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In multiple days of hearings held over several weeks, lawmakers asked local governments, state agencies, universities and nonprofits for input on how the Legislature should spend $1.8 billion in federal pandemic stimulus money.

The groups provided the special Senate subcommittee with nearly $7 billion in requests.

“We have a lot to parse through and a difficult challenge,” said Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, chair of the special subcommittee on American Rescue Plan Act spending. “I did feel like going into this that $1.8 billion would be sufficient … Now I’ve seen differently. Did some folks ask for a car when they could use a bicycle? Yes. But I’d say most of the requests were legitimate.”

It would appear Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation, has many unmet needs in nearly every aspect of public life and suffers from decades of neglected maintenance, staffing and underfunding that even the ARPA federal windfall can’t cover.

READ MORE: State agencies give lawmakers wish lists for federal pandemic dollars

Lawmakers heard about dilapidated buildings, crumbling water and sewer pipes and antiquated computer systems. They heard about dire shortages of nurses and doctors, law enforcement officers and social workers. They heard about the need to improve workforce training and tourism marketing. They heard about the need for a state cancer center and long overdue maintenance at county health departments, and even for a Highway Patrol helicopter.

“Y’all asked us for how much wee needed, not how much we expected to get,” state Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said before he presented the Health Department’s request for $107 million in ARPA funds — nearly half of it for rehabbing county health department and other decades old buildings. He showed slides of leaking roofs, peeling linoleum floors and even a snake that sneaked in through a hole in a wall. He said the feds had recently expressed dismay that Mississippi’s public health system “still used fax machines” to communicate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mississippi is behind most other states in planning for and spending its ARPA funds. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has taken the lead, touring the state over the summer meeting with local governments and community leaders and creating the ARPA subcommittee. The committee plans to present lawmakers with recommendations for the spending in the legislative session that begins in January.

READ MORE: How are other states spending COVID-19 stimulus money?

Polk said some projects and spending agencies have proposed could not realistically be completed by the 2026 deadline ARPA funds.

Mississippi’s city and county governments are also receiving a combined $900 million in ARPA funds. Hosemann, who has called for the money to be spent in “transformational” ways that will have an impact for generations, has proposed the Legislature use up to half its funds to match city and county spending, to provide for larger projects.

The ARPA subcommittee wrapped up its hearings on Monday and Tuesday, although Polk said there could be others called before the end of the year.

Some requests lawmakers heard this week include:

Counties and cities

Up to $900 million in matching funds

Lawmakers heard from Derrick Surrette, director of the Mississippi Association of Supervisors and Shari Veazey, director of the Mississippi Municipal League.

Both said most of Mississippi’s local governments are waiting to spend their $900 million in ARPA funds, and both indicated more guidance, technical assistance and matching funds from the state would be appreciated.

“We have been encouraging cities to focus on water and sewer,” Veazey said, largely because it’s clearly allowed spending in the federal rules for ARPA. She gave examples of small “town A,” and increasing sizes cities B, C, and D to outline the challenges they face.

READ MORE: The rules: How can Mississippi, local governments spend billions in COVID-19 stimulus?

“Town A has a population of 210,” Veazey said. “It’s water and sewer needs have been identified as $586,873. It’s total ARPA it’s receiving is $44,644 … It’s really amazing what some of the things cost, and it gives you some idea why this work hasn’t been done before.”

Surrette said that counties largely do not own or operate water and sewerage, and giving the county money to water associations or city systems would require setting up and riding herd over a grant program. He said counties would still be on the hook to ensure the money was spent properly even if it granted it to others, a cause for concern. He said counties would much prefer to spend ARPA funds on badly needed road and bridge work, but to do so they must show lost revenue from the pandemic to shift the money to general funds. He’s hoping Congress will pass a pending measure to provide more flexibility.

“If there’s one priority need for counties, it would be technical assistance,” Surrette said, noting that Tennessee has created such a state level program of experts and consultants to help local governments with ARPA spending.

Rural water associations

$1.4 billion

Kirby Mayfield of the Mississippi Rural Water Association said a majority of Mississippians get their water from the 1,052 member associations, most of them small nonprofits. He said most of the systems were created in the 1960s and 1970s when affordable USDA loans and grants were available, and now they cannot afford needed upgrades and replacements.

READ MORE: Should safe drinking water be a priority for Mississippi’s federal stimulus spending?

