In a capital city infamous for its crumbling roads and lack of money to fix them, a powerful lawmaker helped steer $400,000 in state taxpayer funds to repave a small, already well-paved northeast Jackson cul-de-sac where he owns a house.
Simwood Place, located in the affluent LoHo neighborhood of northeast Jackson, is a sleepy residential street home to 14 colorful, single-family homes. It’s tucked away behind The District at Eastover, a multimillion-dollar retail development along Interstate 55 that boasts high-end shops and restaurants.
This isn’t the typical kind of road project the state of Mississippi would usually get involved in. But House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, one of the most influential leaders at the state Capitol, owns one of the 14 homes on the street.
Lamar is a top lieutenant of House Speaker Jason White and the House’s point person for deciding how state money is doled out in the Legislature’s annual local projects bills, commonly called the “Christmas tree bill.”
Public land records show that Lamar’s business, JT Delta Company, purchased a Simwood Place home in August 2023. Just a few months later, in the next legislative session held in early 2024, the $400,000 Simwood Place repaving project was approved by state lawmakers. This appropriation, tucked into a lengthy bill, later surprised some lawmakers and local city leaders.
Democratic Sen. David Blount and independent Rep. Shanda Yates, the two state lawmakers who represent that part of Jackson, told Mississippi Today that they did not ask legislative leaders to appropriate money for the project, which is usually how local projects receive funding.
“This was not one of my projects,” Yates said. “I don’t know anything about it.”
Lamar declined to answer any specific questions about the Simwood Place appropriation, abruptly ending a telephone interview with Mississippi Today about state dollars he’s secured for various projects and the property he owns near those projects. Mississippi Today subsequently sent Lamar a list of written questions about the Jackson property, and he also declined to answer those.
However, he told Mississippi Today in a general statement that it was “inevitable” that his family members would own private property near public road projects.
“Any potential innuendo of wrongdoing is baseless and only diverts time and effort away from the real progress that we are making,” Lamar said.
Mississippi law states that public officials cannot use their official office, either directly or indirectly, for “pecuniary benefit” or to somehow enrich themselves.
State Ethics Commission Director Tom Hood, speaking generally and not about Lamar or the Simwood Place project, said a public official helping secure improvements to a street where they own a home would not necessarily pose a legal issue.
“If you’ve got to speculate about something affecting property value, then that’s not enough,” Hood said. “If there’s no pecuniary benefit, then there’s no violation. You have to prove monetary benefit to somebody caused by the government action … Even going from a gravel road to a paved road, if the only benefit is you don’t have to wash your car as much — those are difficult questions.”
Legislative leaders keep tight control over what gets added to the final Christmas tree bill, which becomes a powerful political tool for keeping rank-and-file members in line with the leadership’s policy agenda.
But it’s become increasingly common in recent years for the top lawmaker who controls excess funds like Lamar, to have large power over how much money they can steer toward their personal pet projects.
Jackson-area lawmakers have asked legislative leaders for years to help fund local road projects, and they claim those requests have continuously fallen on deaf ears, making the Simwood Place project even more notable.
The legislation that allocated the funds for the Simwood Place project routed the money through the Capitol Complex Improvement District’s Project Advisory Committee, a board composed of local and state appointees who recommend to lawmakers which Jackson-area projects they should fund.
The CCID is a carveout of the capital city that receives extra state funding and police protection, and Lamar has passionately and successfully pushed to expand that district further into the city, including the area of Jackson where his home is located.
During the 2023 session, Lamar successfully led the effort to pass legislation that created a separate CCID court system within Jackson — the Blackest large city in America — that will be entirely appointed by white state officials.
In October 2023, the CCID’s project advisory committee published a prioritized list of infrastructure projects that used an objective scoring process. The master plan did not identify Simwood Place as one of its priorities.
Rebekah Staples, the CCID committee chairwoman, told Mississippi Today that the Legislature used the organization as a pass-through for several infrastructure projects the committee members didn’t ask for, though she didn’t think that process was necessarily bad. She’s currently reviewing those projects.
While she respects the Legislature’s power to appropriate state dollars, Staples said one of her main goals going forward is to ensure lawmakers are informed of the committee’s scoring process and how it prioritizes road projects.
Ward 7 Jackson City Councilwoman Virgi Lindsay represents Simwood Place at the local level and is a member of the CCID committee. She said she did not ask lawmakers to spend money repaving the road and knew almost nothing about the project.
“If I had asked for this, I would have worked it through the city’s Public Works Department or the 1% sales tax committee,” Lindsay said.
The Department of Finance and Administration, the entity that will eventually disburse the money for the Jackson repaving project, has yet to release the funds to the CCID committee, so the work to improve the road has not begun.
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