A new analysis from the Office of the State Auditor found that many government entities in Mississippi do not have proper cybersecurity measures in place. 

The Auditor’s Office conducted a survey of 125 state agencies, boards, commissions, and universities to track compliance with the state’s new Enterprise Security Program, which is designed to “provide coordinated oversight of the cybersecurity efforts across all state agencies, including cybersecurity systems, services, and development of policies, standards, and guidelines.”

The program was created in 2017 and compliance is required by law. Despite that, 54 of the 125 government entities surveyed did not respond. 

The findings among those that completed the survey showed:

- 53 agencies reporting having proper cyber security measures in place;

- 43 agencies reported having conducted a third-party security risk assessment in the last three years;

- 36 agencies reported having encrypted sensitive information; and

- 49 percent of responding agencies reported being more than 75 percent compliant with the Enterprise Security Program. 

“The results of the survey described above show that Mississippians’ personal data may be at risk,” Auditor Shad White said. “Many state agencies are operating as if they are not required to comply with cyber security laws, and many refused to respond to auditors’ questions about their compliance. State government cyber security is a serious issue for Mississippi taxpayers and citizens. Mississippians deserve to know their tax, income, health, or student information that resides on state government servers will not be hacked.” 

The Auditor’s Office is authorized to verify compliance with the Enterprise Security Program.

The Mississippi Hemp Cultivation Task Force met for the second time Wednesday, with subcommittees offering their reports on what the ramifications of hemp cultivation would be for Mississippi.

Agricultural experts said that markets for hemp — which is derived from strains of the cannabis sativa plant with low amounts of the psychoactive substance in marijuana known as THC — are new in the United States and that cultivation would present lots of unknowns for farmers. Legal hemp would have a THC content of 3 percent or less.

Law enforcement officials complain that they can’t tell the difference between hemp and marijuana and would need more funds. 

Mississippi is one of only three states where hemp cultivation is illegal. The other 47 states have legalized it for commercial, research, or pilot programs.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will present regulations governing hemp cultivation nationally within the next couple of months after the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill authorized the growing and sale of hemp.

Hemp can be cultivated for its fiber, which can be used in insulation, rope, textiles, and other products. The seeds are also a good source of protein and can be eaten by humans or used for animal feed. The flowers of the plant can be used for cannabidiol, or CBD oil production that has benefits still being studied by scientists, including those at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Larry Walker is the director of the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi. He pointed to Kentucky, which was one of the early adopters of a pilot hemp cultivation program, as having advantages since hemp cultivation is very similar to a cash crop already grown in the Bluegrass State, tobacco. 

Kentucky has issued about 110 processor licenses in 2019 and the industry is expected to create about 900 full-time jobs. 

“Tobacco growers can do a lot of things as far as planting and processing that are very similar with hemp,” Walker said. “They’ve had great success, but some of the numbers there are quite inflated.”

Wes Burger is the associate director of the Forest and Wildlife Research Center at Mississippi State University. He said hemp has the potential to be a competitive crop in the state’s agricultural mix, but that isn’t a silver bullet or a path to prosperity. 

He also said there will need to be markets set up for hemp and seed testing to find varieties that would grow best in Mississippi’s climate and soils. He also said there are no legal herbicides or pesticides for hemp cultivation, which could make it problematic. Also, the thick fibrous nature of the stems that makes for strong products also can damage agricultural equipment such as combines.

According to Burger, there are three types of cultivation. Many farmers grow hemp for the seeds and those type of farms will favor plants with some spacing between them. Fiber farmers will want their plants to grow closely together and be taller with fewer stems to maximize the amount of fiber harvested. Those wanting to grow plants for CBD production would grow them like vegetables such as cucumbers and the plants would be short and bushy.

John Dowdy, who is the director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, said that hemp cultivation would add problems for law enforcement since it requires a laboratory to determine whether the THC content crosses the 3 percent threshold. 

He said that those costs could add up to $500,000 per year for the Department of Public Safety and that the DPS is already overwhelmed trying to stop Mexican heroin and methamphetamines and Chinese fentanyl.

The final meeting of the Hemp Cultivation Task Force is November 20 and the group will finalize their recommendations to the legislature, which is due in December.

All three of Mississippi’s charter schools improved their grades in the Mississippi Department of Education’s annual accountability grades released Tuesday.

The grades evaluate how school districts and individual schools are performing from year to year and 70 percent of districts were rated as a C or higher.

