COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 2,756 new cases
By Mississippi Today | December 31, 2020
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Thursday, December 31:
New cases: 2,756 | New Deaths: 40
Total Hospitalizations: 1,463
Total cases:215,811|Total Deaths: 4,787
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
What we know so far about COVID-19 vaccines in Mississippi. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, Pool)
Health officials are scrambling to distribute COVID-19 vaccines and inoculate Mississippians according to a priority list that begins with healthcare workers and longterm care facility residents.
The main point that Mississippi’s healthcare officials are dwelling on this week: The rollout of the vaccine will take several months, and how that process looks depends on how many doses the state can receive and when.
“We’ve got a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still a long tunnel,” said Dr. Paul Byers, state epidemiologist at the Mississippi State Department of Health.
It is still uncertain when the general public may be eligible to receive the vaccine. Officials this week said they are hopeful that every healthcare worker and longterm care facility resident in Mississippi will receive at least the first dose of a vaccine by the end of January.
Once that happens, a next phase of vaccines will be opened up to Mississippians such as older adults, essential workers and those with chronic diseases which raise their risk of serious illness from COVID-19. But the timing of this next phase is still undetermined by health officials.
We have many questions about the COVID-19 vaccine rollout process, and we’re working hard to get them answered. If you have questions you’d like us to try to answer, please email adam@mississippitoday.org. We’ll do our best to get them answered quickly. In the meantime, visit the MSDH’s vaccine page here.
Here’s what we know as of Dec. 31, 2020:
• Mississippi remains in Phase 1A in vaccine distribution. This phase targets healthcare personnel and residents/staff at longterm care facilities. Mississippians currently eligible for the vaccine, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health: “Any healthcare worker, paid or unpaid, in any setting where they may be exposed directly or indirectly to COVID-19 patients or COVID-19 infectious materials. Healthcare workers include nurses, physicians, emergency medical services, technicians, pharmacists, dietary and food staff, environmental services staff and others.”
• State health officials have received and distributed around 120,000 doses so far in Mississippi – about 90% of the doses that Mississippi has been allocated. Those doses have been distributed to Mississippi hospitals and pharmacies partnered with the MSDH. Health officials are working to get the remaining 10% “out the door” to healthcare facilities across the state.
• Of those 120,000 doses in the state, 17,410 Mississippians have been vaccinated with a first dose, according to the health department’s immunization registry. Healthcare workers across the state are being asked to update the immunization registry regularly. MSDH officials noted on Wednesday that the numbers reflected in the registry are delayed and likely underrepresent the actual number of vaccinated Mississippians.
• On Jan. 3, officials will open 18 vaccination drive-thru locations across the state. That effort is being coordinated by MSDH and University of Mississippi Medical Center. Those clinics will initially target healthcare professionals — first responders, doctors, nurses, etc. More information about these clinics, where they will be located and how you can schedule an appointment can be found here.
• In efforts to ensure that people who sign up for these first vaccine appointments are actually healthcare workers, officials will reference healthcare licenses and certifications. “At a minimum, most of these people have a healthcare facility ID,” officials said on Wednesday. “We’ll be checking all of that.”
• MSDH is working with CVS and Walgreens pharmacies to distribute vaccines to all 204 long-term care facilities in Mississippi. Some LTC facilities have already received doses of the vaccines. Many other facilities have been contacted by the pharmacies, the officials said. “This is going to be a matter of weeks before this series of vaccinations (to long-term care facilities) gets completed,” Byers said.
• Officials are still unsure about who will be included in the next phases of vaccines, and they’re unsure about when those phases will begin. “A lot of it just depends on how many doses we get,” officials said on Wednesday. Experts in early December predicted the next phases could look something like this, but they have not yet been formalized:
Phase 1a: Front-line health care workers, including first responders, pharmacists and the national guard (90,000 doses estimated)
Phase 1b: long-term and home care residents and staff (55,000 doses)
Phase 2: those over the age of 65; essential workers, including workers in: education, public health, dentistry, funeral homes, transportation, postal workers, grocery stores, meat packing; homeless people; people with obesity, heart disease, CPOD, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, asthma; and people incarcerated in prisons and jails (2.7 million)
Phase 3: general public (200,000 doses)
• Health officials on Wednesday said that they feel comfortable about the state’s funding to distribute the vaccine. They noted that about 75% of vaccine support funding comes from the federal government, and about 25% of funding will come from the state. “We continue to get that support from the federal government. The Legislature is aware of covering the 25%, and they’ve been working with us closely,” Byers said. The officials said the state’s biggest need is continuing to get vaccine doses allocated to Mississippi.
