Mississippi Today
‘Every man’s home is their castle’: How Ocean Springs’ pursuit for growth cost it the trust of its residents

OCEAN SPRINGS – In many ways, Ocean Springs stands out from the rest of Mississippi.
Mississippi is 55% white and 36% Black; Ocean Springs is 79% white and 5% Black. Despite Mississippi’s underfunded and understaffed education system, Ocean Springs has received an “A” grade from the state for 10 years running. Despite being in the poorest state in the nation, Ocean Springs has a poverty rate lower than the country’s. Compared to the state overall, homes in the city are valued roughly one and half times higher.
National media has lauded the city in recent years: A 2022 USA Today list ranked it the best small coastal town in the country, praising its “quaint cottage-like” downtown and “artistic flair.” Another piece in the Wall Street Journal celebrated Ocean Springs for its “distinct charm.”
“We’re known for the historical homes, the mom and pop stores, the majestic oak trees,” described Greg Gipson, a native and longtime resident of the city.
But recent moves by city officials, Gipson and others feel, have started to erode that identity.
Mayor Kenny Holloway, who took office in 2021, says he wants to keep the charm that the so-called City of Discovery is known for. He believes to do that, the city has to think bigger.
“If the city’s not growing and moving forwards, you’re going backwards,” Holloway said in a recent interview with SuperTalk radio.

In the last couple of months, the mayor’s vision for growth has hit a wall: After word of a redevelopment plan spread through social media in August, the details of the plan drew a wave of dissent from residents, especially from those in a historic Black neighborhood called the Railroad District.
The Urban Renewal Plan lists over 100 properties in the city that officials, back in April, deemed to be “slum” or “blighted.” Those include vacant lots, small businesses, and old but still occupied homes.
The goal of the plan, as a city attorney told an audience at a recent public meeting, is to help the city qualify for federal development grants. Holloway, in an interview with Mississippi Today, explained that Ocean Springs wouldn’t normally qualify for certain grants, such as Community Development Block Grants, because the city’s median income is too high, which is why it had to single out specific areas as “blighted” to get funding for those properties.
When owners of those properties first saw the plan in August, their eyes clung to five words repeated throughout the document: “possible acquisition by the city.”

As it turns out, a Mississippi code allows cities to take someone’s property if the city designates it as “slum” or “blighted,” which is defined as places “detrimental to the public health, safety, morals or welfare.” In Mississippi, there’s no requirement for the city to inform property owners of the designation when it happens, and there’s also a 10-day limit on how long a property owner has to contest the designation, a restriction that doesn’t exist in most states.
In fact, most states don’t have any time limit, explained Dana Berliner, an attorney with the Institute for Justice. Berliner is representing Ocean Springs landowners in a recently filed federal lawsuit against the city over the redevelopment, which argues that the Mississippi laws violate the 14th Amendment right to due process.
The Ocean Springs Board of Alderman voted 5-2 to approve the designations at an April meeting, but the city neglected to notify any of the property owners beforehand. By the time property owners learned about the Urban Renewal Plan in August, the 10-day period had long passed.
After hearing from shocked and angered residents, Holloway said he was surprised by the pushback.

“We thought we were doing something that was very positive for every area and every citizen in Ocean Springs,” Holloway said. “If you had a house that needed sprucing up and (you wanted to use grant money), that’s what we were trying to present to that part of Ocean Springs.”
He admitted that the city could’ve done a better job communicating its intentions. As he repeatedly emphasized, the city has no interest in forcibly taking anyone’s property, and he added that he doesn’t believe anywhere in the city is actually a “slum.”
Still, he said, the city has followed the state law, explaining that “we’re not required to send out individual notices” when giving those designations.

