OurTupelo

Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe joins editor-in-chief Adam Ganucheau to discuss federal charges filed last week against Nancy New and Zach New, what’s next in the ongoing federal and state investigations of their alleged misspending, and who else may be ensnared in the alleged schemes.

Listen here:

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Gov. Tate Reeves and other Republicans have argued that states do not need the $195 billion in federal funds from the American Rescue Plan to offset revenue losses caused by the coronavirus-induced economic slowdown.

Mississippi is slated to receive $1.8 billion from the pot of money — a sizable amount considering the annual general fund state budget is about $6 billion.

Reeves is right in the sense that many states, including Mississippi, have not yet suffered as dramatic revenue losses from the COVID-19 economic slowdown that they experienced during the recession caused by the financial meltdown in 2008-10.

Mississippi’s tax collections have continued to grow during the pandemic. Through February, which is the seventh month of the fiscal year, the state has collected $338.5 million, or 9.5% more than during the same time last year. Sales tax collections, the state’s largest single source of revenue, is up $73.3 million, or 5.5%. Use tax collections — primarily the 7% tax on internet purchases and the fastest growing source of state revenue — is up $63 million, or 30.3%.

Because of these strong revenue collections, Mississippi’s policymakers do not have to use the American Rescue Plan funds just to make up for revenue lost because of the coronavirus economic slowdown as some states will have to do. They have a chance to be innovative in spending the funds for the betterment of the state.

There are restraints on how the funds can be spent that will need to be explored. But policymakers can take their time to study their options because they have multiple years to spend the funds. The funds can be spent, for instance, “to make investments in water, sewer and broadband infrastructure,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

There are, of course, countless local governments throughout the state, with the city of Jackson at the head of the list, with water and sewer infrastructure needs they cannot afford to fix on their own.

“A lot of options are available,” said Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, who said House attorneys are still evaluating those possible options.

“We have the opportunity to stretch out and take bold action in spending the funds to help Mississippians,” said Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, the House minority leader.

The situation is much different for Mississippi than in 2009 when Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Mississippi received about $1 billion from that federal legislation to help make up for state revenue lost from the so-called Great Recession.

Mississippi needed every dime of those federal funds and more to prevent state budget cuts, including the layoff of state workers. The decline in state tax collections during that time was unprecedented. In fiscal years 2009 and 2010, the state for the first time in modern history experienced consecutive years where less revenue was collected than the previous year.

Mississippi used the ARRA fund to partially offset the reduction in tax collections during a period of three fiscal years.

This time around, Reeves says that the Mississippi economy has fared better than the economies of many other states because businesses were not shut down because of COVID-19 to the extent they were in other states.

Many economists also point to the impact of past federal COVID-19 relief packages as being particularly helpful to Mississippi. The $600 per week in unemployment benefits provided in the past federal legislation combined with the $235 available in state unemployment relief resulted in many Mississippians earning more while not working than they were making at the job they lost because of COVID-19. In other words, the extra $600 in unemployment benefits went further in Mississippi than nearly every other state in the nation because Mississippi has more low-paying jobs than most states.

In addition, past COVID-19 stimulus payments of $1,200 and then $600 for individuals went a long way in Mississippi.

The payments of $1,400 — another round of enhanced unemployment benefits and tax credits for children in the American Rescue Plan recently signed into law by President Joe Biden — should help keep the Mississippi economy going strong.

In addition to the $1.8 billion in aid to the state, another $1.3 billion will go to Mississippi’s cities and counties.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann called it “a staggering amount of money.”

The city of Jackson is receiving the most at $46 million, while the village of Satartia is receiving the least federal funds at $11,273.61. In between Jackson and Satartia, Lee County, for instance, will receive $16.6 million, the city of Gulfport will garner $18 million, Alcorn County will get $7.2 million and Adams County will receive $6 million.

Meridian receives $8.2 million, DeSoto County gets $35.8 million and Greenwood gets $3.1 million to name a few others.

How policymakers on both the state and local levels opt to spend those funds could have long-term consequences for Mississippians.

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A more infectious and vaccine-resistant variant strain of COVID-19 was detected in Mississippi on Friday. One person in Harrison County was found to be infected with the B.1.351 variant, which was discovered in South Africa in December and reached the United States in January.

There are currently 181 confirmed cases of the B.1.351 variant across 26 U.S. states and territories.

