Cassandra Welchlin, executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, says Mississippi still ranks at or near the worst in pay inequality for women compared to white men. That gap is even worse for Black women in the workforce. Mississippi’s male-dominated Legislature has been loath to address the disparity in any meaningful way.
Sports gambling giant DraftKings and energy company Entergy spent a combined $107,398 on a 2025 Super Bowl weekend for House Speaker Jason White, House Public Utilities Chairman Brent Powell, White’s staff and a couple of their spouses.
The companies, which stand to make millions from state government actions for which they are lobbying, spent more than White’s annual salary of $85,000 wining and dining the speaker, Powell and staff on a one-weekend Super Bowl trip to New Orleans. The trip was first reported in a 2025 Mississippi Today article. The special interest spending was only recently made public in official lobbying reports because of Mississippi’s weak lobbying laws and reporting requirements.
State lobbying laws give the clients of lobbyists, in this case DraftKings and Entergy, until the end of a year to document gifts to public officials. Even though White’s Super Bowl trip took place in February of 2025, it only appeared in state documents nearly a year later, after lobbying reports were due on Jan. 30. And when it did appear, the initial report DraftKings filed documenting the expense was inaccurate and was later updated.
The Mississippi House has passed legislation to legalize mobile sports betting for three years in a row, first passing it the year before White became Speaker. But the measures have died in the Senate. In 2025, days after House lawmakers voted to legalize online betting for the second time, the speaker’s staffers were enjoying the hospitality of DraftKings at its Super Bowl weekend festivities.
Entergy spent a total of $47,398 on tickets, dinner and lodging for White, his wife, Rep. Powell and Powell’s wife. As chairman of the House Public Utilities Committee, Powell has some oversight of Entergy, the state’s largest energy company.
Powell declined to comment on the trip.
In 2025, Entergy spent over $300,000 lobbying the Legislature to advance its interests. Such efforts can reap significant rewards, though lawmakers have said such lobbying doesn’t influence their policy decisions.
For example, in 2024, the Legislature granted Entergy the authority to build power-generating facilities without obtaining the normally required approval from the Public Service Commission. The deal is part of a $10-billion state agreement with Amazon Web Services. This session, the House has passed a bill requested by Entergy for the state to loan the company $200 million to cover damages from Winter Storm Fern.
In a statement, Leyla Goodsell, an Entergy spokesperson, said the company had access to a limited number of Super Bowl game tickets, some of which were assigned to a suite specifically for its guests.
“Entergy Mississippi, an operating company of Entergy Corporation, invited Speaker White and Representative Powell and their spouses to attend the event as our guests,” Goodsell said. “As always, Entergy will comply with all federal, state and local regulations.”
DraftKings, one of the nation’s highest-grossing gaming companies, has invested heavily in lobbying for legal online betting in Mississippi and other states. It spent $60,000 on box seat tickets for three members of White’s staff and one of their spouses, who documented the trip on social media. Mississippi Today found that the social media posts were later edited to remove any mention of DraftKings after the news outlet began asking questions about the trip.
DraftKings initially filed a lobbying report on Jan. 29 that showed a $60,000 expense for Super Bowl tickets for Jason White. But the company changed the report to say it bought tickets for White’s staff, not the speaker himself. Mississippi law says lobbyists must document gifts for all public employees, not just the officials these employees work for.
On Feb. 6, DraftKings filed a corrected report removing Speaker White’s name and inserting four expenditures worth $15,000 each for three members of the speaker’s staff and one of their spouses.
White didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the trip when Mississippi Today published its initial story revealing the trip in 2025. When reached for comment in February on the lobbying reports, White told Mississippi Today his Super Bowl trip was never about sports betting.
“I went to meet with the board of directors from Entergy, which obviously is our largest utility provider in the state,” White said. “It’s where their home corporate office is, it’s where their entire board was. They were a major corporate sponsor of the Super Bowl. I never thought twice about being their guest. I enjoyed my time with them. I also enjoyed meeting other elected officials who were there as well during my time meeting with the Entergy folks.”
When asked why his staff attended the game on DraftKings’ dime, White said it was the result of an invitation that he passed along.
