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Gov. Tate Reeves announced on Tuesday that teachers and first responders in Mississippi can begin receiving COVID-19 vaccines starting on March 1.

The expanded eligibility includes all K-12 school, preschool and daycare employees, who can begin scheduling open vaccine appointments on Feb. 23. It does not include college educators or employees.

“This is exciting news for people who are working hard to keep our schools open and our streets safe,” Reeves said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

The Mississippi State Department of Health reported on Monday that 341,102 people in Mississippi — about 12% of the state’s population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. About 145,941 people have received both doses since the state began distributing vaccines in December.

As vaccine eligibility increases, COVID-19 cases and deaths continue their dramatic decline in Mississippi — an encouraging sign after a brutal winter spike that set new records for both statistics.

The Mississippi State Department of Health reported 348 new COVID-19 cases of COVID-19 and 24 coronavirus-related deaths on Tuesday. This brings Mississippi to a total of 291,222 coronavirus cases and 6,577 deaths since the pandemic began in March 2020.

January saw the most coronavirus-related deaths in a single month in Mississippi, with 1,240 confirmed. The state also set new single-day records for new cases: 3,255 cases on Jan. 7, and 98 deaths on Jan. 12.

Additionally, the number of COVID-19 cases, COVID-related hospital admissions and clinic visits for COVID-19 like illnesses in Mississippi have been trending sharply downward in 2021.

Mask mandates are currently in effect in 75 of Mississippi’s 82 counties. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original statewide mandate issued by Gov. Tate Reeves on Aug. 4 with helping cases improve after a sharp summer spike. Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate on Sept. 30, but has since issued orders for the individual counties.

Last week’s winter storm caused many across the state to have to postpone vaccination appointments as drive-thru clinics and county health departments closed due to hazardous weather conditions.

MAP: Mississippi’s COVID-19 vaccine locations

All of the MSDH drive-thru vaccination appointments that were canceled due to the closures have been automatically rescheduled for some day this week at the same time as the initial appointment. As a result, MSDH drive-thru clinics will be vaccinating a much higher number of people than usual this week. A MSDH spokesperson confirmed that no vaccine doses expired over the course of last week’s closures. 

The post Mississippi teachers, first responders eligible for COVID-19 vaccines on March 1 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The House Ways and Means Committee on Monday passed a bill that would eliminate Mississippi’s personal income tax within a decade and reduce the state’s highest-in-the-nation tax on groceries while raising the sales tax and other taxes.

The landmark tax bill was authored by the three highest-ranking House Republicans: Speaker of the House Philip Gunn, Pro Tem Jason White and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Trey Lamar.

“This is a much fairer tax structure,” Lamar said, adding that the bill is essentially revenue neutral. Lamar said that the leaders drafted the bill in hopes it would garner bipartisan support. It passed the House Ways and Means Committee on Monday with no dissenting votes, including from the several Democrats on the committee.

The bill would immediately eliminate the personal income tax for individuals making under $50,000 a year and for married couples making less than $100,000. It would totally phase out the state’s personal income tax over a 10-year period if revenue growth standards are met. If the growth standards are not met, the tax cut for that year would be delayed.

In addition, the 7% tax on groceries would, as of July 1, be reduced to 4.5% and ultimately reduced to 3.5%. Cutting the state’s grocery tax has long been a top stated goal of legislative Democrats.

Other taxes would be increased to make up for lost revenue from the proposed cuts. The general sales tax on other retail items, which is currently 7%, would be increased to 9.5% starting July 1. The sales tax on vehicles, currently 5%, would be increased to 7.5%. Essentially, all items currently taxed at 2% or 3%, such as some farm implements, would be increased by 2.5%.

The 68 cents per pack tax on cigarettes would be increased by 50 cents. Taxes also would be increased on other items such as alcohol.

Lamar said a person making $50,000 per year would receive an immediate savings of about $2,030 and would have to spend more than $82,000 on items to pay as much in sales taxes as they would be saving in income taxes.

White also stressed that the legislation would ensure that the revenue municipal governments lost from the reduction in the grocery tax would be replaced by the state. Local governments receive a portion of the sales tax revenue collected within its borders.

Lamar said he hopes to bring the bill up for House vote on Tuesday. If the bill passes there, it will move to the Senate for consideration.

READ MORE: Key House leader says Mississippi should cut highest-in-nation grocery tax

In addition to taking up the massive tax bill, legislators, facing a tight deadline from time lost to last week’s unprecedented winter storms, hurriedly passed a first draft of a $20 billion state budget Monday afternoon.