Reimagine Prep has gone up a letter grade in the last three accountability scores, going from a C last year to this year’s B. Smilow Prep improved from a D to a C and Midtown Public Charter School went from an F to a D.

There were other improvements with public schools. The number of schools that are considered failing (with a D or F grade) dropped from 37.6 percent in 2016 to 26.2 percent in the latest batch. The number of failing districts fell from 50 last year to 42 in this year’s scores.

The state Board of Education has to approve the accountability scores at its meeting today.

Last year, 28 districts improved their grades. This year, the numbers were even better, as 46 districts bumped up a letter grade. At the individual school level, 258 of the state’s 877 public schools improved by a letter grade from last year.

Petal was the highest scoring school district statewide, with Ocean Springs, Clinton, Oxford and Madison County rounding out the top five. 

Thirty one districts received the top grade of A, up from 18 in last year’s grades, and nine of those earned an A rating for the first time. There were 35 districts that earned B grades and 35 more with grades of C. Last year, 42 districts earned B grades and 37 finished with C grades.

After three years of F grades that almost resulted in a state takeover, the Jackson Public School district improved to a D. All of the JPS high schools received a failing grade and only 22 out of the district’s 56 schools received a passing score. 

Since 2011, when the MDE switched to a letter grade system for accountability scores, the JPS has scored no better than a D.

The accountability grades are partially based on the performance of students and the annual progress made on the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program tests for English language arts and mathematics, which are administered annually to students in the third through eighth grades and in high school.

Also figured into the accountability grades are the four-year graduation rate, student performance on biology, U.S. history and ACT tests, and student participation and performance in advanced coursework such as Advanced Placement.

Republican Brent Bailey and Democrat De’Keither Stamps recently shared their vision for the public service commission on Monday. 

And despite party labels, it wasn’t terribly different. Both candidates support increased renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and both promise to keep utility rates low while promoting maximum energy efficiency.

They are running to replace Democrat Cecil Brown in the Public Service Commission’s Central District. Brown is retiring after serving one term on the three-person commission. 

The PSC regulates rates with the state’s two investor-owned utilities (Mississippi Power and Entergy) and also regulates telecommunications, natural gas, water and sewer utilities. 

Politically, the central district is split pretty evenly, both racially and electorally, with a slight edge for Democrats. It includes the Democratic strongholds of Jackson and Hinds county, along with the Delta, while also taking in the Republican suburbs of Rankin and Madison counties, along with Lauderdale county as the only other population center in the district.

In August, 108,000 voters chose the Democrat primary and just under 100,000 selected the GOP ticket. That contrasts with statewide numbers where for the first time in state history more voters chose the Republican primary – about 330,000 – than the Democratic primary – about 300,000. Four years ago, the district supported a Republican for transportation commissioner and a Democrat for public service commissioner. But in 2011, a Republican took both the positions. 

Primary voters by party in the Central and Southern District

The central district is not the only district that will see a change. 

The southern district will have a new public service commissioner as voters will choose between Dane Maxwell, the Republican mayor of Pascagoula and former Ocean Springs Mayor Connie Moran, a Democrat.

In August, Republican voters nearly tripled Democrat voters in the first round of the party primaries, illuminating the Republican strength in the district. By every measure, Maxwell is the odds-on favorite to win a four-year term.

Sam Britton, who served one term, passed on a re-election bid and ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nominee for secretary of state.

In the northern district, Democrat Brandon Presley will be the sole returning member as he is unopposed in his bid for a fourth term.

The two candidates for the Mississippi Public Service Commission’s Central District commissioner position made their pitches to voters Monday and the pair agree on issues far more often than not.

Republican Brent Bailey and Jackson City Councilman De’Keither Stamps, a Democrat who represents Jackson’s Ward 4, will battle in November to replace retiring Central District Commissioner Cecil Brown.

Both candidates support increased renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and both promise to keep utility rates low while promoting maximum energy efficiency. Both also touted their ability to work across party lines.

The Mississippi Public Service Commission regulates rates with the state’s two investor-owned utilities (Mississippi Power and Entergy) and also regulates telecommunications, natural gas, water and sewer utilities.  

Stamps, a former U.S. Marine and Army veteran who owns a farm in Learned, proposed an energy efficiency audit of every state-owned building to provide savings for taxpayers. 