Take a look back at 2020 through the photos that captured the biggest moments of the year. Click the arrows on the photos to scroll through our full gallery.
Editor’s note: This story is part three of a series examining Mississippi’s child support enforcement program. Read the other stories here.
Candace McNeil, an Olive Branch mother of two, said she’s received payments for as little as 25 cents through the Mississippi child support enforcement program.
The same program resulted in one Greenville father losing his driver’s license, an especially brutal punishment for someone who earns a living driving trucks.
Dowayne Charlot, who now lives in Louisiana, cycled in and out of jail for a decade after letting his child support debts pile up, eventually winding up in amodern-day Mississippi debtors prison.
The child support enforcement program sounds great in theory, but for many Mississippi families, the effects are nonsensical.
Since welfare primarily existed for poor single mothers in the 1970s when the public child support system began, the idea was that if the states could hold fathers accountable for their children, they could ease the burden off of the government for providing for those families.
“I’m for people paying their child support. But I also want you to understand that there’s a real humanistic side of me not being able to pay my child support,” said Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, who has filed several unsuccessful bills to make policies within the child support program more friendly to low-income Mississippians. “I’ve just had a real problem with inhumane responses to humane situations.”
The child support system, one of the largest social programs in the nation, has at times operated like a collection agency, backed by law enforcement mechanisms. But it has started receiving a makeover in recent years, with more national agency leaders and policymakers recognizing that a punitive approach to parenting doesn’t produce better outcomes.
This is especially true in the poorest state in the nation, though Mississippi has not fully implemented changes to its child support guidelines to make sure it doesn’t jail indigent fathers, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited in 2011.
“Higher orders and tougher enforcement do not increase collections when the barrier to payment is poverty,” Vicki Turetsky, former commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement from 2009 to 2016, said in a 2019 report.
In the decades since its inception, the child support program has been plagued by distorted stereotypes of deadbeat dads and spendthrift moms. There are narratives of the single, low-income mother struggling to compel a father to pony up, or of the working father who faces a squeezed paycheck and cruel consequences for noncompliance.
Some custodial parents, usually moms, in Mississippi are forced into the program when they try to apply for assistance — then, either the child support payment or the amount of assistance is usually cut as a result. Though states have the option, Mississippi keeps any child support paid to families on welfare to pay itself back for any cash assistance provided the family.
“I think it’s meant to keep it antagonistic,” McNeil, the mom of two, said of the program.
Because the agency division often operates counterintuitively and imposes blanket rules on the complex, unique lives of Mississippi families, advocates say, both sides suffer.
“It’s like we’re eating the seed corn,” said Oleta Fitzgerald, longtime director of the Children Defense Fund’s Southern Regional Office. “While the goal is to get the noncustodial parent to invest in the child and the life of a child that they brought into the world, the outcomes are that the children are not getting what they need to be able to fare better when they get older.”
Generalizing the circumstances of the nearly 800,000 people across the state who find themselves in the program is virtually impossible, which presents a challenge for the program operators, who know that the service must contain consistency.
“You still have got to run a program without redesigning the program every time somebody steps up to the help desk window,” said Rob Wells, owner of YoungWilliams, the state’s child support enforcement contractor. “Because if you do, then you don’t even have a program.”
Before McNeil entered the state system in 2015, she said, when her ex-husband still consistently paid, “It was just like: Ok, we have these kids. They have needs. Open the mailbox, a check’s there. You put it in the bank. You take care of whatever.”
“But with child support enforcement, it’s like you’ve invited someone else into your home that creates a lot of extra conflict,” McNeil said.
Ever since the court turned her case over to the Mississippi Department of Human Services, she said she’s received inconsistent, delayed and sometimes nonsensical payments amounting to pocket change from the father of her two children. Without a portal to track the incoming funds, it’s nearly impossible for her to know how much she’s receiving each month and how much she’s owed.
McNeil, a freelance administrative worker, eventually had to apply for food benefits, which required that she continue to comply with the program. Most states don’t have this policy.
“Sometimes you’re forced into poverty and there’s like this cycle,” McNeil said. “I just want to be done. It does feel like prison.”
When people don’t feel the state is aggressive enough in pursuing absent fathers, officials say, it may be because they do not realize what the operation actually entails.
