Legislative Session: Speaker of the House Philip Gunn

Speaker of the House Philip Gunn talked to Paul and Will about the importance of transportation infrastructure, the legislative process and more.

MDOT presents The Extra Mile Podcast Legislative Session.

Welcome to The Extra Mile Podcast: Legislative Session. This is a special run of episodes focusing on transportation infrastructure within Mississippi’s legislative session. I’m your co-host Paul Katool. So happy I’ve got a co-host on this endeavor. Will Craft, he handles Government and Constituent Affairs here at MDOT and he’ll be with us throughout the session. Thank you so much for agreeing to doing this. I know you’ve got a lot of different things going on during session so thank you for being my co-host. Absolutely. I appreciate you guys having me on.

Will, like we said you handle Government and Constituent Affairs here at MDOT. Where all have you been and kind of what brought you to MDOT?

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Paul. Again my name is Will Craft. I grew up in Mendenhall, Mississippi down in Simpson County. I went to Simpson Academy. I attended the University of Southern Mississippi—to the top. I graduated there with a degree in communications. I got my first job after college up at the Department of Audit actually working for state auditor Stacy Pickering at the time as a member of his public affairs team. Stayed there for a couple of years then had an opportunity to work for Senator Thad Cochran in his Jackson office in various different things for portfolio with the federal government there. As he retired I stayed onboard with Senator Hyde-Smith’s staff there to assist with her transition and get everything set up.

Then was made aware of an opportunity here at the Department of Transportation to be more involved with local matters and local legislation and things going on at the Capitol which I had developed a passion for. So I jumped at the opportunity. I came here in July of twenty 2018 just before the special session there. I got here and got set up. It’s been great. I love what I do and love the people here at MDOT so appreciate it.

Can you briefly just kind of talk about what your day to day entails here at MDOT?

Yea. Absolutely. It certainly can change from time to time as most state employees would agree that oftentimes you have to wear different hats and take on different responsibilities and roles. That certainly is a factor. Generally during the legislative session it’s a bit more streamlined as to what my daily expectations are. As well I just had my baby girl. She’s five months old now. So she’s got our day starting a little different these days.

It’s certainly earlier but usually beginning with that 7:30 drop off here at Galloway for her then mosey over to the office get some coffee going, see what bills have been filed that have been uploaded online, check and see if there’s anything that’s an impact to our agency or if there’s anything I just have a personal interest in following. Seeing what committee meetings have been scheduled for that day. Making sure that we have if not myself at least someone there to engage and be a part of the dialog going on with legislative matters that would impact us.

Another side of that is just the amount of dialog between our agency and the different legislators over there. It’s important for us to be aware and on top of news, traffic accidents, project updates things of that nature that are continuously being updated and ongoing that you never know when you may get a question or especially if you’re in a committee meeting and have to give some type of report or comments on things. So a lot of reading. A lot of research. A lot of dependence on you guys here in the public affairs office for sure taking care of me with email updates and blasts on things that are going on.

Then lastly just dialoging it and working hand in hand with our partners at the federal government. Spending a good deal of time talking with our different congressional staffers about policy decisions and things that are upcoming and ongoing. Specifically and notoriously right now the infrastructure bill that’s just passed so we spent a lot of time talking with our federal partners and working through that. Obviously there are still some strings and guidelines that coming forth we’ll understand, hope to understand as we receive some further guidance. Yeah. Again just generally a lot of reading and catching up a lot on what’s happened in the last eight hours.

Well again I’m so happy that you’re my co-host for The Extra Mile Podcast: Legislative session. Our first guest is a big one. We’ve got the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives Philip Gunn. So without further ado let’s just get into that interview.

We’ve got a very special guest today. Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives Philip Gunn. Speaker Gunn, I got a little information on you. You began serving in the Mississippi House of Representatives in 2004 and became Speaker of the House in 2012. I know it’s a very busy time for you right now. Thank you so much for joining us.

Absolutely. It’s great to be with you and thank you so much for letting me have the opportunity to come and talk.

