Mississippi Today
Mississippi regulators to solar boosters: Sit down and be quiet
Kyle Wallace sat in the audience with his hand raised earlier this month so he could speak during an open discussion at the Mississippi Public Service Commission‘s Solar Summit.
Wallace, an executive with the New Orleans-based rooftop solar developer, PosiGen, wanted to share information about solar energy with the relatively fresh-faced regulators. All three said earlier in the day they had many questions about how the renewable fuel would fit in in Mississippi, which still gets most of its electricity from fossil fuels.
But after another speaker, Brent Bailey, a former Republican Public Service Commissioner who advocated for clean energy and who now works for a local solar and energy efficiency company spoke, the commissioners cut off comments from that side of the room — abruptly ending the chance for any solar advocate or industry representative to speak.
“We want to hear from people who are not selling solar panels,” said De’Keither Stamps, a Democrat and a former state lawmaker who was elected to the commission last year.
Chairman Chris Brown backed him up.
“We’re turning into an infomercial,” said Brown, a Republican who also was elected to the three-member PSC last year after serving in the state House of Representatives.
Said Wallace: “We were sitting there in the audience thinking, ‘We have answers to these (questions); these are not new questions.’ We want to be able to address them, but we just weren’t provided the opportunity.”
In fact, the agenda for the Aug. 15 meeting included no one from the solar or clean energy industry. Serving in the role as an expert at the summit was a representative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank funded by the oil and gas industry that is adept at spreading its anti-renewable agenda nationwide.
Stamps later defended shutting down the pro-solar voices at the summit: “It was a question-and-answer period,” he told Floodlight. “It wasn’t a ‘give-your-speech’ period.”
Keeping clean energy advocates out of the conversation is just one of a series of tactics the commission has used to discourage solar development in the Magnolia State. Earlier this year, the commission halted rules that would have made rooftop solar more affordable for homeowners and institutions including schools.
The Aug. 15 discussion comes at a time when climate change is approaching a tipping point, and the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has rolled out billions in tax breaks for clean energy to cut economy-wide carbon emissions 40% by 2030.
Lots of sun — but little solar
Mississippi is the 13th sunniest state in the United States. But when it comes to solar, the state ranks 37 out of 50, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, an industry trade group.
Mississippi’s neighbors in the South aren’t faring much better. Alabama ranks 32; Arkansas, 27; Louisiana is at 36, and Tennessee, 30. All figures are according to SEIA.
Wallace said the PSC staff member who was handing a microphone to audience members stopped walking toward where he and other environmental advocates were sitting. They all put their hands down.
He said members of the solar industry had been reaching out to the commissioners all year to help them understand the industry and the impacts of their policymaking on the future of solar in the state.
“It was disappointing,” Wallace said in an interview with Floodlight. “We had hoped that it would be more of an opportunity to have a dialogue and really engage. It obviously did not turn out that way.”
Policy expert is fossil fuel lobbyist
Those invited to speak were executives from the politically influential Mississippi Power Co., the Tennessee Valley Authority, the state’s agriculture and commerce commissioner and Brent Bennett, a policy director from the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Bennett noted that most new power generation is coming from wind and solar. He said that correlates with higher electrical prices in California and Texas, where adoption of renewables has been higher than most states.
“For anyone that’s wanting to add more wind and solar to their resource mix, I think there’s a burden of proof there to show that, ‘OK, well, if you’re going to do that, how are you going to keep costs down?’ ” he said.
But pieces of that puzzle have been studied. A December 2023 report from the consulting firm Ernst & Young found the cost of producing and moving solar electricity over the life of the panels is roughly 29% lower than the cheapest fossil fuel.
Bennett’s track record for creating barriers to renewable energy can be seen in a sweeping energy law the Texas Legislature passed in 2023. According to the Guardian, Bennett edited several amendments to the bill, which doles out incentives for new plants that burn natural gas, also known as methane.
The edits included adding new transmission costs on renewables as well as a requirement that developers ensure wind and solar — intermittent sources of electricity — have access to backup power from fossil fuels, according to the Guardian.
Monika Gerhart, executive director of the Gulf States Renewable Energy Industries Association, said a lot of the information shared at the meeting “raised some real red flags.”
