“It was devastating,” said the town’s mayor, Jerry Norwood. “We went on life support at that point.”

The mill closing meant the loss of 400 jobs, Norwood said, making it by far the top employer in a town of just 900 people. Despite being the mayor, Norwood knows how hard it is to find work close by. His last gig was at a chemical plant in Geismer, Louisiana, a three-hour round trip from his Gloster home.

“The workforce is probably the biggest obstacle (to attracting new industry),” Norwood told Mississippi Today. “We don’t have enough people to fill those (skilled) positions, electricians and stuff like that. And we don’t have a school here in Gloster. The school closed in 1989. People don’t want to move in here if their kids can’t get a quality education.”

In the last decade, towns like Gloster turned to what they saw as a new hope: the emerging wood pellet industry. While the industry is now grappling with a variety of environmental objections, the state and local governments have invested millions of dollars in wood pellets, through tax exemptions and other incentives, in an attempt to stem rural disinvestment.

In 2022, the world’s largest wood pellet producer came to another Mississippi town, Lucedale, 160 miles east of Gloster. The town was in a similar economic predicament: Census numbers show just 29% of working-age residents there are employed, compared to 60% on the national level, and over a third of the town lives below the poverty line. 

So when George County’s economic development director, Ken Flanagan, learned that the company, called Enviva, was bringing one of the largest new wood pellet operations in the world to Lucedale, he took a moment to let it sink in. 

“I never really had that, you know, winning the national championship moment where you get the trophy and jump around,” Flanagan said. “It was just a big sigh of relief.”

Lucedale beat out a number of other places chomping at the bit to house the new plant, he said, with some offering as much as 95% off the company’s tax bill. 

Enviva brought with it 103 full-time positions and 200 more contracting jobs, something to behold for a place with just under 700 working residents. While Lucedale is a small town, it’s in the heart of one of the top timber-producing regions of the world, known as America’s “wood basket,” which made it an ideal spot for a company like Enviva.

Since opening about two years ago, the impact of Enviva has transpired as Flanagan hoped: Most of the jobs have gone to local residents, he said, and even with a two-thirds tax discount the county gave up, Enviva still paid $1 million in revenue last year. 

“The fact that we were able to bring timber back to George County, we knew early on that this is going to be a big, big, deal,” he said.

Excited by the economic promise of the wood pellet world, and what it could mean to struggling rural areas, Mississippi officials have agreed to give companies like Enviva over $24 million in incentives over the last decade – a figure that’s likely much higher due to unquantified tax exemptions. 

But in the process, the wood pellet industry has turned parts of rural Mississippi into venues for a climate and public health debate that’s traversing the globe, one that people in Gloster are all too familiar with. 

The company was in the middle of an impressive fiscal performance: In 2023, Drax posted $1.5 billion in profits, on top of billions in subsidies from the British government.

In recent years, countries in Europe and Asia have gradually injected wood pellets into their energy portfolios as a way of meeting their carbon reduction goals. The trend is based on the belief, which was laid out in the European Union’s 2009 renewable energy directive, that burning wood instead of coal will help reduce emissions.

With a growing global demand for wood pellets, Drax and Enviva have expanded operations in forest-abundant regions like the Southeast. And in Mississippi, the industry has found one of its most eager suitors.

The Lucedale plant, for instance, was widely touted as the largest wood pellet operation in the world when it opened in 2022. To lure Enviva there, the state and county governments committed an estimated $20 million in grants and tax breaks, public records show. Enviva almost raked in another $46 million in state and local incentives for a new Mississippi plant, the Stone County Enterprise reported. But financial struggles have put the new project on hold as Enviva recently declared Chapter 11 Bankruptcy to reorganize its debts. It’s stock price as of Friday stood at 42 cents per share.

Overall, as of 2023, Mississippi had permitted production of over 2 million tons of pellets per year. In the South, where most American pellets come from, only one other state – North Carolina – had more capacity. 

But last year at Drax’s shareholders meeting in London, Martin had traveled to tell everyone about what’s gone wrong with the wood pellet business. During a Q&A portion of the meeting, she grabbed the microphone and addressed the companies’ leaders.

“We have become a sacrifice zone, and we feel like you don’t care about us as people,” she said, choking up as she spoke. “You are willing to pollute our community and extract our natural resources for your own economic gain. So I came all this way from Gloster, Mississippi, to ask you: What role are you prepared to play in addressing the health issues and air pollution that you continue to inflict in our community?”

It didn’t start out bad. When Drax’s facility opened in 2016, Gloster residents were pleased to see a new job creator come to town. 

“When you’re a small rural community, and they announce a business is coming, most people get excited,” Martin recalled to Mississippi Today. 

State officials were excited about it, too. Then-Gov. Phil Bryant even shouted out the new wood pellet plant in one of his State of the State speeches. To bring Drax to Gloster, Mississippi shelled out $2.8 million in grants, in addition to several tax exemptions, which include: full, 10-year corporate income and corporate franchise tax exemptions, as well as a 10-year sales and use tax exemption estimated at about $1.5 million, according to the Mississippi Development Authority. The company also received a 10-year local property tax exemption.

Due to confidentiality laws protecting taxpayers, Mississippi Today couldn’t accurately quantify the full value of those exemptions. For reference, though, Drax estimates it contributed $5 million in state and local revenue in 2023 alone, even with those incentives.

The local revenue has allowed the city to keep utility rates low, Norwood said, emphasizing the importance of making services affordable in a place with a high poverty rate. 

“Thank God for Drax, we have money in those departments where we can do that,” he said.

Drax’s overall economic impact to Amite County, where Gloster is, was $160 million in 2023, company spokesperson Michelli Martin told Mississippi Today. 

But it’s the facility’s environmental impact that has drawn more attention. 

In 2018, Drax alerted the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality that it had underestimated its release of toxic chemicals called Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, since the plant opened in 2016, and was over three times the legal limit. It wasn’t until 2021, almost five years after the releases began, that Drax finally came into compliance over its VOC emissions. In 2020, MDEQ fined the facility $2.5 million, one of the largest Clean Air Act penalties in state history.

Shortly after, Drax slipped up again. Testing from 2022 showed that Amite BioEnergy, the name of the Gloster facility, was releasing 50% over its permitted limit of another, more dangerous group of chemicals called Hazardous Air Pollutants, or HAPs. MDEQ cited Drax for a violation in 2023, and is now negotiating a new penalty with the company. 

The company also miscalculated its emissions from two wood pellet plants in Louisiana, for which the state fined Drax $3.2 million in 2022. Throughout the Southeast, regulators have fined wood pellet facilities 14 times for air emission violations since 2012, totaling $6.6 million in penalties. 

Krystal Martin and other residents were quick to connect Drax’s violations to health issues among those living near the plant. Martin’s mom, for instance, had just started going to the hospital in 2020 for an array of respiratory issues when they heard about the $2.5 million fine. 

Another resident, Shelia Dobbins, lived about a half mile from the plant until 2022. Dobbins told Mississippi Today that in 2017, she fainted during a doctor’s visit. After an extended hospital stay, doctors diagnosed her with COPD, and since then Dobbins has had to carry an oxygen tank with her wherever she goes. In the years after, she’s watched as similar symptoms have plagued her family and neighbors.

“I’m on oxygen… my husband was on oxygen, he’s deceased. My brother-in-law was on oxygen, he’s deceased. My sister is on oxygen right now. All these houses are right there together, around that plant,” she said.  “They need to own up to what they did.”

Three other residents who have lived near the plant told Mississippi Today they’ve also experienced respiratory issues since Drax arrived, and Martin said there were many more.

No conclusive evidence exists connecting Drax’s emissions to any of the aforementioned health symptoms. Norwood, the town’s mayor, was dubious aout the plant having anything to do with the health issues. MDEQ Executive Director Chris Wells told Mississippi Today that, just because Drax violated air emissions limits, doesn’t mean the company has harmed the public’s health. 

“God sees all sin the same,” Wells said. “In the environmental regulatory world, there are gradients of sin … I know that some of the folks in the Gloster community have expressed concerns about their health, and I understand why. What we've tried to tell them is, they are equating a violation with a health impact. I'm not saying there hasn't been. What I told them is that we haven't seen any evidence of that.”

Connecting any health symptoms to any one source of pollution is a tall order. But Erica Walker, a Jackson native who teaches epidemiology at Brown University, believes her ongoing research will determine if there is such a connection. 

Last August, Walker set up air monitors at different homes around Gloster to collect air quality levels. The preliminary data, she said, shows daily averages below federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. But those averages, Walker added, mask a worrisome trend: At night, when most people are home and near the air monitors, the pollutant levels are “magnitudes” higher than EPA standards. 

Walker also pointed to high levels of “noise pollution” that come from the plant, which operates through the night. Irritation from loud noises can build stress, she explained, which over time can increase a person’s risk of symptoms like cardiovascular diseases.

“A hundred percent of the people we’ve talked to in Gloster have expressed that (the noise) is something they can’t control,” she said. “They hear it all the time, at random times of night. Even people that live a distance away from (the plant).” 

Walker said it won’t be until August, when she’ll have a year’s worth of data, before she can officially compare her measurements to EPA standards and then start to narrow down the possible causes of residents’ health issues. 

But regardless of whether Drax is at the root of those issues, Walker said it’s a huge concern that officials allowed a wood pellet facility, which are known to release toxic chemicals harmful to residents, to be built so close to residents in an area with already poor health outcomes like Gloster.

“We want to make sure we aren’t additionally burdening already burdened communities,” Walker said. “When I first went to Gloster and saw where the wood pellet plant was, like literally in the middle of the community, like a real blastoma in the middle of this community that expanded, I was like, ‘Who approved this?’

“There are people that live right around (the Drax plant). If we would’ve taken seriously the environmental justice philosophy, I don’t even think that plant would have been approved. I can just say that plant would not be approved to go sit in Fondren, or the nice fancy part of Madison.”

When asked about the company’s emission violations, Drax reiterates it was the one to tell MDEQ it was out of compliance. 

“What the news articles that covered this don’t mention is that the emissions matter discussed is a direct result of how we continually monitor operations to ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements,” Martin, the company’s spokesperson, said in an email. “The potential issue was identified by Drax through our own on-site monitoring, and we shared the data with the (MDEQ) to proactively address it. Moreover, Drax is constantly evaluating new ways to enhance our operations as technology and best industry practices evolve over time.”  

But the immediate impacts from emissions are only part of the environmental debate going on around wood pellets. More and more, scientists are questioning the very premise that the industry was born out of.

When accounting for the loss of trees that sequester carbon naturally, wood pellet production actually increases the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Carr said. 

“Most of those studies show that, for the next three decades to 100 years, you’re going to have more carbon in the atmosphere from burning trees than if you just continue burning fossil fuels,” he said, citing a study the center commissioned looking specifically at Drax’s plants in Mississippi and Louisiana. “The reason is that you’re cutting down trees that are currently storing carbon, and you’re putting that carbon immediately into the atmosphere. You’re not going to recapture that carbon until they grow back to an equal level of carbon storage.”  

A 2018 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made the same conclusion. 

Part of the discrepancy between skeptics and those in the industry is over what kind of wood gets used for pellets. Companies like Drax and Enviva maintain their pellets come largely from leftover wood that other businesses, like sawmills, can’t use, as well as from thinnings, which is when a forester removes smaller trees to let larger ones grow.

But in a letter to President Biden and other leaders in 2021, over 500 scientists from around the world argued that even using the “low-grade” wood those companies rely on creates a “carbon debt.”

“Regrowing trees and displacement of fossil fuels may eventually pay off this carbon debt, but regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change,” the letter reads. “As numerous studies have shown, this burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas.”

It’s unclear what the growing public opinion against wood pellets means for its future in Mississippi. It’s especially unclear for Enviva after its recent bankruptcy declaration. Flanagan, the economic development director in George County, said operations at the Lucedale plant have gone on as usual and he hasn’t heard any sign of that changing. 

