee Gregory “Latimer” Smith and retired WWE wrestler Brett DiBiase within an alleged scheme to embezzle a total of $4.15 million from a federal program intended to help the poor.
As the accountant, McGrew would have some of the most direct knowledge about who directed funds to which sources, so she’s an important witness for the state’s case.
Under McGrew’s financial watch, at least $2 million federal dollars flowed from Mississippi Community Education Center to Nancy New’s for-profit education company New Learning Resources Inc., where McGrew was also bookkeeper. McGrew falsified documents, invoices and ledgers to hide Nancy and Zach New’s theft, according to the indictment against her.
Nowhere have auditors or prosecutors shown how McGrew may have personally benefited from the scheme she aided.
McGrew’s attorney Joe Holloman and Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens could not share further details with Mississippi Today because of a gag order Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson entered last November in the case.
McGrew is the second person to plead guilty within the scheme, more than a year and a half after the arrests.
Brett DiBiase pleaded guilty to making fraudulent statements last December but not to an original conspiracy charge.
Investigators caught DiBiase for accepting a $48,000 contract from the agency for work he was unable to perform because he was staying in a luxury rehab facility in Malibu, California, at the time. A judge won’t sentence him until after the other cases conclude. His crime carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
Though McGrew is now cooperating with state prosecutors, she and her colleagues at the nonprofit did not comply with requests from accountants during a recent independent forensic audit of the Mississippi Department of Human Services.
As a result, the audit, for which the state paid $2.1 million, could not parse out what happened to over $40 million of the nonprofit’s spending.
The report did not analyze payments from New’s nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, to:
Most of the money in question came from a block grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a few-strings-attached federal fund which states can use to provide cash assistance, formerly known as the welfare check, to very low-income families or on a number of other programs.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services had offered small contracts to New’s nonprofit and another nonprofit called Family Resource Center of North Mississippi over the years. But in 2017, the agency began funneling tens of millions to the two organizations under the guise of a family-stabilizing initiative called Families First for Mississippi.
The two organizations then subgranted with dozens of other people and organizations but kept very poor track of the spending or what the recipients were supposed to be accomplishing. But only officials from New’s nonprofit have been accused of a crime.
In the summer of 2019, once the auditor’s office caught wind of the scheme, McGrew emailed a ledger to the welfare agency outlining how “Families First” had spent about $14 million, Clarion Ledger reported.
A former agency spokesperson told Mississippi Today that the agency had never received a similar detailed accounting of Families First before that.
The spreadsheet the agency did get at that time, which showed egregious spending such as expensive travel, dinners, advertising and lobbying, wasn’t even accurate or reliable, auditors found. The nonprofit often failed to properly delineate the sources of its funds. The way McGrew pooled money in their records made it difficult to identify who actually received TANF dollars.
The criminal charges against the six defendants address just a sliver of the overall misspending that occurred at the welfare agency under the leadership of Davis, and his boss, Gov. Phil Bryant.
The $2 million in theft that McGrew covered up represents less than 3% of the $76 million in misspending identified by the most recent independent audit.
The amount Brett DiBiase fraudulently obtained represents an even smaller fraction.
Charges against Brett DiBiase didn’t address the salary he was making at Mississippi Community Education Center or the $160,000 the nonprofit paid for his rehab stay.
Prosecutors haven’t brought any charges against his father, Ted DiBiase, whose organization received $2 million in welfare dollars from the agency or his brother, Ted DiBiase Jr., who may have profited more than any other individual from the welfare misspending after receiving more than $3 million from the nonprofit. The latest audit said all payments to the DiBiase family were indicative of fraud, waste or abuse.
Fixing the state’s broken ballot initiative process will likely not be part of any special session to be called by Gov. Tate Reeves in the coming days.
Chairs of both the House and Senate Constitution committees said they would prefer to take up the issue of reinstating the initiative process in January when the new session begins. Reeves is expected to call a special session to allow the Legislature to address legalizing medical marijuana.
In November 2020, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative legalizing medical marijuana. But in May 2021, the state Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional both the medical marijuana vote and the state’s entire initiative process.
Ballot initiatives, added to the state Constitution in the early 1990s, are voter-led efforts to put issues directly on a statewide ballot rather than wait for lawmakers or other state leaders to adopt policy themselves. The initiative process, which requires gathering tens of thousands of signatures and voter approval before a policy can be enacted, is widely viewed a cornerstone of democratic government.
After the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, voters of many political backgrounds erupted in anger. Mississippians broadly called for a special session for the Legislature to both enact a medical marijuana law and reinstate the initiative process.