“That’s where there’s a big myth,” Lyndsy Irwin, the state’s former child support program director, told Mississippi Today in a 2019 interview. “I think a lot of our families think that we have investigators who are like going out … we don’t have those kinds of resources.”
When a mother doesn’t believe she’s receiving as much support as she’s due, Wells said, “the question becomes, to what level will we enforce the order against the guy?”
In recent years, the public program has reduced the speed and frequency with which it files civil contempt complaints against nonpaying parents.
“The guy may not have anything more than part-time, cutting grass kind of wages,” Wells said. “Where is the level at which we say stop?”
McNeil, too, said she knows men who are barely able to survive with what’s left of their paycheck after child support is taken out. Nowhere may that be truer than in Mississippi, which imposes a relatively high average monthly child support payment for a state with among the lowest wages and the second lowest labor force participation rate in the nation for men.
Just 74% of men aged 20 to 64 in the state are employed or looking for work. The state also has the third highest incarceration rate in the nation. Mississippi must soon change its program guidelines so that men are not considered “voluntarily unemployed” while in prison, officials told Mississippi Today, but the practice continues today.
Hines, the representative, recalled the story of the Greenville father, whose child support debt piled up during a prison stint. By the time he got out, Hines said, the state suspended his driver’s license for nonpayment. That harmed the truck driver’s job prospects, only making it harder for him to earn the money he’d need to support his children.
“Prior to going to jail he had never missed a payment,” Hines said.
Law enforcement officers picked up Charlot, who faced criminal charges in 2005 for not paying child support, a decade after his initial Pike County conviction. Though he contends he’d already paid the more than $20,000 debt by that time, a judge in 2017 ordered Charlot to live at a Restitution Center, a modern-day debtors prison, for as long as it took him to earn enough money at the low wage jobs where correctional officers placed him. All told, he said he was locked up a total of five years for the offense.
“The state of Mississippi f-cked me, straight up,” Charlot said. “I paid like $50,000 for kids I never saw in my life.”
Charlot’s case might be the extreme, but between 2016 and 2018, at least 185 Mississippians attended court on the same charge, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of data from the Mississippi Administrative Office of Courts.
Whether a parent is appearing in court for criminal charges, a civil contempt complaint from the Department of Human Services or even a modification of a support order, judges have broad discretion to decide what happens to them.
“There is no rhyme or reason to it,” McNeil said. “It’s kind of like tornadoes. What makes one tornado land here and skip this house.”
Turetsky, the former federal commissioner, envisioned a completely different approach. While Mississippi is behind in the trend, states have been enacting more humane policies within their child support programs so that the government isn’t digging parents into a bigger hole.
But in watering down harsh enforcement measures, experts acknowledge, something has to take their place to ensure mothers aren’t left in a lurch.
“Sometimes the most effective strategy to increase support for a child is to connect a father to a job,” Turetsky wrote in a decade-old report, adding that child support programs should “intervene early to address the underlying reasons for nonsupport — whether it is unemployment, parent conflict or disengagement.”
Back in 2010, Mississippi’s antiquated child support enforcement system was barely doing the minimum in pushing cases along. But now that Wells’ company has greased the program’s gears, he said, the state has an opportunity to reenvision what child support looks like as a social program.
“To be successful for both parents, we need them to both be communicating with us. But when they feel like they’re perceived as a deadbeat parent, they’re not going to be very willing to communicate with the state,” said Irwin, the former program director. “Trying to change the perspective of the program I think is really important.”
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
State Auditor Shad White attends the Trump campaign rally at the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo on Nov. 1, 2019.
After state auditor Shad White publicly said University of Mississippi professor James Thomas violated the state’s no-strike law, a group representing Thomas is suing White for defamation.
An organization representing Thomas, an outspoken sociology professor who has regularly drawn the public scorn of top statewide Republican elected officials, filed a defamation suit on Wednesday related to White’s “repeated contention” that Thomas violated Mississippi’s no-strike law.
Thomas participated in a national walkout on Sept. 8-9 called the “Scholar Strike,” in which hundreds of faculty at universities across the nation protested police brutality and other racial inequities. Thomas called it a “work stoppage” on Twitter.
After state investigators subpoenaed Thomas’ emails and classroom materials, White, in an early December letter, demanded that Thomas repay more than $2,000 in taxpayers dollars for the two days he didn’t work and wrote that “concerted work stoppages” and strikes are illegal under Mississippi law.