Enviva declined to provide any comment for this story. 

Activists around the world, like Merry Dickinson in the U.K., are working to steer politicians against approving new subsidies for wood pellets. 

Dickinson lives about 20 miles from Drax’s plant in Yorkshire, which is where the pellets from Gloster get shipped to and used for energy production. She was at the same shareholder meeting last April where Martin gave her testimony about the health issues in Gloster. 

“Learning about the huge amounts of subsidies that are coming from our energy bills to support (Drax) and then learning about what’s happening to the communities like in Gloster, Mississippi, around the Southern U.S., and the devastating impact that Drax, and therefore our money in the U.K., is having on these people, on these forests… it is so outrageous,” she said. 

Despite her grievances with Drax, Martin has said repeatedly that she’s not looking to shut down the company. After all, the town does need the jobs. In 2018, the town got its first grocery store in decades. At the end of the day, she just wants what’s best for her hometown.

“No one’s invested in Gloster. Everything’s dead. The trees are dead, the grass is dead, the streets are a mess,” she said on a phone call in March. “We want to see something greater in Gloster.”

The post Trouble in the wood basket: How a global push for renewable energy took advantage of rural Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, has struggled to rebuild after a devastating tornado struck last year. One family is finding their way home.

The post A Displaced Family Finds Their Way Home After Rolling Fork Tornado appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.

BOONEVILLE — Northeast Mississippi Community College was running out of space, so after years of saving, it bought an empty furniture warehouse five minutes outside this small town. 

The plan is to fill the 350,000 square feet with the college’s growing career-technical education programs, setting up everything from classrooms, labs and offices to conference space that could support economic development in the five rural counties that comprise the northeastern-most state lines of Mississippi. 

“I can see it in my mind,” said Chris Murphy, the college’s vice president of finance, standing in the mostly empty warehouse on a recent Thursday. 

Two years later, the warehouse is still mostly empty. In the cavernous space, there are ant hills next to cardboard boxes belonging to a tenant whose business helped the college pay off the building’s roughly $3 million note (the total cost was about $7 million). Outside, weeds poke through the cracked pavement. 

Without help affording at least half of the estimated $15 million in renovations, the warehouse will stay that way, Murphy said.

Until then, the community college and its students will make do with the current career-technical facilities, housed in decades-old brick buildings on the main campus, where conditions are moldy, grimy, cluttered and water-damaged. 

Though $15 million may not sound like much, it’s a big ask for the state’s historically neglected community college system. And NEMCC isn’t alone: Many community colleges across the state are struggling with unmet needs, especially on the infrastructure side, even though lawmakers have drawn from the state’s excess revenue to provide what may be more funding than ever before. 

Not every college has benefited equally. Though all 15 schools have received routine funds for new buildings, repairs or renovations, some colleges have gotten additional appropriations for line-item projects while others, including NEMCC, have not. 

Lawmakers acknowledged this disparity earlier this year and said they are working to fix it. 

“I want to make sure that I keep the big boys happy, and they get their fair share, but just, also … we’ve got to do something for the smaller community colleges to keep them afloat,” said Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville, chair of the House Colleges and Universities Committee during an appropriations hearing earlier this year. 

But it may not be enough to correct for years of paltry funding. Mississippi has historically used bonds to fund capital projects for state entities. In 2021, the most recent year lawmakers gave out bonds, the entire 15-college system received $35 million, according to the Mississippi Community College Board. 

That’s about the highest amount ever received in bonds by the community college system. And yet, the eight universities got more than $86 million in bonds that year, despite educating fewer students than the community colleges. 

For colleges tasked with shepherding the state’s ambitious workforce development programs, the meager funding means they’re educating students in facilities that are falling behind the conditions of private industry. 

“The idea that working in a factory is dark, dangerous, dingy is not true,” said Greg James, NEMCC’s director of workforce systems. Students “need to see the environment they’re gonna be working in.”

“I don’t think I need new equipment anytime soon,” he added. “I need buildings to put it in.”

Dead ladybugs line the windows, which aren’t insulated. A wide refrigerator is broken; another fridge can’t get cold enough. A sink in the back galley is out of commission, the pipes rusting and broken. One time in recent years, water leaked through the floor onto computers in the office below. 

Other career-tech classes are in brick buildings with flat roofs prone to leaking. In a classroom with dead cockroaches and chalkboards, air-compressor equipment is squished together in rows that don’t resemble a factory. In an industrial lab, a basin sink is covered in grime, and the door to the nearby tool room is metal. 

“That looks like a prison to me,” said Nadara Cole, NEMCC’s vice president for workforce training and economic development. But, she joked, at least the leather-and-chrome chairs the college can’t afford to replace are back in style. 

Cole is getting ready to retire. She’s worked at NEMCC since the early 1990s, and in that time, the college has been unable to build any new career-tech facilities. The existing buildings, which she said were all constructed during an older push for vocational programs in the 1960s, are almost as old as she is. 

All the community colleges struggle with funding. With roughly 90,000 students, the community colleges educate more students than Mississippi’s public universities, but they are expected to do so with lower tuition and less state appropriations. 

This imbalance, Cole and others say, is directly reflected in the way the community colleges look which, in turn, affects recruitment. Students who tour NEMCC sometimes come from high schools that are in better shape, she said. 

“It’s subliminally telling them, ‘you’re the stepchildren,’” Cole said.

“That is the image we sometimes feel we are projecting because we don’t look as nice,” she added. 

The 15 community colleges received $396 million in operational support and capital funding last year, compared to the more than $1.1 billion appropriation for the eight universities, a figure that doesn’t include state financial aid. 

It’s not a recent phenomenon: From 1989 to 2021, the community colleges have received one-third the bond funds the universities have, according to figures compiled by MCCB. This means capital projects at the colleges move slower, because they must wait years to accumulate enough bonds, all while the cost of construction increases with inflation. 

Kell Smith, the MCCB director, said he doesn’t know why lawmakers don’t appropriate an equitable amount of bonds to the colleges, except possibly because state laws require counties within a community college district to provide additional tax revenue for the “enlargement, improvement and repair” of the campuses. 

“I hate to say that’s the way it’s always been,” Smith said. 

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People are growing more skeptical about the value of higher education. More rural residents are graduating from high school, but people in those communities remain less likely than their suburban and urban peers to continue their education. This 10-part series from the Rural News Network, made possible with support from Ascendium, explores how institutions and students are meeting their educational needs and the demands of today’s rural workforce. 

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For rural colleges like NEMCC that don’t have the tax base of a Tupelo or DeSoto County, this means they don’t have significant funding alternatives when state appropriations are low. NEMCC is located in Prentiss County, where nearly 17% of its population of less than 25,000 lives below the poverty line.

NEMCC gets about $4 million a year from millage from its five counties, Murphy said. 

The formula that lawmakers use for routine appropriations for repairs and renovations also poses another funding ceiling for rural colleges. Last year, lawmakers appropriated $50 million such funds based on a formula that is one-half evenly split among the colleges and one-half full-time equivalent enrollment, meaning colleges got more money if they had more students.

With about 2,500 students, NEMCC isn’t the smallest colleges in Mississippi, but it can’t compete with ones that draw enrollment from the state’s metro areas.  

Jason Mattox, the associate vice president for career and technical education, said NEMCC receives federal funds for career-tech programs, but the amount is too small to address all the equipment issues in any given year. The money is also shared with the college’s health science programs. 

Without newer facilities, the stigma associated with career-tech education will continue to kneecap the programs, Mattox said. 

“It’s dirty, it’s greasy, it’s what we call the ol’ vo-techs,” Mattox said. “In reality, we’re not that way at all. We’re training students for highly technical, high-demand jobs, and we need facilities that replicate what students should see when they get out into the working industry.”

The difference is noticeable, said Cole Thacker, a 24-year-old culinary arts triple major who worked in restaurants before enrolling at NEMCC. 

The kitchen is so small, he’s burned himself trying to prevent hot pans from touching other students. Because there are not enough stand mixers, he’s had to wait for his turn hours after class to finish assignments. The fridges have ruined his classmates’ projects, making it harder to learn advanced techniques like mirror glazing. 

Thacker views this program as an investment in his future; he hopes to work at Disney World after he graduates in 2026. Going directly into the restaurant industry could only take him so far, he said. 

“I tried to climb my way up, and I found out you can only climb so high without knowing … fundamental stuff that usually isn’t discussed in the professional environment,” he said.  

Toward the back of the shop are gray-and-white automated machines. They’re brand new — not to mention expensive, costing a total of $816,000. They can be used to cut material into a range of shapes to be used in the manufacturing process for anything from car parts to surgical implants. This skill set is so desirable that NEMCC’s programs have helped attract major defense contractors and international companies like Toyota to the area. 

“The sky’s the limit,” said Jonathan Shaw, an instructor in the program. 

It’s also something Shaw thinks about more than he should have to. When it rains, the ceiling leaks. The location of the five machines, Shaw said, was strategic. Still, the machines are just a few feet from a wall that he said contains a “splashing risk.” 

The morning a Mississippi Today reporter visited the lab, Shaw had to vacuum up water that pooled on the floor. It’s what he signed up for when he decided to become a teacher, taking a $40,000 pay cut because he wanted to pass on the skills he’d learned to others.

When it comes to requesting state funds for capital improvements, the community colleges are often on their own, according to interviews with state and local college officials. Unlike the state’s public universities, which are under the umbrella of the Institutions of Higher Learning, the community colleges operate more autonomously, with individual governing boards. MCCB supports the college’s requests but isn’t involved in crafting them. 

Mississippi’s workforce development office, called Accelerate MS, is a source of funding for programs and equipment — they helped NEMCC get the new machines. While brick-and-mortar projects aren’t Accelerate’s main focus, the office has acted as a pass-through for construction projects that lawmakers funded with federal pandemic money, said Courtney Taylor, its new director.

Last year, those funds went to community colleges, Taylor said, and the year before that, $20 million went to the private William Carey University for a new primary care institute. 

“Building buildings is very different than building people,” she said. 

Smith said he doesn’t know the scope of deferred maintenance at the colleges, and that the Department of Finance and Administration Bureau of Buildings would have that information. The colleges do provide a 5-year capital plan to MCCB, Smith added, that shows $131 million in repair-and-renovation needs for the upcoming fiscal year. 

What can end up happening is the colleges, like other public entities, receive funds based on how powerful their local delegation is. 

“Our legislators, they do what they say, but we’re one little corner of the whole state,” Cole said. 

At the same time, Cole said she isn’t blaming lawmakers for NEMCC’s needs. 

“There’s just not enough funds to do everything we need to do,” she said. “We’re a poor state. I get it. We can’t depend on just the state, although that is where a lot of it is going to come from.” 

That mentality also leads state agencies like MCCB to craft budget requests based on what they believe lawmakers will fund. According to a 2007 law, community colleges are supposed to receive “mid-level funding,” an amount in-between the budgets of K-12 and IHL. But lawmakers have never done that, so MCCB stopped asking for it on behalf of the colleges. 

“What the statute required us to request was such a high amount that we knew this is not reasonable, this is something we can expect to get,” Smith said. 

There’s also a lack of transparency in how funding decisions are made. Though Smith regularly talks with “budget writers” — lawmakers on the appropriations committees — he couldn’t tell Mississippi Today how they decide what to fund other than the state has finite resources. 

And two college presidents whose schools have not received as much state support as others declined to talk with Mississippi Today for this story. The presidents of Copiah-Lincoln Community College and East Central Community College said they did not have time for an interview. 

At Mississippi Delta Community College, the law enforcement training academy is struggling with mold and a roof that’s falling in, lawmakers learned during the House appropriations committee earlier this year. Tyrone Jackson, the president, said he wouldn’t talk with Mississippi Today for this article because the colleges advocate with one voice during the session.

But the colleges don’t receive state funding as one. 

In NEMCC’s industrial maintenance classroom, instructor Brian Warren demonstrated how to cut dice while trying not to sweat. The air compressor in the decades-old building’s AC blew out that morning. 