“It is not anything that we tried to hide,” Holloway said, explaining that maps of the plan were on display in city hall weeks before the April vote. “You got to understand, we get the commotion part of it. Did we roll it out properly? There were some errors we made, obviously. But we did everything by statute.”
Whether or not the Urban Renewal Plan includes acquiring properties, the homes of families who’ve lived in Ocean Springs for generations are stuck with the “slum” and “blighted” labels because they missed the 10-day appeal period. That means that, at any point, the city could still decide in the future to acquire those properties, with or without the owners’ approval.
In the weeks after residents discovered the proposal, more controversy from city hall widened the division between officials and the public.
At a September meeting of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission, a committee member was caught on microphone saying old homes in Ocean Springs, including those targeted in the redevelopment plan, “need to be burnt down.” The member later told the Sun Herald he was being “sarcastic.”
On a Monday night in early October, the city held a public meeting at the Ocean Springs Civic Center to hear feedback from residents on the Urban Renewal Plan. Of the dozens who spoke, only one person, a woman from nearby Pascagoula, supported the plan. Almost everyone else was critical of the mayor and aldermen sitting on stage before them.
“That was so disrespectful for someone to say something like that,” said John Joiner about the “burnt down” comments. Joiner spoke on behalf of resident Joe Daley, a cancer patient who was sitting next to Joiner and has lived in the city since 1946. “It’s their home. Every man’s home is their castle.”
Cynthia Fisher spoke about the property her grandmother bought in 1920 in the Railroad District, just outside of downtown Ocean Springs. The Urban Renewal Plan shows a picture of the home there, where Fisher’s sister now lives, with text reading, “The elimination of blighting conditions on this property will increase the probability of redevelopment of the neighborhood.”

Fisher, who now lives around the corner from the house, told the officials that before bars started popping up nearby, “y’all didn’t even think about that part of town.”
“There’s a lot of history down there in that neighborhood,” she said. “For y’all to include that, that’s the only completely Black neighborhood in there.”
Rana Oliver, whose family’s home was also listed in the plan, said she only found out that her property was included when a friend messaged her on Facebook.
“Your Urban Renewal Plan was disrespectful, it was disrespectful because there was no notification to the citizens,” Oliver told the officials. “We’re your fellow citizens. And I want to ask you as my fellow citizens, where was your humanity?”

Even before the Urban Renewal Plan, residents in and around Ocean Springs were skeptical of the city’s pursuit for more development.
Four years ago, a group of residents sued the city over plans to build a beachfront condominium called “The Sands.” They argued that the area was primarily used for single-family homes, and that the Ocean Springs Board of Aldermen were bending zoning codes to allow the project to move forward. In 2021, a circuit court judge sided against the city, calling the board’s actions, “unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious.”
Another avenue of growth the city has worked on for years is trying to annex surrounding parts of Jackson County, but last year the county Board of Supervisors voted unanimously against it.
Anecdotally, residents say the identity of the city, especially downtown, has shifted to accommodate more entertainment.
“When I first got here in the late 1990s, Government Street (in downtown Ocean Springs) wasn’t like it is now. It was more quiet, quaint,” said Sam Washington, board chairman of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. The church has been a hub in the Railroad District for decades, and part of its parking lot is included in the redevelopment plan.
“Over the years, it has gone more towards the ‘entertainment district.’ People going clubbing, people drinking,” Washington said.
Washington referenced a “to-go cup” law the city passed in 2016, allowing patrons to walk outside with alcohol in parts of downtown, just next to the Railroad District. Some longtime residents say the recent trend has come at the cost of the city’s character.
“I’m not saying I’m against development, but we have to do it in a smart way where we keep the charm of Ocean Springs,” said Gipson, the Ocean Springs local. “But when you start adding additional bars, additional hotels, and all this other stuff, it just does not match up with what this city was built on.”

