Over the past month, Gov. Tate Reeves has signed three bills that will make it easier for those leaving prison to maintain employment.

Senate Bill 2437, authored by Senate Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, will allow for the creation of a pilot program at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF). Located in Rankin County, CMCF houses over 3,800 individuals – the largest population of any prison in the state.

The new program is aimed at improving work prospects for those leaving Mississippi prisons by allowing them to work while incarcerated and learn a trade or skill that they can utilize when reentering the community.

The work initiative aims to employ those incarcerated in positions that teach them marketable skills. Income earned by the participants will be deposited into a special account which can go towards paying fees or fines owed and family support obligations.

SB 2273, also authored by Barnett, will allow those who are on community supervision and working to avoid checking in with their parole or probation agent. In lieu of the check-in, the new law allows employers to submit time cards, proof of ongoing employment, and results of required drug tests in lieu of the meetings. The bill also allows employers to withhold earnings from the individual to cover monthly supervision fees, which are set by statute at $55 per month.

And House Bill 586, which was authored by Rep. Gene Newman, will expand a work release program that permits nonviolent offenders in the last year of their sentence to work for local businesses outside of jail. The program is currently running in Rankin county and has now been expanded to Harrison and Lee counties.

Dignified work has the potential to offer new beginnings, change lives, and reduce recidivism.

I was proud to sign House Bill 586 which gives certain non-violent inmates additional opportunities to work in their communities and better prepare to rejoin society.

— Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) April 11, 2022

Maintaining gainful employment is crucial for reentry, but it’s also important while an individual is incarcerated. Meaningful work gives people a sense of dignity and purpose. Work opportunities are an important rehabilitative tool and should be expanded throughout the state’s prisons.

These opportunities can ensure that people leave prison better than when they went in – helping more people re-enter the workforce, saving taxpayer dollars, and improving public safety in Mississippi.

LELAND — The Black Bayou Water Association, which now connects to nearly 3,000 rural customers in the Delta, was started about 30 years ago by a rice and soybean farmer with no water service experience.

David Koehn, now 76, had plans to build a mobile home park on his land in Washington County, but didn’t have a central water source to offer residents. At the time, Koehn and others in the area drank from their personal shallow well, usually filled with brown, iron-laden water.

So the farmer went home-by-home to see who’d want to pay for a new water service. He took out some loans, found local volunteers to form a board, and by 1991 had the Black Bayou Water Association up and running, serving about 350 homes.

“It started as a community service and it turned into a career,” Koehn said.

Black Bayou eventually built a reputation in the area for its clear water. It’s common in the Delta to see brown tannins flowing out of the tap because of years of Mississippi River flooding, he explained.

Over the years, the water association picked up new customers and merged with other small utilities. Now, the utility serves about 2,800 homes across multiple counties, with connections stretching over 60 miles from Shaw to Mayersville.

But about ten years ago, the rural water service ran into a legal hurdle: the chlorine it relied on to remove the brown coloring violated EPA limits on disinfectant byproducts, which have a number of health risks such as liver and nervous system damage, as well as increasing the risk of cancer. The byproducts, or DBPs, form when chlorine reacts with organic matter in the water.

Black Bayou now treats its groundwater with reduced chlorine, which, while not posing any health risks, means that most of the homes paying for the utility’s service are getting brown water.

Some, about 600, are getting clear water from a new $1.5 million plant, paid for through USDA loans. The facility there uses a polymer that coagulates the small bits of organic material in the water, which then settle out.

Koehn said that the goal is to replicate that process for the remaining 2,200 connections. But, in order to reach all of its far-spread customer base, the small utility needs $14 million for a new plant and distribution.

Mississippi is filled with small water systems in need of assistance like BBWA: of the state’s 1,200 public water systems, about 70% are rural systems serving 1,000 homes or less, most of which were built in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Their issues range from aging wells, to delivery lines that are too small, to lacking a backup power source when a storm hits. Several other utilities are facing the same compliance issues as BBWA.

When news came last year of incoming support through the American Rescue Plan Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Mississippi Rural Water Association (MRWA) asked its member utilities what amount they needed. The survey showed a combined need of $700 million, but only a third of the state’s rural water associations had responded.