What really gets to Warren — who, like Shaw, took a roughly $40,000 pay cut for this job — is the lack of space. 

One day, he hopes he will finally have a shop large enough to teach students how to work with a manufacturing robot, donated by a nearby Toyota supplier, that has been sitting wrapped in plastic for four years because he doesn’t have enough space to safely use it. 

James, the workforce systems director, asked the council for feedback on what NEMCC could be doing to help local employers find qualified workers. If NEMCC can secure funding, the council would likely meet in the renovated furniture warehouse, in a grander space befitting the group’s ambitions.

“Are we working on something you think is a waste of time?” James asked the group. 

One person suggested NEMCC should offer a lineman class. Several people said they wanted to see NEMCC teach common sense skills, from a work ethic to how to read a clock and use a tape measure. Leon Hays, the executive director of the Prentiss County Development Association, added that “getting a diploma doesn’t give you life skills.” 

Rusty Berryhill, the president of a furniture company in Union County and a past chairman of the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, said NEMCC should consider creating a distribution list for employers of recent graduates, an idea that generated a lot of interest. 

Then Forrest Bryan, an ecosystem coordinator from Accelerate MS, invited members of the council to a roundtable discussion with industry, not lawmakers or nonprofits, about funding opportunities. 

“If we’re not listening to industry, we’re not listening to the people who really matter, okay?” Bryan said. “Politicians really don’t matter. I mean, obviously they matter, but they have their place over there. So the industry leaders and the industry needs are what we are wanting to address at this particular discussion.” 

“Somebody should shout, ‘Amen!’” Taylor, NEMCC’s finance person, said, tapping Mattox on the shoulder. 

The council’s next stop after the meeting was to tour a brand new robotics lab the college did up itself with painted floors and new lighting.

Before checking out the new classroom, Berryhill paid NEMCC a compliment, saying the college was working hard to be beneficial to local industry. He recently hired one NEMCC graduate at his small company, where he employs less than 125 people, and is employing another NEMCC student part-time. 

But are lawmakers appropriating enough to help the college sustain its programs? 

“I’m not answering that,” Berryhill responded. He later said he felt like it wasn’t his place to comment on funding matters, because he doesn’t want lawmakers to feel criticized for appropriating too little or make them think they are giving too much, adding “it’s a no-win situation on my part to answer that question.” 

Murphy said he thinks lawmakers support Mississippi’s community colleges — they just need to know how. By purchasing the furniture warehouse, NEMCC made a commitment to help citizens in its five-county region, an area where the free-trade agreements of the 1990s led the economy to suffer.

“We need the Legislature behind us,” Murphy said. “I think they are, especially on the workforce equipment and program side. But we need help on the capital side as well.” 

The post ‘The stepchildren:’ Community colleges struggle to fund buildings for growing workforce programs appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi election officials moved at least 10 voting precincts ahead of the Tuesday, March 12, 2024, primaries.

The post Mississippi Moves 10 Voting Precincts, Provides Incorrect or Missing Information For 90 appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.

Sarah Fowler is reporting on the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., in the state where she was born and raised, as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

In winter 2021, more than 150,000 people living in Jackson, Miss., were left without running water.

Faucets were dry or dribbling a muddy brown. For weeks, people across the city lost the water they normally relied on to drink, cook and bathe. With no way to flush their toilets, some parents sent their children into the woods to relieve themselves. Businesses closed. Mississippi’s capital effectively shut down.

The following year, at the height of Mississippi’s sweltering summer in August 2022, it would all happen again.

Each time Jackson faced a water crisis, local and state leaders cast blame in familiar directions. Lawmakers criticized city officials for ignoring leaky pipes and failing to collect payments from customers. City officials pointed to Jackson’s shrinking population and decades of economic decline. And they said state officials, mostly white and Republican, had starved the mostly Black, Democratic city of resources.

But the final blow was delivered by Siemens, a giant German corporation that had swept into town in 2010, boldly promising to install modern water meters that would boost revenues and return Jackson’s water system to a moneymaking enterprise that could afford to fix its crumbling infrastructure.

Siemens, better known for building power plants and high-speed trains, failed to deliver on its promises. Jackson found itself with many meters that didn’t work and wildly inaccurate water bills it couldn’t collect.

Siemens returned the $90 million it had been paid for the project. But the damage was done. Jackson was out more than $450 million in fees and lost revenue. It had no way to repair failing equipment and aging pipes that left city water unsafe to drink and ultimately led to a federal takeover of the water system in December 2022.

The outlines of Siemens’s role in Jackson’s water issues were laid out publicly in 2019, when the city sued the company. But Jackson was not the only Mississippi city that fell victim to the promise of easy money.

A yearlong New York Times investigation, drawing on thousands of pages of government records and interviews with city officials across the state, reveals how Siemens and other corporations went from one small, cash-strapped town to the next making grand promises to modernize water systems and boost revenues. It also sheds new light on the involvement of a state agency that was supposed to vet the deals.

In town after town, salesmen lured city officials who had little expertise in water meters with gee-whiz technology and complicated cost-saving algorithms. They said the meters could be installed at no cost to taxpayers and offered cash-back guarantees.

Even when meters started failing in large numbers and cities complained they were on the verge of financial disaster, the companies kept selling their services.

For nearly a decade, three companies — Siemens; the Mississippi-based McNeil Rhoads, started by a former Siemens salesman, Chris McNeil; and the North Carolina water meter manufacturer Mueller — crisscrossed the state signing multimillion-dollar deals in cities desperate for money.

Mr. McNeil pitched most of the deals, first for Siemens, then for his own company. He claimed that Mueller’s “smart” meters would be so accurate and efficient they would more than pay for themselves. In accordance with state policy at the time, every project was reviewed by the Mississippi Development Authority, an agency run by executives appointed by the governor.

From 2009 to 2017, at least 10 Mississippi cities signed contracts with the companies to install smart meters or other new technology. All but one have reported problems, and at least four have sued to recoup money they paid to Siemens, McNeil Rhoads or Mueller. Three of those suits are still pending.

Siemens and McNeil Rhoads, competitors that pitched the projects and acted as project managers, hired contractors who installed many meters improperly, according to officials in Jackson, McComb and Moss Point. In some cities, the two companies also struggled to link meters to the home office or to merge a new billing system with an old one.

Officials in at least eight Mississippi cities said they had problems with Mueller’s smart meters, which sometimes didn’t measure accurately because of faulty parts or batteries that died sooner than promised. Water departments in other states, including California and Missouri, have reported similar problems with Mueller meters over the past decade.

McComb, a city of 12,000 people south of Jackson, signed the first Siemens water meter contract in Mississippi. Mayor Quordiniah N. Lockley, city manager at the time, said McComb agreed to pay the company $10 million to install 6,000 smart Master Meters.

But contract workers hired by Siemens put them in backward and missed deadlines to install the antennas that the meters needed to communicate with a central office, Mr. Lockley said. Then some customers saw their water bills hit as much as $1,000 per month, with no obvious explanation.

Mr. Lockley said he called a friend, whom he declined to name, on the Jackson City Council and warned him not to go forward with the developing Siemens deal there.

He said he had one message: “Run.”

“Just because they come in a suit and tie doesn’t mean they’re not selling snake oil,” Mr. Lockley said in an interview.

Even as lawsuits and complaints from customers mounted, the companies continued making the same promises, and state and city officials continued approving contracts.

Jackson ultimately signed a deal with Siemens to install Mueller meters, the largest contract in the city’s history. Officials in Cleveland, a small city in the Mississippi Delta, inked a deal with Siemens for Mueller meters as well. Columbus, Meridian and Moss Point — all largely Black cities of fewer than 35,000 people — hired McNeil Rhoads to install Mueller meters.

Officials in some of the cities say they have been financially crippled.

In a letter to the development authority and the state attorney general, Jamie Lee, the city attorney for Cleveland, wrote that hundreds of meters were malfunctioning and the issue “could lead Cleveland into a major financial deficit if not addressed immediately.” She asked for “the assistance of your two offices in achieving a resolution with Siemens.”

Ms. Lee said she never received a response.

In a statement that did not address complaints by other Mississippi cities, a Siemens spokeswoman, Annie Satow, said the company had invested significant work in Jackson to “help navigate persistent challenges outside the company’s control,” including “substantial assistance beyond contractual requirements” with the billing system.

“Siemens acted in good faith, worked cooperatively with city personnel and was transparent and responsive to oversight by the city’s administration and Department of Public Works,” she wrote.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba of Jackson said that while he couldn’t discuss the specifics of the deal, Siemens was not entirely to blame. Jackson, he said, willingly entered into a bad agreement. He declined to elaborate, and his office did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. Since the federal takeover, which came with an infusion of $600 million and a third-party manager to run the water system, leaks are being repaired and citywide boil-water notices have drastically diminished.

Mr. McNeil did not return numerous calls seeking comment. A Mueller spokesman and other executives did not respond to repeated calls and emails.

Records show that Siemens and Mueller made attempts to replace or repair some meters in the cities where problems arose, but the cites still lost money and some, including Jackson, McComb and Moss Point, had to pay to replace meters or other technology on their own.

Reached by phone, Glenn McCullough, executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority from 2015 to 2020, said he had not been aware of widespread problems with Siemens, McNeil Rhoads or Mueller. He referred questions to the agency’s spokeswoman, Tammy Craft, who declined to comment.

“We can’t speak on this any further, since no one involved in reviewing these contracts back-when is at M.D.A. anymore,” Ms. Craft wrote.

But she noted that in 2017, state lawmakers passed a bill ending M.D.A.’s oversight of such contracts.

A promising solution for an ailing system

At the time Jackson was considering a deal with Siemens, the water industry was in the midst of a major transition. New technologies had made it possible for sensors to more accurately measure water use. Smart meters could eliminate the need for meter readers to visit homes to calculate people’s water bills, a huge potential savings for utility departments.

Manufacturers, including Mueller, saw the technology as a critical part of their future. But only if they could convince municipal water departments it was worth spending millions of dollars to replace old equipment. In financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015, Mueller described water utilities as slow adopters of the technology because of installation costs.

The water industry found a solution in the growing effort to make public agencies and schools more energy-efficient.

As far back as the 1980s, the federal government had been supporting partnerships with private companies to retrofit buildings with more efficient equipment.

Under energy performance contracts, municipalities could borrow money and use it to hire private contractors to replace old light fixtures, air-conditioning units and other appliances. Savings from lower electric bills would then be used to pay off the debt, allowing cities to invest in improvements at no real cost to taxpayers.

The contracts had made Siemens tens of millions of dollars in Mississippi alone and allowed a financially struggling state to afford equipment upgrades that otherwise might have been out of reach.

Then, two years before Siemens pitched a plan to help Jackson fix its ailing water system, the Mississippi attorney general’s office issued an opinion that helped pave the way for even more ambitious projects.

In 2008, the office reviewed the state statute governing energy performance contracts and concluded that cities and school districts could use them to finance projects that conserved water, not just energy.

An opportunity ‘too good to pass up’

In 2009, a decade before Jackson officials sued Siemens over failed meters, the company signed its first water contract in the state in tiny McComb.

McComb had boomed as a railroad city in the 1870s, carved out of a dense pine forest about halfway between Jackson and New Orleans.

Today it resembles a lot of small Mississippi towns: Its shrinking population is almost 75 percent Black. One in three people live under the poverty line. A downtown resurgence has begun, but money for civic improvements is in short supply.

So when Siemens offered a way to fill city coffers through the water department, the opportunity seemed too good to pass up.

According to Mr. Lockley, Siemens told city officials they would be able to disconnect someone’s water with the touch of a button while sitting in their office. New smart meters would measure water use remotely and more accurately.

Siemens said the meters would boost revenues by more than $600,000 a year, sales materials show. And city officials believed McComb would be “one of the top water departments in the state,” Mr. Lockley recalled.

