Mississippi will receive about $6 billion from the federal American Rescue Act — an amount equal to the entire annual state general budget, and an amount state leaders say could change Mississippi for the better if spent wisely by state and local governments and bureaucrats.
“Clearly this is something that is transformative to Mississippi,” Hosemann said, saying state leaders are trying to get a grip on exactly how much money is coming to the Magnolia State and the rules for spending it. “… It is a good problem to have. Part of our process in my own mind is not only using this over the three years, but how to make this have an effect over the next five, 10 years or longer.”
While state and local leaders are still trying to suss some particulars on what money is going where, the money includes:
$1.8 billion to the state, to be spent by the Legislature
$97 million for Mississippi’s metro cities of Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Moss Point and Pascagoula, with Jackson receiving the largest share at $47 million
$258 million for smaller Mississippi cities
$577 million for the state’s 82 counties
$1.6 billion for K-12 education, with most directed to local school districts using existing formula’s for federal money disbursement. For perspective, the state K-12 budget is a little more than $2 billion a year.
$429 million for Mississippi’s colleges and universities
$166 million for capital projects statewide, primarily for rural broadband access projects
Note: Story continues below chart.
Millions more will go directly to state agencies such as the Departments of Health, Mental Health and Human Services — with state leaders still working to learn those amounts and details. Hosemann said an estimated $3.4 billion will go to individual Mississippians through stimulus payments, tax credits for children, enhanced unemployment other benefits.
Half the money is expected to arrive by the middle of May, with the other half coming within a year later. Governments have until 2024 to spend it.
Fewer strings
Unlike past federal COVID-19 relief or stimulus funding, the money coming to states from the $1.9 trillion act passed by Congress has relatively few strings attached or directives on how it’s spent and a much longer, three-year deadline to spend it. And some of the money is earmarked directly to cities, counties and even state agencies and institutions.
“That’s probably one of the best provisions I’ve seen in a relief package in quite some time — going directly to the counties and cities to be put to work right away instead of any federal or state bureaucracy calling all the shots,” said Gulfport Mayor Billy Hewes, president of the Mississippi Municipal League. His city, the second-largest in the state with a population of about 72,000, is set to receive about $18 million from the plan.
The federal law says local governments can spend the money on water, sewerage and internet infrastructure, but the U.S. Department of Treasury appears to have large discretion over the spending, and Gov. Tate Reeves and other state officials say they are working to get more specifics.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba did not respond to request for comment on the Rescue Act money. Hewes and other local leaders said cities and counties across the state have great infrastructure and other needs, and “we are going to do our best to apply it effectively.”
“Government closest to the people governs best,” Hewes said.
Hewes said the law does not appear to allow local governments to use the money for road infrastructure, something he hopes gets “fixed” by the treasury. He said other federal and state dollars — including in this package and in the last round of COVID-19 relief — have been allocated to broadband internet access, and many cities have greater needs for road work.
“Quite frankly, we are perplexed that roads and streets were left out of that allowance for how it can be spent,” Hewes said. “As president of the municipal league, and hearing from mayors across the country, there is a universal appeal that the treasury expand that definition of infrastructure to include roads, and we are all at a loss why that is not in the act.”
‘Pot of gold for cities’
Many mayors and county leaders this week were trying to glean more info, and in particular confirm how much their governments will receive.
Greenwood, a city of about 15,000, is set to receive about $3 million. Mayor Carolyn McAdams said that’s the number she’s heard and, “I’m hoping that’s the pot of gold we’re getting.”
“We’re still waiting to hear all the stipulations,” McAdams said. She said she would like to be able to use some of the money to provide “an across the board raise” for city employees who have had to “work doubly hard during the pandemic.” She said she understands this may not be allowable for the money and that it’s “one-time” money perhaps better suited to projects than recurring expenses.
“Trust me, in cities and towns, there are lots of ways to use that money, no shortage of needs,” McAdams said. “Right now we are in the middle of repaving streets. It would be nice to do a few more, add more sidewalks. We need improvements to our wastewater treatment plant — we have lots of old infrastructure … our ballparks need work on them … This money will be very usable.”
Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs said the Rescue Act money for local governments “is great news … and it couldn’t have come at a better time.” His city is expected to receive $4.88 million.
“From what I understand there might not be too many restrictions on it, other than it can’t be used to replace money cut out of a budget,” Flaggs said. “We’ll see … they may change some things, and we’re waiting to see all the stipulations.
“I’ve told my board, we need to only spend this on one-time expenditures,” Flaggs said. “I’m a conservative and I believe spend one-time money on one-time expenses, so you don’t inflate your budget. Things like infrastructure, or buying items like police cameras we’ve been trying to get. I hope we can use it on marketing, tourism.”
Flaggs said he’s pleased with the amount allocated to his city, adding, “they didn’t have to give us anything.” He said he’s unsure what calculus was used because he saw some cities larger than his receive less money.
Harrison County Supervisor Connie Rockco, whose county is set to receive more than $40 million, said her county’s leaders have not discussed the money and are awaiting more details.
“They haven’t even said the check’s in the mail yet, so there’s a hesitancy for us to get overexcited,” Rockco said. She said that, personally, she’d like to find ways to directly help small businesses in the county that have been hurt by the pandemic.
“Mental health, children’s services — there are many needs out there, many things that have been neglected by society as a whole,” Rockco said. “In our county, we also have an extreme need for fire services, because our county is growing so quickly, bursting at the seams. We have all sorts of needs, but we will have to see how it can be used.”
In Congress there was intense partisan debate over the Rescue Act pushed by Democratic President Joe Biden, and it passed along party lines.
Republican Hewes, a longtime former state lawmaker and former candidate for lieutenant governor, said that, as a mayor, he’s not focused on the broader politics of the act.
“Going from the state level of government to the local level, you take a large leap from the philosophical or theoretical to more pragmatic,” Hewes said. “A road we need to pave in the city is not a red road or a blue road. It’s a blacktop, and I need green to fix it, that’s what it comes down to.
“We as local leaders gave (Congress) some input through many of our associations and our delegations, and this is what came out of the machine,” Hewes said. “Rather than editorialize, I think folks on the local level just want to use what’s provided to us as best we can. There is an opportunity here to make a substantial impact, not unique to Gulfport or to Mississippi, but universally across the country.”
Mississippi Today reporter Alex Rozier created the searchable chart in this article.
The fragility of Jackson’s water system, plagued by decades of outmigration, deferred maintenance and declining federal support, was on full national display in February after a historic freeze left at least 40,000 without running water for weeks.
City officials are asking for state and federal support to help raise the $1 billion they say is needed to fix the system, which failed to produce safe drinking water for more than a month after the storm.