The Mississippi Center for Justice, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Thomas on Wednesday, is also seeking a declaratory judgment from the court that Thomas did not violate the law.
“White falsely accused Dr. Thomas of violating Mississippi’s law prohibiting certain public employee strikes and called on the University to terminate his employment as a result,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed in Hinds County Circuit Court. “The false statement was made by Mr. White in a letter to the Chancellor of the University, in a subsequent letter to Dr. Thomas himself, in at least one press release, and in a number of interviews and other public statements.”
The lawsuit continues: “This lawsuit is brought on behalf of Thomas. It seeks to hold Mr. White accountable under the law of defamation for this false statement. However, Dr. Thomas does not seek the payment of any taxpayer money. This defamation suit is brought against Mr. White in his individual capacity. If Mr. White is found to be liable for this false statement, the jury can decide whether he personally should pay any money. If the jury says he should pay one dollar, that is fine. If the jury orders payment of more money, that is fine too. But no taxpayer money will be paid to Dr. Thomas as a result of this lawsuit.”
White, in a statement, said on Wednesday: “The lawsuit is not worth the paper it’s written on.”
As we recap 2020 at Mississippi Today, we want to hear what the year meant to our readers. Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey below to help us learn how we can continue to serve your news needs in 2021.
Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks
A cabin at Holmes County State Park, which is ‘closed until further notice’ for repairs, according to the state parks website. Mississippi’s parks have suffered years of underfunding and lack of maintenance.
Lawmakers are trying to figure out how to revive Mississippi’s state parks, which have suffered from years of budget cuts and neglected maintenance.
But 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, with a tax to fund parks likely a nonstarter in the Legislature.
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 MDWFP another $900,000, or by about 15%.
“We are at a crossroads,” said Robert Taylor, chairman of the Mississippi Commission of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks. “We’ve got to fund them to fix the crumbling infrastructure — have parks we can be proud of — or look at different things. But something has got to change.”
Most of the state’s 600 structures in its parks are in need of some repair — from major to minor, said Jennifer Head, parks director for MDWFP.
This comes as 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 a year and serves 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.
Alabama privatized one of its state parks that it had closed because of budget cuts. A few states have sold park land or solicited large private developments.
“We have a jewel in the rough,” Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told Mississippi Today. “But we don’t have our parks up to the standards we would require for our people to use them, and further, they are not up to the standards of surrounding states which have more amenities … We are leaving money on the table with the tourism industry, and this is part of the face of Mississippi. People come through, see a park that’s run down and they can’t hook their RV up, and they get the same impression about us.
“It’s time for us to take a clear, long look at this,” Hosemann said.
But Hosemann noted the state doesn’t have an extra $147 million on hand to make repairs.
Sen. Neil Whaley, chairman of the Senate Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks committee, held a committee hearing on the issue last week. He said lawmakers are still in fact-gathering mode and are looking at all options. This includes possible privatization of parks — either having private interests take over operations or just some some services — which has been a controversial subject in the state and with federal and other states’ parks.
It also includes discussion of local governments, cities and counties, taking over park operations and maintenance. In some cases the local governments would be taking over parks and land they ceded to the state many years ago.
But Whaley said lawmakers must first research legal issues with any privatization, with many parks built years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps or purchased with federal money that could cause legal entanglement.
“This is all theoretical — we don’t even have a plan yet,” Whaley said.
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.
“Absolutely, there is concern that if they’re privatized, are people going to be able to afford to get in there if they start putting high-end developments like hotels and condos?” said Louie Miller, director of the Sierra Club of Mississippi. “Where would that leave the average Mississippian who wants to vacation for a week in a state park with their family? There’s not a lot of public lands in Mississippi, and this was an investment by the taxpayers in state parks through the years … I’m not saying there’s no room for public-private partnership … but privatizing just for someone else’s gain needs to be looked at in the hard light of day.”
Hosemann, Whaley and others say whatever is done with state parks, lawmakers will preserve their affordability and accessibility for citizens.
“These parks belong to the people of the state of Mississippi, and I’m for finding solutions that perpetuate that,” said House Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Chairman Rep. Bill Kinkade. “… I think we all advocate that we need new, creative ways to fund our parks system, and some form of privatization is inevitable — but not wholesale privatization.”
Kinkade said bike, kayak and other rentals, for instance, could be privately operated. The state park system is already signed on with a national reservations systems for cabins.
