Mississippi Today
Session 2023: Hosemann proposes tax refund checks up to $500, increased ed spending, health care fixes
Session 2023: Hosemann proposes tax refund checks up to $500, increased ed spending, health care fixes
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann wants to send taxpayers rebate checks up to $500, increase education spending and push year-’round schooling and pre-K, and find fixes for the state’s health care crisis “not just for next year, but for the next generation.”
Some of his policy priorities for the 2023 legislative session that starts Jan. 3 already put Hosemann and the Senate he oversees at odds with his fellow Republican leaders in the House. For starters, House Speaker Philip Gunn and other GOP leaders said recently they want to eliminate the state income tax, not give one-time rebate checks. House and Senate Republican majorities are also expected to spar over extending postpartum Medicaid coverage for working mothers, which Hosemann and Senate leaders continue to support after it failed in the House last session.
READ MORE: Phase out income tax or cut taxpayers checks? GOP lawmakers, governor disagree
“We did the largest tax cut ever last year, close to $500 million in income taxes cut,” Hosemann said. “We have an excess of $270 million this year from our estimate of taxes we’ve collected. We propose to send it back.”
Hosemann said his proposal will be to refund taxpayers “dollar-for-dollar” what they paid in state income taxes for the past year “from the bottom up, until we run out of money.” He said initial estimates are that refund checks would be capped at about $500.
Republicans Gov. Tate Reeves and Gunn still want to phase out the personal income tax, as a follow-on to the massive income tax cuts passed last year, which are still being implemented. They say this will give the state an advantage with economic development.
Hosemann and Senate leaders say the national and state economies are in turbulent, inflationary times with recession possible, and that much of the state surplus is from unprecedented federal spending that isn’t likely to continue or recur. They warn that fully eliminating the income tax in such uncertain economic times is foolhardy, and that the state’s current windfall should be viewed as one-time money and given back to taxpayers as a one-time check.
Hosemann said he has been meeting with hospital and other health care officials across the state, including Greenwood Leflore Hospital, which he called the “canary in the mine” of the financial crisis facing the state’s hospitals, particularly in rural areas. Hosemann said he foresees the state providing some temporary financial aid and increased Medicaid reimbursement to struggling hospitals, but said he wants to find more permanent, structural fixes.
Hosemann said Mississippi’s health care infrastructure may have to change — particularly given population loss in the Delta and other areas. He said rural hospitals may have to shift to basic and emergency services, with more specialized care becoming centralized.
“I don’t want mommas having babies in the back of a car,” Hosemann said. “I think everyone should be within 30 minutes of care. But for that scheduled heart surgery, you may have to go to a larger hospital for it.”
Hosemann is one of few Republican leaders open to discussion of Medicaid expansion — pushed by many health care advocates and hospitals — but he said politically it’s not likely lawmakers will tackle that issue this year, and he said it’s not a cure-all.
“I don’t think that’s the answer,” Hosemann said. “Even if we had that expansion, (Greenwood Leflore) would not make it, it would still be short.”
Hosemann noted that the Senate has passed extension of postpartum Medicaid coverage for working mothers three times, with the House killing it. He said he expects the Senate to make the push to extend coverage from 60 days to a year again, as a way of helping the state address highest in the nation rates of infant and maternal mortality. He said a new study from Texas extending the coverage has shown numerous positive results.
In recent Senate hearings, numerous experts told lawmakers that Mississippi can spend about $7 million a year to keep mothers and newborns healthier, or continue to spend tens of millions more dealing with the fallout of having theworst infant and maternal mortality and morbidityin the country.
READ MORE: Extending postpartum coverage to Mississippi mothers ‘a no brainer,’ key lawmaker says
Hosemann said he has recently visited several school districts across the state, including in Corinth, Gulfport and Lamar County, that have started using a “modified calendar,” often referred to as year-around schooling. He said such schedules are already showing positive results here and nationwide, and he wants the state to provide incentives to districts that want to participate.
“We don’t need to just keep doing things the way they’ve always been done,” Hosemann said. He said the schedules of roughly nine weeks in school, two-to-three weeks off have been well received by parents and teachers. He said that for Lamar County, it cost about $200,000 to change the calendar and “that will be our measure to incentivize this with state grants for districts that want to do it.”