Mississippi Today spoke with several national policy experts about how other American cities have navigated large-scale water funding shortages and how Jackson could move forward. The experts offered several solutions, chronicled in the article below, but ultimately agreed that the absence of a more involved federal government leaves few answers for Jackson.
“A lot of these systems that are on the brink of falling apart, they’re just one extreme event away from a crisis,” said Dr. Newsha Ajami, director of the Urban Water Policy program at Stanford University. “That’s what happened in Jackson. It’s a cumulative effect of not investing in our infrastructure for so many years. Aging infrastructure, all of these extreme events that we’re experiencing, it’s all coming together.”
Some signs of short-term relief have trickled in during the past couple weeks. Jackson is set to receive $47 million from the American Rescue Plan, the name of the new $1.9 trillion stimulus bill President Joe Biden signed last week. Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith introduced a bill in Congress that would steer infrastructure funds towards the city.
But those measures still leave Jackson a long way from the necessary funding to repair and revamp its water system.
Federal water infrastructure support has plummeted since the 1970s, when the U.S. sent funds to cities to help comply with the newly-passed Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts. In 1977, federal support accounted for 31% of governments’ total water utility spending, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By 2017, that share had dropped to 4%.
Now, such spending largely comes in the form of loans rather than grants, mainly through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act that supports specific projects, as well as an annual allotment called the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which last year totaled $2.7 billion for the whole country.
“If Jackson alone has a $1 billion need, and the total EPA State Revolving Fund is $2.7 billion, that starts to give you an order of magnitude of how big the problem is versus how much money is actually available,” said Dr. Martin Doyle, Director for Water Policy at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.
As for many cities with rupturing infrastructure, the decline in federal support has coincided with Jackson’s sharp decline in population, which has shrunk by 20% since 1980.
Ajami, Doyle, and others discussed with Mississippi Today the ways other cities have tried to boost water infrastructure funding, such as consolidation and privatization, as well as different approaches to water billing.
Consolidation of regional water systems
For many cities, capital improvements such as upgrades to treatment plants and large-scale pipe replacements are simply unaffordable for their tax bases. Those cities instead focus what money is available towards regular operations and maintenance. But as bigger projects get pushed back, their costs only grow.
Dr. Newsha Ajami, director of the Urban Water Policy program at Stanford University
“The cost of recovering from the crisis is much higher than the cost of prevention,” Ajami said.
One successful cost-saving solution is consolidating utilities with neighboring towns and cities, similar to the way school districts merge to save money.
In 2014, after the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, a court ordered the creation of a regional authority that assumed the city’s water and sewer services. The Great Lake Water Authority took on $4 billion in debt from the city, and Detroit officials said the change allowed it to make infrastructure upgrades it couldn’t otherwise afford. Similarly, Raleigh, N.C., saw a decrease in maintenance and operation costs after combining utilities with nearby municipalities in the early 2000s.
“That starts to increase the scale of the operation, which means that you’re able to gain some efficiencies,” Doyle said.
In the U.S., there are more than 50,000 water utilities that operate independently, meaning they each have their own management and set of personnel, from engineers to customer service. When places combine utilities, they’re often able to serve the same populations at a lower fixed cost.
Despite the cost-saving potential, some city officials are unsure if Jackson and its neighbors could come to such an agreement, especially considering political and racial differences.
“I think it would be a difficult political thing to put a regional water system together, just because there’s a lack of trust issue,” said Jackson city councilman Ashby Foote. “A lot of the surrounding communities, I don’t think they would let Jackson run it, and I don’t think the city would vote to relinquish control of the systems.”
Foote and Jackson councilman De’Keither Stamps cited disagreements such as control over Jackson’s airport and the recent decision by West Rankin County officials to break off and build its own wastewater facility.
“Now (West Rankin) has to spend all this money to build a new sewer plant because of relationships and politics,” Stamps said. “How does that benefit the end user?”
Privatization of Jackson’s water system
While not as popular, privatization is a similar solution to consolidation, explained Doyle, who explored water-funding solutions for shrinking cities in an article for the American Water Works Association journal. Private water utilities, which serve 15% of Americans, can combine functions just as a regional utility would and can also provide more resources and expertise. Research also shows they are less likely to violate the EPA’s health-related drinking water statutes than public utilities.
The main concern around private utilities is cost. If a company took over Jackson’s water system, it would have to justify any rate increases with the state’s Public Service Commission; however, Doyle’s paper cites that “it is not uncommon for water rates to increase by greater than 10% when public systems are privatized, and in some cases, rates have reportedly almost doubled.”
Doyle said while it’s unclear how much more a private utility would cost Jackson, it should be considered a “tool in the toolkit.” Ajami and others were more skeptical.
“I don’t think privatization is going to solve the water problem for Jackson,” Ajami argued. “It’s probably going to make water more unaffordable. Their system will be upgraded, I’m just not sure that will lead to more affordable water rates for Jackson.”
Former Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. said he turned down the idea while in office.
“That idea was thrown out, I rejected it,” said Johnson, who was mayor from 1997 to 2005 and again from 2009 and 2013. He asserted that private companies don’t have the same accountability as elected officials, and that cities can get locked into long-term contracts without a way out. “The driving force there is the bottom line, it’s not service.”
Jackson City Council President Aaron Banks said that whether it’s consolidation or privatization, Jackson leadership needs to be open-minded.
“I think we have to explore all those options,” Banks said.
Balancing affordability and water revenue
Mississippi Food Network CEO Dr. Charles Beady Jr. prepares to load a case of water into a waiting vehicle March 6 at St. Luther M. B. Church. Nearly 1000 cases of bottled water were donated by the Mississippi Food Network for the giveaway in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Despite the city’s long list of needed system improvements, officials know that raising water rates could make the service unaffordable in a place where 1-in-4 residents live below the poverty line.
Even if Jackson leaders had the political will to raise customers’ rates, paying for a $1 billion municipal bond would add $55 to $60 a month in charges to every household, or about a full day’s work on minimum wage, according to associate professor Manuel Teodoro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
In 2017, Philadelphia took an innovative approach to address affordability: its Tiered Assistance Program, the first of its kind in the country, allows low-income residents to make payments based on earnings rather than water usage, and it also provides a path for debt forgiveness. Like in Jackson, many Philadelphia residents had built up water debt and weren’t contributing to the city’s water revenue. Since TAP began, the city simultaneously reduced water bill debt and increased the number of customers paying for the service.
Henrietta Locklear, vice president at financial consultant firm Raftelis, worked on Philadelphia’s assistance program and told Mississippi Today that such a system could work in Jackson should the city decide to increase water rates.
