State
MDEQ awards $50k waste grant to Meridian
Meridian Star
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality has awarded the City of Meridian a solid waste assistance grant of $50,000 for a household hazardous waste collection program.
MDEQ awards solid waste assistance grants to Meridian, Clarke County
WTOK
JACKSON, Miss. (WTOK) - The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality has awarded grants to Meridian and Clarke County for their household hazardous waste programs.
MDEQ awards grants to help counties clean up illegal dumpsites
WTVA
JACKSON, Miss. (WTVA) - Three local counties will use grants to help clean up illegal dumpsites.
MDEQ awards solid waste assistance grant to Pine Belt counties
WDAM
JACKSON, Miss. (WDAM) - The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) awarded three Pine Belt counties grant funding for solid waste collection programs.
Mississippi burn ban lifted but some county bans remain
AP
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant says the state burn ban has been lifted because of recent rainfall but some county bans are still in effect.
UPDATE ON RARE WHALE AT IMMS
WXXV
Last month, News 25 told you about the rare whale that was recovering at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies.
State Government
MS Quietly Gives Some State Workers Pay Raises
Clarion Ledger
The Mississippi Legislature is supposed to vote on budgets for state agencies during the legislative session. But the Clarion Ledger has found top lawmakers and legislative budget staff routinely direct millions of dollars in pay raises and new positions through a separate, little-known process.
It's called a budget note — and you won't find one in any bill passed by the Mississippi Legislature.
Lawmakers have used budget notes to funnel money away from public view to select vendors and pet projects. The Clarion Ledger has found they are also being used to direct pay raises to select employees — without the knowledge of most state lawmakers.
Rather than deal with low wages, state workers are increasingly putting down their shovels, hanging up their prison guard uniform, or leaving their desks for good, according to a top state official who called employee turnover a crisis in Mississippi.
As state agencies clamor for public money to raise their salaries and keep competent employees, the final decisions on who gets raises — and who doesn't — are made behind closed doors.
Budget notes are supposed to be used to clarify unclear language after lawmakers have passed budget bills and the governor has signed them into law. Instead, they are used to discretely move millions of dollars to specific agencies without consent of the full Legislature.
Mississippi's state personnel board says it's trying to end to the process of pay raises through budget notes.
After learning that some state employees had received pay raises through budget notes, the Clarion Ledger requested all budget notes from the Mississippi State Personnel Board since 2017.
How they work
The budget notes show lawmakers directing individual pay raises of a few thousand dollars to tiny state agencies and also blocs of hundreds of thousands of dollars to larger agencies with sparse guidelines on how to spend it.
The Mississippi Development Authority, for instance, was authorized to spend $600,000 in 2017 for pay raises. MDA spokeswoman Melissa Scallan said that money was for performance-based raises, though none of the money was ultimately used, and MDA never requested it again.
One budget note this year directed $500,000 to the Department of Environmental Quality "to fund vacancies within the Permiting (sic) Division. Agency may use available funds to realign engineering positions."
MDEQ spokesman Robbie Wilbur said the agency has already hired three permitting staff with those funds and plans to hire more.
The Legislative Budget Office, or LBO, sends these "salary reconciliation" instructions — colloquially known as a budget notes — to the state personnel board each June.
The Clarion Ledger has requested budget notes from LBO before, but because LBO is part of the Mississippi Legislature, it is exempted from state public records laws.
Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, was critical of the budget notes for Weight Watchers exposed by the Clarion Ledger earlier this year.
When asked this month about budget notes used for pay raises and new positions, Blount said it was not as concerning.
But Blount also said he was not aware of the extent to which budget notes were being used for pay raises — and he doesn't think other lawmakers are either.
The last across-the-board pay raise for all Mississippi state employees happened in 2007.
Lawmakers attempted to address this in the most recent legislative session.
Workers' group wants more transparency
Roughly 80 percent of workers saw a small pay increase this summer after the Legislature signed off on a salary deal in March. It gave public employees raises up to 3 percent, though many saw less than that, or none, due to the limitations on the increase based on position.
Brenda Scott, president of the Mississippi Alliance of of State Employees, said the increase averages out to $1,050 a worker. She called the pay raise a "slap in the face."
What Scott — and many lawmakers — did not know was that select state employees would be receiving additional pay raises a couple months later through the budget note process.
These pay raises do not appear in state budget bills.
