It’s always Christmas in Senatobia: How a powerful rural lawmaker brings home millions

For many Mississippi lawmakers, Christmas comes again in March or April each year as they typically pass bills full of hundreds of millions of dollars in pet projects — referred to as a “Christmas tree” bill.

But the process of doling out these funds is more of a Bacchanalia and raw politics than good cheer.

And not all lawmakers, or communities, share in the largesse. Those in power tend to get more, as do those who help do the bidding of legislative leaders.

Some get squat, particularly House members who buck their leadership on key votes.

A community’s need for a project is typically far less a factor.

Some lawmakers, such as Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, who oversees Christmas tree spending in that chamber, really make out. He’s helped steer tens of millions of dollars to his rural county and hometown in recent years, even earmarking more than $7 million for improvements in and around the private country club neighborhood where he lives.

By late in the session, legislative leaders will have figured out how much extra cash is floating around the multi-billion dollar state budget — or in lean years how much the state can afford to borrow — for a Christmas tree bill. This typically ranges from $200 million to $400 million a year.

Lawmakers swarm, pushing to get all the bacon they can bring home to their districts for road projects, parks, courthouse renovations, museums — any capital projects not included in main appropriations bills or agency budgets.

It’s pork-barrel spending, not prioritized by statewide need or population, but by politics. It’s how a relatively affluent city or county can get $2 million to spruce up a sports complex, while a struggling city can be snubbed on its request for $2 million in badly needed sewerage repairs.

“It is raw politics,” said House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III, D-Natchez. “It’s a quid pro quo: Will you follow orders? Would you do what we ask, and have you been compliant? … It’s kind of used as punishment-reward, a carrot-stick type thing.”

Rep. Dan Eubanks, a Republican from Walls, is one of very few lawmakers who votes against most Christmas tree bills, particularly when they’ve involved borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars in lean years.

“If something’s for a core function of government, that’s one thing,” Eubanks said. “But when it’s, ‘Here, let’s build you an equestrian park or fund your private school’s band’ — there’s a lot of that that goes on.”

Legislative leaders keep tight control over who gets what added to the final Christmas tree bill, and this becomes a powerful political tool — both a carrot and a stick. A lawmaker who bucks the leadership on an important vote can have their projects denied. A lawmaker who goes along can be rewarded.

In the 122-member state House, in particular, the Christmas tree bill has been used by speakers of the House and their leadership teams to push through agendas and keep members in line.

“I got punished this last session,” Johnson said. “There have been drainage projects and road projects in my area that I’ve been getting partial funding for to try and build up, save until we have full funding, for a few years. Essentially I was cut completely off this past session … You would think, I think the public would think, that we are identifying where the greatest needs are.”

Eubanks said: “I haven’t really brought home much in the way of Christmas tree money. I have a neighborhood in my district that had water so bad it couldn’t be drunk, and it would stain clothes. The city couldn’t afford filtration. I wanted it put in a regular appropriation, but somehow it wound up in a bond bill. Since I vote against them, when all was said and done they gave the credit to a different legislator, who doesn’t represent the neighborhood. That’s what happens if you stand up and speak your conscience and vote your conscience.”

Eubanks said he voted for a Christmas tree-type bill this year, but only because it appeared to have mostly legitimate infrastructure projects and, more so, because it included badly needed work to help congestion on Interstate 55 in his area.

“I have even voted against things that would have helped my district before,” Eubanks said. “… I would never go ask for money to put in a merry-go-’round or walking trail that would only benefit a few folks … I do remember years when they had things such as fixing a levy on private property and putting in new streetlights for a historic district and building a walking trail for an equestrian center. Those aren’t core functions of government.”

For some rank-and-file lawmakers, securing major funds for local projects is their main goal of a legislative session.

“It’s like what happens in D.C. (with Congress),” Eubanks said. “You justify your reason for being there by bringing the money home.”

In the House, Chairman Lamar, a top lieutenant of Speaker Jason White, has become de facto arbiter of the Christmas tree spending. Lamar’s committee handles state debt and in lean years Christmas tree bills are paid for by borrowing. But with state coffers full largely from federal pandemic relief spending in recent years, there has been at least a few hundred million dollars a year cash on hand for pet projects. Lamar has remained largely in charge of the spending that would normally flow through the Appropriations Committee.

And Lamar and his district have benefited greatly from his tasking. State spending on projects in rural Tate County and its cities including Senatobia has dwarfed spending for similar sized counties — and even spending for Jackson, the state’s largest and capital city. Over the last three years, Jackson received $5.9 million for earmarked projects. Tate County received $38.6 million.

“I think when you hold all the keys, people won’t question it,” Eubanks said, “because if you do, you won’t get anything … That’s part of the mindset, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of who holds the keys … Those in control of it seem to get all the things they want.”

Christmas tree projects get little vetting on their merits on the front end. But once they’re approved, they receive nearly no oversight. After the Legislature passes the hundreds of millions a year in spending, that’s usually the last most rank-and-file lawmakers ever see of it.

Once the Legislature approves the spending bill, the Department of Finance and Administration is tasked with disbursing the funds to hundreds of counties, cities and nonprofits around the state.

DFA requires local organizations to sign a memorandum of understanding and to file quarterly reports on how they are spending the money. Marcy Scoggins, a spokesperson for DFA, said most local entities file their quarterly reports, and the agency eventually contacts them if they’re delinquent.