Lawmakers have until Wednesday to pass about 100 appropriations bills out of the originating House or Senate and on to the other chamber. Wednesday is also the deadline for first passage of legislation dealing with taxes.

Gov. Tate Reeves proposed phasing out the state’s personal income tax — which generates nearly $2 billion a year, or a third of the state’s general fund — before the session began. But he did not offer any tax increases to offset the lost state revenue.

Gunn and members of his leadership team in the House had proposed in earlier sessions phasing out the income tax. At that time, they wanted to tie the phase-out to an increase in the gasoline tax, but Reeves, serving as lieutenant governor at the time, rejected that proposal saying he opposed any tax increases, even if they were swaps.

The bill passed out of House Ways and Means Committee Monday does not change the tax on gasoline.

A spokeswoman for Reeves did not return a request for comment on Monday.

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves hopes his tax cut plan makes him the hammer, not the nail in 2021.

Working to get back on schedule on Monday, the House and Senate Appropriations committees passed most budgets at the amount approved this fall by the members who serve on the Joint Legislative Budget Committee. That makes most budget bills placeholders at this point. Later in the legislative process in March, House and Senate leaders will work out final budget numbers the full chambers can accept or send back for further work.

“This is our first crack at looking at our expected revenue and the expectations we have for our state agencies,” said Sen. Briggs Hopson, the Vicksburg Republican who chairs the Appropriations Committee. Recent projections are that state revenue is running at least $300 million above earlier projections, despite the continuing global pandemic.

Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday passed a couple of exceptions to the placeholder numbers. It approved a $51 million increase to the main public education budget to cover a roughly $1,000 pay raise for teachers — a proposal the Senate passed earlier this year — and it shifted $6.4 million from the Department of Finance to the Department of Public Safety for DPS to take over control of the Capitol Police, which the Senate likewise has already passed.

Hopson warned his committee colleagues that they’ll likely have to deal with several deficits from state agencies — although those numbers aren’t yet nailed down and the “deficit bill” was passed as a placeholder.

Sen. Sollie Norwood, D-Jackson, asked Hopson: “Are we setting the budgets too low, then they have to come back for deficits, or are they not operating efficiently enough?”

Hopson noted that the Department of Corrections and Medicaid often have large deficits, and setting their budgets is difficult because their expenses are “moving targets.” But he said other agencies that don’t live within their budgets will have some explaining to do.

“One thing I’ve said to agencies … deficits are for unseen problems,” Hopson said. “I’m not going to be real sympathetic to any agency just coming in expecting deficit spending for things they should have expected.”

The total state budget, including federal funds, is about $20 billion. Another large slice of the budget is funded through special funds — specific fees or taxes to run individual agencies, such as the gasoline tax that is the primary state funding source for the Mississippi Department of Transportation.

The $6 billion state support budget is the portion of the funding pie where legislators have the most discretion in how funds are divvied up for education, health care, law enforcement and in other areas.

The post House leaders move to eliminate Mississippi income tax, raise sales and other taxes in landmark bill appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Thousands of residents in Jackson, the state’s largest city, are still without running water Monday after last week’s historic winter storm disrupted the city’s aging infrastructure.

A majority of residents in south Jackson and parts of west Jackson have no water service at all, and most of the city’s entire population has low water pressure. City officials have given no official timeline for service restoration, but they said on Monday they think most of the city will have running water by midweek.

“We have to have a lot of things that go perfectly over the next couple of days,” Charles Williams, Jackson’s public works director, said on Monday. “We know we’re gonna have a couple of setbacks, but that’s what we are aiming for.”

A historic winter storm slammed the state last week, freezing and bursting many water pipes in the capital city. Jackson residents have flocked to grocery stores, making bottled water extremely difficult to come by in the metro area. Hundreds of residents have lined up at the city’s water giveaway sites, and several churches and volunteer groups have mobilized efforts to distribute water to those in need.

The first hurdle the city faced in restoring water service was restoring water pressure to the system. The pressure, which should be 80 pounds per square inch (PSI) or higher at the city’s water treatment plants, sunk to 37 PSI last Wednesday. As of Monday afternoon, pressure had been restored to 67 PSI.

When the city’s water pressure collapsed last week due to the winter storm, iced-in residents depleted the city’s water reserves, which created a cascading line of service failures. The icy roads also delayed the transportation of chemicals to treat the city’s water.

Another challenge in restoring water service will be a surge in water line breaks that is likely to occur as water pressure returns. The city has reported 25 water line breaks since last week and had repaired six of them by Monday afternoon.