Mayfield said about a third of his membership responded to a MRWA survey on needed infrastructure upgrades for ARPA funding and provided a list costing about $700 million. Asked by lawmakers to estimate the total need of upgrades statewide, Mayfield said, “double that $700 million.” He said many systems are facing “infrastructure failure” and struggling to meet state and federal clean water regulations and the systems are also struggling with worker shortages.

University of Mississippi Medical Center

$360 million

LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor and dean of UMMC, said $360 million is a rough estimate of needs for the state’s only research hospital and public medical school, and that the center is working on firmer figures.

Woodward told lawmakers the medical center campus has many aging buildings dating back to the 1950s and water, sewer and other infrastructure in need of upgrades. But she said lack of staffing is biggest challenge facing UMMC — as it is for hospitals nationwide.

“We have 60 beds that have been closed because of staffing shortages,” Woodward said, saying nurses, respiratory therapists and lab technicians are also in short supply. UMMC hopes ARPA money can be used as pay and scholarship incentives for recruiting and retaining health workers.

Woodward said one “big ticket item” that could have a generational impact on the state would be building a state cancer center.

“Mississippi has several small cancer centers, but not a comprehensive cancer center,” Woodward said.

Department of Mental Health

$174.3 million over five years

Mental Health Director Wendy Bailey said ARPA funds could help the state hasten the federally mandated shift from institutional mental health care to community based services, and said the pandemic has increased demand for services.

The agency wants to use the federal funds to expand mobile crisis teams and other crisis services, provide mental health training and resources for law enforcement and provide premium pay to help combat staff shortages, among other needs.

Child Protection Services

$75 million

Child Protection Services Commissioner Andrea Sanders said the pandemic has exacerbated the risk factors for child abuse, “and the collateral damage will be felt in Mississippi and the world for the next decade.”

The agency wants to use the federal funds to continue a shift from reactive to proactive services and to meet requirements to get out from under decrees and federal oversight from the nearly two decades old Olivia Y. federal court case against the state for failure to protect children in its custody.

The money would help provide more case workers and managers to reduce large caseloads and help the agency “find solutions to keep families safely together” and prevent child abuse. Money is also needed, Sanders said, to help older youth in foster care transition into adulthood and find jobs and to make adoption and guardianship easier for families who want to help.

Tourism

$52 million, through 2024

Mississippi Tourism Association President Marlo Dorsey told lawmakers ARPA funds provide an opportunity for “a strategic investment to recover and grow Mississippi’s fourth largest industry.”

Dorsey said tourism was hit hard by the pandemic in Mississippi — which lost about $2.6 billion in travel spending — and nationwide, but that Mississippi’s tourism has rebounded remarkably compared to other states. She said investment of ARPA money in tourism will provide a major return on investment for the state’s economy.

“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity now to change the trajectory of tourism in Mississippi,” Dorsey said.

The post Lawmakers wanted input on spending $1.8 billion in pandemic stimulus. They got $7 billion in requests. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Legislative Budget Committee unveiled a budget recommendation Tuesday for the upcoming fiscal year of $6.39 billion in state-support funds, leaving an unprecedented $4.4 billion in funds that they could spend on other items.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who chairs the Budget Committee this year, said such a large amount of unallocated funds had “never been seen before in Mississippi, and I don’t think will be seen again.”

The recommendation of the 14-member Budget Committee normally is used as a roadmap, or at least a base line, for the full Legislature when it convenes in January to begin work on developing a budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2022.

The unallocated funds cited by the Budget Committee include $1.8 billion in federal coronavirus-relief funds, and more than $2 billion derived primarily from revenue growth fueled in large part by previous significant influxes of federal funds to deal with COVID-19 and by inflation factors, also related in part to the pandemic.

FOLLOW THE MONEY: How will Mississippi spend billions in federal pandemic stimulus dollars?

Hosemann said the goal should be to ensure the impact for the state in the spending of the unprecedented funds “is generational, not for one or two years, but for one or two generations. I think all of the members of this committee are committed to doing that.”

Some of the funds, like the $1.8 billion in federal American Rescue Plan funds, are one-time funds and are limited by federal guidelines in how they can be spent to such items as water, sewer and broadband expansion.

During the hearing unveiling the budget, House Speaker Philip Gunn offered thoughts on how he believed “the excess funds” should be handled.