Earlier this month, the Legislature appropriated $300 million of APRA funds for rural water associations, and made another $450 million available through a matching program for cities and counties to make water improvements.

“No, it’s not going to near about be enough,” CEO of the Mississippi Rural Water Association Kirby Mayfield said of the ARPA money. “But this is going to be big, it’s going to be huge for our systems. It’s like I’ve been telling (our members): ‘We’ll never see this again in our lifetimes, take advantage of it.’ This is our chance to get things right.”

Mayfield, who brought the survey’s findings to the Senate Appropriations Committee late last year, discussed how many of the older, small rural systems have expanded over the years and are now failing to serve adequate water pressure to every home.

“They didn’t need but a two-inch line going down that road because there weren’t but five houses down that road,” Mayfield said. “And today that road might have 50 houses on that road, and the same two-inch line is trying to serve those 50 customers.”

In his testimony to state lawmakers, he described the financial burden that old and breaking infrastructure is putting on the water associations, which often serve low-income populations: in 2013, the EPA estimated that the national average water loss was 16%. In Mississippi, Mayfield estimated that it’s around 35%.

With so many small utilities around the state, some experts have recommended consolidating rural water associations to save money on resources and combine expertise among board members.

In some cases, like with Black Bayou, nearby utilities are happy to merge. But others, Mayfield explained, are hesitant to take on the debts of struggling nearby utilities. He added that ARPA funds could be used to alleviate such costs and encourage consolidation.

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Every public university but Jackson State University will raise tuition rates this coming school year, continuing a trend that puts the cost of college increasingly out of reach for the average family in Mississippi.

The Institution of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved the new tuition rates at its regular meeting Thursday. The board voted to waive a requirement to wait 30 days after introducing new tuition rates in lieu of immediate adoption.

For the coming school year, average in-state tuition will increase by $177, from $8,219 to $8,396 a year. Average out-of-state tuition will increase from $11,803 a year to $12,197 a year. Room and board will increase to $5,655 a year.

Students at Mississippi Valley State University will see the highest increases from $6,928 to $7,274, about $346 a year, but tuition will remain the lowest of all eight universities. Mississippi State University will continue to have the highest in-state tuition rate at $9,248 a year, up from last school year’s rate of $9,110.

At the board meeting, John Pearce, IHL’s associate commissioner of finance, said the universities cited “a lot of inflationary costs that are happening right now,” as well as salary increases, as the reason for the tuition increases.

Commissioner Alfred Rankins added that without support from the Legislature, the universities would have needed to increase tuition even more.

“Trustees, I do want to point out that had it not been for the generous increase in appropriations we received from the Legislature, the institutions would have had to raise tuition even higher than what we see presented here today,” Rankins said.

The Legislature allocated about $411 million in education and general funds to Mississippi’s eight universities, a 14.5% increase from last year’s appropriation. Caron Blanton, IHL’s spokesperson, wrote in an email that IHL’s appropriations bills don’t allocate a specific amount for salary increases but that “the amount appropriated is sufficient to cover a salary increase for university employees and some additional funds for operating costs.”

Jackson State was the only university that did not increase tuition last year. In 2020, every university but Delta State University decided not to increase tuition due to the pandemic.

Mississippi’s eight public universities have all steadily increased tuition since 2000 as the Legislature has decreased funding for higher education. Tuition now comprises the majority of universities’ revenue in Mississippi. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, tuition accounted for 54% of public university revenue in 2018 in Mississippi, compared to 25% in 2008.

This means college is increasingly unaffordable for the average family in Mississippi who has seen their income stagnate. That is one reason why more than half of Mississippi college students graduated with an average of $29,714 in student debt in 2020, according to the Institution for College Access and Success.

Many low-income students in Mississippi qualify for state and federal financial aid. But some lawmakers and the Post-Secondary Education Financial Assistance Board, which oversees financial aid in Mississippi, have been trying to find ways to limit the number of students who can qualify for the state’s three undergraduate grant programs.

Last year, the Post-Secondary Board proposed eliminating the state’s three grant programs, including the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students, or HELP, grant, which pays for all four years of college for low-income students.

In its place, the board proposed the Mississippi One Grant. Under that program, more students would qualify for aid but Black and low-income students on average would lose thousands of dollars in college financial aid while white students would gain money.

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