“The role is really more to say, ‘We have to have rate increases, and we know it’s going to affect some of our customers detrimentally, and we’re offering assistance to help customers in need,’” Locklear said.
Adjusting the water billing formula
Another way to stabilize revenue could be to adjust the city’s billing formula. Ajami, the Stanford policy expert, explained that while Jackson’s first priority is addressing emergency repairs to its system, the city should also aim to maximize its future water funding.
Jackson, like many cities, charges residents based on both water usage and tiered pricing, which adds a fee after a certain threshold. Customers are charged $3.21 per hundred cubic feet, and then a $7 flat fee is added after 300 cubic feet, or a little over 2,000 gallons, according to a city spokesperson.
Cities rely heavily on volumetric, or use-based, pricing because the more water a utility treats and delivers, the more strain it puts on the system. Yet volumetric pricing can leave a utility with varying revenue returns, Ajami said.
“If you use a gallon or 10 gallons, I still need to operate the treatment plant, I still need to maintain the pipes, I still need to operate the pumps,” Ajami said. “If people use less (water), they’re paying less, and then I have less money to do all those things.”
She said that Jackson would benefit from some combination of its current system and a “decoupled” rate — a common format for energy bills — which includes a fixed rate that pays for the utility’s routine operating costs.
Doyle added that the varying, volumetric nature of water bills stands out from other government revenue streams.
“A lot of the services we get are not use-based,” he said. Many roads, for instance, are mostly paid for by property taxes, not by how much a person drives. “Same thing for jails, same thing for city governments, same thing for school systems.”
In light of affordability issues, Doyle and Ajami both wondered why the U.S. has no federal safety net for water bills.
“You can get money from the federal government to assist you in being able to pay for household food and energy,” Doyle said. “You can’t get that for water, and that’s kind of weird.”
Ajami agreed, pointing to the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that helps pay for energy bills, and the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program that helps with phone bills.
“In a way you’re all subsidizing access to communication, which is important,” she said, “but if we have something like that, why can’t we have something similar for water?”
Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
A “barometer” of segregation
Jackson leaders in the past few weeks have asked state and federal officials to provide the city with money to begin repairing its water and sewer system.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba met with newly-appointed EPA Administrator Michael Regan to discuss funding avenues, and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson pledged to support any request for federal help.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told Mississippi Today that state legislators “want to help.” Yet Hosemann, as well as Gov. Tate Reeves and Sen. Hyde-Smith, have criticized the city’s management of its past funding without mentioning other systemic causes that led to the crisis.
Mississippi Today reported on Wednesday that legislative leaders killed the city’s main ask to improve its water system: allow the Jackson City Council’s proposal to increase the city’s sales tax by 1 cent to be placed on to a citywide ballot.
“If you talk to a city councillor in Memphis, in New Orleans, in Birmingham, in Newark, they’ll tell you the same thing: the federal government has deserted local governments when it comes to infrastructure improvement, and we’re witnessing that now.”
Harvey Johnson Jr., former Jackson mayor
Activists and academics who spoke with Mississippi Today described the way racism has fueled the inability of the 82% Black-city to address infrastructure needs, from white flight to a lack of state support.
Yet even with more state-led enthusiasm, Mississippi alone can’t afford Jackson’s funding needs, said former Jackson city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.
“While we always talk about, ‘We want more help from the state,’ the state doesn’t really have a big pool of money available to flow down to municipalities for this,” Priester said.
Priester and Johnson, Jackson’s former mayor, emphasized that the federal government’s deflated water funding has only inflated the city’s need. For instance, Jackson is struggling to fight its way out of an EPA consent decree for violations under the Clean Water Act, and last year received a $500,000 fine for violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“There’s no resources coming from the federal government to help local governments to meet those standards,” Johnson said. “If you talk to a city councillor in Memphis, in New Orleans, in Birmingham, in Newark, they’ll tell you the same thing: the federal government has deserted local governments when it comes to infrastructure improvement, and we’re witnessing that now.”
Ajami agrees that political willingness is part of the issue, adding that the disconnect between Americans and how they receive water may be why there’s a lack of political pressure.
“Because it’s easy to access water for a majority of Americans, people don’t think about the complexity of the system that brings water to us,” she said. “You drive on the road, so if there are potholes, you experience them. You don’t see water pipes. It’s a hidden infrastructure that we don’t value as much, while it’s the most essential resource we depend on in our daily life.”
Ajami also underscored the impacts of funding shortages on a city’s poorer and disadvantaged citizens: they can’t afford to rely on bottled water or a filtration system, and they’re left with an aging infrastructure that their local government can’t afford to fix.
“We’re getting this segregation not just between households and not just between neighborhoods, we’re getting this segregation between cities.”
Dr. Martin Doyle
Cities have fallen into a cycle where the inability to afford repairs compounds the effects of the broken system, which is largely what created the desperation Jackson felt this past month. That’s why, Doyle explained, water utilities have become a good indicator of disparities across the country.
“Paying for water in a rich city is, on a per population basis, very cheap,” he said. “Paying for water in a poorer city on a per population basis is really expensive. So we’re getting this segregation not just between households and not just between neighborhoods, we’re getting this segregation between cities. That’s why I think one of the best barometers of how that big sorting in America is actually taking place is in the water utilities.”
Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe contributed to this story.
The Mississippi Senate, which has resisted an effort to provide a 1-cent sales tax for the city of Jackson to pay for improvements to its water system, voted Thursday by a 23-15 vote to allow Lee County to impose a 3/4-cent sales tax increase.
Senate Local and Private Chair Chad McMahan, R-Guntown, whose district consists of a large portion of Lee County, said before the sales tax could be imposed, it would have to be approved by voters during the next general election in 2023. In addition, Lee County supervisors, whom he said supported the bill allowing the sales tax increase, also would have to place on the ballot the projects that would be financed with the sales tax increase.
While the bill passed Wednesday does not list any specific projects to be funded through the sales tax increase, Lee County supervisors have recently proposed a sales tax increase within the county to finance a new county jail.
The Legislature has been reluctant to allow local governments to increase the statewide sales tax rate of 7%. Currently, there are two local governments with a local option sales tax on general items. The city of Jackson currently has a 1-cent sales tax for street improvements, and for decades the city of Tupelo has had a ¼-cent sales tax to help finance a surface water supply system.
This session, the city of Jackson has requested another 1-cent sales tax increase to help finance improvements to its aging water system that broke down during the February winter ice storm, leaving more than 40,000 people — mostly Black — without running water for weeks.
Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, filed a local and private bill to allow the city of Jackson to impose the additional 1-cent sales tax.
But House Local and Private Chair Manly Barton, R-Moss Point, said he does not plan to take up any requests for local-option sales taxes, including the Lee County proposal and the city of Jackson’s 1-cent increase, and that has been a consistent House position in recent years.