“I would challenge this committee and I would challenge both (legislative) chambers, let’s find a way to get rid of the income tax,” Gunn said. “Now is the time to give money back to the people. We have done everything. We have funded all of the government. We have excess money. Let’s give it back.”

Rep. Percy Watson, D-Hattiesburg, a member of the Budget Committee, who previously served as chair of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, voiced concern about making large tax cuts that will last for generations based on a historic bump in state revenue collections caused in large part by the coronavirus.

“We have to very careful and not take money out of the revenue steam for years when we are dealing with one-time money,” Watson said.

He added that he believes the state’s financial situation is strong enough to approve significant raises for teachers and state employees during the 2022 session.

The budget proposal the Legislature released Tuesday does provide $25 million to ensure state employees can be paid at least the market minimum level established by the new salary compensation system developed by the state Personnel Board. The market is determined by a combination of the salaries for similar jobs for state employees in contiguous states and by salaries for similar jobs in the private sector.

The Budget Committee recommendation does not provide funds for a teacher pay raise, though various members of the committee — especially Hosemann — have expressed support for a salary increase for teachers.

The Budget Committee recommendation in state-support funds is actually $573.9 million or 4.7% less than the budget passed earlier this year by the Legislature for the current fiscal year.

The proposal provides a $58 million or 2.6% increase for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. The Adequate Education Program provides the state’s share for the basics of operating local school districts. A $58 million increase in funding still would leave the Adequate Education Program more than $250 million short of full funding.

The proposals for the community colleges and universities are a combined $32 million less than the amount they received from the 2021 Legislature.

Other areas where the Budget Committee plan provides additional funding include:

• Fully funding the homestead exemption provided by counties to property owners for their primary residence. The $11 million increase in state support to the counties to alleviate their cost for the homestead exemption would allow the counties to spend more on infrastructure needs, Hosemann said.
• Providing an additional $3.3 million to hire more law enforcement for the Capitol Complex Improvement District, which consist of a large swarth of downtown Jackson, the Jackson State area and the University Medical Center area. The money would be used to hire 37 new officers.

READ MORE: State agencies give lawmakers wish lists for federal pandemic dollars

The post Lawmakers have unprecedented $4.2 billion in extra funds as they craft new budget appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Maybe Scrooge will also sit down to talk with Cratchit’s about his family’s affairs over a bowl of Smoking Bishop.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Pay Raise! appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson says he’s cleaning up the agency.

In the last year, his agency has demanded subgrantees to return nearly $1 million in safety net funds it says the organizations misspent or did not properly document, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of 149 letters.

According to interviews with subgrantees, the accounting issues identified in the last year have much more to do with technical clerical errors and unclear reporting expectations than with outright misspending. Many findings, even final demands, were cleared after negotiations between the parties, without funds being returned.

The agency and its partners are experiencing growing pains as officials implement stricter controls on their spending due to recent scandal and past lackadaisical monitoring at the department.

Mississippi State University, Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Mississippi, Goodwill Industries and various community action agencies — nonprofits designated to carry out federal anti-poverty programs enacted in 1964 — were among the agency partners that received the biggest demands.

Gov. Tate Reeves appointed Anderson in March of 2020, a month after the State Auditor’s Office arrested six people, including the former director John Davis, for allegedly conspiring to steal $4 million in federal funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant.

The allegations of theft are just one component of a larger scandal in which independent auditors hired by the agency say the state frittered away $77 million in public assistance dollars from 2016 to 2019. The nonprofit accused of the most egregious misspending and theft was Mississippi Community Education Center, founded by private school owner Nancy New.

State and nonprofit officials had said they were spending the money on programs and activities to help impoverished people, such as parenting and anger management classes, motivational training and after school programs — many of which are legal purchases but, as federal policies experts point out, are not the most effective ways to reduce poverty.

That emphasis has continued today: the state is still primarily issuing TANF subgrants for parenting initiatives and after school programs, as opposed to work supports like child care and workforce training programs.

As an example of its priorities, the first link on the public assistance agency’s website is “business opportunities,” where private companies can go to find information about how to bid on agency contracts and subgrants. (The department is currently working on redesigning its website).

In the most recent year, from Sept. 1, 2020, to Nov. 10, 2021, the agency questioned nearly $4.5 million spent by its subgrantees — organizations it hired to administer public assistance, such as TANF grants, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) and the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF).

