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After suffering years of budget cuts, the Mississippi State Department of Health has worked overtime and done well during the pandemic.

The post Marshall Ramsey: The Little Engine appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lottery revenue earmarked for maintenance on state highways would be diverted to local road and bridge needs under legislation pending in the Mississippi Senate.

The legislation would undo one of the primary commitments made by the Legislature in a 2018 special session designed to address a deteriorating state transportation system.

During that special session, lawmakers adopted the state lottery and decided the first $80 million in annual lottery revenue would be earmarked for the Mississippi Department of Transportation. At the time, a Mississippi Economic Council study concluded the Department of Transportation needed an additional $300 million annually for state highway maintenance, repairs and construction projects.

The legislation would divert any lottery revenue in excess of $80 million to public education.

Central District Transportation Commissioner Willie Simmons said the legislation pending in the Senate, if passed, “removes from MDOT $80 million in critically important funding and the first new, sustainable revenue source for our state-owned highways since 1987.”

“Without question, this would have a marked negative impact on our mission to deliver an efficient and reliable state transportation system,” Simmons said.

Simmons, a Democrat, was serving in the Senate as Transportation Committee chair when the 2018 special session was held.

In that special session, lawmakers made various other changes to the state’s taxing structure to ensure additional funds for infrastructure needs.

Perhaps the most significant change besides the lottery was a diversion of 35% of the revenue from the state’s use tax (a 7% tax on retail items purchased out of state, such as via the internet) to local governments. When the diversion is fully phased in, it is estimated it will create $120 million annually for city and county transportation needs.

In addition, the Legislature in the 2018 special session created the Emergency Road and Bridge Repair Fund, with $250 million in revenue from the sale of bonds. The three-member Transportation Commission, with advice from a special board created by Legislature, awarded $213 million for local projects and $37 million for projects on the state system. There were about $1 billion in requested projects made of the Emergency Road and Bridge Repair Fund.

Legislation authored by Sen. Melanie Sojourner, R-Natchez, would divert the annual lottery revenue from the Department of Transportation to provide additional funds for the Emergency Road and Bridge Repair Fund. Sojourner said the local governments need the additional funds more than the state agency.

“The last national audit of state highways shows that Mississippi state funded highways actually rank eighth in the nation,” Sojourner said. “However, when you look at locally funded roads and bridges, we have some of the worst in the nation. The only way to truly address this is by designating a steady stream of reoccurring funds to these local infrastructure project.

“The lottery fund is new money just created by our state a few years ago and is a great source of revenue to help us address this critical need in cities and counties across our state.”

She said it also is a way to generate the revenue for the cities and counties without raising any other taxes.

While praising the Emergency Road and Bridge Repair Fund, Scott Waller, chief executive officer of the Mississippi Economy Council, said the lottery revenue does not need to be diverted from the state highway system.

“I thought the Emergency Road and Bridge Repair Fund was a tremendous success,” said Waller, who served on the board that advised the Transportation Commission on the awarding of the projects. “The accountability put in place with the commission (advisory board) helped everybody understand the plan and where the money was going.

“… However, I do not think the diversion from the Department of Transportation is the best approach.”

Waller said the MEC study found that the needs for the state system were about three times those for local roads and bridges.

Simmons and others point out that before the August 2018 special session, the Department of Transportation had not received a new source of revenue since 1987, when the 18.4-cent-per gallon motor fuel tax was enacted. Revenue from the motor fuel tax has been static at best in recent years thanks in large part to increased fuel efficiency in vehicles at the same time the costs of supplies for road maintenance and construction, such as the cost of asphalt, have increased by an estimated 400%.

According to data from the Department of Transportation, the $80 million in lottery revenue was used in fiscal year 2020 to pave 280 miles of state highways that had not received maintenance in 30 years. During the next seven years, it is estimated that 2,000 miles will be paved with the lottery revenue in primarily rural areas of the state that do not qualify for federal funding.