Documents from the State Personnel Board show that top lawmakers directed raises beyond the 3 percent mark for hundreds of employees at state agencies, including the Department of Finance and Administration, Department of Revenue, Gaming Commission, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Board of Animal Health, and the Forestry Commission.
Kelly Hardwick, executive director of the Mississippi State Personnel Board, said his department ensures that any instructions in the budget notes "are within law and policy" and "will not implement notes that are not compliant."
"We are working on revising our current compensation system to give state agencies more salary flexibility while still being compliant and transparent," Hardwick said. "Our goal is to give agency heads more freedom to increase employees' salaries through policy, so that budget notes will not be needed."
Brittany Frederick, a spokeswoman for the State Personnel Board, said the department does not have a record of how long the budget note process has been going on. Frederick declined to say what exact changes the personnel board is making, saying those changes are still being ironed out.
Scott said she had not heard of a "budget note" before, but noted that agencies often get creative with their budgets in order to get pay raises for their employees.
To the average state worker, it's often unclear how and when raises are coming, Scott said, and the leadership in the Legislature does not do a good job of communicating about pay to state workers.
"They need to have a public hearing or something to hear directly from the workers," Scott said.
'The Legislature's pretty tight'
Many of the pay raises directed through budget notes not only go to the average state worker — forest rangers, accountants, human resource employees, regulatory inspectors — but also management and agency heads.
The Commissioner of Banking and Consumer Finance, Charlotte Corley, got a $16,000 pay raise in 2018 thanks to a budget note. Her pay went from $140,899 to $156,900.
Corley explained that she got a pay raise so that her employees could get a pay raise.
Under state law, examiners cannot make more than the commissioner or her deputy, Corley said, and that rule was causing some of her employees to miss out entirely on pay raises.
Her examiners are already underpaid compared to federal bank examiners and similar employees in the private sector, Corley said, and they kept being poached by employers offering better salaries.
So Corley said she needed a pay raise in order to allow a new ceiling for her examiners.
Those employees were able to get a raise after Corley got hers, and she stressed that her agency is one of the few government agencies that actually brings money into the state coffers.
“We are not funded by taxpayer dollars. Zero. Zero dollars come out of general fund through our agency," Corley said. "...We’re funded through assessments, exam fees and license fees of the industry that we regulate. So we’re 100 percent self-funded."
Corley was aware that her pay raise had come through a budget note, but said she had no involvement in that process.
“I don’t understand the budget note process. I don’t know that anybody but maybe the legislative staff understands it," Corley said. "But we don’t see those. They don’t come back with our budget.”
Virden Jones was hired as the executive director of the Mississippi Public Utilities Staff with a salary of about $108,000.
By 2018, Jones said he and much of his staff had gone seven years without a pay raise.
The Public Utilities Staff is relatively small state agency, about 25 positions, Jones said, meaning it doesn't have much flexibility when it comes to raises.
"It's very important for us to retain good, competent staff," Jones said. "... What's killing us and a lot of other state agencies is turnover."
So that year, Jones said he made a push for pay raises.
“It took a lot of talking to legislators on the appropriations committees and expressing our needs," Jones said. "... The Legislature's pretty tight."
The pay raises came in 2018, thanks to budget notes. The notes show his agency received just over $145,000 in raises — including about $12,000 for Jones, his first pay raise as executive director.
Stephanie Boya has been the executive director of an even smaller state agency, the Mississippi Board of Physical Therapy, for 15 years. Boya, too, has gotten raises through the budget note process, though she had never heard of a budget note.
Boya said her agency's board approves a proposed budget and she presents that budget to lawmakers during the session.
According to Boya, she got a phone call one day and the person on the other end said: "Hey, y'all got approved for raises."
Oil Spill
FSU taps voices from the seafood industry, conservationists and government on Apalachicola Bay project
Tallahassee Democrat
Vance Millender has been a fixture in the seafood business in Franklin County for decades.
Millender and Sons Seafood in Carrabelle, a family operation since 1942, is now run by his sons, David and Stephen, who represent the fourth-generation ownership.
National
‘Sense of Dread’: How a Mining Disaster in Brazil Raised Alarms in Minnesota
WSJ
EMBARRASS, Minn.—An earthen dam is set to rise behind the trees of Dan Ehman’s 120 woodland acres in northeastern Minnesota’s Iron Range, a region with close ties to mining for more than a century.