Of course. Of course. We’ll get into the legislative session a little bit more but first of all I just kind of wanted to go a little broad. You know transportation infrastructure being kind of a core functions of government can you tell me in your opinion why it’s important for Mississippi to have a robust, safe, efficient transportation infrastructure network?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I tell this story in some of the speeches that I give and when people ask that question. I had the opportunity last summer to meet with a man from Washington who is a lobbyist for I think it was The American Equipment Manufacturers. His job was to go around the country and to find sites for companies to put their industry, put their companies in different states. I just said, “Tell me what you look for?” when you’re looking to move around the country and put a company in a state or in a location what are some of the things that you look for? And most economic developers will tell you the same thing. We move around the country and we try to track jobs to the state of Mississippi. It’s important to know what they’re looking for.

The number one issue for them is workforce. You’ve gotta have qualified, educated reliable people who can come and work at your factory. He said the second thing is infrastructure. He said they’ve gotta have the ability to get their product to market. They’ve got to have an assurance. When I say infrastructure it’s more than just roads and bridges. It’s electricity. It’s water. It’s access to the Internet. All those things come into play. But that just kind of brought it home for me to realize just how important infrastructure is. We try to increase jobs in Mississippi which is going to result in economic prosperity for all of us. Infrastructure was the top two things that companies look for.

And then they turn to other things like qualities of life issues as I call it. What’s your school system like? What’s your crime rate? Are there good neighborhoods for us to live in and my kids to go to school? That sort of thing. I’ve talked to a lot of communities around the state about that. They want to know when are we gonna get a company to come to our town? And I tell them you’ve gotta have good answers for those questions. You’ve gotta have an educated reliable workforce, good road, bridges, streets, etc. But you also gotta have good schools. You’ve gotta have a low crime rate. You’ve gotta have good neighborhoods for these people to live in. They’re not gonna come to your town if they don’t have an assurance that those things matter. That I think highlights the importance of infrastructure.

Continental Tire in Clinton is another example. You had a railroad right in front of that facility. I don’t know how familiar y ’all are with that job site but there was a railroad that runs right in front of it. Interstate 20 runs right in front of it. Interstate 55 is within 15 miles of it and the Mississippi River is within 30 miles of it so that’s the kind of infrastructure that these people are looking for. Not only to get materials and products in so that they can produce whatever it is they’re producing but the ability to get those products out.

And then of course it affects the quality of life like I talked about a minute ago. People want good roads and streets to ride on. And I can’t tell you how many complaints we get around the state when a bridge or road is not open or it’s got full of potholes. People like to have good quality roads to ride on. So all of those things play into why infrastructure’s important.

To even add to that as Mississippi here we have a predominately rural state that spends a lot of time commuting so just even further on that quality of life aspect. The ability to spend that much time on roadways and not have to continually fix and repair vehicles.

And that’s an excellent point regarding the rural nature of our state. We have a lot of farming. A lot of people trying to get crops to the mills and the places that they have to get their crops to. It affects their ability to do that as well. I was aware of one company and I think was in Clarksdale several years ago who purchased materials from Tupelo. There was some provider in Tupelo that gave them the product that they needed. On Highway 6 I think there were 12 or 13 bridges that were insufficient to carry the weight. So this company rather than just routing from Tupelo to Clarksdale had to go up to Memphis and go across and drop down which was like twice as far. And so that not only added to their time, it added to their labor, their overhead, their costs and it just showed how that affected the ability for both companies to make a living and to afford costs. So all of those things we could go on and on with more stories but the point is infrastructure is very important. We recognize that.

Certainly very insightful there. We’d like to think that state government is kind of a team sport. There’s a lot of different players. Can you talk about the House side of things and what the house does to kind of advance things?

Yeah. A lot of people are not really aware sometimes of how government works or even what the Speaker of the House does. I speak often and say particularly to school kids. Do you know what the speaker does? They all say you give a lot of speeches. Well that’s’ true but that’s not really the role that the speaker plays.

