Attorney General Mike Moore said he is certain the Legislature is going to tap into Mississippi's tobacco trust fund.
Moore's belief concerns members of the Greenwood-Leflore County Chamber of Commerce who run a school program funded with earnings from the tobacco money.
"I don't think the Legislature wants to go into the health-care trust fund, but I think they're going to," Moore said. "My job is to lessen the impact.
Moore met with the Governmental Affairs Committee of the chamber Wednesday in Jackson.
Gov. Ronnie Musgrove and lawmakers are currently looking for a way to bail Mississippi out of a budget crisis that includes a $148 million Medicaid shortfall. Both sides have proposed plugging the deficit with money from the tobacco trust fund, set up in 1999 after Moore won a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies.
Money that tobacco companies have paid Mississippi is worth $860 million, currently invested in stocks and bonds, Moore said. The state allows spending money on interest earn from that corpus, but not the corpus itself. This year, lawmakers appropriated $70 million from the expendable fund, Moore said.
On Friday, Musgrove shied away from using the trust fund and suggested borrowing money from state aid highway funds and setting up a bond issue.
But on Wednesday, while the chamber committee was in Jackson, lawmakers rejected Musgrove's new plan. They proposed to go ahead and tap the trust fund and to make cuts to Medicaid providers.
By breaking into the corpus of the account, the state government would be negating the interest earnings that would continue to grow, Moore said. "If left alone for another year, it would be worth a billion dollars," Moore said of the trust fund.
Every year, the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi grants the chamber $1,500 to run Choices, a program that teaches life skills to ninth-graders at Greenwood, Leflore and Amanda Elzy high schools.
That grant money is generated directly from the tobacco trust fund, said Janice Moor, executive vice president of the chamber.
"Choices is a structured program that tells children they need to choose between a good path and a bad path," Moor said. "Are they going to watch TV or do their studies? It shows them what the consequences are of their actions."
Volunteers for the chamber's Education Committee conduct the program once a year. Last year, they met with eight different English classes. They used play money to teach money management and other lessons that many of the students can't get at home, Moor said.
Choices volunteer Barbara Biggers said, "We gave them money that they would earn making minimum wage for 40 hours a week. They thought they were really rich." Then money was extracted based on taxes and living expenses, and in the end, Biggers said, "there was nothing left."
The grant money goes mainly into paying the $1,000 franchise fee for the course, with about $500 used for supplies, "little things to make the children think," Moor said. She said she didn't know if spending trust fund money would jeopardize or affect Choices.
The attorney general told the chamber committee members that lawmakers are considering desperate measures, such as using the tobacco money, because the Medicaid deficit is much worse considering the amount of government waivers lost. "Remember that $150 million is really $600 million with the $450 million coming in federal money," Moore said.
State officials have criticized Moore for his policing of the trust fund. Moore also cracked down on Musgrove earlier that this month, saying the governor would be breaking the law by letting the Medicaid deficit linger. But since the attorney general doesn't make the laws, the ball is not in his hands, Moore said.
"I'm the messenger of the law," he said. "You can shoot the messenger, but it won't change what the law is."
