As long as there has been a Mississippi Legislature, those with the most power have been steering state money to their home communities.
It’s not just tolerated by voters but encouraged. Incumbents rarely lose a reelection contest because their constituents know that the longer their senator or representative stays in office, the more clout that legislator is likely to have in getting state money for local projects.
Usually, though, this earmarked money is directed toward projects that benefit public institutions, such as schools and libraries, or groups of people who are in true need of help because they don’t have clean water or adequate drainage or decent roads where they live.
But such altruistic motivations are not always the case. Sometimes the public’s money is spent by powerful legislators for self-serving reasons. That’s when it becomes galling even to those who might be lobbying for earmarks themselves.
This past week, Mississippi Today released a months-long investigation into how one powerful member of the Legislature, Rep. Trey Lamar, has been able to steer millions of dollars to improve two areas where he has homes. In addition, a disproportionate amount of the Legislature’s capital spending for local projects has been going the last several years to the Senatobia Republican’s home county of Tate.
Among Mississippi Today’s findings, Lamar secured:
- More than $7 million in state money to improve the affluent country club neighborhood where he lives in Tate County and the private golf course that’s part of it. Among the improvements was widening the road so that golf carts could more safely travel on it and installing a stylish roundabout.
- $400,000 to repave a road in Jackson where Lamar bought a home, presumably to stay at when the Legislature is in session, even though the road is in perfectly fine condition, especially when compared to some of the potholed and crumbling streets elsewhere in the capital city.
- Almost $39 million over the past three years for Tate County from the smorgasbord of local and pet projects that lawmakers approve at the end of most every session. Two counties of nearly the same population as Tate got a fraction as much, and even the city of Jackson, with five times the population, received less than $6 million during the same time.
Some of this may be just good old fashioned “pork barrel spending,” the kind that Republicans used to decry when Democrats were in control but now they dish out just as eagerly. But some of it seems like an abuse of power, and maybe that’s why Lamar stopped answering Mississippi Today’s questions. He couldn’t explain it away.
The work on the private country club, for example, was supposedly to correct drainage problems created by the nearby road improvements that Lamar had previously gotten the state to fund.
The contractor who did the road work and the county engineer who oversaw it dispute that claim. The engineer said the country club had pre-existing drainage issues that were amplified by a couple of massive rains. The contractor asks if he was truly at fault, why didn’t the county go against his surety bond to pay for the remediation rather than sticking it to the state’s taxpayers?
The roadwork in Jackson is just as questionable. According to Mississippi Today’s reporting, neither of the two state lawmakers who represent that neighborhood nor its council member asked legislative leaders to appropriate money for that project. Nor was the repaving on the list of road projects recommended by a capital city advisory committee created by the Legislature. The only people apparently who thought this work was needed were Lamar and his new neighbors.
Such dubious spending is able to go unchecked because few in the Legislature are going to challenge it.
It gets loaded into a late-in-the-session catch-all appropriations bill over which Lamar, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has a lot of say. Sometimes the language authorizing a specific project is intentionally obscure to prevent lawmakers and anyone else from easily knowing for what the money is being spent.
Only the most fiscally principled lawmakers are going to vote against the goodies in the so-called “Christmas tree” bill, which typically ranges between $200 million and $400 million. Lawmakers know that if they don’t go along with the leadership, their own pet projects are unlikely to get funded.
One of those principled lawmakers, Republican Rep. Dan Eubanks from DeSoto County, explained it this way: “I think when you hold all the keys, people won’t question it, because if you do, you won’t get anything.”
Those who are questioning it, though, include not just Mississippi Today but also some Tate County residents. They have been calling attention to Lamar’s earmarks on a Facebook page the citizen watchdogs created. Just like rank-and-file lawmakers, though, these citizens are scared of crossing him. They are only willing to complain anonymously.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