Anderson said questioning costs and demanding repayment is how the agency monitors its subgrantees, which receive around $150 million of the agency’s $1 billion in federal public assistance funding each year, past audits show.

“Under John Davis, that process existed, but when the findings were brought to him, often that was all that ever happened to it,” Anderson said in a Facebook interview on Oct. 8 following the release of the independent forensic audit on Oct. 1. “We didn’t actually send the questioned cost letters out to the subgrantees if John said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ What we’re doing now is, we’re sending those finding letters directly to subgrantees.”

Mississippi Today could not verify this statement. Mississippi Today asked the agency over several weeks to provide the number of letters sent during the Davis administration, to confirm Anderson’s statement, but department wanted the news organization to pay nearly $376 to answer the question. It said it did not keep a record of the questioned cost letters it sent which subgrantees, so it would have to manually pull every subgrantee file to determine whether they received a finding, and charge Mississippi Today the research costs of $17-an-hour for 21 hours.

Davis’ attorney Merrida Coxwell did not return calls for this story.

In many cases, the subgrantees who received initial findings letters responded to the agency with supplemental information that satisfied the agency’s questions, so the agency did not send final demands.

Final demands total over $1 million, but subgrantees still have the option to file appeals.

Mississippi State University received one of the larger demands for repayment: $56,763.68 on April 22, 2021, for money it received through TANF, and $35,043.69 on Sept. 3, 2021, for money it received through CCDF. University spokesperson Sid Salter told Mississippi Today that the welfare agency cancelled the TANF demand after the university submitted additional time sheets to justify the expenditures. As for the CCDF funding, the university has appealed the demand and will attend a hearing on Jan. 28, 2022. Mississippi State University has received MDHS grants for various programs over the last few years, such as the TK Martin Center for Technology & Disability, but the bulk of the funding has gone to the National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center, or “NSPARC,” which houses personal data on Mississippians, connected from several state and federal agencies.

Thirteen other organizations also received final demands over $10,000.

Mississippi Department of Human Services said the following entities owed money they received from the TANF block grant:

• Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Mississippi ($88,461.51)
• CompuRecycling Center Inc. ($17,635.55) (A representative said the organization paid the demand in full.)
• Save the Children Foundation ($16,064.38) (The organization charged to its TANF grant portions of two local staffers who were doing work under the TANF contract but whose positions were not included in the grant budget, so the agency found during a routine audit that the costs were unallowable. A managing director for Save the Children, Patrick Iannone, said the organization repaid the costs and the audit was closed.)
• Scientific Research (SR1) ($14,472.11) (Representatives from SR1 said the organization returned the funds to MDHS after learning they did not have the documentation the agency required under the grant. Executive director Tamu Green said MDHS has started offering more technical assistance to subgrantees so no surprises arise after the grant period is over.)
• Jobs for Mississippi Graduates ($12,913.33) (Executive director Ramona Williams said she did not receive the letter until a month after it was sent and that she has requested a hearing to object to the findings. She said she also did not receive the initial letter that questioned over $150,000, which was dated Sept. 2, 2020, more than a year before the final demand. Unlike New’s nonprofit, Jobs for Mississippi Graduates was paid on a reimbursement basis, so Williams said the agency should have questioned expenses when they were submitted for monthly reimbursement, not a year after the fact. She also said the fact that monitors from MDHS have not been able to visit her organization in-person due to COVID has made the process more cumbersome.)

“We’ve been penalized and held to a standard that is just so unfair,” Williams said. “We’ve been in the trenches. We provided the requisite services that were needed. Yet I feel as if we’ve been penalized for something we didn’t do.”

The welfare agency said several community action agencies owed money they received from LIHEAP, CSBG or the federal weatherization assistance program, but many of the final demands arose from issues within the organizations’ budgets grouping certain expenditures, and many of them were cleared.

