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Mississippi’s brand new workforce development office has awarded nearly $1 million to a Gulf Coast college program that trains diesel technicians, marking the first time Accelerate Mississippi has publicly flexed its authority over state job training funds. 

The award signals a shift in how the state is spending workforce training dollars under the guidance of Ryan Miller, Accelerate Mississippi’s executive director. Miller’s office oversees tens of millions of dollars, including a $25 million pot collected via an unemployment insurance tax on businesses for the state’s 15 community colleges. But that oversight just began in July.

“We are trying to be more targeted and specific toward the areas where we are focusing funding and resources,” Miller said. “Where are there industry sectors that appear to have a large amount of vacancies with a large need that are also professions that pay above the average wage?” 

Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, which will use the money to grow the capacity of its diesel technician program from 20 students to 40, is the first program to make a proposal to Miller’s office and be awarded money. Miller has designated $10 million of the $25 million pot for the office’s grant program to target in-demand jobs.

That money is part of the state’s Workforce Enhancement Training — or “WET” — fund. It had previously been the charge of the state’s Community College Board, which is still involved in processing the funds. 

Miller’s new office, however, was given freedom and flexibility under legislation passed in 2020 to direct those funds in ways the college board could not when it manned the money alone.

The board’s former director, Andrea Mayfield, told Mississippi Today last year that the fund’s guidelines favored those already working and relied upon employers making requests. That’s no longer the case. 

“In essence, we’ve taken the position that, in addition to direct requests from employers, we need to focus our WET fund resources upon those career opportunities in which there is a discernible need and could result in increased wages for Mississippians,” Miller said. 

A Mississippi Today report last year found that a quarter of the roughly $23 million spent through the Community College Board covered businesses’ Occupational Safety and Health Administration training. In most cases employers are required to provide such training, which doesn’t typically result in new skills. 

Miller said as his office looks over past expenses in its new role, it will have to ask hard questions. 

“Does stand-alone safety training meet the requirement of enhancing productivity?” Miller posed. “In most cases, probably not.” 

Kell Smith, the interim director of the Community College Board, said the body has welcomed Miller’s direction. 

Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s grant totals $941,701. The grant will cover $500,000 in new equipment and $288,000 in scholarship money among other expenses to train technicians to maintain and repair diesel engines. 

Mississippi graduated 106 diesel technicians per year during a four-year period ending in 2020, according to state data. Yet, the average number of positions open per year in the state during that period was 526. 

The Gulf Coast college created the program in spring 2020 in direct response to businesses that were grappling with the gap in qualified candidates to fill open technician jobs. The college reported in its application that every student in the first cohort found a job in the field. 

“Our college is thrilled to take on this challenge and in return create economic opportunity for residents of the gulf coast,” Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College President Mary Graham said in a statement. 

The post Accelerate Mississippi funds Gulf Coast diesel tech program, flexing its new authority over job training dollars appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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State Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson said lawmakers are not following the will of voters with a medical marijuana proposal and reiterated his vow that his agency will not participate in regulating it.

“Who is going to operate this expansive program?” Gipson, a former longtime state legislator, said at a press conference on Monday. “Who is going to pay for it? How much is it going to cost? Standing here today, I don’t think anyone can answer these questions … The Mississippi Legislature is notorious for passing massive government programs and expanding bureaucracy without providing any way to pay for it.”

“This agency is not designed nor equipped, nor is this agency funded for such an expansive and expensive program as this proposes,” Gipson said. “… This is not what people voted for … This is not what people elected me to do, be a marijuana kingpin.”

READ MORE: Mississippi’s long-awaited medical marijuana draft

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and House Speaker Philip Gunn last week announced that legislative negotiators had reached agreement on a draft bill to create a medical marijuana program to replace the Initiative 65 program passed by voters last year but shot down by the state Supreme Court. Hosemann and Gunn have asked Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers into special session on Friday for the Legislature to pass the measure.

The proposal calls for the program to be regulated by the Mississippi State Department of Health, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Revenue. Initiative 65, briefly enshrined in the state constitution by voters before being struck down by the high court on a constitutional technicality, would have had MSDH solely in charge of regulating the program.

But Gipson, who said he had no input in the bill and only saw the draft on Friday, has said for weeks that he does not want to regulate growing, processing or transportation of marijuana as the bill provides. He initially said marijuana remains federally illegal, so he would be violating his oath of office to uphold U.S. laws if he participated. On Monday he listed numerous other problems he has with the proposal, although he said he believes the state will ultimately join more than two dozen others in having a medical marijuana program.

For starters, Gipson said, the legislative proposal doesn’t follow the letter or spirit of Initiative 65.

READ MORE: Summary of the long-awaited medical marijuana deal.