“The actual government of the state of Mississippi, from state government to county governments to city governments to school districts, we spend too much money on utilities,” Stamps said. “The biggest savings we have for our budgets is to make all of our buildings be more energy efficient. We need to reduce those costs across the state.”

He also wants municipalities to partner with cellular providers to erect more cellular towers and improve services as an expansion of public/private partnerships which Stamps said he wants to encourage as part of the PSC.

“When it comes to the utilities, we’re going to be the most aggressive Public Service Commission you’ve ever seen,” Stamps said. “We’re going to be focused on making sure the interests of our ratepayers and our utilities are taken care of. Utilities are very important and provide great service in economic development and providing quality of life.” 

Bailey, a Mississippi State University graduate and engineer in the energy sector, is running on a platform of energy efficiency, ending robocalls and providing cost-effective broadband to rural communities.

Bailey has been an intervenor in many matters before the PSC, including net metering (which allows homeowners with solar systems to sell some of their excess generation back to the grid) and the controversial Kemper Project. 

Bailey was a strong critic against Mississippi Power’s Kemper Project, an integrated coal gasification power plant that was later converted to a natural gas-fueled plant at a massive savings for ratepayers. 

Taxpayers could’ve been on the hook in the form of rate hikes for more than $6.5 billion, later reduced to slightly more than a $1 billion. 

Mississippi Power has yet to decide what it will do with the mothballed gasifer units at what is now called Plant Ratcliffe, a 30-minute drive north of Meridian.

“I’d like to think I’m the candidate with the most experience, the qualifications, the know-how and the independence to really be the voice of the consumer at the Public Service Commission,” Bailey said. “I, and others, sounded the alarm on Kemper. Questioning its justification and the viability of its technology and certainly its impact on rates for consumers. 

“We certainly believe that with simple transparency and an unyielding commitment to due diligence, we could’ve avoided the magnitude of that project that lies in the political lore with the beef plant and the KiOR facility.”

A ballot initiative that could authorize medical marijuana is a step closer to appearing on the ballot in the November 2020 election.

Mississippians for Compassionate Care submitted 105,686 certified signatures from registered voters to the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office this week. The secretary of state’s office will have 90 days to determine if the initiative will qualify for the ballot. The signatures were required to be certified by county circuit clerks before being filed with the secretary of state’s office.

The group exceeded the minimum by more than 20,000 signatures statewide.

“We’re above the minimum in each of the old, five congressional districts because if a batch (of signatures) gets kicked out because it doesn’t have a signature or it doesn’t meet any of the requirements, we wanted to have a buffer there in each one that we indeed qualify,” said Jamie Grantham, who is the communications director for Mississippians for Compassionate Care.

If the ballot initiative is approved by voters in November, marijuana would be legal for those with a debilitating medical condition and would have to be authorized by a physician and receive it from a licensed treatment center.

Some of these conditions include:

• Cancer
• Epilepsy and other seizure-related ailments
• Huntington’s disease
• Multiple sclerosis
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• HIV
• AIDS
• Chronic pain
• ALS
• Glaucoma
• Chrohn’s disease
• Sickle cell anemia
• Autism with aggressive or self-harming behavior
• Spinal cord injuries.

The Mississippi Department of Health would regulate the cultivation of marijuana, processing and being made available to patients. There would also be limits on how much marijuana a patient could obtain.

As of now, there are 33 states, including Arkansas and Louisiana, that have approved the use of medical marijuana and 2.8 million nationally are using medical marijuana to relieve pain and treat their symptoms.

“Patients in Mississippi are the same as anywhere else,” Grantham said. “We want them to have that option and it helps so many people. It’s polling at about 77 percent. What we’ve found talking to groups of people that most Mississippians are educated on this and understand that it helps people with severe conditions like epilepsy, cancer and Parkinson’s. They’re in favor of a strictly regulated medical program that’ll provide relief to patients.” 

This initiative wouldn’t affect recreational use of marijuana, which would require a new ballot initiative.

Speaking of that process, the way it works is organizers apply with the secretary of state’s office to start gathering signatures. The ballot initiative language and petition also has to be approved by the state Attorney General’s Office. 

Organizers of a ballot initiative need 17,237 signatures apiece for a total of 86,185 from the five old congressional districts — as they existed in 2000 —for a ballot initiative to meet the standard. 

Organizers have a year to get the required number of signatures and MFCC started on September 6, 2018.

For the measure to go into effect, the number of votes in favor of the initiative need to equal or exceed 40 percent of the total votes cast in the election.