Some of those entities were:

• Pearl River Valley Opportunity, Inc. ($210,538.58) (Executive Director Helmon Johnson said his organization has submitted more supporting documentation and “we are waiting on a response from the Monitoring Division which should clear up these outstanding cost.”)
• Prairie Opportunity ($121,933)
• Hinds County Human Resources Agency ($121,835.5) (MDHS later administratively cleared these questioned costs, a Nov. 23, 2021 letter shows, which arose from an issue with the way the organization charged its MDHS grant for employee benefits.)
• Jackson County Civil Action Committee ($121,427.89) (Director Vanessa Gibson said the agency sent the demand in error and it eventually cleared the findings, a Sept. 2, 2021 letter shows.)
• South Central Community Action Agency, Inc. ($11,656.83) (Director Sheletta Buckley said in an email that her organization appealed and the state eventually found the demand to be “unsubstantiated.”)
• Northeast Mississippi Community Services ($10,006.72) (A representative from the organization said it sent paperwork justifying its purchases after receiving the initial demand, but due to turnover at the state agency, the paperwork was misplaced and a final demand letter was sent in error. A follow up letter shows MDHS cleared these costs.)

“It was just a matter of them not asking for the right documents. And once they asked for the right documents it all went away,” said Gibson, who runs Jackson County Civil Action Committee. “We have never, ever, ever had any kind of findings that looked anything close to this. We are one of their best programs and we were very distressed that this would even be an issue, because it was a nonissue.”

Goodwill Industries received a final demand on Oct. 12, 2020, for $35,941.72 it received from the SNAP work program grant.

On Oct. 8, Mississippi Today requested all questioned cost letters the agency sent from Sept. 1, 2020 to present. This request was part of an ongoing series of requests Mississippi Today has filed at the Mississippi Department of Human Services in an effort to hold the agency accountable for its spending and internal controls. For the 149 letters, Mississippi paid $161, which was mostly researching costs. Read the questioned cost letters here.

“MDHS has made significant strides in its monitoring function over the past 18 month period,” Anderson said in a written statement to Mississippi Today. “Monitoring visits are being conducted or desk audits are being completed, questioned costs are being assessed, and subgrantees and other partners are either repaying the questioned costs or availing themselves of the administrative hearing process. That is the way monitoring is supposed to work. Questioned costs do not always translate to recouped funds, if the subgrantee or contractor can provide missing documentation or substantiate questioned costs.”

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Gov. Tate Reeves awarded $3 million to a nonprofit that created technology to assist social workers at the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services in finding extended family members of children in foster care. 

It may also help the state come into compliance with the judge’s order in Olivia Y., a nearly two-decade old lawsuit over the embattled foster care system that the department is still struggling to resolve.

Ohio recently became the first state to announce it will use the family mapping technology Family Connections, which its creators say “looks like Facebook on the front end and works like Ancestry.com on the back end.” Reeves is using a portion of his federal emergency education relief funds for Mississippi’s project with the group.

For Jessica Stern, co-founder and chief operating officer of the organization, the work is personal. After the death of her mother, she and her seven siblings were split up across three different towns. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder, as many children in the system do, and struggled in school.

“I would sit there with my head on my desk,” she remembers. Now as an adult, she realizes growing up with all of her siblings and having consistency and care at home would have made all the difference, she said.

That’s why Stern and Jennifer Jacobs, a nuclear scientist and a former White House fellow, founded the nonprofit in 2017. The goal is not to make money, they say, and neither draws a salary from the work, according to tax documents for the organization.

Stern said most child welfare agencies she’s interacted with are using systems that are at least 35 years old. The system is “overwhelmed and outdated,” she said.

In Mississippi, child welfare workers use old-school methods to locate family members, CPS spokesperson Shannon Warnock said.

“Presently our workers utilize time and labor intensive methods of investigation including record and registration checks, sending correspondence to previously known addresses and utilizing social media sources,” she said.

Connect Our Kids’ Family Connections tool, which is free, searches public records and social media platforms to build out a family tree for children. The goal is to create a streamlined, easy-to-use tool to track down relatives, which federal law requires social workers to do when a child first enters foster care.

Studies have shown children placed with family remembers remain in one home longer, and caregivers report fewer behavioral and developmental problems, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.  

In Mississippi, where 3,837 children are currently in foster care, the group will use the $3 million to develop additional versions of the tool. They will also train social workers, court appointed special advocate volunteers and other child welfare workers on how to use their tools in addition to creating “trauma-informed video content” for children ages 14 to 24, also known as “transition age youth.” 

“Connect Our Kids will allow MDCPS to leverage technology in a consistent, consolidated manner that will permit our staff to minimize the trauma associated with removal by locating relatives, neighbors, or other fictive kin that can provide safe, stable placement for foster children,” said Kimberly Gore, general counsel for the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services. “The search tool itself is free, but the (federal funding) will provide intensive training to our staff and technical support to integrate the search engine with our existing technology.”