Hosemann said he wants to increase funding for pre-K public education. The Legislature has increased funding for early learning collaboratives to $16 million, funding about 30 programs across the state, plus another $20 million for other public pre-K programs, Hosemann said. But the state is still serving only about 6,000 of 20,000 eligible kids. Hosemann said he would like to increase that number to about 10,000 students in the coming year.
Recently House Education Chairman Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, said he also would like to expand pre-K in the coming session. He noted that the state should not only provide more money for the programs, but provide schools with capital funding to build facilities for pre-K classes.
Hosemann also said he wants to increase funding in the coming year for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. MAEP is the state’s school funding formula passed into law by the Legislature 25 years ago, but almost never fully funded, usually falling short hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Hosemann said Wednesday he wants to increase funding for MAEP, but declined to give an amount. He said it would likely still fall short of full funding, but “will be enough to make you smile.”
But Gunn recently said he was not for putting more money into MAEP. In the past, Gunn has unsuccessfully pushed to scrap the formula, which he said is flawed and continually calls for more money for schools that lawmakers can come up with. He called it “unattainable,” and has instead pushed for money going outside the formula to school programs lawmakers support rather than a formula that allows schools and districts autonomy on spending.
Hosemann said the state Legislature and federal government have pumped historic amounts of money into infrastructure in the last couple of years, and he plans to continue. He said the state will likely use remaining federal pandemic stimulus money to provide more matching water and sewerage money to cities and counties as it did last year. He said he also wants to provide another $100 million for the state’s Emergency Road and Bridge Program as it did last year. The state had recently faced closure of hundreds of roads and bridges, particularly in rural areas, due to lack of maintenance, but Hosemann said the state is well along in addressing the problem.
Hosemann said the state this year let about $963 million worth of road work contracts, “double what they normally would.”
Mississippi has seen huge budget windfalls since the federal government began pumping pandemic stimulus and infrastructure spending into the states. Hosemann said the state will have paid off about $600 million in debt during this time, increased its “rainy day fund” savings to about $700 million, and he proposes no state borrowing for the coming year.
“That means you don’t have to go out into the market to borrow at 6%-7%,” Hosemann said. “… We started a few years ago cutting our budget and getting things in order. We’re running Mississippi like a business and now we have the cash to address the issues we need to address.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/?p=201816
The superintendents for Leake County and Hollandale school districts and a consultant have been indicted on four federal counts of conspiracy to commit embezzlement, theft and bribery.
According to the indictment, Earl Joe Nelson, while superintendent of Clarksdale Municipal School District and now Leake County School District, and Mario D. Willis, as superintendent of Hollandale School District, allegedly paid each other tens of thousands of dollars in school funds for consultant services that were never rendered from November 2021 until at least June 2023.
Additionally, the duo is accused of stealing U.S. Department of Education funds that were intended for their respective districts.
A St. Louis-based consultant and teacher, Moneka M. Smith-Taylor, has also been indicted on bribery charges in connection with the case. She allegedly received more than $250,000 from Willis for consulting services that were never provided over the course of two years.
She returned part of that money to Willis in the form of a cash kickback in return for the consulting contract, the indictment says.
A spokesperson for the Mississippi State Department of Education directed Mississippi Today to local school boards, who make personnel decisions for their respective districts, for comment.
The job status of the two superintendents is unclear. District officials could not be reached by presstime, but Willis is still listed as the superintendent of Hollandale School District and Nelson is still listed as the superintendent of Leake County School District in the state education department’s online directory.
It’s also unclear whether the defendants have a lawyer who could speak on their behalf.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Mississippi school superintendents indicted on fraud charges appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Centrist
The article reports on the indictment of two Mississippi school superintendents and a consultant on federal fraud charges in a straightforward, factual manner. It presents the legal allegations without editorializing or taking a stance. The language is neutral and focused on relaying verified information from the indictment and official sources, without suggesting guilt or innocence. There is no evident ideological framing or advocacy; rather, the piece sticks to reporting the details of the case and the status of the individuals involved. Thus, the article adheres to objective journalistic standards without discernible political bias.