She added, “Everyone wants progress in innovation, and I’m not sure this summit was designed to meet those needs.”
Stamps said the meeting was a first step and wasn’t set up, “to solve all of the problems in one day.”
“It was just the start of the discussion, build some relationships, people can see people,” he said in an interview with Floodlight. “The anti people can come and be in the same room as the pro people … just put everybody in the same room together.”
When asked to respond to his comment regarding a desire to hear from people who weren’t selling solar panels, Stamps said that he’s allowed Bailey — his opponent in two previous PSC elections — and others from the industry to speak about solar on other occasions.
Solar faces political winds
Roughly 20 solar companies are based in Mississippi. The bulk of the solar installations there are in large — or so-called utility-scale — projects. Electric utilities prefer these projects for two reasons: they operate similar to existing power plants, and they can own them, which beefs up their bottom line.
On the flip side, these utilities are resistant — or even take steps to block — customers using rooftop solar because it is disruptive to the industry’s business model. The companies typically use an argument known as “cost shifting,” saying that rooftop solar customers depend less on the power grid, thus driving up the costs that others have to pay for that infrastructure.
Indeed, solar on homes and businesses in Mississippi barely shows up on a SEIA graphic of annual solar installations.
In 2015, the Mississippi PSC adopted a rooftop solar policy to make it more affordable for residents and small businesses. The rule was a top priority of then-veteran regulator Brandon Presley, a widely popular Democrat who ran unsuccessfully to unseat Republican Gov. Tate Reeves last year.
Presley, who also authored the PSC’s policy to boost energy efficiency, was behind a revamped rule in 2022 that offered rebates for home solar systems for low-income households as well as increased the amount they would receive for selling excess electricity back to the grid.
The new rule also created incentives for schools to install rooftop solar to decrease their annual energy expenses.
But the commission gutted that policy earlier this year, arguing that incentives through the IRA’s Solar for All program, administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, would make it easier for low-income residents to put solar on their roofs. The 2-1 vote happened without public notice or an opportunity to comment on the issue beforehand.
The Sierra Club, whose lobbyists are active in fighting anti-renewable energy policies at the PSC and at the Mississippi statehouse, sued the PSC in May, arguing the action should be rescinded because of the lack of notice.
During the summit, Gerhart was among the attendees who pointed out that regulators did not use the full hour-long time block allotted for discussion. The summit was running ahead of schedule, a rarity in any state utility regulatory meeting, so there could have been even more time to hear from members of the audience.
“So most of the industry folks who actually have valuable and factual information to share have sat here all day waiting for this public comment,” she told Floodlight. “They said that they didn’t want to hear from the industry, and then they shut it down.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
New health care coalition forms, including hospitals that left state hospital association
A new health care alliance will unite several of Mississippi’s largest hospital systems – all of which left the state hospital association following controversy over Medicaid expansion – under the umbrella of one of the state’s largest and most influential lobbying firms.
The new group will be helmed by former Mississippi Medicaid Director Drew Snyder, who served under two Republican governors who thwarted Medicaid expansion and the flow of billions of federal dollars to provide health insurance to low-income Mississippians for over a decade.
The new collaborative will focus on “providing sustainable solutions to challenges facing access to care,” said a press release. It will include representatives from the state’s leading acute and trauma care hospitals, rural hospitals, mental health providers and primary care providers.
Critics, along with the Mississippi Hospital Association, say the new group’s formation is motivated by partisan politics.
A slew of hospitals left the hospital association after the organization’s political action committee made its largest-ever contribution to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, a strong supporter of Medicaid expansion, in 2023. All but one have joined the new collaborative.
This means lawmakers in 2025 will hear from two separate groups of hospitals and health care organizations, raising questions about whether their overall impact will be diluted without a unified voice.
Snyder, who declined repeated requests for comment for this story, will lead the Mississippi Healthcare Collaborative under the umbrella of multi-state, Jackson-based lobbying firm Capitol Resources and its new health policy consulting division, Health Resources.
Capitol Resources is a strong supporter of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves. The firm’s political action committee has contributed nearly $75,000 to Reeves since 2018.
Five of Capitol Resources’ scores of Mississippi clients hold multi-million dollar contracts with the Division of Medicaid.