“They actually went as a last-minute invite because DraftKings had a box that had open seats and they called and invited me, and I said, ‘No, I’m already attending with Entergy,’ and they offered that to my staff and some other staff in the building who went.’ For me, it was much ado about nothing. We passed mobile sports for multiple years, the trip was never about discussing legislation related to mobile sports,” White said. “It was nothing out of the ordinary for us. I know y’all have made lots of hay about it, but it didn’t change any perspectives for us, nor for the average Mississippian who is for mobile sports betting.”
Critics of Mississippi’s lobbying laws argue the practice of lavishing public officials with expensive gifts fosters distrust. One such critic is John Reeves, an attorney and former longtime Republican state representative. Reeves helped pass reform of Mississippi’s lobbying laws in the 1990s, including a ban on lobbyists paying for lawmakers’ rent. He said the price tag for the Super Bowl weekend exceeded much of what he witnessed while trying to rein in trips and high-dollar gifts for lawmakers.
“That’s just absolutely off the charts. I hate to be criticizing people. I don’t like to do that,” Reeves said. “But my goodness, how can you explain getting a $15,000 ticket to the Super Bowl, and how that has anything to do with your public service? You can’t. And all that’s going to do is erode the public’s trust in government.”
The Republican speaker, one of the most powerful politicians in the state, has repeatedly said that legalizing mobile sports betting is one of his top priorities. Proponents such as White say legalization would be a financial boon to the state. It would also further enrich the gambling companies that facilitate online betting.
Estimates vary, but many say the state is missing out on between $30 million and $80 million a year in taxes as a black market for online betting continues to thrive. While specific revenue figures for DraftKings aren’t publicly projected, as one of the nation’s most dominant companies in the industry, it would likely compete for a significant share of Mississippi’s market.
The Boston-based sports gambling giant has been at the forefront of a years-long lobbying push to legalize online betting in Mississippi and around the country. In a statement, Stephen Miraglia, a DraftKings spokesperson, did not answer questions about what the company hoped to achieve by paying for these tickets or why it had to correct its initial lobbying report.
“On occasion, DraftKings hosts elected officials from around the country at live sporting events and is careful to ensure compliance with all state and federal lobbying disclosure requirements,” Miraglia said.
Around 40 states have some form of legalized sports betting, and over 20 have full online betting with multiple operators, according to Action Network, a sports betting application and news site. Some states have only in-person betting, and some only have a single online operator in the state. Mississippi allows sports betting now, but only inside casinos.
Mississippi has been one of the holdouts on online betting, in part due to fears that legalization could cut into the profits of brick-and-mortar casinos and increase the prevalence of gambling addiction, which some experts say is a growing problem. Influential religious institutions in the Bible Belt state have also opposed the spread of gambling.
On Feb. 8, the day before the 2025 Super Bowl, White reminded his social media followers that Mississippi had attempted to legalize mobile sports betting for three years.
This year, his chamber voted again to legalize online betting, this time tying the policy to a proposal to shore up financial support for the state’s struggling public employees’ pension system. It is unclear whether the proposal has the support to advance in the Senate.
That hasn’t stopped lobbyists from sports gambling companies, including DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesar’s, from spending money throughout the year on trips to sporting events and dinners out on the town for Mississippi politicians.
The state’s lobbying laws allow for a distinction between individual lobbyists and clients, leaving open to interpretation what lobbyists and their clients are required to report and when they’re required to report their expenses.
Reeves left the Legislature in 2008 and said public reporting regulations for lobbyists remain lax compared to other states, a status quo that sows public distrust. He believes the Legislature should pass new regulations requiring the clients of lobbyists to report the gifts they purchase for lawmakers within 30 days. He also thinks lawmakers should raise their own salaries to disincentivize them from accepting gifts from lobbyists.
“In a perfect world, they would set the salary of the Legislature at a rate that would encourage people to run for it and not expect freebies, like some states do. Because when you accept a trip like that, whether it’s benign or not, you couldn’t convince one person in the public that it doesn’t influence the vote of those members,” Reeves said. “It’s the appearance of impropriety.”
John Pelissero, professor emeritus of political science and a government ethics scholar at Loyola University Chicago, told Mississippi Today that delays in disclosing lobbying or campaign finance information create an “absence of transparency.”