McComb paid Siemens to replace 6,000 water meters, but computer software glitches and delays in installing communication antennae left the city unable to monitor water usage remotely, Mr. Lockley said. Residents also began complaining of erroneous water bills.

When McComb tried to cancel the contract, Siemens sued and the case went to mediation. To get out of the contract, McComb agreed to pay for the meters already in the ground at a cost of $2 million to $3 million, Mr. Lockley said. Then the city hired another company to install software that allowed the meters to function.

Mr. Lockley said he has never spoken publicly about the settlement before because he signed a nondisclosure agreement.

“They tie your hands, say you can’t talk about the situation, and it just keeps happening,” Mr. Lockley said.

Jackson’s crippling ‘sweetheart deal’

Even as problems arose in McComb, Mr. McNeil used the city as a selling point to win new business for Siemens.

Mr. McNeil had been a local football standout in Petal, Miss., before becoming an offensive lineman at Mississippi State University in the early 2000s. He previously had secured a 15-year contract for Siemens to overhaul lighting, air-conditioning and traffic lights throughout Jackson.

He and a fellow salesman, Dusty Rhoads, the son of the mayor of nearby Flowood, traveled the state, pitching similar contracts to financially strapped towns. They eventually left Siemens and started their own company, McNeil Rhoads, signing smart meter contracts with at least six cities.

When pitching to Cleveland, Mr. McNeil, representing Siemens, noted the McComb contract in a sales presentation, city records show. Savings were “guaranteed,” his slide show said. If they fell short, “we will write you a check for the difference.” The statement was followed by eight exclamation points.

In September 2010, Mr. McNeil sent the first in a series of emails to the Public Works Department in Jackson. He had a plan to replace the city’s water meters and make critical repairs to its infrastructure. The project would create jobs, he promised, and the new meters would cover the cost of installation — or else the company would.

Mr. McNeil pursued Jackson officials for two years and backed up his cost-saving claims with a Siemens-funded study of the meters. All of this, he said, had already been done down the road in McComb.

By the end of 2012, Jackson was on the verge of signing a $90 million deal that the city would later estimate cost it $450 million in expenses and lost revenues.

Based on an email Mr. McNeil sent to Jackson’s public works director then, Dan Gaillet, at least one Jackson official was aware of the project in McComb. But Mr. Lockley said no one called him about it and his warning was ignored.

Problems emerged just weeks into the Jackson project. A politically connected subcontractor, hired by Siemens at the recommendation of city officials, had installed some meters improperly, and later, there were communication errors between the meters and receivers. Some meters showed customers not using any water, while others got huge bills that city officials said were implausible.

Unable to calculate realistic bills, Jackson officials stopped collecting from thousands of customers.

The loss of revenue exacerbated years of neglect and poor decision-making and left the water department in dire financial straits and residents facing a near continuous string of boil-water notices. City officials would later accuse subcontractors involved with the project of contributing to the problems, something they deny.

A former Jackson councilman, Melvin Priester, was elected after the city had signed the deal but before groundbreaking had begun. He voiced his objections but was in the minority.

Siemens got a “sweetheart deal,” Mr. Priester told The Times, but “when you are in bad straits like the City of Jackson is now and was in 2013, all of your options are bad deals.”

Calls for help went unanswered

The Mississippi Development Authority, which greenlit the project, was created in 2000 as an economic engine for the state. It directs tax credits to attract companies and gives out millions of dollars in grants to spur revitalization efforts.

As far back as 2010, it also played a role in reducing local energy and water use.

If a city wanted to borrow against future savings for a retrofit project, it had to submit a request to the development authority. State law required the authority to review and approve each contract to “assure that entities can rely upon projected and guaranteed energy savings,” according to policies that were in effect until 2017.

The reviews, conducted by licensed engineers outside the authority, were seen as a critical backstop by city officials, who often lacked the expertise or resources to verify companies’ promises.

“M.D.A. legitimized it,” said Amy St. Pe’, Moss Point’s city attorney, who is suing McNeil Rhoads and Mueller. “Any doubts that we had, when we saw that M.D.A. was backing the program, we felt that it had to be good for the city.”

During a sales pitch, Mr. McNeil cited the agency’s approval process to dispel naysayers in Harrison County, a Gulf Coast community that was considering a project with his company. At a September 2014 meeting, the board of supervisors worried that the county could be left millions in debt if the savings didn’t pan out, according to an article in The Biloxi Sun Herald. Mr. McNeil responded by saying the project was “100 percent regulated by the Mississippi Development Authority,” and the board voted unanimously in favor.

Records show the agency often engaged in back-and-forth with cities seeking approval of the contracts. No application prompted more scrutiny than Jackson’s.

When the development authority reviewed Siemens’s proposal, it raised more than 200 questions, asking how the work being described could possibly save the city money. Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. sent a 19-page reply that answered and largely dismissed those concerns. One week later, in March 2013, the agency signed off on the contract.

From 2009 to 2017, at least 12 cities pursued energy performance contracts that the agency reviewed, a number of them involving water projects.

Companies pitching the work came up with predicted cost savings using their own methods, records show. Siemens’s estimate, for example, depended largely on how much more accurate new meters would be than old meters. But nowhere in the state’s analysis did engineers ask Siemens or the other companies to prove their calculations.

In a review of hundreds of pages of correspondence between the agency and local officials, The Times did not find a single instance when state officials passed on information about problems cities were experiencing with Siemens, McNeil Rhoads or Mueller.

In fact, when cities directly reported problems and begged the agency for help, they found themselves on their own.

Ms. Lee, the Cleveland city attorney, said she, the mayor and at least two aldermen sought guidance from the agency to no avail.

Ms. Lee wrote her letter in May 2018. A year later, in August 2019, when the city was already embroiled in a lawsuit with Siemens and Mueller, Alderman Gary Gainspoletti sent another letter, pleading with officials as the city was trying to “stop the bleeding.”

An agency official acknowledged receipt, but help never came.

Mr. McCullough, the agency’s executive director at the time, said, “I don’t recall seeing any document regarding defective water meters coming to my desk.”

Warning signs emerge nationwide

For years as companies installed Mueller meters across Mississippi, the meter manufacturer was aware of problems with its products in other states, including California and Missouri.

In 2012, the same year Cleveland was putting faulty water meters in the ground and Jackson was signing its contract, Mueller alerted a water authority in Missouri that some meters had defective magnets that would break, preventing them from recording water consumption, according to a regulatory report. The water authority returned the meters to Mueller for repair.

Years later, a federal class action lawsuit filed in New York by a Mueller shareholder alleged that executives had “misled the investing public” by not being honest about the failure rate of smart meters. The suit was dismissed in 2020, but sworn statements by three confidential informants suggested that Mueller was struggling with high failure rates as early as 2013.

That is when San Diego officials realized that a connection problem was preventing many of the meters from recording data, according to one of the witnesses, described in the suit as a regional manager for Mueller. Residents complained for years of abnormally high bills. The same issues would arise in Jackson and other Mississippi cities.

The suit also pointed out problems that year in Missouri. Mueller replaced nearly 80 percent of water meters in Chillicothe after moisture was found in parts that were supposed to be dry. By 2019, because of battery issues, the replacement meters had a failure rate of 89 percent.

The largest investigation into Mueller by a public utility would unfold in the state. From 2012 to 2015, Missouri American Water installed thousands of Mueller meters. Regulators reported that the meters had “several different kinds of defects,” leading to inaccurate readings or none at all. In August 2015, the utility began a costly campaign to replace 24,000 of the nearly 100,000 that had been installed.

All the while, Mueller was touting its smart meters as a critical driver of growth and telling investors that municipal governments would increasingly seek out the new technology.

‘They preyed on disadvantaged cities’

Mr. McNeil continued to push Mueller meters. After winning Siemens the Jackson contract, he started his own company and used the meters in energy performance contracts he landed across Mississippi — in Columbus, Gautier, Grenada, Meridian, Moss Point and Tupelo.

Seven years after signing in 2014, Columbus Light and Water Department reported excessive failure rates and began pressing Mueller to make good on an extended warranty it had promised. Early on, the company was responsive, answering emails and sending a batch of parts, according to department records. But when complaints continued, Mueller employees stopped answering the department’s questions, said Mike Bernsen, the utility’s interim general manager in 2021.

“We played it through the channels as far as we could.” Mr. Bernsen said.

Frustrations with getting Mueller officials to respond continued into 2022, emails show. In a series of emails early that year, department officials asked Mueller for a meeting to discuss the increasing number of failing meters, but after weeks without an answer, they concluded the company was avoiding them.

Moss Point, signing with McNeil Rhoads in 2017, discovered problems almost immediately, according to Ms. St. Pe’, the city attorney. Residents’ bills were improbably high, and Mueller initially offered batches of replacement devices.

But then, once the city filed suit, the company claimed it was under no obligation to replace the meters because the city had bought them from McNeil Rhoads, not directly from Mueller. Mueller stopped responding and McNeil Rhoads went out of business, leaving Moss Point with little financial recourse, Ms. St. Pe’ said.

“McNeil Rhoades is who convinced us to purchase these water meters,” she said. “I feel like they preyed on disadvantaged cities, predominantly African American cities.”

Out of the six known cities that hired McNeil Rhoads, four are majority Black.

Mueller may have stopped replying to Columbus and Moss Point, but a sales representative, John Flynn, was still pushing updated meters in Tupelo last June.

In an email to Chris Lewis, the local utility’s superintendent, he asked if the city wanted to “try some of our new meters.” Mr. Lewis said he would take five. Mr. Flynn said they come eight to a box.

Mr. Lewis responded: “Perfect!”

Irene Casado Sanchez contributed reporting. This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University.

The post Big Companies Cashed In on Mississippi’s Water. Small Towns Paid the Price. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

BELZONI – Deep in a crumbling building, there is a room filled with folders. 

Just a sliver of the room’s walls peek over the top of the manila piles. There are too many folders to count, with thick stacks of documents inside them, containing precious, forgotten information about a forgotten community, a community once cared for in this very building.

The only hospital in Belzoni, Patients’ Choice Medical Center of Humphreys County, closed in 2013. Besides the piles of paper, this building is empty, and the town is following suit. In the decade since the hospital’s closure, Belzoni has suffered.

Belzoni calls itself the “heart of the Delta” because of the town’s central location — people driving to various places in the region must pass through Belzoni, particularly those coming from Jackson.

After driving over the last hill just north of Yazoo City, U.S. 49 opens up into the Delta’s vast fields of green, leading straight to the city of Belzoni, just a speck flying past on the right. If you blink, you’ll miss it.

But to miss it would be to miss one of the rural communities that comprise the beating heart of Mississippi.

Rural towns, where the majority of Mississippians make their lives and homes, are often powered by hospitals that provide health care and jobs that sustain small but significant economies. When these small-town hospitals like Belzoni’s close, it can be devastating to so many people. 

It’s not just a loss of health care — economies collapse, as does a sense of safety. Almost everyone in Belzoni seems to have had a near-death experience, or a family member who has a near-death experience, after the hospital closed. The nearest hospitals are at least a 25-minute drive away.

And not all citizens suffer equally. 

In the Delta, the power dynamic and wealth gap between Black and white residents borne out of a history of slavery and Jim Crow laws are still prevalent. Poverty, race and health are inextricably connected. 

Belzoni’s story may be the future of other small towns in Mississippi. Nearly half of the state’s rural hospitals — just like the one that shuttered here — are at risk of closure.

Most Mississippians support Medicaid expansion. Ample national and state research shows that the policy is financially beneficial, and medical experts have said for years that it would help Mississippi’s hospitals and residents. But Gov. Tate Reeves continues to vehemently oppose the policy. 

Meanwhile, hospital closures loom across the state, due in large part to huge uncompensated costs from caring for uninsured Mississippians. The Delta, the sickest region of the state, is in particular danger. 

At least 12 hospitals, including long-term care facilities, besides Patients’ Choice have closed since 2008, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health.