House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, was vocal in advocating for the governor to call a special session to fix the initiative process that was ruled unconstitutional in the controversial decision by the state Supreme Court.
But while legislators have worked to reach a consensus on a medical marijuana proposal in advance of the governor calling a special session, efforts to fix the initiative in special session have lost steam.
When Gunn recently spoke of items he would like to see on a special session agenda, he listed medical marijuana and some COVID-19-related items but said nothing about adding an initiative fix.
“Originally the speaker was open to knocking that out with medical marijuana,” said House Constitution Committee Chair Fred Shanks, R-Brandon. “We were ready to go on the House side. But there has not been much talk of it lately. But we will take care of it ( the initiative process) during the regular session.”
Shanks’ counterpart in the Senate, Chris Johnson, R-Hattiesburg, offered similar comments.
“We spent a lot of time working on the marijuana bill, but I think we need to put time into working on the ballot initiative process before we take it up,” said Johnson, the Senate Constitution Committee chairman. “There’s no benefit to doing it before session as it has to go on the ballot in November 2022.”
Any fix to the initiative process adopted by the Legislature would have to gain the approval of the voters. But there is no provision mandating that the voter approval would have to occur during a November general election. Legislators could schedule a special election for any date, though the election cost would be much lower if the vote on the initiative fix was part of an already scheduled election. Secretary of State Michael Watson has estimated that costs of a special election of between $1 million and $1.5 million.
The initiative process was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because of language saying in order to place a proposal on the ballot a specific number of signatures had to be gathered from five congressional districts. The state lost a congressional seat in 2000 and now only has four, rendering both the medical marijuana initiative that relied on the five-district language and the entire initiative process invalid, the Supreme Court ruled.
Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, said he would prefer not to wait until the regular session to deal with the initiative fix.
“I would prefer to see it in the special session along with some other things,” he said. “We keep hearing they are limiting it to medical marijuana. I don’t think that is a good idea, but I am not part of leadership.”
Rep. Robert Johnson, the House Democratic leader, said multiple items should be considered, such as COVID-19 “hazard pay” not only for health care workers but grocery store clerks and others who “had to come to work every day” to ensure a functioning society.
Johnson also said the initiative process should be reinstated as soon as possible to allow people to gather signatures to bypass the Legislature to place issues on the ballot, such as expanding health care to provide coverage for the working poor with the federal government paying most of the costs. Various high profile groups such as the Mississippi Hospital Association had started work on a Medicaid expansion initiative when the Supreme Court invalidated the initiative process.
“We should do medical marijuana, but I don’t understand why we are not talking about other serious issues,” Johnson said.
Mississippi laid out an argument before the U.S. Supreme Court last week that could impact water law principles around the globe.
The state is seeking over $600 million in damages from neighboring Tennessee over what it sees as stolen groundwater. Since 1985, Mississippi claims, a Memphis public utility has pumped enough water from an interstate aquifer to force water from Mississippi’s side of the border into Tennessee.
The nation’s highest court has ruled on a number of disputes dealing with surface water in the past, such as two states fighting over use of the same river, but this is the first case to focus entirely on groundwater.
Law and water resource experts explained to Mississippi Today why the Supreme Court’s ruling could have wide-reaching effects.
First, the supply of groundwater in the world dwarfs that of surface water, which is already becoming less reliable due to climate change; about three-quarters of Mississippi’s water comes from groundwater.
Second, very few places around the world that share aquifers have any agreement over how to divide the resource.
“People, communities, countries are going to have to go to groundwater to meet their water needs, and they’ll eventually be pumping from the same aquifers on different sides of the border,” said Gabriel Eckstein, a professor and director of the Energy, Environmental, and Natural Resource Systems Law Program at Texas A&M University.
This case, he explained, will help inform places across the world on how to share groundwater.
“Well do I sue my neighbor, do I enter into a treaty with them, or do I ignore them?” Eckstein said.
For the most part, bordering states and countries have chosen the latter option. With this case, Mississippi is hoping to set a new precedent by staking ownership in the water under its land.
Physically, the evidence backs Mississippi’s claim, explained Robert Mace, a professor at Texas State University with a Ph.D. in hydrogeology.
“Tennessee’s pumping creates what we call a cone of depression, and that cone of depression reaches out across the state line,” Mace said. “The data clearly shows that the human intervention of (Tennessee’s) well field has impacted the groundwater flow in the aquifer and is pulling water from Mississippi into Tennessee.”
Conceptually, however, it’s unclear what the legal grounds are for Mississippi’s claims, as the justices expressed during last week’s oral arguments.
In past interstate water disputes, the Supreme Court has leaned on “equitable apportionment,” a set of principles that determine a fair allotment of water based on factors such as how many people need the water, what it’s needed for, conservation, climate, among others.