DraftKings and Entergy filed their required lobbying reports on time. But because current state law requires only an annual filing, the public cannot see how major industries lobby lawmakers until long after the regular legislative session is over.
“If you find out about this a year after the Super Bowl, it loses its significance because it’s so long after the event took place,” Pelissero said.
He added that several states are pushing for more frequent reporting requirements for elected officials and lobbyists to provide the public with timelier information.
“What more frequent sharing of information does is serve the public interest by providing more information,” Pelissero said.
Editor’s note: Warwick Sabin, the CEO of Deep South Today, parent company of Mississippi Today, attended an Entergy-sponsored reception in New Orleans the morning before the Super Bowl in 2025. The event was not at the Superdome. He did not have any editorial involvement in this article or Mississippi Today’s previous articles about Mississippi lawmakers, legislative staffers and some spouses receiving an expenses-paid trip to the 2025 Super Bowl.
Introducing, Mississippi Explained: our weekly news quiz to test your knowledge of this week’s news 🧠
Tuesday is the deadline for committees to pass general bills from the other chamber. However, some lawmakers, including Rep. Rob Roberson and Sen. Lydia Chassaniol, have said it’s unlikely they’ll call another committee meeting ahead of the deadline. The move will likely kill school choice and prison health care reform.
Quiz question: Who decides which bills are brought up for a vote in committee?
Email your answer to newsletter@mississippitoday.org with your first name and last initial, and we’ll shout you out in the next quiz post on Monday, March 9.
Last week’s answer: Committee
Congratulations to last week’s winners: Jon A., John O. and Rita H.
Think you know the news? Take more quizzes like this one: sign up for The Today, our daily newsletter, and never miss a chance to test your knowledge.
Two men have pleaded guilty in federal court to fraudulently receiving COVID-19 unemployment benefits while they were incarcerated in Mississippi.
Kev’Veonta Short and Travis Thorn were convicted last week in separate cases in the Southern District of Mississippi of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They are expected to be sentenced in the coming months. The charge carries a maximum 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine.
The unemployment insurance benefits were federally subsidized through the CARES Act during the pandemic. Incarcerated people were not eligible to receive the money.
Short, 32, of Natchez, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for submitting false unemployment insurance claims while imprisoned at the South Mississippi Correctional Institution. Short is scheduled for sentencing in July.
Between May and July 2020, Short submitted an application through the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, according to court records.
Within a span of two weeks that May, a dozen incarcerated people in the state, including Short, submitted unemployment benefit applications, the indictment states.
After receiving the money, Short and other members of the conspiracy transferred it to other prisoners using “Green Dot” reloadable debit cards, Way2Go Cards and CashApp, according to court records.
In 2020, Short was serving time for cocaine possession and aggravated assault, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections. He was discharged in 2022.
He was ordered held in federal custody pending trial in September 2025 for a number of reasons, including prior criminal history for violent offenses and failure to appear at past municipal court appearances, according to court records.
Short’s two accomplices in the COVID fraud scheme, Adrian Wilson and Aaron Sanders, pleaded guilty to the same charge in February. Both men are still incarcerated and state prison records list their unit as “Federal court order.” Wilson is set to be sentenced in June.
Another co-defendant, Vicki Page, is set to go to trial in April. She is accused of receiving over $7,000 of fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits and transferring them to Sanders through CashApp, according to court records.
On Wednesday, Thorn, 45, of Monroe, Louisiana, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for working with others to fraudulently obtain about $13,500 in unemployment benefits while he was in a Mississippi prison. He is expected to be sentenced in July.
Between May and September 2020, he worked with an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator and others in Harrison County to fill out an application for benefits for him with the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, according to court records. Thorn gave his personal information to another person to apply for the benefits, and the co-conspirator provided her address in Gulfport as the residence on Thorn’s application.
Through a debit card, he received about $3,400 in state unemployment benefits and about $10,200 in federal unemployment compensation, according to the indictment. Then the co-conspirator used some of the benefit money to make purchases and transferred some of it to Thorn through his commissary fund.
In 2020, Thorn was serving time for burglary and aggravated assault, according to MDOC. He was released on probation in March 2025 and was being supervised by federal officials in Louisiana.