During the 2018 special session, revenue from casino sports betting and from a new tax on hybrid cars also were earmarked for the Department of Transportation. In fiscal year 2020, those funds generated less than $5 million combined.

The post Should lottery revenue be spent on state roads? Senate bill would send money to local governments. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

House Ways and Means Chair Trey Lamar, a Republican from Senatobia and one of the Legislature’s most powerful members, talks with Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison about key issues facing the 2021 Legislature. Lamar, like Gov. Tate Reeves, supports phasing out the state’s income tax but says it cannot be done without finding other sources of revenue.

Listen now.

The post Rep. Trey Lamar, a key House leader, talks taxes, alcohol and Medicaid appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In 2018, Jennifer Rogers warned a task force of lawmakers and college presidents that state financial aid had reached a “tipping point.” The number of students qualifying for financial aid had shot up, but funding hadn’t kept pace. The state’s three main financial aid programs were at risk of running at a deficit. If the Legislature didn’t act soon, students could start to see their aid cut, Rogers said. 

Heeding the advice of Rogers, who is the director of the Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid (OFSA), the task force in early 2019 proposed four solutions to Mississippi’s financial aid woes. 

Its most ambitious recommendation was to eliminate two of the state’s primary grants — the Mississippi Tuition Assistance Grant (MTAG) and the Mississippi Eminent Scholars Grant (MESG) — and expand the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students (HELP) program. Not only would this proposal help the state afford its financial aid programs, but it would ensure money got to the students who need it most. 

Two years later, the Legislature has yet to act on a single recommendation from the task force — and it has funded the state financial aid programs at a deficit for the second year in a row, according to statistics released this month in the Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid’s annual report. 

“We’ve tipped over,” Rogers told Mississippi Today.

The report also shows that Mississippi continues to disproportionately subsidize college for white students from wealthier families at the expense of working class students of color.

Of the 26,322 students who received a portion of the $45.5 million the state meted out in financial aid last year, more than two-thirds were white. Only 19.7% of all recipients were from the most poverty-stricken families in the state, those that make less than $30,000 per year, while the largest percentage were from homes that make $48,000 or more. This is disproportionate to Mississippi’s demographics.

Essentially, Mississippi is spending almost half of its strained financial aid budget on programs that disproportionately benefit students who are likely to go to college regardless of whether or not they receive state support.

“We’re excluding the highest need students,” said Ann Hendrick, the director of Get2College, a nonprofit that works to increase the number of students attending college statewide. 

Not only have these programs become more expensive since they were enacted in the late 1990s, Hendrick and other advocates for college access say the grants are no longer achieving the goals the state set out to meet when it created them. 

For example, MESG, the state’s primary merit-based grant, aims to keep the best and brightest students in-state for college. But a study from Mississippi State University research center NSPARC commissioned in 2018 found that MESG did not increase in-state enrollment of high-achieving students. Mississippi awarded $7.4 million in MESG grants last year. 

MTAG, the state’s largest program in terms of recipients, was created to support students who do not qualify for need-based federal aid. The idea was to help students from middle-class families who don’t qualify for the Pell Grant but would still struggle to pay for the cost of college. But the Legislature hasn’t increased the amount MTAG awards — between $500 and $1,000 per semester, depending on a student’s academic year — since the program was created in 1995.

When the Legislature created MTAG, “it really made sense,” Rogers said. “The federal Pell Grant program was helping the low-income students and did nothing for the middle-income, working-class parents who wanted to send their kids to college but really couldn’t afford to do so and were getting help from nowhere.” 

That year, MTAG covered 41% of tuition for juniors and seniors at the state’s eight public universities. As the cost of college has increased, the program covered just 12% of tuition last year. 

MTAG, while “still helpful for the middle,” Rogers said, “no longer has the (purchasing) power that it once did.” 

Because the goal was to help students who don’t qualify for Pell Grants, MTAG also excludes low-income students that receive the full Pell Grant. 

“I will be honest. While everybody appreciates every aid they get … I have never heard anybody say without that $500 I could’ve never gone to college,” Hendrick said.