But the impact of Medicaid expansion goes beyond financial viability for hospitals — it means making health care accessible for more people. As of 2019, 8.9% of people in Humphreys County were uninsured and would qualify for coverage if Medicaid was expanded, the highest rate of any county in the Delta and tied for the fourth-highest rate in the state. That’s slightly less than half of the total population of uninsured adults in Humphreys County. Statewide, an additional estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people would qualify under Medicaid expansion.

The lack of a hospital didn’t stop Emily Donovan from moving to Belzoni from Vicksburg in 2015. Her love of the lush Mississippi Delta and small-town life outweighed her concerns. After all, growing up in rural Mississippi, she was used to driving at least half an hour to get to the closest hospital.

But now, almost a decade and two kids later, Donovan is worried about her family and the vitality of her community.

She and her husband, who own an internet and phone cable business, have been turned down by prospective hires because of the lack of emergency care in Belzoni. And Donovan is the executive director of the county’s economic development board. It’s hard to do her job — boosting the town’s economy — when there’s no hospital for 25 miles in any direction. 

Though Donovan estimates about a dozen businesses have opened in Belzoni since she moved there, an even greater number have closed.

“When you don’t have a hospital, businesses don’t usually want to come into a community,” she said.

As Donovan’s kids grow up, the issue also hits closer to home. 

At a sleepover Donovan’s son hosted at her house a few months ago, he and his friends climbed up on the roof in a fit of boyish play during the night. When Donovan’s husband realized where the teenagers were, he hollered up to them, “We don’t have a hospital anywhere near here, so y’all need to get down!”

“What are you going to do in the middle of the night?” Donovan asked one afternoon in November, lines of motherly worry creasing her forehead. 

A number of people in Belzoni could tell her the answer: Drive like hell and hope you make it.

A bell jingles as Mayor Joe Jackson opens the door and shuffles into a restaurant a few steps away from City Hall.

“Hey, mayor,” the owner behind the counter says, while others murmur their greetings to him.

Many of the patrons have known Jackson for a long time, long before he was elected mayor in 2020. He was born and raised in this community, like many of them. Belzoni is that way — a town where there are no strangers. 

It’s a rainy day. Jackson orders gumbo, looks out of the window and starts a story.

“Our small town hospital didn’t offer a whole lot,” he begins. “But it was something.” 

Jackson was born in Belzoni by a midwife in 1960, the same year his hometown reached a population peak of 4,071 residents. 

Though the town’s population had been dropping for decades, three strikes hit the town in the latter half of the century. First, the factory operated by retail company Jockey and employing at least 300 people closed in 1993. 

Then, Belzoni’s largest industry was devastated. Once called the world’s catfish capital, the town couldn’t keep up with the rise of imported fish. Belzoni is hesitant to let go of its moniker — painted catfish sculptures still leap from its sleepy downtown sidewalks — but the days of leading in catfish exports are well behind them.

The final nail in the coffin was the hospital closure in 2013. 

“When the hospital closed, it was kind of a surprise to most people,” Jackson said. “It was almost like they were open one week, and then closed the next week.”

At first, residents, including Jackson, were hopeful the hospital would reopen. He had worked at the hospital for 20 years as an EMT, from 1985 to 2005. It seemed unfathomable to him that the hospital would close for good.

At the time of its closure, rumors were flying about hospital mismanagement — it seemed like most people hoped that new leadership could reopen the facility and turn the hospital around, Jackson said. 

But months went by. 

Suddenly, there just seemed to be fewer people in town. Some of the hospital’s 100-plus employees left Belzoni, and those who didn’t had to find jobs elsewhere.

“There were people in town every day because they worked at the hospital,” he said. “Now, they’re working out of town, so even the restaurants and stuff around town failed … downtown got a lot quieter.”

Despite repeated requests for data about city revenue, the city clerk never provided any information. State data shows, though, that Belzoni has collected less and less in sales tax since the hospital closed. In 2013, the city’s share of sales tax was $536,960. Ten years later, despite inflation, it’s down to $461,588.

Jackson has seen the hospital issue from all sides: as a longtime citizen, as a former hospital employee and now, a town leader. No matter how you look at it, he said, Belzoni is a shell of its former self.

“You can’t really convince people to move to a small town that does not have a hospital,” he said. “It just breaks your heart.”

In 2020, the same year Jackson was elected mayor, Belzoni’s population dropped below 2,000 for the first time in a century.

Five men sit at a table in a stuffy room on the top floor of the Humphreys County courthouse.

At the center is Humphreys County Board of Supervisors president Richard Stevens, known to most as just “Dick” or “Dickie.” Stevens, the sole white person on the board, is flanked by the other four supervisors. 

All eyes are turned toward them and the woman Stevens is currently in a screaming match with, Timaka James-Jones, the county’s circuit clerk.

One hour into the board of supervisors meeting on Nov. 6, a discussion about county affairs has devolved, but no one seems particularly surprised. 

This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in a county where the gaps between members of the community are so wide and deep.

People who live in Belzoni don’t agree on why the hospital closed and whether it’s had an impact on the town’s economy. Even its leaders can’t reach a consensus on the hospital. And for some of the town’s residents, these meetings are the easiest way to be heard by the five men who make decisions for them all. 

Stevens is perhaps the most powerful man in Humphreys County. 

He was the board’s longest serving member until his retirement in December, and the owner of the county’s largest employer, Consolidated Catfish Co., located just a few miles north of Belzoni in a pinprick of a town called Isola. 

Stevens and Roy Broomfield, who also retired at the end of last year, were the only two board members serving in December who were also on the board when it voted to sell the hospital to a private owner, Ray Shoemaker, a few years before its closure. 

However, the two long-serving board members have differing ideas about how important a hospital is to Humphreys.

Stevens has lived in Humphreys County since 1949. He was 6 when his family moved from Tremont, a small town in north Mississippi near the Alabama state line. His father was a crop duster, so instead of flying back and forth every summer, the Stevens patriarch made the move permanent. 

Stevens started farming catfish in the late 60s, and his plant, a result of two merged catfish processors, has been around for decades. The company processes more than a million pounds of catfish every week, and it employs around 600 people, who are some of the only people in Humphreys County with health insurance, Stevens said.

He decided to run for the board seat 24 years ago because he wanted to protect the county’s economic vitality. 

However, two decades later, one of the town’s biggest economic drivers is closed, according to the mayor and other city leaders. 

Stevens doesn’t see it that way. He said the hospital had been losing money for a long time, and it wasn’t even doing its job that well. 

“It wasn’t comparable to nearby hospitals,” he said. 

Stevens complained that residents were misusing the emergency room, treating it like “free” primary care. 

Though there are two health clinics in Belzoni that offer primary care, emergency rooms are the only health care option for many uninsured people because they cannot turn away patients, regardless of insurance status. There are few, if any, primary care or preventative care options for people without health insurance — the hospital was likely their only option.

By the time the board of supervisors sold the hospital, it was millions of dollars in the hole, Stevens said. He hoped Shoemaker would be able to turn things around but doesn’t consider it much of a loss that he ended up being unable to. 

“I think he did what he could do to make it work,” Stevens said, placing much of the blame on Belzoni’s already-slowing economy, which he doesn’t think the hospital’s closure significantly affected. “There were many negative factors.”

Stevens is, at best, resigned and, at worst, indifferent: “It’s just the way of life here.”

Dr. Sidney Gorton II feels similarly. He and his father are the only two full-time doctors in Belzoni. They run a family rural health clinic in Belzoni, and both used to work at the hospital. 

He agreed with Stevens that misuse of the emergency room was one of the things that led to the hospital’s decline. The hospital’s inpatient census was always pretty low, too, he remembers, and when patients did have Medicaid coverage, low reimbursements rates didn’t cover hospital expenses.

But the doctor said he was not sure that Medicaid expansion was the solution to Belzoni’s health care desert, and that issues leading to the hospital’s closure were more far-reaching. 

Broomfield’s recollection is a little different — and much more painful.

While Broomfield, who’s been on the board for two decades, agrees that perhaps Belzoni didn’t have the population or dollars in the community to sustain the hospital, he believes the lack of emergency care in Belzoni is dangerous. He knows it’s dangerous. 

Because even Broomfield, another powerful and well-known Belzonian, isn’t immune to the effects — he lost a son to lack of health care in the Delta a little over a decade ago. 

It was supposed to be a happy occasion.

Back in 2010, Broomfield’s son, 39-year-old Roy Jr., was home visiting his parents. He lived states away in Dallas, and Broomfield was thrilled to have his son in town.

But at about 2:30 a.m., Broomfield’s son woke him up, complaining about feeling sick. His father guessed it was indigestion or something similar, but thought they should go to a hospital anyway, just to be safe. 

Broomfield figured they had a little time, so he didn’t take his son to Patients Choice, which had a reputation as a declining hospital at that point, referred to as the local “Band-Aid station.” So Broomfield decided to take him to Greenwood Leflore Hospital, a little over 30 minutes away. 

On the way, his son suffered a massive heart attack. An ambulance Broomfield called never arrived, and the son was brain dead before they reached the Greenwood hospital.

Broomfield has regrets — he always will. But at least he had the option to take his son somewhere closer. 

“At least we had a place to go to get a Band-Aid put on,” Broomfield said. “Now we don’t even have that. A lot of people’s lives could have been saved if we had a hospital here.”

The circuit clerk, James-Jones, shares Broomfield’s perspective, as do many Black leaders in town. James-Jones grew up with Broomfield’s son, and she was born at what was then-Humphreys County Memorial Hospital.

Not only was the hospital a huge employer, James-Jones said there were also impactful community advocacy programs being run by the hospital. In her eyes, the hospital was central to the community.

That’s why James-Jones, who was recently elected to the state House of Representatives, isn’t afraid to speak her mind to the board and fight in public with its leader. She has suffered immense loss — friends and family — from the lack of emergency care, which she directly attributes to the board’s actions. One of the most well-known examples is the death of one of her relatives, Harmony Ball-Stribling. 

Everyone in town seems to know Harmony’s story, every grisly and heart-wrenching detail.

During the summer of 2021, Harmony was days away from giving birth when she began experiencing pregnancy complications as a result of preeclampsia, a condition that results in high blood pressure and organ damage.

Her husband, Byron Stribling, raced her to the hospital in Yazoo County. Harmony was his high school sweetheart, the love of his life. She was pregnant with his first child, a baby they had tirelessly prayed for and underwent an arduous in vitro fertilization process to conceive.

But before they arrived at the hospital, Harmony went into cardiac arrest in the passenger seat. Byron, who operates a funeral home, buried his own wife and baby days later. 

After her death, Harmony’s mother, Shenelle Ball-Burks, and Byron implored the board of supervisors to figure out how to reopen the Belzoni hospital. Harmony’s mother remembers how defeated she felt when the supervisors told her there was nothing they could do.

James-Jones says the hospital closure is “the most devastating thing that has happened” in Humphreys County.

Amid the competing opinions and recollections of the demise of Belzoni’s only hospital, one of the few people who should be able to explain the hospital’s closure isn’t keen on providing many details. 

Much of what happened with the hospital is lost to time, thanks to a specific kind of small-town Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

No one can say where the hospital’s financial reports are. The county’s board attorney, state Rep. Willie Bailey, didn’t know where they would be and said the county wouldn’t be in possession of them, if they even still existed. He suggested the hospital board might still have them.

But the hospital board is, obviously, disbanded. Several of its previous members have died in the past 10 years. 

Even Mack Liddell, the Humphreys County chancery clerk since 2020, couldn’t say where the records were. 

“Those records are not in my care at this time,” he responded to Mississippi Today’s records request. 

Liddell said his predecessor had taken a great number of county records “home with him” when he left office, and then promptly died, too. Perhaps the records are somewhere in that man’s house, or they’re in one of the many manila folders in the run down hospital building that sits on the edge of town.

One would think that Ray Shoemaker, the hospital’s last owner, would have all the answers, but it doesn’t seem like he particularly wants to talk about the hospital’s decline.

