MS Power’s Kemper Plant will be hot topic at Southern Co. shareholder meeting.

Questions about the abrupt departure this week of Mississippi Power President Ed Day are likely to be asked during the annual meeting of Southern Co. stockholders today in Pine Mountain, Ga.

Representatives of the Sierra Club said in a conference call Tuesday they will use the shareholders’ meeting as an opportunity to ask about the cost overruns at the power plant under construction in Kemper County and the leadership changes at Mississippi Power.

On Monday, Mississippi Power announced Day was retiring. Two weeks ago, Tommy Anderson, vice president of generation, also left abruptly.

“We want to know who’s running the ship,” said Sierra Club regional representative Glen Hooks. He said his group also wants to know the true nature of the Kemper County plant’s cost overruns.

“We’ve just begun our investigation,” said Leonard Bentz, chairman of the state Public Service Commission. His chief of staff, Jay McKnight, will serve as special investigator. Bentz said the PSC has had open discussions with Southern

Co., “and we’ve been assured that there will be cooperation.”

Ed Holland, lead attorney for Southern Co., parent company of Mississippi Power, has taken over as president of Mississippi Power. Holland said in a statement Monday information the PSC requested was not provided.

“There was no intentional withholding of information,” Holland said. Executives decided to communicate the information in a meeting, he said, but failed to follow through. “We made a mistake of not delivering in a timely fashion,” he said.

Bentz said his agency first asked for the information a year ago. “We asked four specific times and we did not receive it until last week,” he said.

The documents no provided deal with a $366 million cost overrun announced in 2012 for the plant. In April, Mississippi Power announced the plant was $540 million more over budget.

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Abrupt replacement of MS Power chief a result of withholding documents from PSC.

Mississippi Power Co. made an abrupt leadership switch Monday amid cost overruns at the Kemper County power plant it’s building, naming Ed Holland president to replace Ed Day.

The subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said Monday that Day, who resides in Ocean Springs, was retiring and would be replaced immediately by Holland, Southern Co.’s chief lawyer.

Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley said Holland told a PSC lawyer last week that Day directed or allowed Mississippi Power employees to withhold documents from regulators about a $366 million cost overrun at the Kemper plant. That increase was announced weeks after commissioners voted in 2012 to reaffirm the company’s license to build the Kemper plant, raising questions about whether executives knew they were over budget but didn’t tell the commission.

Presley said the PSC lawyer sought information about what the company knew.

“In a subsequent management meeting, Ed Day directed or definitely inferred that the documents should not be given to the commission, and these documents were never given to the commission,” said Presley, a Democrat who has consistently opposed the plant.

Holland said in a statement that “information was asked for by the (Mississippi) Commission and unfortunately we did not provide that information in the detail requested. I am sorry for this and apologize. I will see that it never happens again.”

Spokeswoman Amoi Geter said Holland was too busy Monday to speak to reporters.

Southern District Commissioner Leonard Bentz, a Republican, said commission staff members are still evaluating what Mississippi Power may or may not have withheld. He said he’d been talking to Southern Co. CEO Thomas Fanning about problems at Kemper.

“It sounds like Southern Co. is listening to the Public Service Commission’s thoughts and ideas,” Bentz said.

Mississippi Power announced last month that what it calls Plant Ratcliffe was another $540 million over budget, bringing the total cost of the plant, mine and pipelines to $4.3 billion. The company said shareholders would absorb the latest overrun. Ratepayers will have to pay for $2.4 billion of the plant’s price, plus repay up to an additional $1 billion in bonds that Mississippi Power won’t make a profit on.

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• MPC Says Costs Rise at Kemper County Plant (wtok.com)

Sierra Club lawsuit seeks PSC reboot for MS Power’s Kemper County project.

In legal papers filed Thursday, the environmental group says that a January settlement so changes the permission that the PSC gave Mississippi Power in 2012 that the utility regulator should be forced to look again at its analysis. Mississippi Power said it would respond in court, but had no immediate comment.