Marcia Lowry, director of national advocacy organization A Better Childhood, which sued the state on behalf of children who were abused, questioned the reasoning behind the program.

“I would be very interested in how this nonprofit is going to do this, and whether it can actually deliver,” Lowry said Monday. “The data in the system is so bad, and so unreliable, that I would be surprised.  The problem is not just in finding relatives but equally importantly how MDCPS checks them out. It has not had the capacity to do that and probably still doesn’t.”

Hiring and retaining enough caseworkers to reduce caseloads — the number of foster care children monitored by each caseworker — is the most critical element of the ongoing court settlement under Olivia Y. In the 2004 lawsuit, A Better Childhood argues Mississippi has failed to protect the kids in its care or provide necessary services.

“You cannot do anything else if you don’t have enough caseworkers,” Lowry said. “You can’t get assessments done on time. You can’t then approve foster parents. You can’t provide services to families so that they can take their children back home. You can’t do anything really, adequately, unless you have people. You have to have human beings who are both trained and who will stay on the job for at least several years, who then can provide the services to kids and families, but that’s not what the system has. It doesn’t and it never has.”

Mississippi has never met its caseload requirements under the settlement. Most recently, Lowry said, just 54% of caseworkers maintained adequate caseloads. CPS asked the Legislature for $32 million in federal COVID-19 funding to pay for salaries for 100 additional case workers, 20 local social workers and 82 case aides.

Reporter Anna Wolfe contributed to this report.

The post Nonprofit aims to help Mississippi social workers find relatives of kids in foster care appeared first on Mississippi Today.

About 19,000 of the 24,000 Mississippi state employees who fall under the state Personnel Board guidelines will be eligible for a pay raise of up to 3% in January.

About $7 million for the pay raise was appropriated earlier this year during the 2021 legislative session. Agency heads were given discretion on whether to actually award the raises, though legislative leaders made it clear at the time that the money was appropriated to provide state employee salary increases. The pay raise will be the first enacted under the Personnel Board’s new salary classification system called “Project SEC2.”

“What we are trying to do is give agencies more flexibility to manage the dollars they receive (in legislative appropriations) for state employees,” Kelly Hardwick, executive director of the state Personnel Board, said Monday during a news conference with journalists.

Project SEC2 replaces the state’s old compensation classification system that was put in place in the 1980s. Hardwick said it was a good system when enacted, but through the years has become too burdensome to be effective.

The new system will provide “more accountability and… be more functional and transparent for the Legislature, agencies and state employees,” Hardwick said.

In developing the system, Hardwick said the Personnel Board received input from most of the state employees who fall Personnel Board guidelines.

“We asked them what they did,” he said. Then taking that information and working with experts, the Personnel Board classified the state employees and developed “a market” minimum and maximum salary range for each classification. The market value is determined by looking at similar job classifications outside of state government.

Under the old system, there were 114 classifications in law enforcement. Under the new system, there are 10 classifications.

The research found that information technology workers, nurses and accountants are in the state employee classifications that are generally the most underpaid.

Hardwick said employees who are below the minimum market values (19,293 of the 24,816 employees) will be eligible for a pay raise of up to 3%, based on the legislative appropriation. Those who are not eligible already are paid at least at minimum market value.

READ MORE: Personnel Board determining how to award pay raises after 2021 session

The legislation enacting the pay raise did not mandate that the agencies provide the 3% raise, but the general belief is that because that was legislative intent, most agency directors will award the raise.

Employees who fall under Personnel Board guidelines are generally those who are non-political appointees, meaning their jobs are not tied to election outcomes. Teachers and university and community college faculty also are not under the Personnel Board.

The average salary of state employees in Mississippi is $41,260 compared to $52,351 in the four contiguous states.

Getting all state employees up to the market minimum under Project SEC2 would take $53 million — and about $23 million would come from the general fund. The rest of the funds would come from agencies funded by specific fees or taxes.

The post Most Mississippi employees eligible for January pay raise under new salary classification system appeared first on Mississippi Today.

I still take COVID serious (triple vaxxed and proud of it) but like you, when Omicron was announced, I just thought, “Well #$%, will this ever end?” The first (official) case in Omicron has now been found in Mississippi. It apparently spreads faster than Delta but early indications suggest it isn’t as virulent.