Grantham said the MFCC used an outside vendor to obtain the signatures and the group did a lot of events statewide in addition to going door to door, important since Mississippi is a very rural state. 

Last year, in a massive, high-profile, bidding war, the corporate behemoth that is Amazon announced that it would be opening a second headquarters, and would be accepting applications for this opportunity. 

Altogether, 238 cities/states applied for the opportunity. For months, Amazon made it seem that it would be seriously considering all proposals, before ultimately settling on two massive urban centers in New York City and outside Washington D.C. in Northern Virginia. While 24 different applications came from Massachusetts, only one came from Mississippi, and records don’t seem to provide the name of the city that applied. This process reveals the lacking capacity of Mississippi to draw in major business programs.

Now this process was inherently flawed, as it encouraged states to dole out state-sponsored bribes in the form of tax incentive programs and to favor one company over others. However, it also reveals the structural challenges Mississippi faces in attempts to be competitive against other states when it comes to the modern market incentives to draw in and sustain businesses. 

We have previously written about the need to reduce crime to positively influence population growth in the Jackson area. But that’s not all. There are also legislative and regulatory policies hindering business growth in the state, and changes that could be made to prepare for the future.

As city and state leaders further consider the future, they ought to reflect on how best to build an environment which positively promotes business development and entrepreneurship on the local level. 

To meet this end, Jackson, Ridgeland, Madison, Flowood, and Pearl need to consider branding themselves not just as individual cities competing for business and citizens, but as the Greater Jackson Area along with the capital city. 

This type of community partnership has proven quite effective elsewhere across the country, especially in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, and the Research Triangle that is Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill in North Carolina. In these cases, cities have been able to combine their individual strengths such as education centers, available land, working-age populations, and more in order to make a more coherent pitch for both new businesses and new residents.

These strong regional coalitions have undoubtedly contributed to these cities becoming some of the fastest growing in the nation. One needs only to look into the history of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle to understand how a regional area can turn itself around. In the early 1950’s, the per capita income of the area was one of the lowest in the entire Southeast. Yet today, the Research Triangle cities are consistently listed as one of the best places to live in the country, and each day they attract about 80 new residents to the area.

A few key lessons emerge from the development of the Research Triangle. It was not a top down initiative driven by government. The Research Triangle was endorsed and publicly supported by leadership but was driven forward through private solutions which allowed the organization to operate with the efficiency of a non-governmental entity. The privately funded Research Triangle Institute targeted the emerging technological developments and sought to make itself a flexible institution, capable of changing with a shifting economy.

These lessons ought to be internalized by local leaders and applied to our future growth. First, government can’t dictate and direct the economy and see consistent success. We need to encourage private growth and investment, and take the government hands off the wheel. Second, only in the promotion of market freedom can we ease the regulatory burden and encourage creative entrepreneurs to steer the economy in Jackson and the greater metro area.

Recent studies reveal the unfavorable environment for starting a business in Mississippi. Business Insider ranked us the 35th best place to start a business. In a more recent report, another website ranked us the 38th best place. You can search for others that have similar results. What is clear is that we’re at least stagnating, but are potentially getting worse by comparison to other states. In these studies, while we were consistently ranked well for our cost of living, we ranked rather low in regards to our access to an educated employee base, and the actual cost of starting a business.

Another important factor in both of these studies is an evaluation of the overall entrepreneurial environment. This status depends on how many people are starting businesses and the survivability of a business. This is another factor which Mississippi and individual cities can directly impact. 

Policies that protect entrenched interests stifle economic competition and limit the ability for new business owners to break into the market. This stifling effect can be accomplished through a variety of regulatory and legislative approaches. Burdensome occupational licensing, business fees, and restrictionist policies all play a part.

Regulators often claim the need to protect citizens in establishing these rules, but really they are protecting entrenched business interests across the state. While we ought to create policy that is favorable to business, it shouldn’t favor established businesses over those attempting to break into the market. Competition is good, it incentivizes further development and elite performance. 

When a competitive business market is present, the best companies thrive, and the consumer is presented with the best options and quality of experience.

In order to help ease this burden, we need a mechanism to repeal outdated or unnecessary regulations. A few years ago we established an occupational licensing board to review new regulations, but there is still no metric in place to effectively and efficiently dismiss overly burdensome, previously established, regulations. To this end, we ought to create a non-governmental review board with the authority to roll back excessive regulations.