Scientists are concerned about the variant because clinical trials of the three vaccines approved in the U.S. are showing that they offer less protection against B.1.351 than other variants. People who recover from COVID-19 may be reinfected if exposed to B.1.351 because one of its mutations makes it harder for antibodies to latch onto. 

While more data is needed, preliminary studies have shown that despite any small decreases in overall effectiveness, the vaccines being administered in the U.S. still provide robust protection against the most severe outcomes of a COVID-19 infection. 

“This just reinforces our messaging how important it is to get vaccinated and protected now. Time is of the essence,” State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said during a Friday press conference.

Dobbs also encouraged Mississippians to continue to follow preventative measures like masking in public, because limiting community spread is the best way to prevent new strains from gaining significant footholds in the state.

As infections from variants continue to surge in the United States, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is preparing a plan to update vaccines if needed. This could include the development of a third booster shot by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech for their vaccines.

B.1.351 is the second variant strain of COVID-19 to reach Mississippi. Ten cases of the U.K. variant, B.1.1.7, have been confirmed in the state since mid-February. Preliminary studies in Britain have found this variant to be 30-50% more infectious and around 55% deadlier than the original strain of COVID-19. 

In Mississippi, 627,922 people — 21% of the state’s population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. More than 350,000 people have been fully inoculated since the state began distributing vaccines in December.

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These are the first words I have typed on my shiny new laptop, and I am pretty pumped about it. It arrives, after all, at my favorite time of the sporting year. 

Spring is here and with it college baseball and soon the Final Four. They will play 16 games of March Madness on TV today. If I want, I can watch several of those games on this shiny new laptop, replete with a sharp picture and bright colors. It does not even resemble the manual Underwood typewriter on which I typed my first game stories all those years ago. My late daddy, who bequeathed me that Underwood, would be greatly amazed.

He would be excited, too. After all, the Masters is just around the corner, along with Major League Baseball. Our own golf courses are greening. Flowers are blooming. Every indication is we might be nearing the end of this god-awful pandemic that has so changed the way we play — and watch — sports.

But before I wax on about the future on this shiny new computer, I must first pay homage to the one that is retiring and bears the scars of 10 years of loyal service. You can scarcely read the letters on her keys. Indeed, she’d probably still be with me if I hadn’t pounded those keys so hard. When you learned to type on an Underwood manual, the adjustment to sensitive, 21st century keyboards apparently takes longer than a lifetime. 

My retiring computer was dependable almost to the end. She endured through three jobs, 10 March Madnesses and more deadlines than either of us care to remember. She couldn’t have enjoyed the deadlines any more than I did. You see, the less time I have to write, the harder and more furiously I type. Go figure.

And still, I had to replace her keyboard only once. 

She endured. She was a plugger. An old coach would describe her as solid and dependable, a team player. She endured Ole Miss winning the Sugar Bowl on deadline. She endured two NCAA Women’s Final Fours on deadline, several College World Series and nine Egg Bowls. She endured being lost in the Atlanta airport. Twice. She made it through a working, golf vacation in Ireland. I typed on that old computer in the Crow’s Nest at Augusta National, in a Tuscan villa, and at 30,000-feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

She outlasted three football coaches each at Mississippi State and Ole Miss and four at Southern Miss. Rick Comegy was the Jackson State football coach when I put her into service. Deion Sanders is the JSU coach as I take her out. There were three in between, five total.

As I mentioned, I began typing on a creaky, old Underwood that I still have in my attic. I was 13 and not quite five feet tall. I looked more like eight or nine. But I wanted to cover games for my hometown newspaper and the editors said I would need to learn to type. So I took a typing class at the university, and you should have seen the looks I got when I walked in that classroom.

I can tell you, for certain, it was a long climb to the press box with a manual typewriter before press boxes had elevators. The evolution of how sports writers type and send their stories has gone through several phases since. We used to type our stories and then read them over the telephone to somebody back on the copy desk. Often, in those early days, my stories thankfully were edited as I talked. 

Then came something called telecopiers, which transmitted the printed pages back to the office, often in blurry, almost unreadable condition. Then, there were these things called portabubbles, sort of a precursor to today’s computers. Those early portabubbles were sensitive to loud noise. Once, during a rowdy Alcorn-Mississippi State basketball game at Biloxi, my portabubble began spitting gibberish every time the crowd went crazy, which was about every 30 seconds in those Davey Whitney days. I lifted that damnable thing above my head and was about to heave all 25 pounds of it to mid-court when Orley Hood, bless his soul, snatched it out of my hands, thus saving my job and probably keeping me out of jail.