Barton said that the Lee County bill will die on the House side, as the Lee County delegation is not united in support for the tax increase.
“We have been very hesitant to do general sales tax increases for other cities — in fact, we turn them down every year,” Barton said. “We had four or five requests this year. A lot of times the bills don’t even get filed. We work with them on local food-and-beverage, hotel-motel taxes, but there’s just no appetite to do general sales taxes. We’ve been pretty consistent.”
Barton added, “Part of it is the precedent.” He said that if lawmakers allow a city to add a local sales tax, “… we’d better get ready to do 20 or 30 of them for other cities next year. That has just not been the policy here, with our leadership.”
Senate Hob Bryan, D-Amory, who also represents a portion of Lee County, agreed with Barton and spoke against and voted against the local option sale tax increase for Lee County. He said every county in the state had a jail or access to a jail that had been funded without the aid of a local option sales tax and questioned why Lee, an affluent county, needed the sales tax increase when others did not.
“If we let Lee County do this, every county and every city will be up here asking for a local option sales tax,” he said.
In addition, Bryan said the sales tax is an unfair tax, forcing low wage earners to spend more of their income on basic items than more affluent people.
He said the county would be asking the low wage earners to pay a larger percentage of their income to finance the jail if the jail was built with sales tax revenue.
McMahan countered that the sales tax is the state’s fairest taxing method.
While the House has a bill to allow Jackson to impose the additional sales tax, no similar legislation has been filed in the Senate. And no senator representing Jackson has endorsed such a proposal.
The bill allowing Lee County the local option sales tax, which needed a three-fifths majority, passed by one vote. And 14 of the senators in the 52-member chamber did not vote or voted present.
None of the five state senators representing the city of Jackson supported their city’s proposed sales tax increase — the chief reason the Senate never considered it.
Four of them met privately with Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann on March 12, and none of those senators — Democratic Sens. Sollie Norwood, Hillman Frazier, John Horhn and David Blount — told the lieutenant governor they supported the sales tax increase, according to several of the meeting’s attendees. Sen. Walter Michel, R-Ridgeland, could not attend the meeting but was said to oppose the sales tax increase.
During Wednesday’s final vote on the Lee County sales tax increase, Norwood and Michel voted yes; Frazier voted present; Blount voted no; and Horhn did not vote.
Did you know the first person to ever be diagnosed with autism lives in Mississippi? Don Triplett of Forest, now in his late 80s, was patient number one.
A new documentary, “In a Different Key,” by Caren Zucker (award-winning producer at ABC news) and John Donvan (journalist, broadcaster and debate moderator) debuts at the Oxford Film Festival and tells Triplett’s story along with a brief history of autism.
Some of the stars of the movie are the citizens of Forest, who show us all that it truly does take a village to show kindness and compassion to children and adults with autism. “In a Different Key” tells a powerful story and shows us a better way. It’s based on Zucker’s and Donvan’s Pulitzer-Finalist book of the same name.
A bill to allow Jackson to raise its citywide sales tax by 1 cent for water and sewer system repairs is dead in the final days of the 2021 legislative session.
A historic winter storm in mid-February froze water plant equipment and burst many pipes in the capital city, leaving at least 40,000 residents — mostly Black — without water for nearly three weeks. City leaders, who have neglected funding the system for decades, say they need major investment from the state and federal government to repair the system, which is estimated to cost at least $1 billion.
The Jackson City Council attempted to take matters into its own hands, passing a proposal in early March to raise the city’s sales tax by 1 cent. That new revenue — an estimated $14 million per year — would be used to back large bonds for repairing and replacing the city’s water and sewer system. But state law requires approval from lawmakers before the local sales tax increase could be placed on a citywide ballot. State Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, filed a bill on behalf of the city to acquire legislative sign-off on the 1-cent proposal.
That bill will die without committee consideration, House Local and Private Chairman Manly Barton, R-Moss Point, told Mississippi Today — a blow to the capital city’s main legislative ask as it struggles to afford water system repairs.
Barton said killing the bill is based on precedent — with the 2013 exception of allowing a previous 1-cent sales tax increase for Jackson — of not allowing cities to add on to the state’s sales tax.
“We have been very hesitant to do general sales tax increases for other cities. In fact, we turn them down every year,” Barton said. “We had four or five requests this year. A lot of times the bills don’t even get filed. We work with them on local food-and-beverage, hotel-motel taxes, but there’s just no appetite to do general sales taxes. We’ve been pretty consistent … Of course there was the one for Jackson some years ago — there were conditions set on that and a committee — but we have otherwise been pretty consistent.”
Barton continued: “I think the 1-cent tax would generate about $14 million for Jackson, but it’s a really big hole they’re trying to fill with infrastructure. What I did say is I would do everything I could to help find revenue somewhere else if we possibly can.”
City leaders all along have said the intended purpose of that $14 million a year in new revenue would be to back large bonds, possibly giving the city hundreds of millions they could use in the short-term for infrastructure upgrades.
“This bill, which includes a one percent tax, will support repairing infrastructure after decades of neglect,” Bell told Mississippi Today. “We’ll still need additional support, but this is a first step at a time of urgent need. Sadly, our plan hasn’t been accepted by those in leadership, which further makes our road to recovery difficult.”
Earlier this month in private meetings with both House Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba asked for support of Bell’s bill. The 1-cent sales tax increase was the mayor’s main ask of the Republican leaders, along with state bonds that could help the city make emergency repairs on its water distribution system.
Local and private legislation like Bell’s bill traditionally requires support from all or most lawmakers of the locality in question — an unwritten but decades long-standing rule inside the Capitol. In this case, not all of Jackson’s House and Senate delegates were on board with the measure.
After his meeting with Lumumba, Gunn publicly expressed concern about allowing Jackson to raise its sales tax, prompting questions about whether Bell’s bill ever stood a chance of passing out of the House chamber.
“It creates a precedent, if you will, that may be a dangerous area to go to as far as other cities around the state wanting to do the same thing,” Gunn told Scott Simmons at WAPT earlier this month. “And we may get in a situation where the tax burden (on Jackson residents) is just too great.”
Even had the bill passed the House, it faced a difficult road in the Senate. Hosemann, the Senate’s presiding officer, met privately on March 12 with four of the five state senators representing the city of Jackson. None of those senators — Democratic Sens. Sollie Norwood, Hillman Frazier, John Horhn and David Blount — told the lieutenant governor they supported the sales tax increase, according to several of the meeting’s attendees. Sen. Walter Michel, R-Ridgeland, could not attend the meeting but is said to oppose the sales tax increase.