One major expense for Mississippi parks is that MDWFP is responsible for all utilities — roads, electrical services, water and sewerage — inside parks. There has been some discussion of asking power companies, co-ops and other entities to help with this infrastructure.
Hosemann said that, as former secretary of state, he has a record of championing public lands as he led the state’s acquisition of Cat Island off the Coast and thousands of acres statewide. He said he would oppose any privatization that restricted public access to parks or raised prices drastically.
“Enlarging and improving our public spaces has been a goal of mine, and I intend to pursue it further,” Hosemann said.
COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 3,023 new cases
By Mississippi Today | December 30, 2020
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Wednesday, December 30:
New cases: 3,023 | New Deaths: 29
Total Hospitalizations: 1,409
Total cases:213,055|Total Deaths: 4,747
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
Repeat eviction judgments to be commonplace across the state, analysis shows.
Under a federal eviction moratorium and as a deadly virus continued to rage, landlords in Jackson sued even more tenants each day than they did in previous years.
Many Mississippi families, especially those who were suffering before the pandemic, have not been protected under the government’s narrowly tailored efforts to keep people housed during a global pandemic, advocates argue.
“Housing is fundamental, and in a perfect world, it would have been an original consideration for funding,” said Mississippi Home Corporation Director Scott Spivey, noting that by mid-December, Congress still had yet to appropriate funds that could be used to pay the rents of most struggling tenants, even in previous relief bills.
Under a new stimulus package Congress passed Dec. 20 and President Donald Trump signed on Sunday, Spivey said he expects Mississippi to receive about $200 million out of $25 billion for rental assistance. “It isn’t coming until now and it’s been talked about since mid-summer,” Spivey said.
Jackson property owners filed evictions — just the first step in forcing a tenant out of their home — against more than 1,100 families between Sept. 4 to Nov. 30 while the federal eviction moratorium was in place, according to records Mississippi Today requested from the Hinds County Justice Court clerk.
That amounts to nearly 13 families each day in that time period, compared to roughly ten per day in 2016, according to the Princeton University-based research group the Eviction Lab.
The landlords also secured warrants of removal, one of the last steps in an eviction, against nearly 200 Jackson renters.
It’s hard to say how many of these families overall were displaced, the way most people visualize an eviction, because data on actual evictions does not exist.
The Eviction Lab found that in 2016, about eight families were evicted from their homes each day, a rate that caused Jackson to be ranked fifth in the nation for cities with the most eviction that year.
So why — with a federal moratorium on evictions and $1.25 trillion that Mississippi received through various pandemic relief — did evictions continue?
Shortly after tens of thousands of Mississippians first began losing their jobs in March, the federal government increased unemployment benefits by $600 a week to those who qualified. Many continued to struggle because the overwhelmed unemployment agency had trouble taking in and processing the influx of claims. The $600 boost expired in August. A $300 boost started for some recipients in September but lasted only six weeks, an agency spokesperson said, at which point checks fell to the max of $235 per week. Congress extended the $300 boost in the latest relief bill.
But more than 11,000 people in Mississippi’s capital city were also unemployed before March, meaning that while the virus undoubtedly caused them hardship, they would not have been able to say they lost employment due to the pandemic and therefore would not have qualified for most relief.
The first pandemic-related funding Mississippi received to help struggling renters came through an existing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program called the Emergency Solutions Grant. This rental assistance program began in July and totaled $18 million in Mississippi.
By Dec. 8, that program, called the Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program (RAMP), had received 8,736 calls, approved 1,155 applicants and committed just $2.88 million of the funding. It was processing an additional 925 applications. To be eligible for the pandemic relief-funded program, a renter household must earn under 50% of the median income of the area — $35,450 for a family of four in Hinds County, for example — be at immediate risk of homelessness and have been directly impacted by the virus.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered a stop to some evictions and residential removals beginning Sept. 4 to the end of the year, but for it to have worked, a renter must have provided a declaration to their landlord or property manager, certifying that the order applies to them.
“It’s pretty narrow,” said Desiree Hensley, who runs the Housing Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “You have to have a loss of income that is directly related to COVID, and that can be really difficult for people to demonstrate, especially, I think, as more time passes.”
Then, if the moratorium did apply to a renter, they became ineligible for any possible help under the RAMP program, Spivey said, because they were no longer close enough to an eviction and homelessness to qualify for the emergency funding.
“It’s so incredibly counterintuitive so as to be almost ridiculous,” Spivey said.