In an effort to streamline the recovery and repair process going forward, the Jackson City Council voted on Monday to declare a state of local emergency. This will allow Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba to hire contractors for repairs and other services without receiving multiple bids for them.

Williams said that the maintenance crews currently repairing water main lines can handle the level of demand they’re experiencing, but that additional contractors may have to be hired if the city sees its larger water lines begin to burst with the return of pressure. Residents are asked to call 311 if they see any burst lines.

During a press conference on Monday, Lumumba acknowledged that Jackson’s water system, with its decades-old pipes and lines, are in desperate need of repair, and estimated upgrades would cost around $2 billion.

“We are long overdue for a major investment from the federal government towards city infrastructures,” Lumumba said. “We have aged infrastructure that cannot be replaced in one calendar year, it can’t be replaced, you know, even over the course of four years. It takes a lot to make such a significant investment.”

The city is continuing to distribute non-potable (flushing) water to residents. Many resorted to collecting large amounts of snow from the streets last week and melting it down just to flush their toilets. Jackson residents can bring containers to the following locations until Monday night to receive non-potable water:

• Forest Hill High School – 2607 Raymond Road, Jackson, MS 39212
• Raines Elementary School – 156 N Flag Chapel Road, Jackson, MS 39209

Residents can also call these numbers to report non-emergencies relating to water service disruptions:

• 601-960-1111
• 601-960-1777
• 601-960-1781
• 601-960-1778
• 601-960-0379
• 601-960-1779

The post Thousands in Jackson, the state’s largest city, are still without water following historic winter storm appeared first on Mississippi Today.

READ: Thousands in Jackson, the state’s largest city, are still without water following historic winter storm

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In this week’s episode of The Other Side, Mississippi Today journalists Bobby Harrison and Adam Ganucheau break down two key transportation funding bills, including the eyebrow-raising proposal to let Mississippi voters decide whether to raise the state’s gasoline tax.

Listen here:

The post Podcast: Could Mississippi finally raise its gas tax? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Deion Sanders got his first head coaching victory Sunday, and that was just for starters. He also got an icy Gatorade bath. He was presented a trophy on the field, and then his players awarded him the game ball in the locker room — “one of the best moments of my professional sports career,” he would call the game ball presentation.

You’d think he’d would have been smiling from ear to ear in his first postgame press conference as head football coach at Jackson State.

He was not.

“I’m pissed. I’ve got mixed emotions,” Sanders said, and then he said a whole lot more.

He said he had been robbed, that someone had stolen his belongings out of the coaches’ dressing room while the game — a 53-0 JSU victory over Edward Waters College — was being played. He said somebody had pilfered his wallet, credit cards, cell phone and watches. “Thank God I had on my necklaces,” he said.

“So when I talk about raising the quality and raising the standards, that goes for everyone, not just the people on the field, not just the coaches, not just the teachers, not just the faculty — everybody, security and everybody.”

Just a few minutes later came the remarkable news that Sanders had not been robbed after all. His belongings had been moved for safekeeping. They were back in his possession.

So file this one under the category: All’s well that ends well…

Unless, that is, you are the Edward Waters College Tigers, a Division II school from Jacksonville, Fla. For Edward Waters, things did not begin well, proceed well or end well. And when it did mercifully end, the losers faced a nine-hour bus ride back to the east coast of Florida.

So, what to make of the coaching debut of Sanders, a Pro Football Hall of Famer and a neophyte college head coach?

It’s hard to say. The talent differential between the two sets of Tigers was almost like men and boys. Edward Waters had won eight games and lost 35 over the last four seasons. They were playing a long way from home and decidedly out of their class.

Never mind Sanders’ Tigers were playing without many of their most highly touted recruits and transfers who won’t be eligible until the fall. The Mississippi Tigers were bigger, better and faster at virtually all positions. They took command from the outset.

The visitors’ return man was savaged at his own 19-yard line on the opening kickoff. A first down pass fluttered like a winged duck, landing nowhere near a human being. A second down run gained three yards. A third down pass was dropped by an JSU defender. And then came an 18-yard punt. And so it went…

A Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium announced crowd of 11,000, including Sanders’ former Dallas Cowboys teammate Troy Aikman, applauded politely as JSU, breaking from tradition with bright red jerseys and trousers, rolled up the score, 17-0 after one quarter, 31-0 at half.

All in all, the game had the feel of a spring football game, which, come to think of it, it was — except that it counts in the record books. COVID-19 wiped out the 2020 SWAC fall football season. Some SWAC teams, such as Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State are playing abbreviated spring schedules. Others, such as Alcorn State, will wait until the fall. Jackson State and MVSU will play at The Vet Saturday for the second of the Tigers’ seven-game spring schedule.