The FBI and Mississippi State Auditor’s Office investigated the case involving Short and the other SMCI prisoners. The auditor’s office, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Office of the Inspector General handled the investigation of Thorn.
Auditor Shad White launched Operation Payback in May 2024 to investigate unemployment compensation during the pandemic. It has resulted in another state prisoner’s conviction for fraud.
“We will continue to find as many of these fraudsters as possible and hold them accountable for their crimes,” White said in a February statement announcing a 15-year sentence and restitution for Kenjarell Thomas, who received benefits while incarcerated.
Secretary of State Michael Watson on Monday announced he will not run for reelection in 2027, further fueling the speculation that he will run for lieutenant governor next year.
Watson, a Republican, said at the Stennis Institute’s Capitol Press Forum that while he won’t run for secretary of state again, he will “still be on the ballot” next year.
“We have really gotten to the point where we feel like we’ve done our duty,” Watson said. We’ve done our work at the secretary of state’s office. I can walk out of there feeling like I’ve left the place better than I found it.”
Watson, 48, represented Jackson County in the state Senate for three terms. He later won a bid in 2019 to become secretary of state and was easily reelected to a second term in 2023.
Since serving as secretary of state, Watson has championed measures to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in Mississippi elections, to strengthen the state’s campaign finance laws and to repeal onerous “red tape” regulations on businesses.
Watson is the second statewide official to reveal at least part of his future political plans, though Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Gov. Tate Reeves are prevented from running for another term in their current offices because of term limits. State Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson has announced he is running for governor next year.
The lieutenant governor has enormous sway over the legislative process and is the presiding officer of the Senate. The chamber’s rules allow the lieutenant governor to appoint people to lead legislative committees and refer bills to specific committees.
A state senator says she is unlikely to advance bills aimed at improving medical care in Mississippi prisons and redirecting control of the state prison health care contract.
Corrections Committee Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona, called a committee meeting on Thursday and advanced only two House bills. She told Mississippi Today that she was unlikely to call another meeting ahead of Tuesday’s deadline for committees to pass general bills from the other chamber.
Chassaniol is running the committee while Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, is out with an illness. She said Barnett only requested two bills be passed, and that she planned to honor his wishes even if it meant the House proposals, which passed that chamber 120-0, would die.
“Well, too bad. Too bad. I mean, I was trying to, it’s very important to me to show respect for our chairman, and that’s what he asked us to bring forward, so I’m basically a stand-in for Chairman Barnett, who was unable to be here today because he’s ill,” Chassaniol said.
The proposals Chassaniol is poised to let die include a bill to require the creation of a hepatitis C program and an HIV program aimed at improving the treatment to prisoners. An Mississippi Today report in October revealed that only a fraction of Mississippi prisoners diagnosed with hepatitis C receive treatment, which has allowed the treatable infection to develop into a life-threatening illness. Additionally, the bill would require the state to develop a plan focused on improving the health of female prisoners.
Another bill Chassaniol declined to take up would take the power to award health contracts away from the Department of Corrections and task the Department of Finance and Administration with soliciting proposals for a new medical contractor. The current medical contractor, Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, was awarded over $315 million in emergency, no-bid state contracts by the Department of Corrections from 2020 to 2024. It has since faced legal challenges and allegations that it routinely denies or provides inadequate care inside Mississippi’s prisons.
Those bills, which follow an ongoing investigative series from Mississippi Today on the alleged denial of care in state prisons, are part of a reform package spearheaded by Rep. Becky Currie, the Republican House Corrections chairwoman from Brookhaven.
Chassaniol did advance a bill authored by Rep. Justis Gibbs, a Democrat from Jackson, that would require MDOC to develop policies for supplying protective equipment when incarcerated people use strong cleaning chemicals. Gibbs introduced the legislation, which also passed the House last year but died in the Senate, in response to the case of Susan Balfour, a woman who developed terminal breast cancer after she came into contact with raw industrial chemicals during cleaning duty. Balfour died in August.
The other measure passed by the Senate panel on Thursday would create more oversight of prison deaths. The bill would direct and empower the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force to look into “unexpected” deaths using information provided by coroners’ reports and MDOC.