The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. announced last month that what it calls Plant Ratcliffe was another $540 million over budget. The company said that it expected Southern shareholders would absorb those costs. The parent company announced it would amend its financial reports to record some of the loss in the last three months of 2012 and the rest in this year’s.

The Legislature, which generally governs PSC operations, approved two laws to ratify the settlement. One allows Mississippi Power to sell up to $1 billion in bonds to pay for Kemper construction and financing costs over $2.4 billion, though the company wouldn’t earn a profit on that money. It would only collect from customers to repay the debt and interest. The other law allows the PSC to approve a seven-year rate plan for the plant, smoothing out rate increases. Subsequently, the PSC approved a 15 percent rate increase, to be followed by a 3 percent increase in 2014. The company also expects to raise rates another 2 percent to 4 percent later to pay off the bonds.

Sierra Club state director Louie Miller said that although the Legislature was involved, responsibility ultimately rests with the PSC.

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Democrat Rep. Chuck Young: Expand Medicaid or risk “civil unrest”.

(Democrat Rep. Chuck) Young said the state needs to cooperate with the federal government on (Medicaid expansion.)

“We are trying to pick and choose which federal guidelines we want to take and which ones we don’t want to take,” Young said, suggesting that Republican lawmakers learn from the state’s history. “We’re borderline to civil unrest. We are very close to civil unrest.”

Young said he can’t support any move that would take those jobs away.

“It is my sincere Christian belief that if we don’t expand Medicaid, thousands of people will lose their jobs and a number of hospitals will close their doors,” Young said.

Young said he suspects that Republicans don’t want a vote on it yet because they don’t want their constituents knowing where they stand.

“Mississippi overall is a very poor state. There are a lot of Republicans who represent a lot of poor areas and the one thing they don’t want to do is vote on Medicaid expansion so that their people can see that they pushed that red button to vote against them,” Young said. “If the House and Senate vote on it, when they vote no for their people, there will be some earth-shattering consequences to pay.”

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• Plunkett: DSH payments will never be cut. Dems should vote to reauthorize Medicaid now. (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
• Democrats continue to play politics with lives of most vulnerable Mississippians. (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
• A brief timeline of where we are on Medicaid and why. (savemsmedicaid.wordpress.com)
• Missouri Gov. Nixon seeks Medicaid answers from feds (kansascity.com)
• Democrat Rep. Chuck Young: Expand Medicaid or risk “civil unrest”. | Mississippi PEP (savemsmedicaid.wordpress.com)

DOJ and Meridian Public Schools reach agreement on discriminatory disciplinary practices.

Seal of the United States Department of Justice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Meridian Public School district have come to terms on a consent decree to address allegations of past racial discrimination in using harsh school discipline policies that the DOJ said created what has been called a school to prison pipeline in Meridian.

If approved by the court, the proposed consent decree will resolve the department’s investigation into complaints that the district unlawfully and disproportionately subjects black students to suspension, expulsion and school-based arrest, often for minor infractions, according to Jocelyn Samuels, principal deputy assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

Samuels conducted a telephone conference press briefing on the issue Friday from Washington, D.C.

The Meridian Public School District was not named in a lawsuit filed by DOJ in October, but the department worked with the district through a longstanding federal school desegregation decree which prohibits the district from discriminating against students based on race.

Those named in the lawsuit included the Meridian Police Department, Lauderdale County, the Mississippi Division of Youth Services and two youth court judges in Lauderdale County. The consent decree between DOJ and the school district does not change the status of the federal lawsuit, Samuels said.

In the course of the investigation, the department found that black students frequently received harsher disciplinary consequences, including longer suspensions, than white students for comparable misbehavior, even where the students were at the same school, were of similar ages, and had similar disciplinary histories, Samuels said. Black students were disproportionately given harsher punishment than white students, Samuels said.

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• DOJ Files Landmark Agreement to Curb Meridian, Miss.’s School-to-Prison Pipeline (colorlines.com)

Former State Rep. dead at 68

Former State Rep. Jerry E. Wilkerson, who served three terms in the Mississippi House and was a spokesman for the propane, petroleum and convenience store associations for 25 years, has died at the age of 68.