We’ll know a little more Jackson State after that one — and a lot more after Sanders takes his team to Grambling State on March 6.

For now, all we know for sure is that Jackson State is infinitely better than Edward Waters and that Coach Prime, 1-0, got his valuables back to go with his game ball. Then, perhaps, he was able to smile.

The post Coach Prime got a Gatorade bath, a game ball — and, he got his stuff back appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Jackson State University’s first-year head coach Deion Sanders led his Tigers to a resounding 53-0 victory over the Edward Waters College Tigers on Sunday at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson.

Jackson State’s season is being played this spring after the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) postponed its 2020 fall season due to COVID-19.

The post Photos: Jackson State routs Edward Waters College in Deion Sanders’ coaching debut appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Access appeared first on Mississippi Today.

When former Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Bill Waller Jr. was weighing a run for governor in 2019, research was done on whether he could conduct a viable campaign as an independent.

Waller, of course, opted to run as a Republican and later lost a runoff election in the primary to then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who had a massive campaign war chest and was viewed as the heavy favorite.

At the time, Waller and others feared that an independent — even a former Supreme Court justice — would not be taken seriously in Mississippi, where there is not much history of viable third-party candidates. And perhaps more importantly, Waller would face a near impossible political task because of provisions in the Mississippi Constitution. Those provisions dictated that if no candidate in a statewide election garnered both a majority of the popular vote and a majority vote in the state’s 122 House districts, the House of Representatives would vote to decide the winner.

The thought was that even if Waller could be in the top two in an election that was thrown to the House, there was no way he could prevail, especially if the other candidate was the Republican Reeves. No doubt, as has been well documented, Reeves is far from popular with House members thanks in part to his time as lieutenant governor, where he presided over the Senate and was often at odds with House leaders. Still, members of the three-fifths Republican majority in the House would have faced tremendous pressure from party leadership to vote for their fellow Republican Reeves.

But things are different now. Elections can no longer go to the House after 75% of Mississippians voted in November to remove those provisions from the state Constitution. Now, if no candidate obtains a majority of the vote, there is a runoff for voters to decide between the top two vote-getters.

Would Waller have opted to run as an independent if that provision already had been removed before the 2019 election? Probably not. But it is interesting to look ahead to whether an independent could one day be a viable candidate in the current political environment.

There is growing talk from some national Republicans, who are not enamored with the leadership of former President Donald Trump or the prominent party leaders who support him, of forming a third party. A Gallup poll released last week found that a record 62% of Americans support forming a third party because the two major parties “do such a poor job representing the American people.”

Would Reeves have won in 2019 had Waller run as an independent? Probably. But it is not such a stretch to see a scenario where the outcome would have been in question in a three-way November general election with Republican Reeves, independent Waller and Democrat Jim Hood on the ballot.

It is safe to assume no candidate would have garnered a majority. Who would have won the runoff? We will never know for sure.

Perhaps someone in the future — a businessperson with no background in politics — could wage a successful third-party campaign.

After all, that there is at least one example of a third-party candidate impacting a Mississippi election. The constitutional provisions throwing statewide elections to the House applied only to the eight state offices — not the U.S. Senate posts. In 1978, Thad Cochran became the first Republican elected to statewide office in Mississippi since the 1800s when he won a U.S. Senate seat. Many believe Cochran, who served until 2018, won that historic election because Charles Evers, brother of Civil Rights icon Medgar Evers, ran as an independent and is generally believed to have siphoned the majority of his votes from Democrat Maurice Danton. Cochran won that election with 45% of the vote.

When Reeves was asked last year about the proposal to eliminate the provisions that had the potential of throwing statewide elections to the House, he responded in partisan terms.

“If this provision passes at this point, it is going to make it harder for Republicans to get elected,” the first-term governor said.

The governor did not talk about the need to remove the provision because it was placed in the 1890 Constitution as a safeguard to prevent African Americans, then a majority in Mississippi, from being elected to statewide office. He did not say the provision needed to be removed so that Mississippi could join the rest of the nation — with the exception of Vermont — by specifying the candidate with the most votes in the statewide races would be declared the winner. Instead, the governor spoke of the potential of the change hurting state Republicans and blamed Democrats in 1890 for originally putting the language in the Constitution.

Perhaps somewhere down the line, removing that provision does not help a Republican or a Democrat, but an independent.

The post Could Mississippi constitutional change pave the way for winning independents? appeared first on Mississippi Today.