At the October public meeting, several residents raised concerns that the city was simply using the Urban Renewal Plan to transfer property over to private developers. Holloway, the mayor, is himself a developer; according to the bio on the city’s website, he’s a broker and owner of a real estate and development company.
According to a Mississippi Today analysis of campaign finance reports, Holloway received $32,550 – a third of his total itemized donations – from a plethora of businesses and employees in construction, civil engineering, urban planning, real estate and development. The mayor also received $2,000 from restaurants in downtown Ocean Springs, and another $2,000 from two companies proposing to fill wetlands along Ocean Springs in order to build multi-family housing.
In a city where only five percent of residents are Black, much less than in Jackson County and the state overall, a vast majority of homes listed in the Urban Renewal Plan are in the predominantly Black Railroad District.
The neighborhood, bisected by train tracks going East and West, was the main part of Ocean Springs that Black families felt welcome for decades, residents there say. Gipson, 56, said his father used his wages from working at the shipyard to build a home across the street from the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. He remembers as a kid recognizing that the Black families mainly stayed in that part of the city.
“This was an all Black area, we knew that,” he said. “We knew it, going to Sunday school, going to church. When we got to a certain point, up the road, down the road, they would have people looking out for us, and they would call and tell our parents, ‘They just passed by.’”

Curley Clark, president of the Jackson County NAACP Chapter since 1980, said the fact the Railroad District is being targeted in the redevelopment plan is a result of the city’s segregated history.
“Because of historical discrimination and historical redlining, Black people were only allowed to acquire property in certain areas,” Clark said. “The Black community remained where it was, and the white community expanded outwards. And since the central city remained in its present location, the Black neighborhoods end up being prime property.”
Holloway, as well as the aldermen, are all white. After hearing residents’ criticism, the mayor’s office spoke with both Clark as well as ACLU-MS.
Holloway told Mississippi Today about those conversations: “They don’t see anything wrong that we’ve done. They don’t see any racial issues attached to it.”
When Mississippi Today reached out to the groups, though, neither agreed with the mayor’s version of what was said.
Clark said that, while he agreed there weren’t any racist intentions in the plan, he told Holloway the city should’ve done more to include community members in the early stages of writing the plan.
“I take issue to that,” Clark said of the mayor’s account. “I looked him in the eyes and told him, ‘You didn’t develop the plan in the best manner, and you should’ve had more participation from the minority sector.’”
Ashley McLaughlin, director of Policy and Advocacy for ACLU-MS, said she never indicated she approved of the plan, and also told the mayor’s office the city could do more to build a relationship with community members.
With the recently filed lawsuit, the plan’s future is unclear. The city is giving property owners an option to sign an “opt out” form until the end of October to leave them out of the plan, but which would also prevent them from receiving the grants the city is looking for.
While the mayor said the city has “pumped the brakes” after hearing residents’ feedback, he also said he and the city aldermen will revisit the redevelopment proposal in the future.
“Our city attorney spoke with Attorney General (Lynn) Fitch who will address the claims that the urban renewal plan statutes are unconstitutional,” Holloway said in response to the lawsuit, reiterating that the city still has yet to vote to approve the plan. “The city’s proposed Urban Renewal Plan has not violated anyone’s rights. It is unfortunate that our residents have chosen to file a lawsuit instead of having a constructive discussion with the city.”