Four years ago, agents from the state auditor’s office arrested Tunica nonprofit operator Mardis Jones in what the office trumpeted as the second-largest embezzlement case in its history and demanded Jones return over $1 million to the state.
The charges accused Jones of stealing $750,000 from a home rehabilitation program he was supposed to be administering while turning away needy rural residents living in crumbling houses.
But his defense attorney attacked holes in the case, and last month, a local jury found Jones not guilty of the criminal charges. Now, the state has made no indication it will bring a civil case to try to claw back the money from him.
Jones’ nonprofit Tunica County Housing Inc. secured a subcontract with the county through the North Delta Regional Housing Authority in 2014 to run the county’s home rehabilitation program funded with casino revenue. For his work, vetting applications and managing expenses, Jones earned $12,000 a month.
At the core of the criminal case were “strange money transfers” and a finding that several of the people whose applications for home rehab were approved allegedly never received any repairs to their homes. According to the auditor’s office, investigators found less than 20% of the nearly $2 million Jones’ nonprofit received went to the contractors working to rehab homes.
“Once again, an arm of government trusted a private organization to run a government program, and a large percentage of the program’s spending was flat out stolen,” State Auditor Shad White said in a press release after the arrest.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch echoed White, saying, “These funds – hundreds of thousands of dollars – were meant to help the elderly, handicapped, and poverty stricken. But the funds never got to the vulnerable citizens who needed it most.”
Jones’ lawyer Carlos Tanner explained to Mississippi Today that the program operated with an extreme backlog, and that “some of the people they were claiming didn’t get their houses done actually did” by the time the trial was held this year.
The program was poorly administered, Tanner said, meaning that even if a person’s application was approved and a rehab contract prepared, county officials could direct Jones to put someone else’s repair job ahead of his or hers.
“But just because it was run like a first weekend lemonade stand does not mean Mardis Jones stole money,” Tanner said.
Tanner said the investigators gathered paltry evidence, only looking at details that fit their narrative. While Jones did earn a large salary through his contract, Tanner said prosecutors never presented evidence that Jones converted money that was supposed to be used on home rehabilitation to his personal use.
Investigators got a warrant to seize Jones’ electronics, Tanner said, but “they never bothered to search it.”
“The two OSA (Office of the State Auditor) officials who were running the investigation, I questioned them about it during trial, and neither of them could tell me where the computer was, where the phone was, or what the contents were,” Tanner said.
Jacob Walters, a spokesperson for the auditor’s office, defended the way the investigators handled the case, saying, “The state auditor’s office is never going to turn a case we investigated over to a prosecutor unless we’re fully confident in the work that we did.”
At the time the auditor’s office announced the Jones arrest, it also said it delivered a demand letter ordering Jones to repay over $1 million, the money it alleged he stole plus interest and investigative expenses.
It’s up to the attorney general or local district attorney to decide how to prosecute auditor investigations, or in Jones’ case, what happens to the civil demand now that a jury found him not guilty in the criminal case.
When a person receives a demand alongside his or her arrest, regardless of what happens with criminal charges, the claw back can be enforced through civil litigation — much like the case against several defendants in a stunning Mississippi Department of Human Services fraud case, which began in 2020 and has yet to be resolved. Walters said the demand against Jones is still the office’s next-largest in history, second only to the welfare scandal.
The government might choose to pursue civil litigation, even if criminal prosecution is unsuccessful, because there is a lower burden of proof to win civil cases.
But the attorney general’s office told Mississippi Today last month that it had not received the Jones demand letter from the auditor, meaning it has nothing left to enforce.
Walters said the auditor’s office sent the letter along with the case file four years ago, but that with a turnover in attorneys prosecuting the case, the auditor had to resend the file last year. If the attorney general’s office no longer possesses the demand document, Walters said, “it’s an incredibly easy problem to resolve.”
“Just reach out to us with a single phone call or email and we can get it to you,” Walters said.