After all, Shoemaker was sentenced to 55 months in federal prison in 2012 for multiple counts of health-care fraud, most of the malfeasance related to another hospital he ran.

“I don’t want my story played again,” he said when reached by phone. 

Though hesitant to talk, he explained that he became interested in owning the hospital because he grew up in Walnut Grove, another small town in east central Mississippi, and recognized the need for rigorous health care in the state’s rural communities. 

When the board of supervisors heard Shoemaker was interested —  he was being lauded then for turning around Tri-Lakes Medical Center in Batesville — they jumped at the opportunity. Shoemaker took over the Belzoni hospital’s management in 2007, and a year later, he bought the 34-bed hospital outright, taking on its $5.4 million in debts.

When asked what made him think he could turn the hospital around, Shoemaker joked, “Insanity.”

He went on to take charge of several other hospitals across the state. Shoemaker says he reduced the Belzoni hospital’s debt and increased its services by sharing resources among his facilities.

Then in 2012, Shoemaker was prosecuted for health care fraud committed at the Batesville health center. 

Despite purported strides at the Belzoni hospital, when Shoemaker started experiencing “legal challenges,” as he puts it, the facility was suddenly in danger. He could no longer manage the hospital’s daily operations. 

Inspection reports show that the hospital faced difficulties in its final years, even before Shoemaker took over.

Apparently, record-keeping has long been a struggle for the facility. Since 2007, state evaluators have been taking issue with the unorganized mountains of records stored in the hospital. In December 2012, “the administrator stated that he could not find documentation that the facility had conducted an annual evaluation of its total program during the past year,” according to one inspection report.

The reports show that by July 22, 2013, Patients’ Choice was no longer in operation.

As it turns out, Shoemaker can’t speak to the hospital’s final days. He was in prison.

Joann and Joseph Wilson walk through the dark halls of the dilapidated hospital building.

The ceilings are falling in, and there’s graffiti on the walls. There are rooms upon rooms of documents. But they think the building still has some life in it. 

The old hospital was recently bought by an investor who has partnered with the Wilsons to turn the building into a clinic for people struggling with mental health issues and substance abuse. 

For Joseph, the project holds special meaning — his life was saved at the Belzoni hospital when it was in operation. He was rushed here in 2008 because he slipped into a diabetic coma, and doctors in the emergency room stabilized him.

“If this facility had not been here when I was sick, I might not be alive today,” he said. 

The Wilsons say they’re open to allowing someone to open an emergency room in the clinic building. They agree it’s a major need for the community.

Several people who mourn the loss of the hospital have cited efforts in recent years to reopen an emergency room in Belzoni.

As mayor, Jackson has met with countless politicians and health care leaders to bring back emergency care in Belzoni. It’s hard to see any kind of future for the town without it, he said. James-Jones and Liddell, the chancery clerk, have been invested in this effort, too. 

The efforts went as far as a packed town hall, where prolific hospital owner Quentin Whitwell spoke about new legislation that might have made it possible to reestablish emergency care in Belzoni.

Senate Bill 2735, passed during the 2022 legislative session, was created in an effort to operate freestanding emergency rooms in rural Mississippi. But ultimately, according to Whitwell, “The law wasn’t sufficient to get that accomplished.” No county has gotten an emergency room from this legislation, according to the state Health Department.

The bill’s principal author, Sen. Benjamin Suber of Bruce, said the legislation was an attempt at getting health care to parts of the state that needed it most, but admitted that he wasn’t sure if “it was gonna work or not.”

Suber did not know that Whitwell considered the bill flawed. 

“No one’s ever told me that, but we can do what we can to amend it,” he said. “If we needed to fix something, I would fix it. But that’s the first time someone’s ever said that to me.”

It was news to many residents that this law would not result in an emergency room in Belzoni. They had been waiting for years. 

Liddell was one of them surprised by the update.  

“This is hurtful,” he said. “Until the governor and every ally associated with him believes that the Delta is worthy of health care or other vital services … It doesn’t matter what color you are. You are a human being, and one day you’re going to get sick.”

Belzoni’s sons and daughters who moved elsewhere know that. The ones who stay, such as Byron, know that. The businesses that choose to establish themselves elsewhere know that. Broomfield, the county supervisor who lost his son, knows it, too. 

But after years of feeling like the state doesn’t care about his home, Broomfield doesn’t know what to do.

“The Legislature, they don’t do anything for the Delta,” he said. “They just don’t care nothing about us.”

There’s something different about downtown Belzoni on an afternoon in early December: Specifically, noise.

A hum emanates from the center of town, where a towering Christmas tree, framed by a citrine Delta sunset, overlooks 5 p.m. traffic. For Belzoni, that means just a few more cars on the street than usual.

Emily Donovan, the economic foundation director, is bustling about, setting up tables and greeting guests at Belzoni’s Second Annual Christmas Tree Lighting and Farmers Market. 

State Rep. Timaka James-Jones is here, too, talking to longtime neighbors and friends. Vendors are selling local wares, such as Southern chow chow relish and a variety of pickled vegetables. Kids are chasing each other, breaths like little clouds in the cool evening air. 

This is the Belzoni that Donovan knows and loves. This is the Belzoni that Donovan wants to see survive. 

Five-year-old Treasure Dulaney is one of the many children staring up at the Christmas tree in awe.

Her mom, Tiffany Ceasar, a lifelong Belzoni resident, didn’t think twice about raising her family in Belzoni. It’s home.

But before Treasure can go play with the other kids, Tiffany crouches down and zips up her daughter’s jacket. 

She’s always been prone to colds, and with no hospital in town, Tiffany doesn’t want to take any chances.

This story is part of “The Holdouts,” a reporting collaborative focused on the 10 states that have yet to expand Medicaid, which the Affordable Care Act authorized in 2010. The collaborative is a project of Public Health Watch.

The post A small town struggles to survive in the heart of Mississippi’s hospital crisis appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In the early 1930s, Mississippi had over 300,000 farmers, the most ever recorded for the state in federal census records. The last survey, from 2017, listed just around 55,000.

In the 1930s, the average farm size was around 50 acres. Today, it’s over 300 acres.

For decades from the early to mid 20th Century, Black farmers outnumbered white farmers in the state. Today, 86% of Mississippi’s farmers are white.

While agriculture is still the top employer in the state, who farms, what they farm, and who they sell to has changed greatly over the last century. Victim to many of those changes, experts say, is the so-called “middle class” of farmers.

“When we look at the decrease in farms over time, it’s largely that group of farmers, that medium scale,” said John Green, director of the Southern Rural Development Center at Mississippi State University.

Research shows that input costs – for livestock, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel and other needs – have climbed 70% since 1970 when adjusted for inflation. Green explained that those costs leave farmers more at risk, especially with the harmful climate impacts, such as drought and floods, that Mississippi has seen in recent years.

“There’s a lot more vulnerability for those farmers when there’s a bad year, so it makes it harder to stay in the game,” Green said.

Land is also more expensive due to higher demand, making it harder for newer farmers to buy in and easier for older farmers to cash out.

“It’s a story that can be told in every community,” State Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson told Mississippi Today. “Grandpa and grandma had a farm, and the family wants to keep the farm. Who’s going to run it? Well, this (kid’s) got another job, that one’s moving off. What happens is the farm sits there, and then, slowly, suburbanization comes along, some developer says, ‘I’ll offer you so much for that land,’ and suddenly they don’t have the reason to keep that farm anymore.”

All of these factors are making it harder for farmers in the middle, Gipson explained: Small farmers, like the ones selling fruits and vegetables to farmers markets, will always have demand. Large operations, with technological advantages like an irrigation system, can weather a bad year.

“Most of our farmers in Mississippi have another job to pay the bills,” Gipson said. “That’s that middle group of farmers. They’re at most risk of getting out (of the business) because there comes a point at which the input costs are so expensive that it’s not worth it financially to keep going.”

But Gipson also pointed out that, despite Mississippi having only a tenth of the number of farms it once had, production from the agriculture sector is at an all-time high. With new technology, he explained, farmers can grow more with the same amount of land.

“The good news is we’ve seen our production of agriculture, as far as the number of products, the amount of products, food and fiber and timber, continue to go up,” Gipson said.

If production is at an all-time high, then why does it matter that Mississippi has only a fraction of the farms and farmers that it used to?

For one, farmers are getting older. As Green and two other MSU researchers wrote about recently, the average age of farmers in the U.S. grew from 50 to 57 since 1978. In Mississippi, the average is 59. Their research looks at barriers for new farmers entering the trade, as well as programs like 4-H trying to engage younger farmers and reverse the aging trend.

But also, the loss of middle-tier farms has disrupted the cultural and economic identity of rural areas around the state.

Carlton Turner, a Utica native, said his grandfather worked for years as a farmer on their family land until, eventually, there wasn’t enough money coming in and he had to find a new job. Today, Turner said, the job opportunities in his hometown are harder to come by.

“A town like Utica, that has a long history of agricultural production, the only industry here is a sawmill,” he said. “And that doesn’t provide enough jobs for the community, so the community has to go out to work in other areas.”

Turner, founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, is working to revive agricultural interest in rural, predominantly Black areas that have lost farms over the years. The loss of Black farmers in Mississippi, he said, came from both the Great Migration as well as the mechanization of farming, which reduced the need for labor.

“The food system went from being many local producers that were producing for themselves and for their local communities, to consolidating to larger farms and larger, commercial agricultural industries,” he said. “We've yielded a lot of that power away from our communities in which there's few people that are basically creating the industry and the food for many people.”

Turner also emphasized the wellness impacts of losing small and middle-tier farms, especially in one of the least healthy and most food insecure states. Restoring people’s connection with locally grown food would help reverse that trend, he explained.

“We have some of the most fertile land, but our (health statistics are) the lowest in the country,” he said. “That is directly connected to our food systems. We need more farmers producing high quality, locally sourced whole foods because we don't have the quality of health and wellness that we deserve as a state and as a community.”

Other local farmers are also working to fill in the gap Turner mentioned. Cindy Ayers Elliott, for instance, runs the 68-acre Foot Print Farms in Jackson, which aims to bring young people into agriculture and build the supply of locally grown, healthy foods.

In the 1930s, vegetables like sweet potatoes, cabbages, and tomatoes – not including commodity crops like corn and soybeans – made up over 160,000 acres of the state’s farmland, and tens of thousands of farms grew fruit like apples, pears, and peaches. Today, less than 40,000 acres are used for vegetables – again, excluding corn and soybeans – and just a few hundred farms grow fruit.

As far as solutions, Gipson pointed to workforce development programs that the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce has set up to reach young people, in addition to local 4-H clubs and the state’s Future Farmers of America chapter. He also said a priority is helping family farms set up succession plans, so that farms stay active for future generations.

“Farming today is high technology,” Gipson said, describing the computerized systems now used to harvest timber and row crops. “And it’s our young people who know how to do that. Connecting our young people to farms is the answer, not only for Mississippi's long term economic viability, because agriculture is far and away our largest industry, but also in terms of keeping our young people here.”

The post As agriculture has evolved in Mississippi, the state is losing its ‘middle class’ of farmers  appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As Marquise Tillman led deputies on a high-speed chase through rural Mississippi in March 2019, Sheriff Todd Kemp issued a blunt order over the radio: “Shut him down and beat his ass.”

When the Clarke County deputies caught Mr. Tillman, they did just that, he later alleged in a lawsuit. He said they pummeled and stomped on him while he was handcuffed, leaving him with a fractured eye socket and broken bones in his face and chest.

The sheriff denied giving the order. But it was captured on tape and described under oath by four of his deputies.

Such an explosive revelation might have roiled a community elsewhere in the country and led state or federal officials to investigate. But in Mississippi, it was largely ignored, even after the county paid Mr. Tillman an undisclosed amount to settle his claim.

There was no news coverage and no state investigation. In an interview, Sheriff Kemp said he had turned the case over to the state’s police agency. But the agency could find no record of having pursued it.

That is not unusual in Mississippi, where allegations like those leveled against Sheriff Kemp often go nowhere, an investigation by The New York Times and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today has found.