So hang on. Here we go again.

The post Marshall Ramsey: The New Variant appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi chapter of the NAACP has developed a congressional redistricting plan that it hopes the Legislature will adopt in the upcoming 2022 session.

The recently unveiled plan moves all of Hinds County and a small portion of southern Madison County into the majority-Black 2nd Congressional District. Those areas currently are in the 3rd District.

The plan makes other minor changes in other parts of the state to ensure equal population representation among the four congressional districts.

“This map meets the criteria for the congressional districts according to Section II of the (U.S) Voting Rights Act of 1965, the United States Constitution and it complies with all state laws,” said Carroll Rhodes of Hazlehurst, attorney for the Mississippi NAACP. The NAACP is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

During the 2022 legislative session, which begins in January, the Legislature will attempt to redraw the four congressional seats and the 174 state legislative seats to match population shifts found by the 2020 U.S. Census.

Legislators plan to deal with congressional redistricting early in the session since all four U.S. House seat elections will be held later in 2022. The elections for the state legislative seats are not scheduled until 2023.

READ MORE: Lawmakers face redistricting reality: Mississippi’s non-white population is growing

On Dec. 15, the joint House and Senate redistricting committee will meet with the intent of adopting a congressional plan to present to the full Legislature in the 2022 season.

Corey Wiggins, the executive director of the state chapter of the NAACP, is asking the committee to consider the NAACP proposal.

In a letter, Wiggins told the committee the goal of the NAACP plan is to not “disproportionately affect marginalized communities” in a negative way.

He said the NAACP plan “ensures all Mississippi voters are represented in the voting process, gives special consideration to compactness of congressional districts and meets all federal and state laws.”

The plan, Rhodes said, splits fewer counties, municipalities and precincts than the current map does. The ideal population is 740,320 people in each district. Rhodes said the NAACP plan has two districts that are one person each below the ideal size and one district that is one person above the ideal size. The other district is the exact ideal size based on the 2020 Census data.

The law calls for the districts to be as close “as practicable” to equal in population.

Wiggins said the NAACP is submitting a plan early in hopes of avoiding litigation. The Legislature has been unable to complete congressional redistricting efforts after the previous two censuses and it was left to the federal courts to draw the districts.

Both Dean Kirby, R-Pearl, the Senate chair of the redistricting committee, and Jim Beckett, R-Bruce, the House chair, have said they hope to avoid litigation and have a plan approved by the Legislature.

The biggest chore facing the Legislature in drawing the congressional districts is the loss of more than 65,000 people in the 2nd District. The Legislature will have to address the population loss and at the same time, based on federal laws, maintain a Black majority district.

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents the 2nd District, has advocated moving all of Hinds from the 3rd District, represented by Republican Michael Guest of Rankin County, to his district to help offset the population loss.

READ MORE: Rep. Bennie Thompson wants all of Hinds Co. placed in his 2nd District

The NAACP plan also proposes moving all of Hinds into Thompson’s district.

Under the NAACP plan, the 2nd District would have a Black voting age population of 62.1% compared to 64.8% under the current map. The 3rd District would have, as it does now, the second highest African American population at a little more than 35%.

To meet equal representation goals, the NAACP plan also would:

• Move Winston and all of Oktibbeha County to the 3rd District from the 1st.
• Move all of Marion and Clarke counties and a tiny portion of Jones from the 4th to the 3rd.

Wiggins said the NAACP is working to develop a proposal for the 174 legislative seats.

READ MORE: Mississippi one of just three states to lose population since 2010

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On Monday, the Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH) reported the first confirmed case of the COVID-19 omicron variant in the state. The case was identified in a fully vaccinated individual who recently traveled to New York. The individual has not been hospitalized. 

 “We were prepared for the appearance of this variant in Mississippi, and we need to remember that Delta is still a very active variant of COVID-19 currently in the state, as well,” said MSDH State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs in a press release. 

 Mississippi is the 17th state in the U.S. to report the presence of omicron. Infections from the variant have been identified in dozens of countries on every continent except Antarctica. 