“I am not in favor of (the 1-cent increase),” Horhn told Mississippi Today. “I think it will place too much of a burden on the city’s taxpayers. I believe it inhibits businesses from coming into the city. And it also hurts the efforts to retain and to expand businesses already here.”
Norwood told Mississippi Today he was “open-minded,” but that many of his constituents “have expressed disdain for (the sales tax increase), but I am still not done surveying it.”
Frazier told Mississippi Today he was still studying the possibility of the sales tax increase, “but I have not heard many positive comments about it from the folks in my district. They say it is regressive, and they already are paying an extra 1 cent for infrastructure.”
When asked if he supported the sales tax increase, Blount would not commit. “We are discussing all options, state and federal sources,” he said.
In another indication that the senators opposed the proposal: No one filed a Senate bill similar to Bell’s House bill that would garner legislative approval of the tax increase.
Lawmakers are working to end the current legislative session soon after this coming weekend, and it is unclear what funds, if any, they will appropriate to the city of Jackson. Republican leaders have remained tight-lipped as they are in closed-door meetings this week hammering out the state’s general fund budget.
The closing days of any legislative session are usually when lawmakers pass large packages that send state bonds to local governments. Neither Hosemann nor Gunn have publicly said they wouldn’t support a modest bond package for Jackson, and every lawmaker representing the city of Jackson in both the House and Senate support that effort.
Janna Avalon, a 72-year-old retired newspaper editor, lived out the mid-February ice storm and weeks-long water outage just feet from South Jackson’s empty water tower.
The one million-gallon tank, one of several across the city, is meant to store water at a high elevation, utilizing gravity to pressurize the delivery system, especially during service interruptions.
But contingency plans are a myth in a system as chronically broken as Jackson’s.
So for the better part of the last month, Avalon and her husband Billy heaved buckets of water they retrieved from government tankers, kind neighbors or rainfall into their home to flush their toilet or wash dishes.
Most Jacksonians lost running water altogether after back-to-back winter storms the week of Feb. 14 stunned unprepared utilities across the Deep South, and the Avalons were some of the roughly 43,000 people whose taps remained dry for more than two weeks. City officials were still telling most residents, 82% of whom are Black, to boil their water a month later.
“Water is the most intimate relationship you have with the government … when the water is of poor quality or, in your case, just not delivered, it’s a profound betrayal of trust.”
Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
In the Avalons’ spacious backyard — beyond a wooden playset, garden and plum trees, plastic flamingos and decorative stone statues — the water tower adds its own charm. Avalon said it reflects colors in the evening sky, prolonging sunsets.
“It’s got all these great little attributes,” Avalon said, “except water.”
Avalon grew up in Jackson and has lived in her home, where she raised her five children, for 28 years. Despite ongoing utility hiccups, she’s intent on staying. She asks why she should have to move — and contribute to the city’s population decline of 20% since 1980 — to access basic human services. Why city and state government officials can’t or won’t improve conditions where she already lives. Why her water bills are unreliable, why nobody reads her water meter, and why there is a “huge city water tower in our backyard and there’s no water in it.”
The questions seem simple, but the answers are complex, and the dysfunction is causing a rift between Jacksonians and their leaders.
“Water is the most intimate relationship you have with the government,” said Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “It comes into your house. You take it into your body. We put our children in it, and we prepare food with it. And when that fails — when the water is of poor quality or, in your case, just not delivered — it’s a profound betrayal of trust. And it shakes you to your core.”
Jackson residents Janna and Billy Avalon discuss their water woes on Mar. 1, 2021, just as they started to see a trickle at their kitchen tap after two weeks without water following mid-February ice storms. Credit: Anna Wolfe / Mississippi Today
Many Jacksonians lacked access to clean drinking water long before the most recent storm. In fact, on a good day, officials advise pregnant people and children under five not to drink from the tap, a phenomenon that’s been the case for the last five years.
“And most people in Jackson don’t even know,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, a longtime reproductive rights activist in Jackson and director of Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, told Mississippi Today during the recent outage. “The city and the state have done nothing to provide water to those populations. This whole time they should have been providing water for pregnant people and children under five. This whole time.”
And yet, when Jackson water customers do receive a bill (because consistent and accurate billing has also been a problem), they’re sometimes paying exorbitant amounts for water that’s unsafe to drink.
Every city water bill notifies customers of the hazard of high lead levels first found in Jackson’s tap water in 2016, caused by recurring faulty water treatment techniques that remain unaddressed.
Only a year ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency order stating that the city’s water system presented “imminent and substantial endangerment” to its customers and could contain E. Coli.
Water outages and the presence of harmful contaminants when the water does reach the tap are two different scenarios with unique sets of threats, but they both stem from decades of underinvestment and deferred maintenance within a dysfunctional and outdated water treatment and delivery system.
The city is faced with two colliding but distinct funding problems: One, the city’s infrastructure is only getting older and past administrations did not plan for inevitable future capital investments, as is true in many aging cities. Two, the loss of customer base and pervasive billing troubles have left the water department without a feasible revenue model for regular operations and maintenance.
“This is like a triple or quadruple whammy, what’s going on,” said Alan Mallach, senior fellow at D.C.-based Center for Community Progress. “One layer is the fact that older cities — completely leaving aside race, poverty, all that — are at a disadvantage to young cities.”
“Then you get the second layer,” Mallach continued. “You have this whole phenomenon which has been going on really since the 1950s, where older cities, central cities, have essentially been abandoned by large parts of the middle class, especially the white middle class, for the suburbs.”
Winter storms in past years — 1989, 1994, 2010, 2014 and most recently 2018 — have tested the city’s outdated water delivery system and caused widespread water main breaks and outages. Each time, the city has scrambled to make band-aid repairs, only to wait until the next catastrophe. Jackson isn’t alone in taking this approach, said Teodoro, the Wisconsin professor.
“The nature of local politics is that city governments will tend to neglect utilities until they break because they’re literally buried,” he said. “One of the things that is a perennial challenge for governments that operate water systems is that the quality of the water system is very hard for people to observe. But the price is very easy for them to observe.”
Not even EPA orders — including a decade-old consent decree over the city’s wastewater system that continues to release raw sewage into the Pearl River — have resulted in much meaningful action. City water and sewer systems are not like corporations, Teodoro said; the authorities can’t just take their license away. And imposing large fines only punishes the taxpayers they are supposed to be protecting. “In the end, there’s very little you can do,” Teodoro said of regulators.
“They just want to keep on letting stuff break until we break and go away. That’s what it feels like.”
Laurie Bertram Roberts, a longtime reproductive rights activist in Jackson and director of Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund
This year, Jackson officials said, issues were particularly pronounced at the water treatment plants, which are not enclosed and protected from the elements like plants typically are up north.