State authorities are responsible for investigating shootings and in-custody deaths involving sheriffs and deputies. But they are not obligated to investigate other potential wrongdoing by sheriffs’ offices, and may not even know about it: The sheriffs’ offices are also not obligated to report incidents to them.

The Times and Mississippi Today examined dozens of publicly available federal lawsuits that described severe brutality and other abuses of power, reviewing thousands of pages of court records and interviewing people involved in cases across the state.

At least 27 claims do not appear to have led to a state investigation, including accusations of rape, brutal assault and retaliation against sheriffs’ enemies.

Many of the lawsuits depicted incidents that had eyewitnesses or significant physical evidence. Some included transcripts of deputies admitting under oath to troubling conduct. All but five of the cases were settled, according to court files that do not disclose the financial terms.

Mississippi has a long history of powerful rural sheriffs breaking the law with little consequence. This year, The Times and Mississippi Today revealed how sheriffs and deputies dodged accountability after allegations that they had sexually abused women in their custody, tortured people for information or misused subpoena power to spy on others.

The lawsuits underscored how many similar allegations have been leveled in the state over the past decade, especially in small-town jails. A man in Itawamba County said that in 2020 his jailers tied him to a chair, choked him and squeezed his genitals until he vomited. A woman in Bolivar County said that in 2016 a deputy held her arms behind her back and raped her in her cell. A man in Simpson County said that the sheriff in 2012, Kenneth Lewis, choked him and slammed his head against a cell wall until he passed out.

All of their lawsuits were settled. Attempts to reach former Sheriff Lewis for comment were unsuccessful.

Officials with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office said they could find no records indicating that either office had investigated any of the 27 allegations. Jim Hood, who was attorney general during most of these cases, did not respond to requests for comment.

Reporters also reached people familiar with 12 of the claims, including plaintiffs, their family members and their lawyers. All said they were not aware of state investigators asking about the cases.

In a statement responding to The Times and Mississippi Today’s findings, the state’s public safety commissioner, Sean Tindell, said he was working toward more oversight. He said he would ask the legislature to empower Mississippi’s law enforcement licensing board, which he oversees along with the bureau of investigation, to investigate abuse allegations and consider revoking law enforcement officers’ licenses, an approach some states use aggressively.

Sheriffs are elected and not required to hold licenses, however. And it would not change how cases are investigated criminally.

The lack of investigations troubled experts who reviewed some of the cases.

James Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who now lectures at Harvard Law School, said the lawsuits described “corrupt” and “criminal” behavior that should have been investigated by the attorney general.

“This wasn’t one renegade cop or a renegade D.A. There is a systemic problem here,” he said.

In Mr. Tillman’s case, the accused deputies all denied beating him. They do not appear to have faced any consequences. “I don’t think there was any wrongdoing,” Sheriff Kemp said in an interview.

“Everybody kept their job,” recalled Mr. Tillman’s aunt, Kristy Tillman.

Mr. Tillman is serving 12 years in prison for crashing into deputies during the high-speed chase. Sheriff Kemp is retiring at the end of this month after 24 years in office. His elected successor, Anthony Chancelor, is one of the deputies accused in the beating.

Trails of Evidence

Across Mississippi’s 82 counties, candidates for sheriff are not required to have law enforcement experience or police training. Once in office, sheriffs can launch investigations, direct the use of force and put people in jail, where they control virtually every aspect of an inmate’s life.

“There is no transparency for what happens inside these local jails, and we know that abuse thrives in dark places,” said Michele Deitch, the director of a center at the University of Texas at Austin that studies jail oversight and operations. She said the allegations of brutality described in the lawsuits were a window into a world that sheriffs have been allowed to conceal.

Many of the lawsuits examined by The Times and Mississippi Today included trails of evidence — video footage, medical records, eyewitness accounts — ready for an investigator to follow.

In 2020, deputies at the Itawamba County jail beat Christopher Evan Easter relentlessly, he said in court filings and an interview.

He said one jailer put him in a chokehold until he passed out; he awoke to deputies doing chest compressions on him. They tied him to a chair, squeezed his genitals and punched his head until he lost consciousness again, he said. “When I come to, my ears are ringing. I’m covered in puke and blood,” he recalled.

Mr. Easter was taken to a hospital, he said, but when he returned to jail, he was stripped naked and thrown in a dark, maggot-infested room the deputies called “the hole,” where the plumbing did not work and the toilet was full of feces.

Mr. Easter’s father, Christopher Lewis Easter, said the jail’s administrator told him that his son had fallen and hit his head on a filing cabinet. The family filed a lawsuit, detailing the violence inflicted on Mr. Easter, which the county settled for $15,000, he said.

Some claims revealed patterns of similar allegations. In a three-year span, two men held in the jail used by Humphreys County filed lawsuits saying deputies had taken them to the chapel before beating them out of view of security cameras. The lawsuits said that members of each family had confronted then-Sheriff J.D. Roseman, who acknowledged one of the assaults happened. Both cases were settled. Sheriff Roseman remained in office until his death in 2020.

In other cases, deputies’ testimony supported some of the plaintiffs’ claims.

The county administrator of Tunica County, population 10,000, accused Sheriff Calvin Hamp of conspiring to have him arrested in 2014 in retaliation for trying to cut the department’s budget.

Two days after the men argued over a purchase order, a captain in the department pulled over an S.U.V. carrying the administrator, Michael Thompson. The captain instructed Mr. Thompson to get behind the wheel and watched him drive away, then pulled him over and charged him with driving with a suspended license. The sheriff’s office issued a press release announcing the arrest.

In a sworn deposition, the captain conceded that he had known Mr. Thompson’s license was suspended — because of an unpaid traffic ticket in another county — when he told him to drive.

Sheriff Hamp did not respond to questions from The Times and Mississippi Today. Mr. Thompson declined to comment.

On appeal, a judge dismissed the charge against Mr. Thompson, and a jury later awarded him $50,000 in damages.

Deflecting Responsibility

In 2022, state lawmakers formally gave the attorney general and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation responsibility for investigating police shootings and prosecuting those that involve criminal misconduct.

When a sheriff or a deputy is accused of other types of crimes, however, it remains less clear what is supposed to happen.

The F.B.I. and the Justice Department handle some law enforcement cases, but generally look into only the most serious allegations.

District attorneys can investigate and bring charges. But those local prosecutors can have “politically incestuous” relationships with sheriffs, creating pressure to overlook allegations, said Chris Toth, the former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General.

To avoid conflicts of interest, sheriffs or local prosecutors can ask the attorney general or the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to step in. But the system only works if local officials contact the state for help, and that often does not happen, The Times and Mississippi Today found.

Mississippi’s Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training also conducts background checks and decides whether law enforcement officers who have been fired for cause or charged with a crime should be allowed to serve in other counties. But it does not perform its own investigations into officers’ conduct. Mr. Tindell, the public safety commissioner, argues that it should.

Some states, including Florida and Arizona, have long taken an approach like the one Mr. Tindell is proposing, with powerful licensing boards that require police agencies to report misconduct and then can hold hearings and potentially revoke officers’ certification.

More recently, other states have given their attorneys general additional authority. New York’s can now investigate any officer or deputy, and Illinois’s and Colorado’s can conduct wide-ranging civil investigations into patterns of illegal conduct.

In Mississippi, the lack of process has allowed some sheriffs and district attorneys to disregard reports of abuse within their jurisdictions.

In Clarke County, accounts that Sheriff Kemp had gotten on the radio and ordered his deputies to beat a fleeing man were widely known.

District Attorney Kassie Coleman said in a statement that she had heard about the accusation and that it was “general knowledge” that both the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the F.B.I. had been contacted about the case.

“I was not provided an investigative case regarding any potential criminal acts that resulted from the investigation into the allegations,” Ms. Coleman wrote, “nor was I provided a copy of the federal lawsuit.”

But the state bureau of investigation said it had no file on the case, Mr. Tillman’s family said he was never contacted by the F.B.I. or anyone else, and the lawsuit is available in an online courts database.

People who have complained directly to Mississippi sheriffs’ offices have often found themselves speaking to someone close to the sheriff.

A man accused deputies in Forrest County of shackling him in a holding cell, beating him unconscious and breaking his ribs in 2016. He noted in his lawsuit that he filed complaints with the F.B.I. and Nick Calico, a chief investigator for then-Sheriff Billy McGee, giving him medical records and photos that could have served as evidence.

In an interview, Mr. Calico said he had investigated the allegations and found that nothing improper happened. After the lawsuit was filed, he said, he was contacted by the F.B.I., sent them a copy of his investigative file and never heard about it again.

Seven months after the alleged beating, he would marry Sheriff McGee’s daughter.

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This article was co-reported by The New York Times and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today.

Joel Engelhardt contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

The post Who Investigates the Sheriff? In Mississippi, Often No One. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In 2013, at 54 years old, Jones had two toes on his right foot removed and would later lose the big toe on his left foot. He didn’t know it then, but he had peripheral artery disease, or PAD, a condition where plaque builds up in peripheral arteries – those that do not supply blood to the heart or brain – and restricts circulation. Without treatment, a patient will continue to need further amputations and will die young.

One doctor told Jones he would likely need to amputate his entire foot – but Jones, whose condition made him retire early from his job at Baxter Pharmaceuticals, was resolved not to let that happen.

“I thought ‘I don’t want that,’ and me and the doctor were through,” Jones said. “It would have changed my life. I already can’t drive my truck no more.”

But many diabetics in rural Mississippi don’t have access to the care Jones went on to receive to avoid further amputations. Diabetes and the cardiovascular problems it causes are often asymptomatic at first, or symptoms are obscure. A lack of specialists coupled with some of the lowest social determinants in the country leave regions like the Delta prone to late detection of diabetes and a high rate of amputations.

Now, Jones goes to cardiologist Dr. Foluso Fakorede’s Cleveland clinic, Cardiovascular Solutions of Central Mississippi, for regular wound care from a nurse practitioner who travels to the clinic every Thursday from Oxford.

His life is different now, but he’s thankful he can still move around and hasn’t had to undergo a major amputation, which, for legs, is characterized as any cut above the ankle joint.

Mississippi is the only state with every county represented in what is called the “diabetes belt” of the U.S., which spans an upward arc from the deep South to Appalachian states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fakorede said academic institutions should be investing in the region through medical research, but it’s not an attractive market.

“I’ll make the argument that it should be,” he said. “Because these people were never given the chance to catch up. And now we’ve left them to suffer in isolation and in pain.”

With 14.8% of its adults diagnosed with the disease, Mississippi is second only to West Virginia in prevalence.

Uncontrolled diabetes, which runs rampant in rural and underserved areas, can lead to blindness, kidney failure, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attacks, strokes and gangrene.

Mississippi, one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid, is the fifth highest uninsured state. In Bolivar County and several other Delta counties, at least one in five residents have medical debt in collections.

About one in three diabetics over the age of 50 will develop PAD, which often goes undiagnosed and untreated in medical care deserts like the Delta.

When it is caught, doctors often have an “amputation-first” mentality, which results in the loss of limbs and early mortality – despite the fact that a procedure exists to clean out the arteries of a PAD patient and restore blood flow to extremities.

Within five years of an amputation, diabetics stand a good chance of being dead. Nationally, Black patients are four times more likely to suffer diabetes-related amputations than white patients.

“It’s a death sentence,” Fakorede said, “and it’s very often preventable.”

Jones received five angiograms and revascularization procedures in both his legs over the course of the last two years.

The number of angiograms a diabetic patient with PAD will need depends on a number of risk factors such as age, race, hypertension, heart conditions and habits such as diet and tobacco use.

In the U.S., more than half of patients never receive an angiogram or revascularization procedure before a major amputation.

At his Delta clinic, Fakorede, the only cardiologist in Bolivar County, estimates that the number of amputees who never had an angiogram is close to 90%.