Gipson said he estimates it would cost his agency $2.9 million a year to oversee cultivation and processing of medical marijuana, and he doesn’t yet have an estimate how much it would cost to regulate transportation and disposal the draft bill tasks his agency with. He noted lawmakers tasked his office with overseeing hemp growing two years ago, but have twice denied his request for $500,000 in additional funding for it and have “not appropriated one copper penny for the Hemp Cultivation Act.”

“That $2.9 million would be a 41% increase in the budget of this little agency,” Gipson said.

Gipson said the Health Department should handle all regulation of the program, as Initiative 65 outlined. He said only one other state, Florida, has its agriculture department regulating it. He said having one agency, the Health Department, regulating marijuana would provide “efficiency” and less expansion of government and bureaucracy.

Gipson said Initiative 65 would have been self-funded, “by the industry” through fees, but that lawmakers are now planning to tax it and all the money “is sucked up and going into the state general fund” with no clear plan from lawmakers on how to fund the program.

“This proposal is not what people voted for,” Gipson said.

Gipson said the bill would have his agency providing oversight within 60 days of its passage and that timeframe “is unworkable.” He noted that Alabama’s newly created medical marijuana program gives agencies 18 months to stand up a program.

Neither Gunn’s nor Hosemann’s offices immediately responded to a request for comment on Gipson’s press conference on Monday. But legislative negotiators have noted that they provided Gipson with an out in the proposal. It would allow Gipson’s agency to contract out its oversight in the legislation to another agency or private contractor.

Gipson, who had previously said he might sue if lawmakers tried to force his agency to regulate medical marijuana, said, “If this passes the way it reads now, we would have to consider farming it out.”

“But if they put that in the bill, why not let the Department of Health farm it out, too?” Gipson said, saying that having three agencies involved is a recipe for inefficiency, red tape and high costs. He said he is also concerned the legislation “has no real role for law enforcement” such as the Department of Public Safety or Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics.

Gipson said he’s willing to work with lawmakers on drafting a better program and believes “at the end of the day this can be fixed very simply with modest changes, and make it look more like Initiative 65.”

READ MORE: Gov. Reeves noncommittal as lawmakers ask him to call special session on marijuana, COVID-19

Reeves, who has sole authority to call special legislative sessions and set the agenda, has not said when, or if, he would call lawmakers back to Jackson to deal with the proposal, but he had said he would call a medical marijuana session if lawmakers were in agreement on a program.

Hosemann and Gunn last week said they believe they have the votes to pass the proposal.

The post Agriculture commissioner bashes medical marijuana bill, says he won’t participate appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This photo gallery is part of our new initiative, MT Listens. Learn more about the project here or be part of it by taking our survey.

Take a virtual stroll through Moss Point, a historic Mississippi community, through the lens of Mississippi Today photojournalist Vickie King.

Moss Point is one of five communities our newsroom is focusing on for our community listening project, MT Listens. The others are Canton, Yazoo City, Forest and New Albany.

Be part of this project.

If you live in Canton, Yazoo City, Forest, Moss Point or New Albany, please take a minute to fill out the below survey, or share it with someone you know.

The post Photo gallery: Moss Point, ‘The River City’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi House and Senate negotiators have agreed to a draft bill for a medical marijuana program to replace the one approved by voters in Nov. 2020 but cancelled by the state Supreme Court in May 2021.

Lawmakers have asked Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers into special session on Oct. 1 to address the legislation, which is subject to change (or to not be passed) by the full Legislature. Reeves, who had promised he would call lawmakers into session if they could agree on particulars of a medical marijuana program, has not said when or if he would call them back in.

Among other things, the 144-page draft bill would allow smoking of cannabis, allow cities and counties to “opt out” of the program and would be subject to state sales and excise taxes.

Click here to read the full bill, or read it below:

READ MORE: Summary of the long-awaited medical marijuana deal.

READ MORE: Gov. Reeves noncommittal as lawmakers ask him to call special session on marijuana, COVID-19

The post Read the bill: Mississippi’s long-awaited medical marijuana draft appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Jackson attorney Rob McDuff of the Mississippi Center for Justice discusses with Mississippi Today’s political reporters Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender the efforts of him and others to invalidate a state constitutional provision crafted in 1890 to prevent African Americans from voting.

Listen to more episodes of The Other Side here.

The post Podcast: Federal court hears case challenging Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement law appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Mississippi Arts Commission Executive Director Sarah Story. Story became executive director of Mississippi Arts Commission in November 2020 and leads the state agency in its mission to be a catalyst for the arts and creativity in Mississippi. 