HELP, the state’s only need-based grant, covers the full cost of tuition and fees for students attending public colleges and universities. It is the state’s fastest growing program: 4,411 students were awarded aid last year, nearly double the number of recipients in 2016. 

But only about half the students who apply for HELP actually get it. Part of the reason so many applicants are denied is that, in order to qualify, students must come from families that make no more than $39,500.

“If you make $39,600, you get nothing” from HELP, Rogers said. 

This is because the Legislature set the income limit for HELP at $39,500 in 1999. In 2014, they raised that income limit to $42,500, but the Legislature has never funded the program at a level that would allow OFSA to cover full tuition for families at that income range.

Hendrick said the HELP grant is the most useful one for families.

“The game changing one is the HELP grant. I’ve seen people do dances, tears — it is a game changer because Pell can’t pay for tuition at (one of the state’s public universities). The only way a low-income student who got 20 on the ACT is gonna go to a four-year college or university is they get the HELP grant.” 

For years, OFSA has repeatedly warned in its annual reports to the Legislature that Mississippi’s financial aid programs are growing at a financially unsustainable rate. The Legislature, the office warned, has two options to fix the funding gap: Invest more money in the state’s existing financial aid programs or redesign the state aid offerings to more wisely spend its dollars. 

The 2018 task force to study financial aid recommended the state redesign its programs to prioritize working class students by phasing out MESG and MTAG and creating one grant solely based on need. Significantly, the committee also suggested creating a pilot program to smooth the funding cliff for HELP, so that families making more than $39,500 could still receive need-based aid. 

But the Legislature never did this. Instead, Hendrick says it seems like legislators have mainly attempted to limit who can qualify for financial aid. She pointed to Senate Bill 2547, a bill introduced this session by Sen. Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, that would raise ACT scores to 17 for MTAG, 30 for MESG, and 20 from a single test administered to be eligible for HELP. 

Currently, students must score a 15 on the ACT to get MTAG, a 29 for MESG and a superscore (highest cumulative score) of 20 for HELP. Raising the qualifying ACT scores is problematic, Hendricks said, because the current data shows it can have the effect of excluding students of color, who often don’t have access to the same ACT preparation programs as affluent, majority white districts. Because ACT scores highly correlate with income, MESG is one of the most racially disparate financial aid programs in the state, while HELP is the most racially equitable program. 

In a Senate Universities and Colleges Committee meeting last week discussing SB 2547, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson proposed an amendment to the bill that would eliminate MTAG, limit MESG recipients to students from families making 200% or less of the median household income in the state, and raise the income limit for HELP by $10,000. 

“What we ought to be about is what’s best for the state,” he added. “And what’s best for the state is to have more people go to college, complete college and graduate from college… We can’t just wait and wait and wait and keep doing what we’ve been doing, have deficits every year, and give money to families of students who are perfectly capable of paying tuition.”

The amendment failed, but the bill ultimately passed out of committee and will come before the full Senate by Feb. 11 if lawmakers intend to move it forward in the legislative process.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi Postsecondary Education Financial Assistance Board, which oversees OFSA, has started a series of strategic planning meetings to push the Legislature to act. 

Hendrick said she would encourage the Legislature to look at “who benefits the most rather than just making changes across the board that would change financial aid for all students.” 

“Are we giving the right amount of money to the right students in order to make college accessible and affordable?” Hendrick added. “Are we really looking at it to see who benefits the most?”

Editor’s note: Get2College is a program of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, a Mississippi Today donor.

The post ‘We’re excluding the highest need students’: Most recipients of financial aid in Mississippi are from wealthier families appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Hattiesburg’s old high school gymnasium, long since abandoned, burned down in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Thankfully, the memories live on. And we will get to those.

The gym, completed in 1937, was home to the Hattiesburg High Tigers for nearly 50 years. The gym never really had a name. Some folks called it Hawkins Gymnasium, because Hawkins Junior High was across the street. Mostly, we just called it “the old high school gym,” no capital letters necessary. It was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project, one of thousands across the U.S. and one of hundreds across Mississippi. Thank you, FDR.