The first U.S. omicron case was identified on Nov. 29 in San Francisco in a person who had recently returned from South Africa, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Public health experts have urged caution over panic when reacting to the emergence of omicron. Scientists expect to learn much more in the coming weeks about the new variant. At the moment, much is still unknown about the severity of illness caused by the variant and how it interacts with currently available treatments and vaccines. Dobbs said the best thing people can do right now to protect themselves is to get vaccinated and a receive a booster dose if eligible. 

 “Vaccines remain the best public health measure to protect people from COVID-19, slow the transmission rate, and reduce the likelihood of new variants emerging. COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalizations, and death,” he said. 

First identified in Botswana and South Africa, omicron has been called a “variant of concern”  by the World Health Organization. The organization has warned that it poses a great danger to the global recovery from the pandemic, despite the current lack of data on the variant. 

Any person that wishes to schedule a vaccination or booster appointment in Mississippi  can online at covidvaccine.umc.edu, or by calling MSDH’s COVID-19 hotline at 866-498-4948. 

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As billions of dollars flow into the state of Mississippi from federal relief funds, some state leaders point to what’s happening in Prentiss County as a playbook.

Long before the start of the pandemic, the Prentiss County Electric Power Association (EPA) was working to increase broadband, or high-speed internet, access in their area. They lobbied the state Legislature to pass the Mississippi Broadband Enabling Act in January of 2019, which gave them the statutory ability to provide broadband services. Construction took about a year, and in July 2020 they began installing fiber internet in customers’ homes. 

“The speed at which they have gotten it done is just unheard of,” said Brandon Presley, northern district public service commissioner. “Every single home in Prentiss County can now get high-speed internet service. That would have truly been thought impossible just two years ago.” 

Internet usage has become nearly ubiquitous, with 93% of American adults regularly using the internet in 2021 according to the Pew Research Center. But some populations still struggle to consistently access the resource; 72% of rural individuals have access to broadband, and 57% of low-income individuals have access. The pandemic has put into stark relief how essential internet access is to participation in society, leading to an increased investment by lawmakers to expand access.

In July 2020, electric cooperatives across the state received Coronavirus, Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding to increase broadband access for communities that had no other service available. For the Prentiss County EPA, that meant $5 million to serve what Ronny Rowland, general manager of the Prentiss County EPA, calls the “CARES area” — rural areas that larger companies wouldn’t service because of the high cost. 

READ MORE: Mississippi is one of the most under-connected states in America. Why is that?

“We’re a not-for-profit, we borrowed the money to build out to them and the CARES money just came in to help us pay our loans back quicker,” Rowland said. “We were going to build out to them anyway because they’re our electric members and they own the co-op system.”

Currently, 56% of the co-op’s electric customers are signed up for the fiber internet, which jumps to 76% in some of the areas covered by the CARES Act funding.

Rowland started this project to help north Mississippi stay economically competitive and to improve the quality of life in the region, but said the pandemic put a particular focus on the need for high-speed internet access. 

Jeff Palmer, the superintendent of Prentiss County Schools, said that the improved internet access through the EPA’s program helped students reach the virtual classroom and stay engaged with their education. 

“We went from doing paper and pencil packets when it all started to having most of our students fully online by the start of school last year,” Palmer said. 

Prentiss County Schools used the $600,000 in education-targeted CARES broadband funds they received to help students who were not on the EPA’s fiber internet. They created hotspot school busses that were strategically parked around the county and expanded the wifi capacity at the schools so people could access it from the parking lot. 

Of the $50 million that was earmarked for schools, 79% was spent on education broadband projects, while 21% went unspent and was returned to the state unemployment fund.  The Mississippi Department of Education said that the nearly $40 million was spent primarily on hotspots, network infrastructure, and laying fiber optic cable, with some larger projects to build cell towers. 

Six school districts rejected the funding: Amite County Public School District, Midtown Public Charter School, the Mississippi School for the Blind and Deaf, Smith County School District, Water Valley School District, and Winona Montgomery Consolidated School District. Of those, two that Mississippi Today spoke with cited issues with the quick funding deadlines and restrictions on what could be purchased. 

“A hotspot won’t do you any good if you don’t have cell service,” said Nick Hillman, Superintendent of the Smith County School District. 

Presley said he was not aware of any co-ops that had not met the spending deadline, which was similar for both programs. 

“This is a wonderful playbook for the hundreds of millions of dollars that are coming down now in terms of both the infrastructure bill and the American Rescue Plan,” said Presley. “This program showed that those dollars can be spent effectively and have a great impact.”

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