Officials with Robert Barham Family Funeral Home say Wilkerson died at his home in Daleville on Wednesday. The cause of death was not released.

Services were being held Friday at Robert Barham Family Funeral Home Chapel with burial in the Daleville Community Cemetery.

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Rep. Greg Snowden talks state budget at Meridian meeting.

At a Council of Governments meeting on Monday, Snowden said the session, which began a week ago, will last 90 days.

The biggest action of the first week, he said, was passing appropriations bills that will put money mainly at community colleges and IHL facilities for bad roofs.

Traditionally, he said, this money has been generated by bonds.

“This is the way we would like to do it. You don’t want to borrow money for long-term when, let’s face it, you have a volunteer department buy a fire truck, the truck is rotated out before it’s time to pay off the bond,” Snowden said. “That’s not really good business so we’re trying to appropriate for those things.”

Of course the state’s budget is always of serious concern to lawmakers, Snowden said. Even though the state’s revenue is up by about $230 million, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee is proposing to spend less because there will be more than $400 million less coming in this year since that money was from one-time appropriations.

Snowden says many lawmakers are being cautious about spending money.

“We’re still not back to the revenue levels that we enjoyed in 2008,” he said. “We hope to be back to that level in a year or two. We’re going to be in a challenging time with budgets for some time yet.”

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Mississippi Supreme Court throws out death sentence conviction on grounds of mental disability.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has thrown out the death sentence of Howard Dean Goodin on grounds that he’s mentally disabled.

Goodin, now 58, was sentenced to death in the November 1998 robbery and fatal shooting of Union store owner Willis Rigdon.

The court ruled today that a “preponderance of the evidence” shows Goodin is mentally disabled. The justices returned the case to Newton County Circuit Court for resentencing.

The only sentencing options for a capital murder conviction are death or life without parole.

At Goodin’s 1999 trial, jurors saw a surveillance tape that showed Goodin entering Rigdon Enterprises and stealing money and a VCR. It also showed Rigdon being led by gunpoint from the store and forced into his pickup truck. Rigdon was shot on a nearby dirt road.

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Mississippi Power says Kemper County facility more than 70 percent complete

Mississippi Power is reporting that the Kemper County energy facility is more than 70 percent complete.

Last week the two largest pieces of equipment were delivered to the plant site, which will aid in reducing emissions.

The delivery was a coordinated effort between the Mississippi Department of Transportation, the Kemper County Sheriff’s Department, the city of DeKalb, Tennessee Valley Authority, 4-County Electric Power Association, East Mississippi Electric Power Association, and Burkhalter Rigging according to a news release issued by Mississippi Power.

Also last week energy began flowing to the main electrical building at the site.

“These milestones are indicators of the tremendous progress being made every day to deliver 21st century coal technology to our customers,” Tommy Anderson, Mississippi Power vice president of generation development was quoted as saying in the news release. “And with more than 3,000 workers on-site today, the project is helping to fuel the Mississippi economy.”

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Speaker Gunn talks charter schools and PERS reform

(Mississippi Speaker of the House Philip) Gunn is a proponent of charter schools in Mississippi and is hopeful the House and Senate can agree on legislation during the next session to offer parents and their children school choice, particularly in failing school districts.

“I think it’s time for us in Mississippi to get our educational system on track. We have continued to lag behind for the last 40 years,” Gunn said.

Charter schools could be the answer, he said.

“This is an idea where you create a school in a district that gives the opportunity for some children to go to where they are structured and disciplined.”

Gunn also pledged fiscal responsibility in developing the state’s budget, adding that the state has to wean itself from one-time money sources.

During a question and answer session, Gunn talked about problems with the Public Employees Retirement System, which has been under scrutiny of late because it is paying out more than it is bringing in.

“PERS cannot continue to be sustained in its current form,” Gunn said. “I don’t know what the solution is. A lot of people are looking at it but it cannot sustain itself in its present form.”

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