Fakorede, who was born in Nigeria and spent his teenage and young adult life in New Jersey, struggled to justify moving to Mississippi and opening his own clinic. He knew nothing about the place and had never operated his own business.  But when he saw how great the need was in the Delta for a procedure he was skilled at, he knew his mind was made up.

“You walk through Walmart or Kroger here,” Fakorede said, “and I promise you you’ll see someone who has had a limb taken off or a dialysis catheter around their neck.”

In the end, Fakorede said the Delta proved to be far more similar to his hometown in Nigeria than he thought. They are regions that, for the majority of residents, reflect nothing of their country’s wealth – despite the rich resources they provide that contribute to that wealth.

“That is actually what made me stay – that similarity,” he said.

In the Delta, Fakorede explained, there are a number of socioeconomic factors that contribute to what he calls “the perfect storm” and leave people at a greater risk of chronic and life-threatening conditions.

Studies have shown that the body’s inflammatory response to chronic stressors like poverty, food deserts and unemployment – all of which pervade the Delta – can accelerate diseases like PAD.

Fakorede believes that a large part of the problem is inadequate screening measures. The United States Preventive Services Taskforce, or USPSTF, is the governing body that doctors look to for recommendations on who to screen for which conditions.

The USPSTF has not endorsed a screening for PAD, despite the fact that the five-year mortality for undiagnosed or untreated PAD patients is higher than that of breast cancer and prostate cancer, and studies have shown minorities are disproportionately affected.

“That is atrocious,” Fakorede said. “These patients have existed for decades. We know that this disease is destroying them because it’s taking them out of the workforce. It’s taking them out of their homes. They’re ending up in caskets early on.”

In Mississippi, nurse practitioner KC Arnold, director of the Ocean Springs Diabetes Center, witnesses the shortage daily.

“Every single day I’m getting a call: ‘hey, my pharmacy can’t get this,’” Arnold said. “In all my years of helping people with diabetes, this has been the biggest challenge for me to help people get what they need.”

Arnold’s facility is nurse practitioner owned and run – a rarity in Mississippi, where restrictive and expensive collaboration agreements limit the freedom with which nurse practitioners can operate.

Ozempic has a weight-loss version called Wegovy, but it isn’t covered by Medicare, so doctors will sometimes prescribe Ozempic in its place. The Mississippi Board of Nursing has guidelines that prohibit nurse practitioners from prescribing the weight loss drugs off label. But that rule doesn’t apply to doctors.

Arnold says she supports insurance companies covering a drug that addresses obesity. But until that happens, doctors shouldn’t be prescribing Ozempic to patients for weight loss.

“I can’t get the medicine for my patients with Type 2 diabetes,” she said. “Insurance needs to change to help people with weight –  I’m all for that – but right now my patients with diabetes need medicine they’re not getting.”

And the drug isn’t just prescribed to people with diagnosed obesity. Chelsea Handler, a comedian and host of the 2023 Critics Choice Awards, joked that “everyone’s on Ozempic” in Hollywood.

Many insurance companies don’t cover drugs prescribed off label, but those who can afford it are paying premiums out of pocket.

“You know who ain’t getting it?” Fakorede said. “We ain’t getting it here in the Delta. There are people who are not even diabetic who are getting it in the Upper East Side in New York. Socioeconomic status matters.”

Pregnancy tends to highlight the socioeconomic disparities of diabetes since some women receive Medicaid coverage for the first time during pregnancy, according to maternal-fetal specialist Dr. Sarah Novotny.

“Often, pregnancy is the first time women have access to health care insurance,” Novotny, who serves as division director of maternal-fetal medicine at University of Mississippi Medical Center, said. “So, a lot of times patients are coming into pregnancy with very poorly controlled diabetes because they didn’t have access to pre-pregnancy care.”

In pregnancy, diabetes can be separated into two categories: women who already had diabetes, whether it be Type 1 or Type 2, and then became pregnant, versus those who developed gestational diabetes during pregnancy.

Women who have preexisting diabetes and become pregnant are at risk of developing vascular problems, high blood pressure, renal problems and retinopathy. Gestational diabetes doesn’t carry the same risks for the mother. Both conditions carry increased risks such as abnormal growth and birth defects for babies.

Women who develop gestational diabetes carry a 50% risk of developing Type 2 diabetes later in life.

Managing diabetes before conception would go a long way in mitigating the state’s maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity rates, according to Novotny. But at the very least, recognizing and diagnosing diabetes during pregnancy can serve as an opportunity for previously uninsured or underinsured women to improve their quality of life.

In the last three decades, despite all the technological and medical advancements that have been made, diabetics in minority populations have seen worse outcomes.

Turning those statistics around would mean prioritizing tackling inequities in health care and recognizing places like the Delta as meccas for research, according to Fakorede.

“We need to be collaborators,” he said. “We need to be hope dealers. We need to be disruptive in terms of using our positive thinking to address some of the systemic inequities that have plagued these people and this region for decades.”

The post ‘These people were never given the chance to catch up’: Inside the diabetes belt of rural Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

When she heard her great grandmother calling for her aunt from the bedroom, Simmons strode into the room, hopped up on the hospital bed and helped to turn and change the 84-year-old the way she had seen the women in her family do many times.

Forty-seven years later, that’s still the way she operates as a certified nursing assistant in the Mississippi nursing home she serves.

“When you walk in that door, every resident is your patient,” Simmons said.

Despite her dedication and more than 30 years of experience, she is only making $17 an hour at the nursing home where she currently works. In order to make ends meet, she works two jobs between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m., sometimes working overtime until 10 at night. She says some nights she gets out of work and sits in her car for an hour and a half because she’s too drained to move.

“I feel helpless. I feel exhausted,” she said. “But I know I got to keep going because who else is going to do it? If the people with the hearts give up, there’s going to be no one left for the people in there who are just forgotten about.”

Simmons never considered going back to school to become a registered nurse. What she loves about her job is being a familiar and reliable face for her residents. A CNA is responsible for providing the majority of hands-on resident care, and is often the person a nursing home resident sees the most on any given day.

“I don’t just want to be pushing pills,” Simmons said. “I want to let them talk to me. A lot of the residents tell me things that their families don’t even know about them.”

Poor pay and high turnover are among the reasons Simmons believes new federal staffing requirements in nursing homes will be, in effect, meaningless.

“Where are they going to get the staff from?” Simmons asked. “People are not doing it because they’re underpaid, and they can’t feed their families on that kind of money.”

That’s in line with the national trend: Over the first quarter of 2023 – from January to March – less than 1% of skilled nursing facilities in the U.S. met the draft rule’s two core standards of provider care.

After signing the executive order in September, Biden accepted public comment through Nov. 6. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is the agency responsible for reviewing the more than 40,000 comments and writing the final rule – which hasn’t happened yet and can take anywhere from months to years. Sixty days after the final rule is published in the Federal Registrar, the first phase in a staggered implementation process will begin.

The proposal, which comes at the heels of a years-long battle nursing home lobbyists waged against reform, outlines minimal standards. For example, the draft rule mandates 2.45 hours of CNA care and .55 hours of RN care per resident per day. That’s less than the 2.8 hours and .75 hours recommended by a CMS landmark 2001 study – even though residents’ needs have gotten more complex over the last two decades with more people living longer.

The proposal also mandates having an RN on duty 24-7. Current regulations mandate having 24-7 care, but allow the position to be filled by licensed practical nurses, who are used more frequently because their salaries are lower than those of RNs. The proposal does not have a requirement for LPN care, leaving experts worried nursing homes will simply replace LPNs with other staff.

“The 24-hour staffing requirement is good, as long as they make that in addition to the administrative nurses,” explained gerontologist and national nursing home expert Charlene Harrington. “But the other requirements they propose are just shockingly low. And that’s partly because the nursing homes have been lobbying against these standards for over a year and a half. So, all these advocates and the experts are very upset about it.”

The only two skilled nursing homes in Mississippi already meeting the not-yet imposed standards are Reginald P. White and James T. Champion nursing facilities – sister organizations of East Mississippi State Hospital, one of the state’s two psychiatric hospitals. The two Meridian nursing homes met the staffing minimums every day of the 91-day second quarter of 2023.

These homes receive about 20% of their funding from the state, according to Mississippi Department of Mental Health Planning and Communications Director Adam Moore. That’s in addition to the funding they receive from Medicaid and Medicare, as well as personal insurance and private pay.

Kevin Walker, administrator of Reginald P. White Facility, and Judd Nance, administrator of James T. Champion Facility, were surprised to learn they met the new requirements every day between April and June.

“We probably try to staff a little heavier than most nursing homes do, but we think we’re short all the time,” Nance said.

Any nursing facility participating in Medicaid or Medicare reimbursement is required by law to provide services that “attain or maintain the highest practicable physical, mental, and psychosocial well-being of each resident,” as dictated by the Nursing Home Reform Act of 1987.

Richard Mollot, the executive director of Long Term Care Community Coalition – a national nonprofit dedicated to advocating for residents of nursing homes and their families – says that when it comes to laws, the Nursing Home Reform Act is unique because it focuses on the customer – in this case, the resident.

“Most laws focus on the industry itself,” Mollot said. “For instance, all car manufacturers are expected to meet specific miles-per-gallon efficiency or have certain safety features. Nursing homes, on the other hand, are required to provide the staffing, supplies, and services to assure that every resident is able to attain and maintain their highest practicable well-being as an individual, based upon a comprehensive assessment of the person and a care plan that includes not only clinical needs, but the resident’s cultural background, goals, and personal preferences, too.”

Currently, states are in charge of regulating staffing in nursing homes. Some states have no staffing minimums, while the ones that do keep the requirements very low. In Mississippi, regulations require there to be at least a ratio of one CNA for every 15 residents during the day, and 25 residents at night – despite the fact that studies have shown one CNA for every six to eight residents during the day and 11 to 13 at night is optimal.

Even these suboptimal regulations are rarely enforced, according to Harrington, due in part to a national shortage of inspectors. States are required by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to conduct annual surveys and certifications of nursing homes receiving Medicaid and Medicare. In Mississippi, 54% of nursing home state surveyor positions were vacant in 2022, and 44% of the working surveyors had less than two years of experience.

“Enforcement is very weak, especially on staffing,” said Harrington. “We’d like to see CMS really crack down on the nursing homes that don’t have enough staff, and maybe put a hold on admissions until they have enough staff. If they’re not actually able to hire staff they shouldn’t be able to admit patients.”

In previous nursing homes, Simmons says she witnessed bathroom requests going unanswered and continent residents being diapered out of convenience.

The results can be devastating. Residents who are confined to bed and unable to go to the bathroom not only suffer low morale, but can also develop concurrent urinary tract infections. In the elderly, these infections can cause delirium and exacerbate dementia. Those who try to get up on their own may suffer falls, broken bones and concussions as a result.

“You see residents with UTIs and falls and stuff because they’re crying out for help to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and they fall because they have to go to the bathroom and they’re told to go to the bathroom in their briefs,” Simmons said. “Who wants to be sitting somewhere with a wet brief on? It’s humiliating. And it’s unacceptable.”

According to Mollot, it’s a violation of the Nursing Home Reform Act, and one that could be resolved with adequate staffing.

“Nursing homes claim that diapering residents is necessary because they don’t have enough staff to respond to call bells or implement resident-centered toileting practices,” Mollot said. “But if you think about it, that is pretty outrageous. In effect, facilities are admitting that they are taking in and retaining vulnerable human beings for whom they have neither the ability nor intention of providing decent care. Why do we accept the warehousing of millions of vulnerable Americans every year?”

Simmons says she has been let go twice, in two different states, shortly after filing incident reports to Occupational Safety and Health Administration and to the staffing agency she was contracted with.

But Simmons is resolved to continue advocating for the residents she serves and hopes that in time, higher pay and more stringent regulations will lead to better working environments for staff and quality of life for residents in nursing homes.

“I don’t care if they fire me from every job,” she said. “When I know something is not right, I’m going to stand up for it. And can’t nobody stop me from doing that.”

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