The City of Jackson may receive federal assistance for its ongoing water crisis after U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith introduced a three-pronged relief bill on Tuesday.
What does it mean to be without water? It is innumerable small humiliations: the splash of a toilet flushed with a bucket, days on end without a shower, no clean clothes. It is weeks without a cooked meal, a sink full of unclean dishes, brushing one’s teeth with water from a bottle, if a bottle can be found. For Tamiko and Otis Smith and many others, it is something far more dangerous.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves says he still opposes expanding Medicaid in Mississippi even though the federal government is offering to give the state an extra $600 million to do so over a two-year period.
LGBTQ rights advocates say that Gov. Tate Reeves put transgender teen and young adult lives “in danger” today by signing Senate Bill 2536, “The Mississippi Fairness Act,” banning transgender students at public schools and colleges from participating in sports teams that match their gender.
Members of the Mississippi clergy invoked the tradition of solidarity and acknowledged the still-unfinished work when they hosted a press conference in conjunction with Working Together Mississippi to unveil a letter expressing their discontent with the Mississippi Legislature’s seven-year inaction regarding Medicaid expansion. The letter also endorses the Mississippi Cares plan, a version of Medicaid reform initiated by the Mississippi Hospital Association that is intended to provide health-care coverage for working-class Mississippians who currently fall into the “gap” between traditional Medicaid coverage and private health-care plans.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba and Lt. Gov Delbert Hosemann met today at the Capitol for a “respectful conversation,” in the mayor’s words, to discuss a concrete plan to address Jackson’s short-term water-system needs. The meeting was a preface to the much more complex discussion of how to permanently address the city’s aging water infrastructure.
Mississippi’s K-12 public-school teachers may still get a $1,000 pay raise after lawmakers in the House and Senate reached a last-minute agreement. Some feared the raise could become a casualty amid a legislative impasse over a House tax-reform bill.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said Mayor Kane Ditto, the capital city’s last white mayor, was also the last leader on Jackson’s infrastructure. Former Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. begged to differ. “I don’t know what the impetus is behind all of this misinformation,” Johnson said. “I hope it’s not demographics.”
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann first addressed House Speaker Philip Gunn’s comprehensive tax-cut bill with a spoonful of sugar at the Stennis Press Forum today, praising the speaker, a Clinton Republican.
After that, it was all medicine.
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