Prison understaffing and gang violence likely led to the killings of nearly 50 people since 2015, according to an investigation by Mississippi Today, The Marshall-Project Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, the Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link.
Both of the prison health measures that haven’t advanced were double-referred, which means they would need to pass out of an additional committee on top of the Corrections Committee. When a bill is double-referred, it’s sometimes a sign that it lacks the support of the chamber’s leadership.
A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann did not respond to a request about whether Hosemann supports the prison reform measures or whether he would urge Chassaniol to call another meeting to pass more bills ahead of Tuesday’s deadline.
Chassaniol said she would only call another meeting at Barnett’s request.
“I have been directed by Chairman (Juan) Barnett, whose wishes I’m trying to comply with.”
We are proud to announce that Anna Wolfe, an editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Mississippi Today, will join the staff of the newly formed Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center, created in collaboration with The New York Times and Big Local News.
Wolfe joins as an investigative reporter covering Mississippi, beginning March 16. She will remain based in the Mississippi Today newsroom, and her work will be published in Mississippi Today and The Times.
Deep South Today, the nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News in New Orleans and The Current in Lafayette, Louisiana, launched the investigative center in January. The center will employ reporters in Louisiana and Mississippi and produce investigative stories on topics and institutions critical to local communities in each state.
The center will operate in collaboration with editors at the Local Investigations Fellowship program at The Times, including Dean Baquet, former executive editor of The Times, who now leads the fellowship program.
Wolfe joined Mississippi Today’s newsroom in 2018 to report on poverty and immediately began spotlighting the state’s failures to serve its most vulnerable residents. Her 2020 joint reporting on Mississippi’s restitution centers, Prisoners for Hire, exposed modern-day debtors prisons and received multiple national awards. Her yearslong investigation into the state’s spending of federal welfare funds led to a 2022 series called The Backchannel, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting and earned her a Livingston Award.
In 2023, Wolfe became the youngest solo winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, one of the nation’s top journalism honors, and only the third two-time winner of the award. In 2024, she was named in TIME100 Next, which recognizes emerging leaders driving change. In 2025, four women who were imprisoned on lengthy sentences for offenses related to their pregnancies were released from prison shortly after Wolfe wrote about the hazy legal theory that landed them there.
A native of Washington State and a 2014 Mississippi State University graduate, Wolfe has spent her entire journalism career in Jackson. Last year, she led the launch of Mississippi Today’s Jackson desk dedicated to telling accountability-focused stories about life in the capital city.
“Anna Wolfe has fundamentally changed Mississippi with her relentless, dogged investigative reporting,” said Adam Ganucheau, Deep South Today’s executive editor and chief content officer. “Her work hasn’t just surfaced problems. It’s also forced accountability at the highest levels and given Mississippians the clear, documented truth they couldn’t get otherwise. In an era of diminished watchdog reporting, particularly in Mississippi, Anna’s commitment to going deeper, staying longer and following the facts wherever they lead has proved exactly why investigative journalism still matters. Every Mississippian is better informed because of her, and we’re so lucky to have her fighting for all of us in this new role.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Anna as the first hire of the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center,” said Chris Davis, deputy editor for the Local Investigations Fellowship. “Our mission is strengthened by her expertise, and readers across Mississippi will be better informed because of her relentless reporting. Her arrival marks the first step in our commitment to building a world-class investigative team in this region.”
By working with The Times to launch and build out a new Investigative Reporting Center, Deep South Today will position an upstart investigative team alongside some of the most prominent editors in the journalism industry. This initiative builds on the success that Mississippi Today already established with The Times and Big Local News. A joint investigation by those organizations about corruption and abuse by Mississippi sheriffs was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting and led to expanded federal investigations and legislative reforms in the state. The Local Investigations Fellowship won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2025 in collaboration with the Baltimore Banner and Big Local News for an investigation into the deadly opioid crisis.
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current.
Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now the largest newsroom in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.
With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.
The New York Times Company is a trusted source of quality, independent journalism whose mission is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. With more than 12 million subscribers across a diverse array of print and digital products — from news to cooking to games to sports — The Times is a diversified media company with curious readers, listeners and viewers around the globe.
