Mississippi authorities find 2 bodies
LEXINGTON, Miss. (AP) – Two bodies have been found in different locations in Mississippi’s Holmes County.
Sheriff Willie March says deputies are investigating the discoveries Wednesday as a possible murder-suicide.
WAPT-TV reports March says a woman was found dead at the Durant Motel and a short time later, a man’s body was found in his car parked on a road nearby. March says the man shot himself.
The sheriff says the man and woman had been staying together at the motel for about a month.
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Mississippi budget plan: Spend slightly less in coming year
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUSJACKSON, Miss. (AP)
Amid lagging teacher salaries and unsafe bridges, Mississippi legislative leaders are recommending that the state spend slightly less money on state government services during the coming fiscal year.
Members of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee met Wednesday and adopted a broad outline for a nearly $6.3 billion budget for the year that begins July 1. That would be nearly $94 million less than the state is set to spend during the current year, about a 1.5% decrease.
This is just an early plan, though. The deadline for setting a budget is months away and numbers often change between the first set of recommendations and the final product.
Mississippi has long had some of the lowest teacher salaries in the nation and the plan would not remedy that problem. The plan also recommends a 3.7% reduction in transportation spending, even as the state deals with some unsafe bridges.
Mississippi started selling lottery tickets in November and the first $80 million a year in lottery revenue is designated for highways and bridges. After that, the lottery proceeds go to education.
The budget outline recommends some spending increases.
The Department of Public Safety would receive an additional $4.4 million to pay for new state troopers who are currently being trained and another $1 million for pay raises for the department’s law enforcement officers.
The state would spend an additional $18.4 million to cover the current year’s shortfall for a teacher pay raise plan that was put into law but was underfunded because of a mistake in determining how much the pay plan would cost.
Overall spending for elementary and secondary education would be less than 1% higher than in the current year. Spending for community colleges would decrease about 3.6%, and spending for universities would decrease about 2.6%.
The plan recommends that the state spend about the same amount during the coming year for district attorneys, courts, financial aid for university students, disaster relief and rehabilitation services.
It would leave the state with about $679 million in cash reserves in the rainy day fund.
It’s unclear whether the recommendations adopted Wednesday will be meaningful or useless.
The current four-year legislative term is ending, and the new one begins in early January. The new set of lawmakers – some of them rookies, some of them veterans – will decide how much the state will spend on an array of services, including education, transportation and health care.
“It should be noted that this is the last budget recommendation of this eight-year cycle,” Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said Wednesday.
Reeves is finishing his second term as presiding officer of the Senate and member of the Budget Committee, and will be sworn in as governor in January.
“We wanted to be conservative in our budgeting, but we also wanted to recognize that there will be new leadership. … We wanted to give both the Senate and the House maximum flexibility going into the 2020 legislative session, and that’s exactly what we did,” Reeves said.
Legislators must set a final budget by early May. If the economy is strong, legislative leaders could increase the estimate of how much money the state will have available to spend.
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Mississippi school district sues maker of e-cigarettes
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUSJACKSON, Miss. (AP)
A school district in Mississippi is suing the largest e-cigarette maker in the U.S., saying that Juul Labs is deceptively marketing its products to teenagers and causing young people to become addicted.
The Jefferson County School District filed the lawsuit Dec. 5 in federal court in southern Mississippi. Attorneys are seeking to have it certified as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all Mississippi school districts. The suit seeks an unspecified amount of money, including some to pay for prevention education and addiction treatment.
The lawsuit is similar to those filed this year by several other states and the District of Columbia. North Carolina became the first state to sue the San Francisco startup in May. School districts in Kansas and Kentucky have also sued Juul.
The Jefferson County School District, in rural southwestern Mississippi, has about 1,200 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Attorneys representing the district in the lawsuit are based in Nashville, Tennessee.
The lawsuit says tobacco use among teens decreased significantly from 2000 to 2017.
“This success has been the result of years of litigation and strict regulation,” the Mississippi lawsuit says. “ It is also due to the widespread and mainstream public health message that smoking kills people – a message that Big Tobacco can no longer dispute or contradict. This incredible progress towards eliminating youth tobacco and nicotine use has now largely been reversed due to e-cigarettes and vaping.”
The Jefferson County School District’s lawsuit also targets Altria, which owns Marlboro and other cigarette brands. Altria owns about one-third of Juul.
Juul launched in 2015 and now controls about two-thirds of the U.S. retail market for e-cigarettes. The company faces separate investigations by Congress, the FDA and other federal regulators.
Juul’s top executives dispute allegations that they market their products to teens, declaring that they’ve taken unprecedented steps to combat underage use of the company’s e-cigarettes. Juul has shut down its Facebook and Instagram pages and pulled several of its flavored products out of retail stores. Juul also backs federal legislation to raise the minimum age to purchase all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, to 21 nationwide.
The Associated Press was seeking comment from Juul spokesmen Tuesday about the lawsuit in Mississippi.
Associated Press writer Matthew Perrone in Washington contributed to this report.
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