Business Blog

Ties to military operations have exempted Golden Triangle Regional Airport near Columbus and Key Field in Meridian from closing under a funding cutoff set to begin April 7 under the federal budget sequester. Five other “contract towers” in the state — Tupelo, Greenville, Oliver Branch, Jackson, and Bay St. Louis – failed to gain exemptions [...]

Legislation supporters say would save Mississippi $5 million a year on office leasing costs and whittle the space state workers occupy to levels consistent with federal standards died earlier this month. The bill authored by Sen. David Blount and backed by a Millsaps College analysis easily passed the Senate but failed to make it onto [...]

The White House is encouraging skeptical state officials to expand Medicaid by subsidizing the purchase of private insurance for low-income people, even though that approach might be somewhat more expensive, federal and state officials say. Ohio and Arkansas are negotiating with the Obama administration over plans to use federal Medicaid money to pay premiums for [...]

Air travelers accustomed to catching Silver Airways flights out of Hattiesburg, Meridian, Greenville and Tupelo may soon have to rethink their travel plans. As with a series of other disruptions occurring at airports large and small around the country, the culprit is the federal budget sequester, a series of across-the-board cuts brought about by the [...]

The healthiest Mississippians live in Desoto County and the least healthiest in the Delta’s Quitman County. Those are among the conclusions in the fourth annual County Health Rankings released Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The County Health Rankings rank the overall health of nearly every [...]

Catfish producers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South notched a key victory last week with a Commerce Department decision to put duties on frozen catfish fillets exported from Vietnam. The Commerce Department ruling marks a reversal of several years of refusing to place tariffs on government-subsidized Vietnamese pangasius catfish imported to the United States [...]

Three weeks ago, when Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe was in Washington for the National Governors Association meeting, he made a trip to Health and Human Services. Beebe had an unusual Obamacare proposal. The Arkansas legislature did not want to expand Medicaid for those under 133 percent of the federal poverty line, an option under the [...]

Barring a late surprise, the winner in the competition to be the new home of the Mississippi Department of Revenue should be known by the middle of next week, state officials say. The Department of Finance & Administration late Thursday afternoon opened the ‘final and best” lease offers from representatives of the three properties still [...]

A measure that will provide $8 million for Workforce Enhancement Training at community colleges received Gov. Phil Bryant’s signature Wednesday. The colleges will use the WET fund money to provide training for jobs and skills that employers have identified as being in demand. “For Mississippi to compete in a global marketplace, we must have a [...]

Legislation to increase surveillance and deploy National Guard troops in schools, among other measures, could gain bipartisan approval in Congress – but only by sacrificing such education programs as financial literacy for students, Time.com reports. The school safety bill, introduced by Barbara Boxer of California, was originally going to spend $800 million on surveillance and [...]