Launched in 2020 as a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, Big Local News helps reporters better use data in service of accountability journalism. Big Local News shares data and reporting recipes for journalists to localize stories at biglocalnews.org. It also provides news detection tools that monitor a wide variety of data and information streams. The goal: Make it easier for journalists to find the stories that matter at the local level.
Big Local News regularly supports and mentors journalists in computational methods, including The New York Times’s Investigative Reporting Fellows, and was integrally involved with a collaborative project with The Times and The Baltimore Banner, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting earlier this year.
Some toplines from the Mississippi legislative session this week:
School choice: Going into the 2026 legislative session, school choice – using tax dollars for private schooling – was the big bugaboo issue. House Speaker Jason White and Gov. Tate Reeves deemed it issue No. 1. Senate leaders didn’t want it, but had a more modest proposal to make it easier for students to switch public school districts. But heading into the final month or so of the session, each chamber has snuffed out the other’s proposals. The only related item still kicking is a House-passed plan to double tax credits available for private school scholarships to $20 million over the next few years. Its fate in the Senate is unclear.
Ice storm aid: There are several proposals pending – $20 million in direct spending for MEMA, a recovery loan program and the state loaning Entergy $200 million for utility damages to prevent customer rate hikes. But there appears to be some disagreement on how the state can best help Mississippians and communities recover. Lawmakers heard from the state insurance commissioner that private claims for damages have topped $107 million and will grow.
House-Senate feuding: It’s something of a tradition for lawmakers and Capitol observers to proclaim nearly every session that House and Senate relations are “the worst we’ve ever seen.” But given the current state of affairs between the Republican administrations running the chambers since 2024, that may be on point. The two chambers, as has become the new custom, have killed most of each other’s major initiatives so far this session. Some lawmakers and observers are questioning whether Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Speaker Jason White are communicating at all, and whether the Legislature can set a budget by deadline.
“If you’re going to run for office and say that you are capable of running any level of government, you need to know how to use the damn internet.” – Rep. Shanda Yates of Jackson, discussing a bill that would require Mississippi candidates to file their campaign finance reports online.
House Education Committee Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville, announced last week that the panel of representatives would not meet again this session.
That means, aside from two Senate education bills passed on Feb. 18, a handful of other measures are set to die. These include bills that would have given teachers money for classroom supplies earlier, required school boards to adopt policies restricting or banning cell phones in classrooms and ramped up initiatives to combat absenteeism.
There are no House bills still alive that address these issues.
The Senate Education Committee met and passed three House bills, including one that’s intended to make it easier for school districts to sell unused buildings. More than a dozen House education bills are still pending, but it’s not clear if the Senate committee will meet again, either.
The committee chairmen have until Tuesday to call meetings. – Devna Bose
A bill passed the House last week would allow the state to issue bonds to loan Entergy money to repair its system after Winter Storm Fern, an effort to prevent rate hikes for customers from the damages.
Similar borrowing was provided for Mississippi Power Company after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
HB 4069 would give Entergy better rates on the borrowing than it could get on the commercial market. It’s estimated the company had $200 million to $250 million in damages from the storm. – Katherine Lin
A bill that would fund school resource officers at private and public schools with state dollars has passed the House.
HB 4065, authored by Republican Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar of Senatobia, would establish the Mississippi School Resource Officers School Safety Act. Under the proposed legislation, any school in the state can apply for the Department of Public Safety to pay part of the salary, up to $55,000, for one school resource officer.
The measure, which would cost $5 million for the first year, awaits consideration in the Senate. – Devna Bose
Lawmakers have advanced a bill during the legislative session that allows the Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Commission to create regulations for a bear hunting season that could begin during the 2027 hunting season.
SB 2436 allows the commission to establish a lottery system for issuing black bear hunting tags. The commission would determine how many tags to issue based on the current bear population. To participate, hunters would have to purchase a Mississippi hunting license and apply for a harvest tag through the lottery system.
Black bears were once nearly extinct in Mississippi and hunting them is currently prohibited.