 “You’ll thank me later, Pards,” Orley said.

And so now, on my shiny new laptop I could almost throw like a frisbee, I am. Thanks, Pards.

The post Breaking in a shiny new toy at the absolute best time of the year appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi legislative leaders said tax collections are more than $500 million above the estimate used to set the current year’s budget and the state economy appears to be chugging along as lawmakers get down to setting a $6 billion budget for the coming year.

“We’re in great financial shape,” House Speaker Philip Gunn said after a Joint Legislative Budget Committee meeting on Friday. Lawmakers adopted “the big number,” the total amount of money they can spend as they haggle out a state budget over the next couple of weeks.

That big number is $5.93 billion — about $173 million, or 3%, more than lawmakers had estimated in November that they’d have to spend for fiscal 2022 that begins July 1.

“I want to be clear, this doesn’t mean (every agency) gets an across-the-board increase,” said Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. “… But lots of the cuts we made last year were about 2.5%, so this should restore those … But we will be looking at each budget individually to make those decisions.”

As for the $500 million cash on hand from the current FY21 budget, Gunn and Hosemann said that number may be artificially high because of $230 million in income taxes that normally would have been collected in the previous year were collected in the current budget year after filing deadlines were pushed back because of COVID-19.

Hosemann said he suspects the state budget also saw a boon because of “a significant infusion of federal money” from coronavirus relief funds Congress approved.

The rosy financial projections adopted Friday come as lawmakers debate a massive overhaul of the state’s tax system being pushed by Gunn and the House GOP leadership. It would eliminate the state income tax over the next decade, and increase sales, “sin” and other user or consumption taxes to make up the difference. Hosemann and the Senate have been lukewarm on the idea and killed the original proposal, although the House has attempted to revive it for more debate.

State Economist Corey Miller told the legislative budget committee on Friday that revenue collections continue to be strong for the current fiscal year despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Through February, state tax collections are $500.3 million or 14.7% above the estimate used by legislators in the 2020 session when developing the current budget.

Those surplus funds could be used when developing a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, though in recent years legislators have tried to direct such surplus funds to the rainy day fund, capital expense fund and for other one-time expenses.

Gunn and Hosemann said they plan to sock about $30 million into the rainy day fund this session, which would bring it flush to $558 million.

In addition to the $5.9 billion in tax revenue, legislators will also have another $500 million in funds from other sources, such as tobacco lawsuit settlement funds, that are used in the state-support budget.

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Mississippians are generally more open to getting a COVID-19 vaccination than they were in early January, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The poll from Millsaps College and Chism Strategies found that 63% of those polled said they will definitely or probably will get vaccinated. Another 13% reported already being vaccinated. Of the remaining people surveyed, 20% said they probably or definitely will not get vaccinated and 5% are unsure. Mississippians have reconsidered their stance on the vaccines since the same poll was conducted in January, when nearly half of survey takers said they may refuse to receive the vaccine or were unsure about it.

MAP: Where to get the COVID-19 vaccine in Mississippi

This change in public opinion is likely due to the dramatic increase in vaccine rollout over the past few months. People who may have been hesitant to receive a vaccine when they were first approved have seen friends, family and neighbors get vaccinated safely over the past few months.

“Voters are learning more about the necessity of the vaccines, how participation in vaccination will help the nation return to normal more quickly and receiving encouragement from medical and public health experts along with a noticeably different tone from federal officials. These things have truly helped move the needle for us,” said Dr. Nathan Shrader, chair of the Department of Government and Politics at Millsaps College.

The approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, in particular, has helped. The J&J vaccine only requires one dose and it was produced through conventional methods instead of the newer and less familiar mRNA vaccine technology. Factors like these have helped soothe many people with reservations about getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

Mississippi became the second state to make immunization against COVID-19 available to all residents aged 16 and up on Tuesday. Last week, President Joseph R. Biden directed all U.S. states and territories to make all adults eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine no later than May 1st.

In Mississippi, 592,500 people — about 20% of the state’s total population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Nearly 330,000 people have been fully inoculated since the state began distributing vaccines in December.

READ MORE: Frequently asked questions about COVID vaccines in Mississippi

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