None of the city’s aldermen responded to requests for comment from Mississippi Today.
Attorney Elizabeth Feder-Hosey, an Ocean Springs resident and native, is representing the residents and business owners and church in the lawsuit. She’s working on the complaint with the Institute of Justice, a Virginia-based nonprofit that specializes in eminent domain cases.
At the October public meeting, Feder-Hosey criticized the officials for their lack of transparency.
For example, she noted later in an interview, the agenda for the decisive April board meeting only stated the “Urban Renewal Plan,” and nothing about designating areas as “slums” or “blighted.
“And then you’ve got the complete lack of notice,” Feder-Hosey added. “There’s that whole, ‘We didn’t have to (tell people), so we didn’t do it.’ Which to me is not about serving your people. If you want the community to buy into your plan, you give them a seat at the table and you tell them what the plan is, all the steps of it, the benefits, the risks. The city’s kind of just piecemealed out these little morsels for people to hang on.
“At no step has the city done anything to earn the trust of its people.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Pharmacy benefit manager reform likely dead
Hotly contested legislation that aimed to increase the transparency and regulation of pharmacy benefit managers appeared dead in the water Tuesday after a lawmaker challenged the bill for a rule violation.
The bill was sent back to conference after Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, raised a point of order challenging the addition of code sections to the bill, which will likely kill it.
House members in the past have chosen to turn a blind eye to the rule, which would require the added code sections to be removed when the bill is returned to conference. This fatal flaw will make it difficult to revive the legislation.
“It will almost certainly die,” said House Speaker Jason White, who authored the legislation. “And you can celebrate that with your pharmacist when you see them.”
“…This wasn’t ‘gotcha.’ Everybody in this chamber knew that code sections were added, because the attempt was to make 1123 more suitable to all the parties.”
The bill sought to protect patients and independent pharmacists, who have warned that if legislators do not pass a law this year to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, which serve as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry, some pharmacies may be forced to close. They say that the companies’ low payments and unfair business practices have left them struggling to break even.
The bill underwent several revisions in the House and Senate before reaching its most recent form, which independent pharmacists say has watered the bill down and will not offer them adequate protection.
House Bill 1123, authored by White, originally focused on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. The Senate then beefed up the bill by adding provisions barring the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibiting spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits.
Independent pharmacists, who have flocked to the Capitol to advocate for reform this session, widely supported the Senate’s version of the bill.
The Senate incorporated several recommendations from the House into its bill, saying that they believed that the legislation would have the House’s support.
Instead, the House sent the bill to conference and requested additional changes, including new language that would eliminate self-funded insurance plans, or health plans in which employers assume the financial risk of covering employees’ health care costs themselves, from a section of the bill that prohibits pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to specific pharmacies.
This language seeks to satisfy employers, who argue that regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ business practices will lead to higher health insurance costs.
Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, who has spearheaded pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate, previously said that adding the language to the bill would “remove any protection out of the law.” But she signed the conference report that included the language Monday after a heated conference meeting between lawmakers.
Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs and co-author of the bill, said the bill has something for everybody, gesturing to its concessions for employers and independent pharmacists. He said the bill gives independent pharmacists 85% of what they wanted.
Mississippi Independent Pharmacies Association director Robert Dozier was not available for comment by the time the story published.
Zuber told House members Tuesday to “blame the Senate” for the slow progress of pharmacy benefit manager reform in Mississippi, citing the body’s failure to take up a drug pricing transparency bill half a decade ago, for three years in a row.
“If the Senate had followed the leadership and the legislation that we drafted those many years ago, we would not be here,” Zuber said. “We would have the information on drug pricing, we would have the information and transparency on (pharmacy benefit managers) and we would have the ultimate reason as to why drug costs continue to rise.”
Members of the House expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation Tuesday, arguing it did not do enough to ensure lower prescription drug costs for consumers.
“I’m going to try to do something next year that goes even further,” Zuber responded.
For the past several years, lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, but none have made it as far as this session.
“We’ll go another year,” said White.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back
After months of bitter Republican political infighting, the Legislature appears likely to end its session Wednesday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown if they don’t come back and adopt one by June 30.
After the House adjourned Tuesday night, Speaker Jason White said he had presented the Senate with a final offer to extend the session, which would give the two chambers more time to negotiate a budget. As for now, the 100 or so bills that make up the state budget are dead.
The Senate leadership was expected to meet and consider the offer Tuesday evening, White said. But numerous senators both Republican and Democrat said they would oppose such a parliamentary resolution, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has also said it’s unlikely and that the governor will have to force lawmakers back into special session.
White said he believes, if the Senate would agree to extend the session and restart negotiations, lawmakers could pass a budget and end the 2025 session by Sunday, only a few days later than planned.
But if the Senate chooses not to pass a resolution extending the session, White said the House would end the session on Wednesday.
It would take a two-thirds vote of support in both chambers to suspend the rules and extend the session. The Senate opposition appears to be enough to prevent that.
Still, the speaker said he believes Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Senate leaders are considering the proposal. But he said if he doesn’t hear a positive response by Wednesday, the House will adjourn and wait for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session at a later date.
“We are open to (extending the session), but we will not stay here until Sunday waiting around to see if they might do it,” White said.
White said leaving the Capitol without a budget and punting the issue to a special session might not cool tensions between the chambers, as some lawmakers hope.
“I think when you leave here and you end up in a special session, some folks say, ‘Well everybody that’s upset will cool down by then.’ They may, or it may get worse. It may shine a different and specific light on some of the things in this budget and the differences in the House and Senate,” White said. “Whereas, I think everybody now is in the legislative mode, and we might get there.”