The measure passed the Senate 49-3, and the House Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Committee passed it. The full House must vote to approve it before it can head to the governor for consideration. – Taylor Vance
A bill passed by the Ways and Means committee last week would tax all gross revenue from mobile sports betting at 22%, up from the 18.5% rate that has been proposed in other legalization measures. That would boost the overall revenue Mississippi would generate through mobile sports betting to $100 million, said House Gaming Chairman Casey Eure. Estimates for previous legalization bills that would tax at a lower rate range from $30 million to $80 million. The bill would also lower the state’s regular gambling tax rate from 8% to 6%, which would amount to a $48 million tax cut for brick-and-mortar casinos, Eure said.
The House already passed a separate measure to legalize mobile sports betting in early February. Both proposals would direct gambling revenue to the Public Employees’ Retirement System. Eure said the House plans to keep as many options alive to win over a skeptical Senate, where mobile sports betting legalization has died without a vote. – Michael Goldberg
Amount Mississippians would have to pay to get an associate degree or professional credentials in qualifying fields at Mississippi community colleges under SB 2522, a “last-dollar” scholarship program proposal. The scholarships would cover the remaining balance for a student once they’ve exhausted all other financial aid, essentially free education. The measure is modeled after programs in other states, and similar bills have been unsuccessfully proposed in the Mississippi Legislature in recent years.
Mississippi’s three main food banks last year handed out 40 million meals across all 82 counties and had their largest-ever distribution of produce as a result of a new collaborative effort, food bank leaders said Wednesday at the Capitol. Read the story.
Mississippi currently has two laws dealing with AI, and three more are being proposed. One current law criminalizes creating political deepfakes meant to damage a candidate. The other classifies AI-generated images of children performing sexual acts as child exploitation. Read the story.
A House bill aimed at increasing public school accountability in Mississippi awaits consideration in the Senate. Read the story.
An effort to require Mississippi candidates to file their campaign finance reports online appears, once again, likely to fail in the state Legislature.
The House Elections Committee on Thursday voted to pause debate on SB 2589, with the option to resume debate in the future. But if the committee does not pass the bill by Tuesday, the legislation will die. Similar measures have died in the past.
PODCAST: Secretary of State Michael Watson says Mississippi needs campaign finance reform
The bill would require county, municipal and state candidates to file their campaign finance reports online with the secretary of state’s office. This is an effort to provide the public with searchable, legible campaign finance data, as most states, including all those surrounding Mississippi, have.
But some House members expressed concerns about requiring candidates, especially in rural areas, to file reports online.
“I’m not trying to make an 80-something-year-old try to figure out how to file something online,” House Elections Chairman Noah Sanford said.
But Shanda Yates, an independent from Jackson, said candidates need to learn how to use the internet because it’s “not going away” and technology is an integral part of modern life.
“If you’re going to run for office and say that you are capable of running any level of government, you need to know how to use the damn internet,” Yates said.
Sanford, a Republican from Collins, proposed a compromise that would require candidates for a state office to file online reports, but exempt local candidates from filing an online report with the secretary of state if they receive less than $2,000 in campaign donations in a year.
But Yates and Rep. Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, disagreed with that proposal because they believe every candidate in Mississippi, local and state level, should be held to the same standard.
“If we’re not making everyone do it, I’m going to vote no,” Currie said.
Current state law requires candidates for state office to file reports with the secretary of state’s office, county candidates with local circuit clerks and municipal candidates with local municipal clerks.
But the law gives candidates wide latitude in how they can submit the report.
Candidates can handwrite reports, submit pictures of them, or submit them in spreadsheet format. Lax requirements allow some handwritten reports to be illegible, or the print on the report too small for a person to read.
To solve this issue, Secretary of State Michael Watson plans on rolling out a new searchable, user-friendly campaign finance website similar to the one operated by the Federal Election Commission for federal candidates.
During the debate, Yates pointed out that every candidate is already required to file a statement of economic interest online, which is a report filed with the Mississippi Ethics Commission to disclose sources of income.
Tom Hood, the director of the Ethics Commission, told Mississippi Today that the commission first required candidates and public officials to file the forms online in 2010, and since moving to online filing, the commission has received positive feedback.
For people who have trouble with technology, Hood said the commission allows them to send their form in through the postal service or by alternative means. But “only a handful” of people choose other options, the director said.
“People should not be afraid of online filing,” Hood said.
If passed, the bill would not mandate online filing until 2028, one year after statewide elections in 2027, to give candidates time to acclimate to the new requirements.