In this fun interview, Story talks about all the ways the MAC helps one of Mississippi’s greatest natural resources – its creatives. Story previously served as the executive director of the UMLAUF Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin, Texas, which exhibits the work of Charles Umlauf, his influences, and other contemporary artists and as deputy director and project coordinator of the Ogden Museum in New Orleans. She received a BFA in painting from the University of Mississippi and a Master’s in Arts Administration from the University of New Orleans.

The post Mississippi Stories: Sarah Story appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, in his own low-key manner, spoke with sincerity and authority about the ravages of COVID-19 on himself, on others and on the state as a whole at a recent digital town hall hosted by Mississippi Today.

Hosemann contracted the coronavirus in the summer of 2020 and revealed his struggles to overcome the illness.

“I’ve run marathons, New York marathon and all the others, and I am a regular exerciser, let’s just put it that way,” he said. “And my goal some days (after getting COVID-19) was to try to walk a hundred steps, and many days it was difficult to do so, just a devastating thing.”

He also spoke empathetically of a friend — healthy, but unvaccinated — who died recently of COVID-19.

“One of the last things he said to his three sons before COVID claimed him was, ‘Please get vaccinated,’” Hosemann recalled.

The Republican lieutenant governor also put COVID-19 in the context of what it might mean for the long-term economic health of the state, calling it “the elephant in the room.”

“How do we sell businesses to come to Mississippi as the least vaccinated state? Is that our selling point? I don’t think so,” Hosemann said. “So all these (economic factors) have multiplier effects, not just from the actual virus itself, but also from the economic effects…And I want to be real clear about that. This is a negative economically to you and your family, but also to the whole state.”

Or put another way: Can Mississippi’s population decline be reversed, as leaders say they are striving to do, when the state is mired in some of the most negative coronavirus outcomes in the world?

A few days after Hosemann’s comments, Gov. Tate Reeves appeared on a national news show where he was asked about those bad outcomes — specifically, the state’s highest COVID-19 fatality rate in the country.

The governor’s response to a question about what he was doing to combat that high fatality rate appeared to be that it was only a matter of timing, and that the death rate was “a lagging indicator.” As other states experience the surge in cases that Mississippi endured in July and August, Reeves contended, they would surpass Mississippi as having the highest fatality rate.

Perhaps that is true, but surely no one is wishing that the death rate increases in other states.

In that national interview, the governor could have said correctly that Mississippi has some unique challenges in fighting COVID-19. For instance, he could have pointed out that Mississippi for decades has been one of the unhealthiest states in the nation with multiple diseases that unfortunately make people more susceptible to dying from the virus.

In addition, Mississippians have less access to health care providers than people in just about any other state.

Granted, Reeves didn’t bring any of those problems to Mississippi, though it could be debated whether his policies — as a key state policy maker for more than a decade — have done enough or anything to reverse those trends.

In addition, Reeves could have pointed out that Mississippi also faces unique challenges in dealing with getting people vaccinated. The state has the highest percentage of African Americans and one of the highest percentages of non-college educated white people in the nation. These are two groups with lower vaccination rates nationally, though it should be pointed out the percentage of Black Mississippians who have been vaccinated is higher than the national average for Black Americans.

Ultimately, there are many factors that place Mississippi behind the proverbial eight ball when it comes to battling COVID-19.

It also could be argued that those factors place more of a burden on Mississippi leadership to say and do the right thing to battle the pandemic. That is where many have questioned Reeves’ leadership. Many argue that his constant equivocation on whether Mississippians should be vaccinated has given people just another reason not to get the shots. He also has waged his war on mask wearing accusing people of “virtue signaling” for wearing a mask.

Reeves called the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that even vaccinated people should wear a mask in some settings “foolish, and it is harmful. It reeks of political panic, so as to appear that they are in control. It has nothing, let me say that again: It has nothing to do with rational science.”

In a state like Mississippi, with so many pre-existing conditions that make fighting the coronavirus that much more difficult, the question is whether it is in the best interest of the leader of the state to spend time battling with others instead of fighting the pandemic.

As Hosemann pointed out, the future of the state and the lives of many of its citizens could hang in the balance.

The post Hosemann talks of COVID’s high cost to Mississippians. Reeves attacks. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Last week, Mississippi surpassed New Jersey as the state with the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 citizens, credited to August’s overwhelming strain on the state’s healthcare system due to the spread of the delta variant and low rate of vaccination.

Gov. Tate Reeves continuously skirted inquiries into his plan to address the death rate on Sept. 19, even referring to the dead as “lagging indicators,” meaning a signal that may confirm a pattern already in progress.

View our latest Data Dive detailing COVID-19 death rates across the United States in comparison with each state’s population to demonstrate the scale of the impact of the death rate on that particular citizenry:

READ MORE:

• View all our COVID-19 in Mississippi data and resources.

The post Data: Mississippi ranks first in the country for highest COVID-19 death rate appeared first on Mississippi Today.