Jackson Public Works Director Charles Williams told the media that the screens through which water from the reservoir is filtered had frozen, rendering the plant incapable of taking in water, causing pressure to drop across the system. Operators didn’t discover the issue until the weekend after the storms. They also encountered malfunctioning raw water pumps.
Also, the 10 million gallon basins where filtered reservoir water is stored before it is chemically treated contained two feet of sludge due to an overdose in chemicals that occured over time when water wasn’t coming in — a possible human error, Williams said. The city took two basins offline to clean them the week after the storm and cleaned the third a couple weeks later.
In addition to needed equipment upgrades, the city is sorely lacking the personnel needed to operate the plant in its current condition. City officials rely on these operators to notify them of an event, such as sludge build up, that they need to address. Jackson employs three high-level operators at each of its water treatment plants, when each facility really needs six of these top officials, Williams told Mississippi Today. In 2018, there were 60 unfilled positions in Public Works, Clarion Ledger reported.
“You have to maintain what you have until you’re able to make improvements,” Williams said. “But once again, you have to have funding.”
Two generations of white and wealth flight out of Jackson has reduced the built-in revenue that officials say the water system needs just to maintain full operations, including hiring personnel — let alone to make a dent in an estimated $1 billion worth of needed upgrades.
The city’s bungled attempt to revamp its water meter and billing system through a $90 million contract with German-based manufacturer Siemens only worsened the water department’s cash flow — not to mention public confidence — while any outside investment in the capital city has come at a crawl.
“And we all know why,” Roberts, the activist, said. “Nobody wants to invest in Jackson because of who runs Jackson and who lives in Jackson. Because white folks don’t dominate here anymore. They just want to keep on letting stuff break until we break and go away. That’s what it feels like.”
With a population that’s 82% African American, Jackson is the single Blackest large city in the nation. Roughly 1-in-4 residents live in poverty, and in some west and south Jackson communities, the hardest hit by water outages, the average household pulls an income of $25,000 and as low as $15,000 in some pockets.
The capital city has lost roughly 40,000 residents since the population peaked at about 200,000 in 1980, after an initial wave of white residents left to avoid putting their children in integrated schools. Half of the decline occurred in the last two decades as more middle-class Black families moved, and the city’s white population continued to drop from 52% in 1980 to 28% in 2000 to 17% in 2019, according to U.S. Census data.
As the customer base declines, the system might clean and pump out less water, but the same infrastructure remains under the surface of Jackson’s 111 square miles, an area geographically larger than Seattle, Baltimore or Cincinnati. Parts of Jackson’s 1,500 miles of water mains are over 100 years old.
Of course, pipes under streets in front of abandoned properties — about 4,000 by one 2019 count — still require maintenance.
Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
At the same time, family resources are diminishing with inflation. Household buying power fell just slightly in the 1980s and was relatively stable through the 1990s. But since 2000, the annual median household income in Jackson has dropped about $6,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars, a roughly 15% decrease, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of Census data.
“We are a city with very high levels of poverty, and it’s difficult for us to raise the rates enough to do large scale replacement type projects and not make it unaffordable to live in the city of Jackson,” said former city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.
Yet the cost of Jackson’s poor quality water is still passed on to families who don’t trust the tap and purchase bottled water — which can cost a family of four $50-$100 a month — to drink instead.
“These would be hard problems, but we could solve them if it wasn’t for racism.”
Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
The city raised water rates in 2013, but the Siemens deal penned the same year came with an onslaught of problems, including the installation of faulty water meters and meters that measured water in gallons instead of the correct cubic feet. This made any benefits of the rate increase virtually impossible to see.
The results have been nonsensical. Over the past several years, the city has mailed exorbitant bills to some customers and none to others. Sometimes, the charges weren’t based on how much water a household used and other times, city officials advised residents to “pay what they think they owe.” Past officials said the city lacked the manpower and expertise in the billing department to manually rectify the account issues with any speed.
In trying to protect people during the persistent billing blunders, the city has at times instituted no-shutoff policies, which demonstrate compassion but haven’t helped to compel payment.
Today, more than 8,000 customers, or nearly one-sixth of the city’s customer base, still aren’t receiving bills. Nearly 16,000 customers owe more than $100 or are more than 90 days past due, a city spokesperson told Mississippi Today. Jackson water customers owe a total of $90.3 million.
As a result, the city continues to miss out on tens of millions of water revenues. In 2016, when officials first uncovered the issue, the city’s actual water sewer collections during the previous year was a startling 32% less than projected — a roughly $26 million shortfall.
It’s a vicious cycle: revenue shortfalls make it harder for the city to purchase upgrades or hire the personnel needed to properly manage the billing system; the billing inaccuracies and sloppy accounting encourage a culture of nonpayment; the unpaid bills just further tank the revenue.
Frustration only grows as residents are expected to pay for subpar service within a utility that’s already largely taken for granted.
The city received just under $60 million out of last year’s $90 million Siemens settlement, about $33 million of which is restricted in reserves or bond covenants. Another $12.6 million went to repay the general fund, leaving about $14 million for emergency sewer repairs and a new billing system.
Lawyers got the rest — a little more than $30 million.
The story of Jackson’s failing infrastructure, national experts say, could just as easily describe the scenario in other major cities like Detroit, Toledo or Kansas City, whose leaders have had to look outside their own budgets to solve major crises.
A city rests within a state, after all, and decisions made at the state level and the impact those decisions have on the economy and public services affect what a city is able to accomplish.
“It’s really disingenuous to look at the politics and policies of any one American city in isolation from the state context in which it exists,” Teodoro said.
The residents who left Jackson in the late 20th century fled to surrounding suburbs such as Rankin County, the wealthier Republican bastion that produced many of Mississippi’s most powerful politicians, including Gov. Tate Reeves.
Less than a year ago, Reeves vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have provided relief to poor Jacksonians with past due water bills and propped up the city’s bond rating, a proposal he suggested perpetuated a “‘free money’ concept,” Clarion Ledger reported.
A similar bill, which would apply to all municipalities, is making its way through the Legislature this session. Lawmakers also killed a bill to assist Jackson with infrastructure bonds, but it still has a chance to pass legislation that would allow the city to propose its own sales tax increase to pay for water system improvements.
Meanwhile, Speaker Philip Gunn, another top lawmaker who lives in a Jackson suburb, spent the session trying to pass tax reform that would have actually increased the tax burden on the bottom 60% of the state’s income earners, according to one study, while significantly cutting the taxes of the richest residents.