But the department is essentially a repository. It has no legal authority to penalize local entities that don’t file the required reports, and it doesn’t scrutinize the work or spending. Other than the attorney general’s office or the state auditor’s office getting involved — and they rarely do — there’s virtually no way for DFA to ride herd on the work or programs being funded.

A Christmas tree or similar bill can also be hundreds of pages long, and so full of wonky state code language and references to other bills that it’s hard for lawmakers outside of the leadership and budget team to know exactly what’s in it.

Earmarks are routinely sneaked into it.

Lawmakers in the past have been surprised by spending they’ve approved, such as one year when some other lawmakers learned after the fact that when they approved a Mainstreet Mississippi grant fund, someone late in negotiations inserted language that said for the purpose of that fund, “Municipality means the city of Senatobia, Mississippi” instead of previous language that said any city of less than 15,000 people would qualify for the grants.

In recent years, it’s also one of the final things the Legislature passes during the session, often late at night when legislators are tired, angry at each other and ready to return home to their districts. This process can cause legislators to miss some of the line-items in the bills and provide almost no oversight or participate in legitimate debate on the bill.

How pet projects are sneaked into bills

The vast majority of lawmakers at the state Capitol likely have no idea that, over the last five years, they’ve voted to approve millions of dollars to improve drainage issues on a private country club, install a roundabout on a Tate County road and repave a tiny Northeast Jackson cul-de-sac.

How does this happen?

One answer is some lawmakers insert things into the Legislature’s “Christmas tree” spending bills by using wonky code language and confusing or oblique references to other laws.

For example, in a 2018 special legislative session, House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar first helped secure $1 million to upgrade Country Club Road in Tate County, a two-mile road that runs past his house. When the Legislature approved this project, it was written into Mississippi law.

Two years later in 2020, Lamar secured $1.5 million for another Tate County project. The project’s description was, “To assist in paying costs associated with the purposes described in Section 27-104-301 (2) (mm).” This specific code section — a law already on the state books — was the spending bill for the Country Club Road project lawmakers had already approved in 2018, bringing the total legislative appropriation to $2.5 million.

Unless lawmakers can recite the entire Mississippi Code using an eidetic memory or take the time to look up that code section, they would have no idea what specific project that money was going toward.

This wasn’t the only time Lamar secured funding for a project by using vague descriptions and code sections.

After leaders of the private Back Acres Country Club in Senatobia claimed the original Country Club Road project caused flooding and drainage issues, Lamar went back to the Capitol in 2022 to help create the Tate County Erosion Control and Repair Fund, a perhaps innocuous-sounding program that lawmakers agreed to stuff with an additional $1.5 million.

The fund’s description stated that the money is meant to help Tate County pay for ditch erosion control, repair and rehabilitation along — you guessed it — the project described in Section 27-104-301 (2) (mm) — the original code section for the Country Club Road project first created in 2018. Again, unless someone read through every word of the long bill or memorized the lengthy state law books, lawmakers likely wouldn’t know what that code section was funding.

That brought the total amount of money spent on the Country Club project to at least $4 million, and other spending bills to upgrade the area brought the total to roughly $7 million.

Because the numerous funding mechanisms for the project were stuffed in lengthy bills with dozens of other local projects, lawmakers went along with and overwhelmingly voted to approve all the Tate County spending bills.

Mississippi Today asked House Speaker Jason White, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Gov. Tate Reeves about the Christmas tree bill process and whether they consider it an efficient way to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It also asked the three Republican leaders about the projects Lamar has helped fund for his neighborhood.

White and a spokeswoman for Hosemann responded with written statements about the process, but neither commented on Lamar. Reeves’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

White noted that the projects House members submit are typically projects “that local governments have been unable to fund and the lawmaker has identified as a need in the community after hearing from their constituents.” He said the projects often include letters of support or visits to the Legislature by local officials “to express the gravity of the need.” He said that in the 2024 session, there were more than $1 billion in requests from House members.

“In my 13 sessions we have almost always had a capital projects bill, either funded through a bond bill or cash surpluses,” White said. “Under Republican leadership, the state has realized budget surpluses … With these surpluses, the Legislature has been able to cut taxes, make historical investments in education and our teachers, and the capital projects list has grown, often with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure and economic development projects.”

White said DFA oversees the use of the money the Legislature allocates for local projects “through a system of checks and balances” and a quarterly report and “local governments must comply with all state laws regarding procurement and bidding.”

White said: “In my first session as speaker, we did strive to have a more open and transparent appropriations process as we moved through the session. I applaud our chairmen for their shared commitment to increasing transparency in the process and I know the representatives support our effort to provide more time and solicit member input … We continually look for ways to provide greater transparency and accountability on spending of all taxpayer dollars.”

White, in his first term as speaker, has called for the Legislature to get more of its budgeting done earlier in the session and slow the process down so the rank-and-file have more time to scrutinize spending.

Leah Smith, spokeswoman for Hosemann, wrote: “We understand how important projects are for communities, especially small and rural communities … We also believe it is important to track these projects to ensure they are being completed in a timely manner and in the way prescribed by legislation.

“This summer it was brought to our attention for the first time that some entities are not submitting quarterly reports … with the Department of Finance and Administration,” Smith wrote. “We also learned many municipalities, some of which may have received projects, have not submitted their annual audit to or been audited by the state auditor as required (by law). We are committed to increasing transparency and accountability related to all projects.”

Smith said that Hosemann “has always been in favor of moving back deadlines to allow ample time for legislators to examine bills before they are moved for final passage, especially when they are appropriating significant taxpayer dollars.”

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