The Mississippi Constitution does not grant the governor much power, but if Gov. Tate Reeves calls lawmakers into a special session, he gets to set the specific legislative agenda — not lawmakers.
White said the governor could potentially use his executive authority to direct lawmakers to take up other bills, such as those related to education, before getting to the budget.
“When we leave here without a budget, it is entirely the governor’s prerogative to when he (sets a special session) and how he does that.”
While the future of the state’s budget hangs in the balance, lawmakers have spent the remaining days of their regular session trying to pass the few remaining bills that remained alive on their calendars.
House approves DEI ban, Senate could follow suit on Wednesday
The House on Tuesday passed a proposal to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public schools, and both chambers approved a measure to establish a form of early voting.
The House approved a conference report compromise to ban DEI programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. If the Senate follows suit, Mississippi would join a number of other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump, who has made rooting DEI out of the federal government one of his top priorities.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers follows hours of heated debate in which Democrats, all almost of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. Legislative Republicans argued the legislation will elevate merit in education and remove from school settings “divisive concepts” that exacerbate divisions among different identity groups.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the act, but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law, but only after they go through an internal campus review process that would give schools time to make changes. The legislation could also withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply.
Legislature sends ‘early voting lite’ bill to governor
The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a proposal to establish a watered down version of early voting, though the legislation is titled “in-person excused voting,” and not early voting.
The proposal establishes 22 days of in-person voting before Election Day that requires voters to go to the circuit clerk’s office or another location county officials have designated as a secure early voting facility, such as a courtroom or a board of supervisors meeting room.
To cast an early vote, someone must present a valid form of photo ID and list one of about 15 legal excuses to vote before Election Day. The excuses, however, are broad and would, in theory, allow many people to cast early ballots.
Examples of valid excuses are voters expecting to work on Election Day, being at least 65 years old, being currently enrolled in college or potentially travelling outside of their county on Election Day.
Since most eligible voters either work, go to college or are older than 65 years of age, these excuses would apply to almost everyone.
“Even though this isn’t early voting as we saw originally, it makes this more convenient for hard working Mississippians to go by their clerks’ office and vote in person after showing an ID 22 days prior to an election,” Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England said.
Republican Gov. Tate Reeves opposes early voting, so it’s unclear if he would sign the measure into law or veto it.
Both chambers are expected to gavel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to debate the final items on their agenda.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘A lot of us are confused’: Lacking info, some Jacksonians go to wrong polling place
Johnny Byrd knew that when his south Jackson neighborhood Carriage Hills changed wards during redistricting last year, his neighbors would have trouble finding their correct polling place on Election Day.
So he bought a poster board and inscribed it with their new voting location – Christ Tabernacle Church.
“I made a sign and placed it in front of the entrance to our neighborhood that told them exactly where to go so there would be no confusion,” said Byrd, vice president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods.
Still, on April 1, a car full of voters from a senior living facility who should have gone to Christ Tabernacle were driven to their old polling place.
“I thought it was unfortunate they had to get there and find out rather than knowing in advance that their polling location was different,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson who was on the ground Tuesday helping constituents with voting.
One of those elderly women became frustrated and said she no longer wanted to vote, Norwood said, though her companions tried to convince her otherwise. By midday Tuesday, 300 people had voted at Christ Tabernacle, one of the city’s largest precincts currently in terms of registered voters, but among the lowest in turnout historically.
Voting rights advocates and candidates vying for municipal office in Jackson are keeping an eye on issues facing voters at the polls, though without official results, it remains to be seen if that will dampen turnout this election with the hotly contested Democratic primary.
“I still believed it was gonna be low,” Monica McInnis, a program manager for the nonprofit OneVoice, said of turnout. “I was expecting it would be a little higher because of what is on the ballot and how many people are running in all of the wards as well as the mayor’s race.”
The situation is evolving as the day goes on, but the main issues are twofold. One, thousands of Jackson voters have new precinct locations after redistricting last year put them into a new city council ward.
Two, some voters didn’t realize their polling place for the municipal elections may differ from where they voted in last year’s national elections, which are run by the counties.
In Mississippi, voters are assigned two precincts that are often but not always the same: A municipal location for city elections and a county location for senate, gubernatorial and presidential elections
“People in Mississippi, we go to the same polling location for three years, and that fourth year, it changes,” said Jada Barnes, an organizer with the Jackson-based nonprofit MS Votes. “A lot of us are confused. When people are going to the polling place today, they’re seeing it is closed, so they’re just going back home which is making turnout go even lower.”
Barnes said she’s hearing this primarily from a few Jackson voters who called a hotline that MS Votes is manning. Lack of awareness around polling locations is a big deterrent, she said, because most people are trying to squeeze their vote in between work, school or family responsibilities.
“Maybe you’re on your lunch break, you only got 30 minutes to go vote, you learn that your polling location has changed and now you have to go back to work,” she said.
Norwood said he heard from a group of students assigned to vote at Christ Tabernacle who had attempted to vote at the wrong precinct and were told their names weren’t on the rolls. They didn’t know they had been moved from Ward 4 to Ward 6, Norwood said, meaning they expected to vote in a different council race until reaching the polls Tuesday.
Though voters have a duty to be informed of their polling location, Barnes said city and circuit clerks and local election commissioners are ultimately responsible for making sure voters know where to go on Election Day.
Angela Harris, the Jackson municipal clerk, said her office worked to inform voters by mailing out thousands of letters to Jacksonians whose precincts changed, including the roughly 6,000 whose wards changed during the 2024 redistricting.
“I am over-swamped,” she said yesterday.
Despite her efforts, at least one voter said he never got a letter. Stephen Brown learned through Facebook, not an official notice, that he was moved from Ward 1 to Ward 2.