It was both quirky and creaky, that old gym was. It always seemed to me that it might house ghosts. The court was 104 feet long, 12 feet longer than regulation courts. It had humps in the floor. It had dead spots, too, where the ball wouldn’t bounce the way it was supposed to.

“As home court advantages go, it was the best,” said Purvis Short, who led Hattiesburg High to the 1974 state championship, and would go on to score more than 14,000 points in the NBA. “I have literally hundreds of memories of that place, and all of them are good. That’s rare, isn’t it?”

The old gym is where Coach Johnny Hurtt taught Purvis Short how to shoot high-arching jump shots by guarding him in shooting drills with a broomstick. It is where Hurtt often employed a full-court press to run opponents into submission.

“We knew where all those dead spots were and we made sure the other team had to dribble on them,” Short said. “Can’t tell you how many times we stole the ball like that. Plus the court was so long. The visiting teams weren’t used to that. Man, they were huffing and puffing.”

Purvis followed two years behind his older brother, Eugene, who led the Tigers to the 1972 state championship. Both Purvis and Eugene would go on to play in some of the most famous arenas in the country: Boston Garden, Madison Square Garden and the Forum in L.A., among them.

“The Boston Garden really reminded me of our old high school gym,” Purvis Short said. “There were some dead spots in the floor, but mostly it was the baskets — best shooting baskets in the world. Our goals in Hattiesburg and the ones at the (Boston) Garden were the sweetest shooting goals. They were soft, forgiving. Great backgrounds too.”

And both gone now.

The old Hattiesburg gym was the site of so many classic Gulfport-Hattiesburg games, back when Bert Jenkins coached Gulfport and Sam Hollingsworth and then Johnny Hurtt coached the Hattiesburg Tigers. For my money, Jenkins remains the greatest high school coach — maybe coach at any level — in Mississippi history. Hollingsworth and Hurtt should make anyone’s top 10. In 1970, my senior year in high school, Gulfport went 45-1, and, yes, the one came in our old gym where the great Buddy Davenport — and maybe the ghosts — led the Tigers past the Commodores 47-39.

My single greatest memory of that fine, old gym did not involve the Short brothers, Hattiesburg or Gulfport. No, this was in February of 1966, when I was a 13-year-old gym rat who had heard all the seemingly tall tales of a basketball phenom down in Hancock County named Wendell Ladner.

Ladner-led Hancock was to play West Lauderdale and the great Randy Hodges, a tall shooting guard, in the South State championship in our gym, which had a capacity of maybe 2,000.

That night it seemed all of south Mississippi — and most every college recruiter in the country — wanted to be in that gym. Every available inch of seating was taken. Fans stood at either end and in all the doorways. If you needed restroom relief, you were out of luck. Fire marshals had their hands full. Hundreds were turned away.

Most of Hancock County got in before the marshals locked the doors. They all wore red, and they all went absolutely berserk when Wondrous Wendell led his team onto the court. Ladner went straight for the bucket at the far end of the court and slammed the ball through with a windmill dunk that brought such thunderous applause that old gym seemed to shake. Ladner continued his dunk show throughout layup drills. After his last dunk, he stood, grinning, beneath the basket and hoisted his teammates, one by one, so they could dunk their last time through the layup line.

And then Ladner scored 39 points and pulled down 27 rebounds to lead Hancock past Hodges and West Lauderdale in one of the great one-man shows you can imagine. At one point, Ladner kept jumping up and down and bouncing the ball off the backboard, almost like playing volleyball with himself, before finally tipping the ball through the hoop. “Aw, Coach, I didn’t think you’d mind me having some fun,” he told his coach, Roland Ladner, when scolded at the next timeout.

You should have been there. I am so glad I was. I hate the old gym that never had — nor needed — a name is gone. I am glad the memories remain.