When the moratorium, instead of rental assistance, is used to avoid eviction, the landlord still doesn’t get paid and the rent debts continue to pile up. The moratorium is set to expire at the end of December but the relief bill extends it to Jan. 31.
“I’m actually sitting here, on top of money that I can use to help low income renters, saying to myself, ‘Man I really hope they don’t extend this moratorium on evictions.’ If they extend the moratorium, I’m in the same boat,” Spivey said. “I’m in crazy town.”
The next addition to rental assistance came in October with a $20 million legislative appropriation of the state’s federal pandemic relief funding under the CARES Act, money that must be spent by the end of the year. This appropriation by the Mississippi Legislature established the Mississippi Rental Assistance Grant Program administered by Mississippi Development Authority.
Landlords applied for this grant — up to $30,000 per property owner — between Oct. 22 and the Nov. 15 deadline. According to its website, the agency required the landlords to apply for funds on behalf of either tenants who were behind on rent, whose debts they would consider paid in full, or on units that were vacant as a result of the pandemic.
It approved 3,846 out of 7,213 applications, authorizing $11.9 million in relief, leaving several million unspent by mid-December.
The state Legislature passed a law so that any unspent CARES Act funding is diverted to the state’s unemployment insurance fund before Dec. 31 instead of being sent back to the federal government.
Gov. Tate Reeves’ office also told Mississippi Today he chose to commit the state’s entire additional $38 million Community Development Block Grant to rental assistance, this publication reported in early October. But by mid-December, the federal government had not released the necessary guidance for spending the funds, so Mississippi Development Authority, which will administer the money, had not yet inked a grant agreement with the Mississippi Home Corporation, which will operate the program.
The home corporation would also help administer the extra $200 million in the new relief bill.
Spivey said these future programs, when up and running, should allow greater flexibility to help struggling renters before they find themselves on the brink of homelessness. Those who earn up to 80% of the area media income — $56,700 for a family of four in Hinds County — would qualify.
“When they’re ready to go, we’re ready to go, so it can be as fast as possible and reach as many people as possible,” Spivey said in early October.
Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America
Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves leaves the Capital Club at Capital Towers in Jackson after the Stennis Capitol Press Forum Jackson Monday, January 14, 2019.
Editor’s note: This story is part two in a series examining Mississippi’s child support enforcement program. Read the other stories here.
In 2019, kids in Mississippi’s child support program got an average of about $900.
The same year, Gov. Tate Reeves’ campaign received $25,000 from the wealthy private government contractor who runs the public service.
Mississippi hired local attorney Rob Wells’ company, YoungWilliams, in 2016 to operate the state’s entire child support enforcement program, a federally-funded service that helps mostly single moms secure money from their child’s father.
Now, after Mississippi’s welfare agency cancelled two recent bids to reissue the contract — instead extending the YoungWilliams agreement to the tune of $58 million — one former employee is blowing a whistle about the entire procurement process.
“Me and the other people who worked in the program with integrity all agreed that this was shady and this was inside dealing and this was profiteering off of what should be a social service,” said New Albany attorney Rutledge McMillin, a former YoungWilliams child support attorney who also previously served in a state level Mississippi Department of Human Services’ position. “And we all hated it. We all thought it was corrupt.”
The state welfare agency solicited bids to renew the child support contract twice in 2019, but cancelled both of the procurements after it scored the proposals. In both cases, YoungWilliams received fewer points than their industry rival, Maximus, according to scoring sheets Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.
Former director of Human Services John Davis ushered in the first statewide contract with YoungWilliams. Davis currently faces embezzlement charges in an alleged fraud scheme that centers on the outsourcing of a different public service.
Davis has pleaded not guilty, while current agency officials have tried to distance themselves from his administration.
“My hunch is … instead of awarding the contract to the best bid, they just cancelled it,” McMillin said.
An agency spokesperson said the cancellations were due to poor timing and a significant overhaul of the agency amid an ongoing State Auditor’s Office and FBI investigation.
Wells, a prolific campaign donor, started his Jackson-based company in the 1990s to increase the efficiency of social services. He’s since built a $100 million a year corporation through this government contracting across 17 states.
While virtually no participants are getting rich off the child support service, the program has been lucrative for Wells. And the CEO has used his success to place a foot on the scale in several political races.
In the 2019 Mississippi gubernatorial race, which took place the year YoungWilliams’ first statewide child support contract in Mississippi was set to expire, Wells dumped at least $130,000 into competing campaigns.