A resident of the Briarwood Heights neighborhood in northeast Jackson, Brown’s efforts to vote Tuesday have been complicated by mixed messages and a lack of communication. He has yet to vote, even though he showed up at the polls at 7:10 this morning.
His odyssey took him to two wrong locations, where the poll managers instructed Brown to call his ward’s election commissioner, who did not answer multiple calls, Brown said. Brown finally learned through a Facebook comment that he could look up his new precinct on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website — if he scrolled down the page past his county precinct information.
This afternoon, Brown has a series of meetings planned, so now he’s hoping for a 30-minute window to try voting one more time, even though he’s skeptical it will make a difference.
“I’m a very disenchanted voter, because I’ve been let down so much,” he said. “I vote because it’s the thing that I’m supposed to do and because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, but not because I truly believe in it, you know?”
Brown’s not alone in facing turbulence. Back at Christ Tabernacle, one Jackson voter, who declined to give her name, said she’s frustrated from having to drive to three polling locations in one day.
“I’m dissatisfied with the fact that I had to drive from one end of this street and all of the back to come over here when I usually vote over here on Highway 18,” she said. “This was a great inconvenience, gas wise and time wise.”
The same thing happened to Rodney Miller. He called the confusion some voters are facing in this election “unnecessary.”
“That ain’t the way we should be handling business,” he said. “We should be looking out for one another better than that, you know? It’s already enough getting people out to vote, and when you confuse them when they try? Come on now. That’s discouraging.”
Christ Tabernacle is the second largest precinct in the city in terms of registered voters, with 3,330 assigned to vote there as of 2024, according to documents retrieved from the municipal election committee. But it had one of the lowest voter turnout rates – 10% in the 2021 primary election before redistricting and before it became so large.
Byrd mentioned the much higher turnout in places like Ward 1 in northeast Jackson, compared to where he lives in south Jackson. Why does Byrd think this is?
“Civics,” Byrd said. “They took civics out of school. If you ask the average person what is the role and responsibility of any elected official, they can’t tell you.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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