The city is also still fighting the state’s 2016 attempt to wrest control of Jackson’s airport. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said during a recent mayoral debate that during a conversation with Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the state Senate leader who lives in the white pocket of northeast Jackson, the lieutenant governor asked the mayor to “give me my airport” in exchange for infrastructure funding.
This ongoing tension is the backdrop for the city’s current crisis.
Academics who have studied government water systems recommend they regionalize in order to spread costs among struggling cities and more affluent suburbs. There’s just one recurring hitch to securing such an agreement: “Racism makes all of this so much harder,” Teodoro said.
“These would be hard problems, but we could solve them if it wasn’t for racism.”
The history of racial conflict, Teodoro explained, creates a scenario where Black residents of the city fear losing control of their services to the same people who have systematically oppressed them. And white residents of the suburbs, who chalk the city’s problems up to incompetence, don’t feel responsible to help.
In the Jackson metro, not only is regionalization a tough sell, there are examples of the opposite happening. West Rankin Utility Authority recently splintered off to build its own wastewater treatment facility to become independent from Jackson’s Savannah Street Wastewater Treatment Plant.
It’s twofold: Systemic racism is an unmistakable underlying cause for Jackson’s stripped resources, and while it may be clouded by a mutual distrust today, racism continues to prevent future investment.
For Avalon, a white woman, understanding the decline of her majority-Black community is as easy as pointing to the state’s refusal to fully fund education or expand Medicaid.
“Racism is everywhere,” Avalon said. “We need to recognize what we’re talking about. If my kid goes to public school that’s not up to par, why? We’re all paying taxes.”
The storage tank on Avalon’s street wasn’t full of water, Williams explained, because as the system loses pressure on an ongoing basis, not just during storms, the tower is constantly drained to make up for the deficiencies. He said he didn’t know if that tank had ever been full.
Janna Avalon, a 72-year-old retired newspaper editor, questions the city’s management of resources, considering her home had been without water for weeks despite a water storage tower in her backyard. Credit: Anna Wolfe
South Jackson often bears the brunt of water crises because the area is one of the furthest away from the treatment plant, so water takes longer to travel there. What little water would have been inside the tower at the time of the storm was used up immediately by some of the roughly 70,000 people who live in South Jackson.
That’s a convenient explanation for Avalon, who says her community is always last to receive attention on a variety of issues. “We’ve been putting up with that stuff all my life in south Jackson,” she said.
Jackson City Councilman De’Keither Stamps pushed the council to ask the state for $60 million, in addition to an initial $47 million proposal, to build new water storage towers in South Jackson and Byram to build up capacity in those areas.
“You shouldn’t have to live your life in fear of the plant going down,” Stamps said. “You should have enough capacity within a short distance from your house to maintain yourself.”
On March 1, just as water was starting to trickle out of her tap, Avalon stood on her back porch as it rained and looked out at the empty water reservoir that engulfs the skyline. City contractors had just come out a few years ago to repaint its dingy exterior, she recalled. Some 100 feet up, a large black fowl crouched on top of the massive steel structure stamped with the City of Jackson seal.
“If they’re vultures, gosh, that’s a terrible omen,” she said with a chuckle.
Water pressure in the Avalon home fell again in the following days as city officials discovered the facility’s intake filters were clogged with clams, mussels, tree branches and other items and had to take the systems offline. The Avalons had to shut off their water again the following weekend because of a broken pipe on their property. They’ll expect outages to continue.
“It keeps coming back and slapping us in the face, and we can’t do anything about it,” Avalon said.
Check back for a follow-up story about solutions to Jackson’s water crisis. Reporter Alex Rozier contributed to this story.
This month marks five years of publication for Mississippi Today. To celebrate, we hosted a members-only event on March 22 featuring Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau and Mississippi Today board member Tray Hairston.
Watch to take a look back at Mississippi Today’s founding in 2016, dive into the work we’ve done since and explore what’s next for our newsroom.
Ole Miss ace Gunnar Hoglund deals during his 13-strikeout performance against Auburn in the Rebels’ SEC opener. (Ole Miss athletics)
Here’s the latest round of positive proof that Mississippi is, above all else, a baseball state:
This week’s Baseball America poll shows Mississippi’s college baseball dominance.
• Mississippi State is ranked No. 2 in the nation in the latest Baseball America poll. The Bulldogs, 16-4 and 2-1, are fresh from taking two of three games from LSU at Baton Rouge — no easy feat. Here’s what jumps out at me about Chris Lemonis’ team: State has used a staggering 23 pitchers in the 20 games so far. Those arms have combined for a team earned run average of 2.36. They have struck out 259batters and walked only 66 over 179 innings. Opponents hit only .176. That’s crazy good. Fourteen State pitchers have ERAs of under 2. That’s insane.
• Ole Miss is ranked No. 4 in the latest Baseball America poll, having swept three straight from Auburn to begin the SEC season. The Rebels, like State, are 16-4 overall and the similarities don’t end there. Mike Bianco has called on 19 pitchers to date and most have delivered, led by Friday night starter Gunnar Hoglund, who pitched eight innings of shutout ball, striking out 13 against Auburn. Hoglund leads the nation in strikeouts with 55. At the plate, Ole Miss loves the long ball. The Rebels have hit 24 home runs in 20 games, led by strapping first baseman Tim Elko with seven.
• Unranked Southern Miss, after a slow start, has won eight of its last night games to move to 12-6. Perhaps more impressively, Scott Berry’s Golden Eagles have won five consecutive weekend series to begin the season. Pitching has led the way with 18 pitchers combining to strike out 204 and walk only 36 over 158 innings. You read right: 204 Ks and 36 BBs over 158 innings. That’s a ridiculous strikeout/walks ratio and that pitching has allowed the Eagles to succeed despite an uncharacteristically anemic offensive attack. Southern Miss currently hits .208 as a team. That must improve for Berry’s team to have the success it has come to expect.
• Don’t look now, but Jackson State has the look of an NCAA Regional team. Since starting 0-4, the Tigers have won 11 of 12, including a three-game road sweep of arch-rival Alcorn when the Tigers outscored the Braves a whopping 47-13.
• It should be noted that, despite COVID-19, Ole Miss, State and Southern Miss all have drawn well. No tickets have been sold at the games. The entire allotment of available tickets have been sold beforehand.
Rick Cleveland
If you follow college baseball, you know that the more you win, the more important it seems that the games become. That’s certainly the case this week where the Mississippi teams are concerned.
Start with this: No. 2 ranked State plays a three-game home weekend series with No. 1 ranked Arkansas. How’s that for March baseball: No. 1 vs. No. 2, 14-3 vs. 16-4? If standing-room-only crowds were allowed, you might have 45,000 people for those three games. Arkansas, which took two of three from Alabama to open its SEC season, is scheduled for two mid-week games with Memphis.