Tennessee, the special master — an outside expert the court appoints for highly technical cases — and the assistant to the solicitor general all argued that equitable apportionment should apply to this case as well.
But Mississippi chose to forgo that route for the time being, instead claiming ownership over the water that has flowed underneath Tennessee, an argument that the justices and other legal experts struggle with.
The justices, expressing confusion, made several analogies during the oral arguments to wrap their heads around the issue: If a pack of wild horses ran from one state to another, which state owns the horses? If a plane in the sky forced fog across a state boundary, could one state claim damages from the loss of its fog?
“The bottom line is that water flows,” said Buzz Thompson, a professor at Stanford University who served as Special Master for Montana v. Wyoming, a Supreme Court interstate water case from 2018. “It’s hard to say that you have a right to keep a molecule of water that’s underneath your state from flowing over under another state, unless you tell that state that they can’t pump.
“It’s hard to find very many legal experts outside of Mississippi that would say this is a reasonable and responsible way of resolving these types of disputes.”
Several states, led by Colorado, the International Law Committee in New York City, and various law professors from around the country all filed briefs against Mississippi, citing equitable apportionment as a reasonable solution.
A ruling in Mississippi’s favor would make it difficult to equitably divide groundwater in the future, Eckstein said.
“States will say, ‘This is how much we have, this is how much you have, I’m sorry you have just a small section of the aquifer, too bad. If you want, we’ll sell you some,’” he said. “It’s not an equity issue anymore, it becomes an ownership and market issue.”
As state leaders grapple with workforce issues, young people fleeing the state, and ways for Mississippi to compete in the modern economy, they should remember the colloquial definition of insanity: continuing to do the same things while expecting different results.
One of those is the continuing, long-running failure of state lawmakers to address Mississippi’s high gender pay gap. Mississippi is now the only state in the nation without an equal pay law, after Alabama passed one in 2019. Quick tip: History shows that any time Mississippi is the only state doing something, or the last state to do something, that policy bears close scrutiny.
Recent studies show women make up 51.5% of the population in Mississippi and nearly half of its workforce. They are the primary breadwinners for a majority — 53.5% — of families in this state, which is the highest rate in the nation.
But women working full time in Mississippi earn 27% less than men, far greater than the 19% gap nationwide. That gap grows worse for Black and Latina women in Mississippi, who are paid just 54 cents for every dollar paid to white men.
Women make up nearly 60% of those in Mississippi’s workforce living below the poverty line. The state has continually ranked worst or near-worst in most every ranking for working women.
Lawmakers on the Senate Labor Committee heard these and other similar statistics and issues last week. Labor Chairman Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, is vowing to push again for equal pay legislation next year. The move is backed by the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, Attorney General Lynn Fitch (the only female statewide elected leader in state government) and a bipartisan group of lawmakers that has been growing in recent years.
But it will likely again be (quietly) opposed by business interests and ultimately decided by a Legislature that is only about 16% female, and remains much whiter and more male than the state of Mississippi at large.
Over decades, legislative efforts to pass an equal pay law have been quietly snuffed out in committee, typically without a vote and typically without much public discussion by opponents.
But it would appear the efforts to pass an equal pay law have grown stronger in recent years.
In 2017, there was a bipartisan effort with then-Treasurer Fitch; Republican lawmakers including Reps. Becky Currie, Carolyn Crawford and then-Sen. Sally Doty; and Democrats, including then-House Minority Leader David Baria, Reps. Sonya Williams-Barnes, Alyce Clarke, Bryant Clark and then-Sen. Tammy Witherspoon. It failed, but garnered more attention and public debate than the issue had in recent years.
In 2018, with a strong bipartisan vote of 106-10, the House passed on to the Senate a bill (to prevent local governments from establishing minimum wages) that was amended to include an equal pay provision. Many Republicans who initially voted no changed their votes to yes for posterity — and likely because they would have to face their mothers, wives and daughters. But the Senate, led by then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, let the measure die in committee without a vote.
When pressed, opponents’ stated rationale has been that there are already federal equal pay laws, and that they don’t want to put undue regulations on businesses or cause a bunch of unwarranted lawsuits.
But the numbers for working women in Mississippi would indicate that A: The federal laws are not working, and B: Many wage lawsuits would be warranted here.
And then there’s C: Mississippi is not succeeding in matters of jobs and wage growth, economic development, population growth (it’s declining), reducing poverty … you name it.
Maybe 2022 will be the year Mississippi’s lawmakers join the rest of the country in opposing unequal pay for women, and realize that failing to do so is the definition of insanity.