The post Hattiesburg’s old gym burns down, but so many memories will endure appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Legislature is considering a proposal to expand Medicaid – for incarcerated people.

The state’s Republican leadership has long rejected efforts to expand Medicaid, as is allowed under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, to provide health care coverage to as many as 300,000 Mississippians – many of them the working poor who are employed in jobs that do not provide health insurance and who do not make enough to afford to purchase private coverage.

While the Mississippi Legislature and Gov. Tate Reeves have rejected efforts to provide Medicaid coverage to the working poor, a proposal is making its way through the Legislature to allow chronically sick incarcerated people to be paroled to special facilities where they would be placed on Medicaid. Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, said the proposal is a good idea because if the prisoners are on Medicaid the federal government will be paying two-thirds of their health care costs.

Currently, the state is spending at least $80 million annually on health care for prisoners, Wiggins said.

Many would agree it makes financial sense to allow the federal government to pay the bulk of the cost for state prisoners.

But during recent debate of the bill, Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood, expressed dismay that the state is turning down federal funds to help provide health care coverage for working Mississippians while considering a proposal to take federal funds to provide health care for prisoners.

“At the same time we turn down a billion dollars a year (in federal Medicaid expansion funds) to help someone not incarcerated …we are asking the federal government to pay for possibly the hospitalization of inmates. I am confused,” Jordan said.

Jordan is not against providing health care for these people. He just questioned the wisdom of rejecting the federal funds for non-incarcerated Mississippians. The difference, which Jordan knows, is that the state is legally obligated to pay the health care costs for people it incarcerates. The state is not obligated to provide health care coverage for the average Mississippian, though, many would argue it is morally the right thing to do and also is good public policy.

The Mississippi Hospital Association has long argued that Medicaid expansion would provide a savings for their member hospitals by reducing the number of patients they treat who have no insurance and no ability to pay for their treatment. That uncompensated care costs the hospitals incur impact everyone, including the hospitals and those with insurance and with the ability to pay.

Who does not believe hospitals and other medical providers raise rates on the insured to help cover their uncompensated care costs?

On the other hand, Mississippi’s Republican leadership has long said the state could not afford to put up the 10% match in state funds to pull down that potential $1 billion annually in federal funds that Jordan referenced. The Hospital Association has said its members are willing to pay a tax to help with the state costs.

Reeves rejected Medicaid expansion during his successful campaign in 2019 for governor. As late as last week he reiterated his opposition to Medicaid expansion.

“I will tell you if an entity is providing through a tax a match…somebody is going to pay,” said Reeves, adding that taxpayers or patients would end up paying for any tax imposed on hospitals.  “..I am not for Medicaid expansion in Mississippi.”

It will be interesting to see whether Reeves will sign into law the bill expanding Medicaid for prisoners, if it gets to his desk.

Wiggins said, based on analysis, if the bill becomes law, for a facility with 100 beds the cost to the federal government for treating incarcerated people would be between $6.4 million and $12.8 million annually, while the cost to the state would be between $1.9 million and $3.8 million per year.

“It is actually the equivalent of a hospice situation to be quite honest,” Wiggins said. “…This is an idea to relieve some of the pressure and to reduce the costs” for the Department of Corrections.

The entire Medicaid expansion debate proves that in Mississippi some things never change. Mississippi was one of the last states to opt into the federal-state health care partnership that was enacted in 1965. In 1969, the Mississippi Legislature finally agreed to opt into the original Medicaid program after a marathon-length special session than ran from July 22 to Oct. 10.

Then-Gov. John Bell Williams, who opposed the enactment of Medicaid as a member of Congress, led the charge in 1969 for Mississippi to enact Medicaid – recognizing it as a good deal for the citizens of the state.

Today 38 states have adopted Medicaid expansion to cover the working poor.

Mississippi, of course, is not one of those states, though its policymakers are considering expanding Medicaid coverage to incarcerated people.