No. 4 ranked Ole Miss is scheduled to play Central Arkansas Tuesday night, followed by a three-game set Thursday through Saturday against Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Alabama, 15-5 going into a scheduled Tuesday afternoon home game with Southern Miss, is ranked No. 23 by Baseball America and displayed its power in taking a 17-1 victory at Arkansas before dropping the last two games of the series.
In Hattiesburg, Berry’s Golden Eagles will play one of its most important early season in years this weekend against Louisiana Tech, which is somehow unranked by Baseball America but is ranked No. 23 by DI Baseball and probably deserves to be ranked even higher. The Bulldogs, playing in a brand new ball yard under Meridian native Lane Burroughs, are off to a 13-5 record against one of the nation’s more difficult schedules. Tech clobbered Ole Miss 13-1 in one mid-week game and is coming off a three-game sweep at Tulane.
This weekend will mark the COVID-induced four-game league series in Conference USA. Instead of the traditional three-game sets, CUSA teams will play four-game series with Friday single games, Saturday seven-inning double-headers and then a single game on Sunday. Tech and Southern Miss, along with Florida Atlantic, are expected to be the class of CUSA this season. Hard to imagine a more meaningful March series than this one.
One million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves announced during a Monday press conference.
While that figure signals the progress that has been made in vaccination efforts across Mississippi, the state faces hurdles to radically increasing the vaccinated population.
“We’re not yet out of this fight. In fact, we know that the next million shots are going to be harder to get than the last million,” Reeves said.
Reeves attributed the difficulties in administering shots to vaccine hesitancy in the state. The demand for vaccines was much higher than the state’s supply when its rollout began, but the Mississippi State Department of Health is already seeing the shift to demand being equal to or even lower than supply.
Mississippi is lagging behind most other states in administering the shots it’s received. — And many of the states doing better than Mississippi have much stricter eligibility requirements for vaccination. Mississippi ranks 47th in the percentage of allotted doses given.
Recent polling has shown that Mississippians are generally more open to getting a COVID-19 vaccine than they were in early January, but it’s unclear how significantly this shift has impacted demand for vaccines.
To even maintain the current rate at which shots are being administered in Mississippi, Reeves said the state has to “get creative” in how it distributes the vaccine. That’s why Mississippi was the second state to make all residents 16 and older eligible for vaccination. Last week, Mississippi also became one of the first states to begin mass vaccinating inmates in state prisons.
“It’s another area in which Mississippi is leading,” Reeves said.
Though the state officially reached the milestone of administering one million shots on Monday, the actual number of doses given could be as much as 10% higher, according to Reeves.
That disconnect is due to delays between when certain private healthcare providers administer shots and when they report that through the system the state uses to report to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). All private providers that are receiving vaccine allotments sign an agreement to log all the doses they’ve given into the system within 24 hours of administering them, but some haven’t followed through.
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said this information gap has expanded as more local providers have been brought in to distribution efforts because data entry is more of a hassle for them. A large hospital might have software that transfers their vaccination data to the state system automatically, while smaller operations have to do it manually.
“They think it’s important to get the shots in and the documentation is just boring bureaucratic paperwork, but it’s important,” Dobbs said.
Streamlining the reporting process isn’t just important because it affects the numbers being reported by the state. It also plays a factor in how quickly a provider will receive more vaccine shipments or whether they will at all.
In Mississippi, 646,945 people — 22% of the state’s population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. More than 364,000 people have been fully inoculated since the state began distributing vaccines in December.
The legislative roads for two of the most high-profile issues of the 2021 session — a massive tax swap proposal and the legalization of medical marijuana — appear to have reached a dead end.
While the ability of Mississippi legislators to revive an issue should never be underestimated, it appears the joint rules would make it near impossible to bring back to life both issues.
The end came quietly when House Judiciary B Chair Nick Bain, R-Corinth, made a motion to go to conference on a Senate bill that contained the language legalizing medical marijuana. Senate Finance Chair Josh Harkins, R-Flowood, did the same for the House bill that would have enacted the tax swap. Both motions were approved with no fanfare.
Conference committees consist of three senators and three House members and are formed to hash out the differences between the two chambers on a bill. The reason sending the two issues to conference likely kills the proposals is Legislative Joint Rule 25, which says in part, “When a conference report is considered by the house of origin and it contains an amendment by the other house which adds code sections not included in the bill as passed the house of origin, a point of order that the conference report is not in order shall be sustained and the bill shall be returned to conference” to remove those offending code sections.
Mississippi legal code is broken down by sections with laws dealing with drug enforcement, for instance, found in one code section, and laws dealing with taxes found in other code sections.
The Senate added the language legalizing medical marijuana to a bill dealing with research on cannabidiol, or CBD oil. The code sections dealing with the legalization of medical marijuana was not in the original bill.
Ditto for the House adding the tax swap proposal — multiple code sections dealing with the tax code — to a bill authorizing the sale of bonds to finance long-term construction projects across the state.
A couple of scenarios could occur where Joint Rule 25 is circumvented.
The first is if no member raises a point of order challenging the addition of the code sections. A point of order is not made automatically. A member must raise the point of order when the legislation is brought up for consideration.
There have been popular proposals approved in the past in obvious violation of legislative rules, but no member was willing to raise the point of order to kill the proposal. That is not likely to occur especially in the House where Rep. Joel Bomgar, R-Madison, strongly opposes efforts of the Legislature to approve a medical marijuana proposal that he believes is a not-so-subtle attempt to weaken the citizen-sponsored medical marijuana initiative he helped to pass in November.
The other path around Joint Rule 25 would be for the two presiding officers — House Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate — just to ignore the rule if a member such as Bomgar raises a point of order. That would be unprecedented, but most likely the presiding officers could get away with it.
The courts, based on precedent, would not overrule the presiding officer. The only option would be for the presiding officer to be overruled by a vote of the chamber where he presides. That also is not likely to happen. Seldom would a majority of a chamber go against the presiding officer in such a public manner.
No doubt, both Gunn and Hosemann would want to ignore Joint Rule 25 in these particular instances. Hosemann has spent a considerable amount of the Senate’s time this session trying to pass the medical marijuana legislation, including keeping the chamber in session one day to around 1 a.m. Gunn calls the tax swap bill, which he authored, the most important legislation of his tenure. It would phase out the personal income tax, reduce the 7% sale tax on food in half and increase the sales tax on many other items by 2.5% on each dollar spent.
But it also is unlikely that Gunn and Hosemann, both attorneys, would simply ignore the plain reading of Joint Rule 25.
So, in other words, both the Legislature’s approval of medical marijuana and of a massive tax swap proposal are likely dead for the 2021 session.