A query to the Mississippi Ethics Commission published just days before Snyder announced his resignation from the Division of Medicaid sought an opinion on how a former head of an agency could work for a lobbying firm with clients in the same field as his or her public service without violating state law. Requests for opinions are anonymous.
The Ethics Commission ruled that the public official could not work for compensation on matters “which he or she was directly or personally involved while working for the government,” but would not be forbidden from working for a company that does.
A national ethics expert told Mississippi Today that when public officials transition to private sector work, particularly in the same field as their public service, it can raise ethical issues.
The knowledge and information public officials hold can be used as a “leg up,” which leads to unfairness in private companies’ and lobbying organizations’ business dealings with government entities, said professor John Pelissero, the director of Government Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
Capitol Resources has for years represented Centene, a company that currently holds $5.2 billion worth of contracts for managing Medicaid beneficiaries care through its subsidiary Magnolia Health. The company has paid the lobbying firm $3.9 million over the last decade, according to the Secretary of State’s website.
Tim Moore, the former head of the Mississippi Hospital Association, said he has concerns about the conflict posed by a lobbying firm representing two health care organizations with competing interests.
“How do you represent a managed care company and a bunch of hospitals at the same time?” he said.
Moore was ousted by the Mississippi Hospital Association’s Board of Governors following hospitals’ withdrawal from the organization.
Clare Hester, the founder and managing partner of Capitol Resources, did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The evolution of the Mississippi Hospital Association
The Mississippi Hospital Association was for many years one of the most powerful lobbies at the Capitol. But that began to change with the passage of the federal Affordable Care Act, which created a partisan rift over whether or not the state should expand Medicaid.
The trade association splintered in May 2023, starting with the departure of the state’s largest hospital system, University of Mississippi Medical Center, in May. Four additional hospitals, all led by Gregg Gibbes, left the association in 2024.
Hospital leaders at the time declined to say what precipitated their decision to leave, other than to cite concerns about the hospital association’s leadership. But the exodus was widely interpreted as a rebuke of the association’s support for Presley and, specifically, Medicaid expansion.
Research has shown that Medicaid expansion would provide millions of dollars to Mississippi’s struggling hospital system.
As Reeves faced an uphill reelection bid, due in part to his opponent’s support of Medicaid expansion and his adamant opposition, he worked with Snyder to create a new program to provide supplemental payments to hospitals to offset low Medicaid payments. While the program did not directly support low-income Mississippians, it was estimated to generate $700 million for the state’s largest hospitals.
Republican House leaders pushing for Medicaid expansion in the last legislative session said the program prevented some large hospitals from being strong advocates for expansion, in part due to fear that Gov. Reeves would punish such a move by doing away with the expanded payments.
The Mississippi Hospital Association has 76 current hospital members, according to its online directory. Some are members of hospital systems.
“The Mississippi Hospital Association will continue to be the trusted voice in health care and to offer education and quality advocacy solutions based on sound health care policy – and not politics – as we have successfully done for almost 100 years,” president and CEO Richard Roberson told Mississippi Today. Roberson is the former head of TrueCare, a provider-led, nonprofit managed care organization that contracts with Medicaid.
Kent Nicaud, one of Reeves’ top campaign donors and the president and CEO of Memorial Hospital, will serve as chair of the collaborative’s board. Memorial Health System left the hospital association in 2023, and is a current client of Capitol Resources.
Moore said having two major health care trade associations in the state will “create division among the industry, which is not good.”
“…The best thing for all hospitals is to be united in one voice, because they have similar issues, whether they’re a small hospital or a large hospital,” he said.
Along with hospitals that left the association, Mississippi Healthcare Collaborative incorporates several existing Capitol Resources clients, including the state’s 21 Federally Qualified Community Health Centers, and Universal Health Services, a company with five behavioral health centers in Mississippi.
“For too long, too many health providers have been siloed in our advocacy. It’s time to sit down at the same table and work together,” said Terrence Shirley, CEO of the Community Health Center Association of Mississippi, which represents the Federally Qualified Community Health Centers, in a press release.
Other members of the new group include Methodist Rehabilitation Center and Northwest Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale.