The post Some legislators see value of expanding Medicaid for prisoners appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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The state Senate on Friday approved a year-long study of the efficacy of privatizing some state parks and giving others to local governments. But even the study drew fierce criticism from some lawmakers who say the state’s neglected parks should be spruced up, not given away or leased.

“It’s heartbreaking to hear serious discussion of, instead of doing the sensible thing, talking about privatization,” said Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory. “… Anyone who thinks (the parks study) isn’t an attempt to privatize state parks is mistaken. Look at where it’s coming from … We give billions and billions and billions of dollars away to the well connected, and billions of dollars to out-of-state corporations, but when was the last time we focused on the core functions of government? The pattern plays out — we neglect something, then let a bunch of big boys come in and take over and make a bunch of money.

“These public lands belong to all of us,” Bryan continued.

Senate Bill 2486 was authored by Senate Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Chairman Neil Whaley, R-Potts Camp, and backed by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. The measure originally would have left only four of the state’s 25 parks under Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks management. Others would be leased to private entities, turned over to counties or cities or converted to wildlife conservation areas.

But after the bill sparked criticism and House leaders indicated it wouldn’t fly in their chamber, the measure was changed to create a study committee that would report back to lawmakers before next year’s session. The Senate passed the measure on Friday, but with a dozen senators voting against it.

Hosemann has said many parks could benefit from “an infusion of knowledge and capital” from privatization. Others during Friday’s debate agreed.

Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, told her colleagues that the Little Black Creek Park near her home had been run by the Pat Harrison Waterway District and over years fell into disrepair. She said the park was taken over by private management and “now you can’t even get a site there it’s so nice.”

“I’ve seen (privatization) save that park,” Hill said. “We already have a group that runs the golf courses at our state parks, and they’re in better shape now … We are not utilizing our resources like other states around us … And if you haven’t noticed, during the pandemic, RVs are the hottest thing since sliced bread.”

Mississippi’s state parks have suffered from years of neglected maintenance and budget cuts to the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks. The price tag to bring the state’s 25 parks (three of which are run by local governments) up to snuff is an estimated $147 million. Plus, millions more a year would be needed to keep them up — prompting discussion of privatization and a search for other options.

But privatization of parks has drawn fierce debate nationwide and in Mississippi. Opponents fear private developers would “cherry pick” the best state parks that could turn profits leaving others neglected, or that privatization would turn parks into expensive resorts and limit public access.

Meanwhile, House leaders are moving legislation to create a permanent stream of money to repair and improve the state’s long-neglected parks. House Bill 1231 would divert about $1 million a year in sales taxes collected at sporting goods stores to a new “Mississippi Outdoor Stewardship Trust Fund.”

House Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Chairman Bill Kinkade, author of this measure, said providing dedicated funding to state parks — as other states do — is the best long-range solution and giving parks away is “short sighted.”

Another House measure that would have diverted about $3.5 million a year from the state’s lottery proceeds died in House committee this week.

Kinkade said the House likely will move to approve some borrowing this year for park improvements.

Other states cash in on state park tourism, with the COVID-19 pandemic driving demand for RV-ing, camping and outdoor vacationing and recreation.

Mississippi receives about 1 million visitors to its parks each year. Arkansas state parks attract nearly 8.5 million visitors annually and serve as the state’s largest tourism draw, generating more than $1 billion a year for that state’s economy. Alabama sees nearly 5 million visitors to its parks annually, with an economic impact of about $375 million.

In Arkansas, parks are funded through a dedicated “conservation tax.” In Alabama, parks are 90% self-funded through fees and rentals. Mississippi parks lack an adequate dedicated funding source.

Kinkade said Georgia has a trust fund for parks similar to the one being proposed here.

Mississippi state parks spending has been cut by nearly 60% since 2000, and staffing by 70%. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks lacks manpower and money for even routine maintenance. The initial legislative budget recommendation for the coming year would cut the department another $900,000, or by about 15%.

Most of the state’s 600 structures in its parks are in need of some repair — from major to minor, MDWFP has reported.

The post Move to privatize state parks halted – for now – amid heated debate appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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