Jackson Free Press

There's an expression that says if the nation sneezes, Mississippi catches the flu.

As the poorest state, national economic downturns hit us especially hard, and it takes us longer to recover. For example, Mississippi's 6.6 percent unemployment rate is the 46th highest in the nation, a full percentage point higher than the national average of 5.5 percent. On top of that, with the combination of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the Great Recession and the BP Oil Spill of 2010, Mississippi darn near caught pneumonia.

Imagine the parents of a chronically ill child using money that should go toward their medical care to rebuild a carport or buy a second home, and the outrage that would follow.

This scenario is not unlike what Mississippi has done with its disaster recovery funds. In the case of the 2005 hurricane season, which brought some of the most powerful storms in recorded history, Haley Barbour's Mississippi argued successfully to President George Bush's Department of Housing and Urban Development that expanding the Port of Gulfport would help the Mississippi coast recover faster than re-housing low- and moderate-income families.

We've seen how well that plan has worked: The port expansion has so far proved to be such a boondoggle that Mississippi has had to ask the feds for more time.

Instead, groups like the NAACP, Mississippi Center for Justice and HOPE Enterprise Corp. had to step in and force the state to do right by the people of the Gulf Coast.

After ending up in court over the Katrina funds diversion, one might have expected that state officials had learned their lesson. Yet, even when the oil spill of 2010 compounded Katrina's destruction, Barbour's successor, Gov. Phil Bryant, directed $15 million from an early BP oil-spill settlement to go toward a minor league baseball stadium in Biloxi.

That money should have gone to help restore the ecology of the coast and to fishermen, many of whom lost their livelihoods. The funds could have been used to address poverty in coastal cities. As we report this week, there are more than 1,500 homeless school-age children in Harrison County on the coast—and we know that homelessness is often underreported.

Mississippi has a chance to somewhat right the ship. The state still has about 1 percent of its federal Katrina funding remaining, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that it's about $54 million, which could help the estimated 4,000 people the Mississippi Center for Justice says still need housing assistance.

In early July, Mississippi settled with BP for $1.5 billion for the oil spill of five years ago. State Rep. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, said he plans to propose legislation in the upcoming session to require most of the funds to be spent on the Mississippi coast.

We hope that Mississippi officials learn from mistakes of the past and do the right thing for the real victims of these and future disasters: people.