After the interview, the auditor’s office sent the demand letter by email, and the attorney general’s office confirmed it was received.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Defendant in auditor’s ‘second largest’ embezzlement case in history goes free appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Centrist
This article presents a factual and balanced account of the embezzlement case involving Mardis Jones without overt ideological framing. It reports statements from both government officials criticizing the alleged misconduct and the defense attorney’s rebuttals, highlighting weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. The tone remains neutral, avoiding partisan language or loaded terms. It focuses on the procedural aspects, jury verdict, and potential civil actions without advocating for a political viewpoint. The article provides context from multiple perspectives, adhering to objective reporting rather than promoting a specific ideological stance.
Kerlin Moreno-Orellana is facing deportation over a misdemeanor charge that usually results in a fine. He was picked up by Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents on Thursday morning and transferred from the Raymond Detention Center to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.
On June 16, Jackson police arrested Moreno-Orellana, a contractor, in south Jackson along with his employer Christy Parker, who was showing him one of the old properties she worked on. Both were charged with illegal dumping, but Parker claims they did not dump anything.
After detaining them, Jackson police called a local TV outlet, 16 WAPT News, to come shoot the scene of the arrest. Parker said they were kept in the police car for over an hour, waiting for the news crew. The WAPT newsroom explained that the Jackson police routinely asks them to cover arrests related to illegal dumping or other high profile cases, in order to “dissuade people.”
Once at the station, the Jackson Police Department called ICE on the 35-year-old father of four, who had worker authorization documents. He was kept in jail overnight, while Parker was released hours after their arrest.
“He didn’t do anything I didn’t do,” Parker said in an interview with Mississippi Today. “But because I’m white, I’m here?”
A municipal court ordered Moreno-Orellana’s release the day after, but ICE placed a detainer on him – a formal request to keep a non-citizen in custody for 48 hours, while the agency investigates. It is not an arrest warrant. However, a state law passed in 2016 mandates that all local law enforcement comply with ICE detainers placed on undocumented immigrants.
“What we are doing today is no different than what we’ve always operated when the detainer is sent by ICE to the jail,” said Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones. “Nothing has changed.”
While the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department has historically worked with ICE, Jackson police actively seeking out ICE to detain people is a fairly recent occurrence, said Mississippi-based immigration attorney Jeremy Litton. Jackson police did not respond to a request for comment.
ICE picked up Moreno-Orellana with hours left on his detainer, and he now faces deportation. ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams said that Moreno-Orellana violated the conditions of a past bond agreement by being arrested for a new charge. He had already spent over a month in ICE custody in 2019, after getting arrested by park rangers for speeding and driving without a license.
Still, a minor misdemeanor charge – like illegal dumping – is normally insufficient for ICE to threaten to deport someone with worker authorization paperwork. Removal of a person with documentation is usually justified if the person is deemed a threat to public safety or national security.
“This does feel like a result of the elevated focus on deporting people from the Trump administration,” said Matt Steffey, professor at the Mississippi College School of Law.
Moreno-Orellana, who is from Honduras, has three boys and a girl, the youngest of whom is less than a year old. He has lived in Mississippi for over 16 years. Colleagues describe him as a valuable worker and a good friend.
“All he ever did was work and go home,” Parker said. “He was always willing to give somebody help.”
The possibility of his deportation is leaving his family in a precarious situation. Moreno-Orellana was the sole breadwinner of the family, and his wife worries about sustaining herself and their children without him.
“I’ve always dedicated myself to taking care of my kids at home, and he’s the one who brings food to the table,” his wife said in Spanish. “I’m afraid of staying, being without my children’s father. Not so much for me, but because they need him.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post JPD called ICE on Miss. father, who faces deportation appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article primarily reports on the actions of law enforcement and ICE with a focus on the human impact of deportation on a Mississippi family. While the reporting remains factual, the framing and choice of quotes highlight concerns about racial disparities, immigration enforcement policies, and potential overreach by authorities, suggesting a subtle critical tone toward current immigration enforcement practices. The article’s emphasis on the family’s hardship and the legal nuances involved positions it slightly left-of-center, sympathetic to immigrant rights and critical of aggressive ICE actions. However, it avoids overt ideological language, maintaining largely balanced coverage.
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