He gave $75,000 to Republican Reeves over three years and $55,000 to his Democratic opponent, former Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, according to reports compiled by the National Institute on Money in Politics’ Follow The Money.
In addition, YoungWilliams is represented by high powered lobbyist Austin Barbour, the nephew of former Gov. Haley Barbour, who has charged the company a $45,000 fee most years.
In Mississippi, the welfare agency is an office under the governor and any legal services contracts, such as the child support contract, must be approved by the state attorney general’s office. Wells is a longtime Hood supporter and even hired on Hood’s nephew as a legal director at the company.
Wells also donated $5,000 and $500 in 2019 to then-attorney general candidates Republican Lynn Fitch, who won, and Democrat Jennifer Riley-Collins, respectively.
The businessman has a simple explanation for his extraordinary support in the 2019 election: “I like contributing to schools; I like contributing to certain charities; and I like contributing to people that run for public office that are extremely competent, very smart and very dedicated.”
Rob Wells, CEO of YoungWilliams
Wells had also donated several thousand to former Gov. Phil Bryant over the years, including $6,000 in 2009.
Wells declined to share his salary as CEO of the company or its Mississippi contract profit margin, which he said is a complicated equation in which you’d have to consider the company’s overall operation across several states. For example, he said YoungWilliams has taken on some public programs at a loss.
Wells is Reeves’ second largest individual donor ever, according to Follow The Money. Wells has donated $117,500 to the candidate since 2011, when Reeves first ran for Lieutenant Governor, the most powerful position in the Legislature, a job the politician held for the following eight years.
When asked how Wells’ donations over the years had played into the contracts he’s received from the state, Wells said they had nothing to do with each other.
“Nobody’s ever promised me anything,” he said. “I’ve never asked for anything.”
Mississippi state law allows for unlimited donations from individuals in statewide political races, unlike 39 states which cap donations at various annual amounts — all far under $75,000.
A 2014 report by the Center for Media and Democracy also questioned Wells’ contribution of $2,000, the state maximum, to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback shortly before the state outsourced the bulk of its child support enforcement program to YoungWilliams.
“While YoungWilliams boasted that it landed the contract because of its ‘innovative service delivery structure,’ there might be more to it than that,” the report said, referencing backroom meetings Barbour arranged between the company and the governor.
The child support enforcement contract serves many functions. It provides legal support to separated parents, especially low-income families, so they don’t have to hire a private attorney to secure court orders that spell out how much the noncustodial parent must pay to support their child each month.
The contractor also establishes paternity for children born out of wedlock and enforces support orders by extracting money, usually through wage garnishment and tax return intercepts, from noncustodial parents.
Mississippi’s misunderstood child support enforcement program, in which about half of children and one-fourth of the state’s overall population participate, is notoriously troubled, partly due to its underfunding.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services had attempted different iterations of privatizing components of the program since the 1990s under Gov. Kirk Fordice, but by 2013, officials were considering outsourcing all case management and enforcement.
A bill to allow for this privatization narrowly passed in the Legislature that year, despite warnings from lawmakers like former longtime chairman of the House Public Health Committee and undertaker Steve Holland: “It’s a greased pig already. Somebody on high knows who’s going to get this business. In the funeral business, we’d call this a prearranged funeral. That stinks. I don’t care who the governor is, it stinks.”
In 2015, the agency issued a bid — a process it says it’s not actually required to perform — for a pilot program in which a private company would operate the entirety of the child support offices in 17 of the state’s 82 counties.
YoungWilliams won the contract against just one other competitor, Maximus, because its proposal estimated a significantly lower cost, an agency spokesperson said. State workers in those county offices were given the option to become YoungWilliams employees and the pilot began.
A year later, McMillin said he watched as Davis, the former welfare department director, hastily privatized the entire public service statewide shortly after taking the helm of the agency.
Davis is now facing embezzlement charges, to which he’s pleaded not guilty, within a case that centers on the agency’s privatization of another social program, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program or TANF.
The two programs are closely related. The state actually intercepts child support payments for families on welfare, first paying itself back for any cash assistance it provided the family.
During the 2016 legislative session, lawmakers were notably focused on the welfare agency, but not because of the child support program.
Instead, to deal with a massive federal lawsuit that began in 2004 and alleged the state had failed to protect children in their foster care system, the Legislature worked on a bill to separate child protection services from the Mississippi Department of Human Services into its own agency.
To accomplish this, the bill also exempted all Human Services employees from protections under the personnel board, which McMillin said had been a barrier in past agency attempts to privatize.