The group’s members are based in 78 of Mississippi’s 82 counties.
Ochsner Medical Center, which left the Mississippi Hospital Association last year and is a client of Capitol Resources, is not listed as a member of the new collaborative. Ochsner did not respond to Mississippi Today by the time of publication.
Geoff Pender contributed reporting.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Nov. 5, 1926
Victoria Gray Adams, one of the founding members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was born near Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
“(There are) those who are in the Movement and those who have the Movement in them,” she said. “The Movement is in me, and I know it always will be.”
In 1961, this door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman convinced her preacher to open their church to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which began pushing for voter registration. A year later, she became a field secretary for SNCC and led a boycott of businesses in Hattiesburg, later helping found the umbrella group, the Council of Federated Organization, for all the civil rights groups working in Mississippi.
In 1964, she and other civil rights leaders fought the Jim Crow laws and practices that kept Black Mississippians from voting, marching to the courthouse in the chilly rain to protest. By the end of the day, nearly 150 had made their way to register to vote.
Adams became the first known woman in Mississippi to run for the U.S. Senate, unsuccessfully challenging longtime Sen. John Stennis. She also helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. It was time, she said, to pay attention to Black Mississippians, “who had not even had the leavings from the American political table.”
In August 1964, she joined party members in challenging Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention.
“We really were the true Democratic Party,” she recalled in a 2004 interview. “We accomplished the removal of the wall, the curtain of fear in Mississippi for African-Americans demanding their rights.”
Four years later, the party that once barred her now welcomed her.
She continued her activism and later talked of that success: “We eliminated the isolation of the African-Americans from the political process. I believe that Mississippi now has the highest number of African-American elected officials in the nation. We laid the groundwork for that.”
In 2006, she died of cancer.
“When I met … that community of youthful civil rights activists, I realized that this was exactly what I’d been looking for all of my conscious existence,” she said. “It was like coming home.”
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Polls in Mississippi will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. today as voters make their picks for presidential, congressional, state judicial and some local races.
READ MORE: View Mississippi sample ballot
Voters are reminded to bring a photo identification. This can include a valid Mississippi driver’s license, an identification or employee identification card issued by any government entity of the U.S. or state of Mississippi, a U.S. passport, a military photo ID card, a current student ID card issued by an accredited college or university or a Mississippi voter ID card. For more information on voter ID rules, check here.
READ MORE: Vote Tuesday: Candidates battle for seats on state’s highest courts
Those who do not have a valid ID can vote affidavit, but must return and present a photo ID within five days for their ballot to count. Voters waiting in line as polls close at 7 p.m. will still be allowed to vote. If you vote absentee or affidavit, you can track the status of your ballot here.
POLLING PLACE LOCATOR: Use the secretary of state’s online locator to find where you vote
Stay tuned to Mississippi Today for live results, starting after polls close.
LISTEN: Podcast: Mississippi’s top election official discusses Tuesday’s election
The Mississippi secretary of state’s office offers an online resource, My Election Day, where voters can locate or confirm their polling place, view sample ballots and view current office holders. Those with doubts or questions about their precinct locations are urged to contact their local election officials. Contact info for local election officials is also provided on the My Election Day site.
READ MORE: Mississippi Election 2024: What will be on Tuesday’s ballot?
The secretary of state’s office, U.S. attorney’s office and the state Democratic and Republican parties will have observers across the state monitoring elections and responding to complaints.
The secretary of state’s elections division can be contacted at 1-800-829-6786 or ElectionsAnswers@sos.ms.gov.
The U.S. attorney’s office investigates election fraud, intimidation or voting rights issues and can be contacted at 601-973-2826 or 601-973-2855, or complaints can be filed directly with the Department of Justice Civil Rights division at civilrights.justice.gov. Local law enforcement holds primary jurisdiction and serves as a first responder for alleged crimes or emergencies at voting precincts.
The secretary of state’s office also provides some Election Day law reminders:
- It is unlawful to campaign for any candidate within 150 feet from any entrance to a polling place, unless on private property.
- The polling places should be clear of people for 30 feet from every entrance except for election officials, voters waiting to vote or authorized poll watchers.
- Voters are prohibited from taking photos of their marked ballots.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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