Currently 55 percent of our economy is controlled by the public sector. This is not sustainable for growth. The role of government in the economy is to protect property and enforce contracts, not to fuel the economy both directly and indirectly through its largesse and its allocation of contracts and resources.

In Mississippi, our leaders love to claim success in regards to our low tax rates. However, the more burdensome taxes are still present, but just better hidden, and they hit businesses especially hard. 

We tax land, buildings, inventory, and equipment at higher rates than all surrounding states. All these factors play a direct role in business decisions. As noted in Promoting Prosperity in Mississippi, the state is one of only ten that taxes business inventory. Even with an existing partial rebate, this tax punishes inventory levels and encourages states to set up shop in nearby Alabama and Tennessee, neither of whom have an inventory tax.

Furthermore, we are one of only nine states in the entire nation that tax intangible property such as stocks and bonds. This tax directly discourages any large company from basing itself in the state, because it heavily burdens companies that own their own stock (as most large publicly traded companies do).

On top of this, Mississippi maintains property taxes far above the national average. According to the authors of Promoting Prosperity in Mississippi, if the state were to set its commercial and industry taxes to the national average, then business activity could increase by up to 20%, new plant establishments could grow by up to 8%, and employment growth could increase to 2.44% per year.

Much of Jackson has been designated as an opportunity zone for the next ten years by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and federal incentives have been put in place to fuel business growth and investment. By encouraging businesses to take advantage of these incentives and lightening the present tax burden on industry, we can promote new companies to invest and existing companies to expand.

For many of the regional partnerships around the country, education is a great asset (perhaps especially true in the case of the North Carolina Research Triangle). The strength of Mississippi’s community college programssets this region apart for its ability to create a workforce that is well-balanced for the next generation of jobs. Continuous education will surely be necessary as technological advancements mandate a flexible workforce. 

The region should make this factor a staple as it pitches itself for the next generation of businesses which are guaranteed to be more digital, and more technologically inclined, along with the high caliber private universities in the area. 

As we look to the future, we need to seek to free ourselves of economic reliance on the payroll of government. The pathway to success is consistently proven to be paved by private industry. 

As we attempt to make the Jackson area, and Mississippi as a whole, more attractive to businesses, we must recognize our current barriers to market growth, especially those burdens which were imposed by government with the aim of protecting existing industry rather than seeking to foster the type of economic competition which would ultimately expand it. And we must emphasize our assets, such as our community college programs and low cost of living, and then allow the market to do the rest.

This week, Mississippi Center for Public Policy will be looking into the underlying reasons as to why Jackson is struggling, exploring the legislative and regulatory climate which encourages migration and business stagnation both within our capital city, and across the state.

As a candidate for insurance commissioner in 2007, then-State Sen. Mike Chaney floated the idea of making the position he was running for appointed.

He went on to win election that year and is the odds-on favorite to win a fourth term in a couple months. The legislature never considered making this position appointed. And likely never will. Because we love electing people. Even if we don’t really know what the office does, who is running, or what other states are doing.

Today, Mississippi is one of 11 states that elect insurance commissioners. That’s not the only anomaly. 

The agriculture commissioner is elected in 12 states, mostly in the Southeast. Mississippi has three public service commissioners, divided among the northern, central, and southern regions of the state. We are one of 11 states that elects public service commissioners. That’s better than our other regionally elected office – transportation commissioner. We are the only state that still elects transportation commissioners. 

We find a little more election popularity among other statewide offices. The auditor is elected in 24 states, so close to half. The secretary of state is elected in 35 states and the treasurer is elected in 36 states, so we can at least claim to be with the majority of other states for those two positions. 

And every judge on the supreme court and the court of appeals is elected. Not to mention many of the county and municipal posts that could easily be appointed. 

Could we ever see an elected position become appointed?

The lack of interest in appointing a position like the insurance commissioner probably answers that question. But we have seen minor change here and there. 

We use to elect the state superintendent of education. And four years ago, the legislature switched to appointed school superintendents for every school district. At the time, we were one of the last three states to make the move. 

Odds are we won’t be seeing much change. People like electing officials even if the office is simply a regulatory post where the focus should be on the most qualified individual, not the one who is best at receiving the most votes. 

In this edition of Unlicensed, we talk about Tuesday's runoff, who won, who lost, and where we go from here.

And will Bill Waller endorse the Republican nominee or the Democratic candidate that he is seemingly more closely aligned with? Or will he just stay on the sidelines?