“When the Legislature exempted DHS from those rules, it made full privatization possible because there were no longer any state service employees,” said McMillin, who at the time was working a stint at the Mississippi State Personnel Board, where his job was to track legislation that dealt with the board.
The month it took effect, Human Services issued a bid for the statewide child support contract.
“He (Davis) rushed out an RFP and nobody other than YoungWilliams knew about it or had an opportunity to put together a bid,” McMillin said. “So it was decided beforehand that YoungWilliams was going to get this contract, which I don’t think is the way government procurement is supposed to operate.”
Davis’ attorney, Merrida Coxwell, refuted that assertion, saying by text that privatizing the child support program “was a topic that began well before John Davis became the Executive Director.”
Before the department issued the bid, consultants told agency leaders that the initial pilot supplied no evidence that the services had improved under YoungWilliams, according to emails and documents Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.
Compared to state-run offices, YoungWilliams performed better in just one of four metrics — cases with support orders, an area in which the state severely lacked and where YoungWilliams placed much of its emphasis. The private offices also cost more than half a million more to operate than the state offices, the report said.
But the agency moved forward anyway.
YoungWilliams indeed was the only company to respond to the July 2016 request for proposals and officials inked the contract in October 2016, agency officials confirmed. “Other national vendors had lost interest in the state outsourcing because of the limited (finite) budget and one vendor (Young Williams) was willing to cut the cost per case well below the national average,” Coxwell told Mississippi Today by text.
Davis described the new contract to then-Gov. Phil Bryant in a memo that month, saying, “MDHS, with your support, entered into a contract with YoungWilliams” to operate all county offices.
“During the YoungWilliams pilot program for 17 counties in Southwest Mississippi, it was proven successful both with results and with saving Mississippi tax dollars,” Davis said, contradicting the report the agency commissioned to determine the company’s performance.
YoungWilliams has since closed roughly three-fourths of the physical child support offices statewide as it has centralized case management.
“Whether you think privatization of a government service is a good thing or not, I think the way that YoungWilliams got the contract is shady,” McMillin said. “I think that there was a determination in the Republican political circles to privatize child support and give the contract to Rob Wells. And I think John Davis saw the opportunity … He knew he had free rein. He knew various contract review boards were not going to be breathing down his neck.”
In the following years, YoungWilliams created a new child support enforcement infrastructure for the state, helping to improve program performance in some metrics.
The agency, under Davis, issued a new Request for Proposals for the contract in June of 2019. YoungWilliams had scored better for its project plan, records show, but because Maximus’ price was much lower, it won more overall points. When that happened, the agency cancelled the bid in August of 2019 and simply extended the contract with YoungWilliams. Former director Christopher Freeze had taken over during that time after Davis’ July 2019 retirement.
The same thing happened during another RFP the agency issued in November of 2019 under Freeze and cancelled last February under the interim director Jacob Black. YoungWilliams received a second year-long extension in September under the agency’s new director Bob Anderson.
By the end of September 2021, the state will have paid YoungWilliams $153 million over six years to operate the child support program.
Because of the change in leadership and the departure of top officials of the child support program in recent months, communications director Danny Blanton said the agency retains little knowledge about the past procurements.
Blanton did say that the agency cancelled the first bid in August of 2019 because it did not build in enough time for a potential transition period before the contract’s October 1 effective date. He said it cancelled the second bid so it wouldn’t be tying the hands of the agency’s new incoming leadership. That procurement was in process when the State Auditor’s Office arrested former agency officials in early February.
Wells told Mississippi Today that he was not aware his company had scored fewer points, had nothing to do with the cancellation and that he never donated to politicians while any procurement was taking place.
In early December, the department issued a new Request for Proposals for the contract, which is set to begin in October of 2021, with relatively little fanfare.
Child support privatization hasn’t been a huge conversation in Mississippi in recent years, but it remains on the radars of some officials.
“I’m not against people having government contracts,” said Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, who filed an unsuccessful bill in 2020 to end the child support contract and bring the program back in-house. “I’m not against that, but I am against people making more money off the system than the people receiving assistance.”
Carol Burnett, director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and former director of the Office of Youth and Children for the state’s welfare agency, watched for years as officials fought over privatization — which she said is typically an excuse to pass public dollars to a well-connected contractor.
“(Child support) is just a service that has been in those kinds of fights and used for contracting purposes,” Burnett said, “so this new round is like a new chapter in the same old story.”