Everybody knows just basic civics. We have two chambers in our legislature, the house and the senate. Lieutenant Governor presides over the senate. Speaker presides over the House. The responsibilities that we have include appointing the chairman to the different committees. In the house we have 33 different committees that deal with all manners of topics agriculture, education, transportation, forestry on and on it goes.

So the transportation committee in the House is there to deal with all transportation issues which not only includes roads and bridges. Its airports. It’s rail. It’s shipping. All of those things. Anything doing with transportation they deal with.

So if a bill comes in I get the privilege of determining not only the chairman of the committees I get the privilege of assigning members to those committees and then when the bills are introduced I read the bills and determine what is the subject matter here and then I assign the bill to the various committees depending on what the subject matter is.

When a transportation bill is introduced I look at it, determine what is it and then this goes to the transportation committee that which has been given to this committee which is one of the larger committees in the house. I will tell you that it is the most requested committee in the House maybe next to education but actually I think the last time I did the committees transportation was requested by almost 80 of the 120 members that we have in the house.

House members really like to serve on that committee. They understand the importance of that committee. We have rules that limit the number of people that can be on that committee. I think its 29 is the maximum that can be on that committee. So I go about trying to select members to that committee based upon geographic considerations. I want members from all parts of the state on that committee. Seniority plays a part into that. The more senior members obviously get their request first but we try to have a very diverse committee, republican, democrat, all geographic regions of the state so that everybody can have a voice. All regions of the state have a voice in what’s going on in their area. These are the transportation needs. These are the things we need to address and so on and so forth.

We also have a lot of requests that go along with or that entail an appropriation so you’ve got not only the transportation consideration but the financial consideration. So sometimes a bill will be double referred. Some people think that is an attempt to kill the bill. That is not true. I’ll give you a simple little illustration.

We name roads after people all the time people who have died and have done significant things. We name a road for them. There is a cost as you well know that goes along with maintaining that stretch of road. There’s a sign that’s got to go up out there. There’s certain maintenance responsibilities so it’s not a bill like that why you would think we would have no problem naming that for somebody and we generally don’t but you still have the decision is this road worth naming or is this person worth having a road named after them. That decision’s got to be made by the transportation committee.
But then you have to send it to the appropriation committee for their decision about yes we want to spend money on that. So just because it’s double referred doesn’t mean we’re trying to kill it. But that would be an example of how we refer bills and any bill that is a transportation issue that entails or is going to involve the expenditure of dollars then your appropriation committee has to be involved in that process to and make that decision that yes this is something that we need to do. That’s kind of how it works on the House side.

The Senate has a transportation committee as well functions in the same way. They introduce bills on their end that are important to them. We do on our end. We each pass our respective bills. Those things are traded and we debate each other’s bills. And if an issue or bill is not agreed upon in the way it’s drafted then that bill has to go to conference which is something that people don’t understand.
The last weekend of the session is what we call conference weekend. So you got a House bill. You got a Senate bill. They both deal with the same subject matter but they are not identical. They’ve got to to be negotiated and discussed. Those individuals sit together. Those two committees get together. They hammer out those differences and they’ll produce a conference report which is then returned for consideration by both chambers. So you’ve heard it said often that the legislative process is like making sausage. You don’t want to see sausage being made. You don’t want to see legislation being made.
Our founding fathers wanted it to be difficult to pass laws. There’s a lot of hurdles that a bill has to jump through. Committees on both ends of the building. Points of order that can be raised. A chairman that doesn’t like the bill. There’s a lot of ways to kill a bill. But it’s very hard to get one passed. They’ve gotta jump through a lot of hurdles to get there. And that’s by design. They want it difficult for government to pass laws. That’s more than you asked for I know.

No. That was a great explainer and that’s what we want. We want people to kind of understand the whole process.

Well then I would just add to you speaking of your House members and specifically the Transportation Commission we certainly appreciate Chairman Busby and Vice Chairman Massengill for the relationship with them. We appreciate them very much.

Well they’re both very passionate about this topic and they work very hard. Our Chairman Busby is an engineer so he’s got a better than average understanding of what is involved in building roads. Vice Chairman Massengill works for a trucking company who obviously is very concerned about the condition of roads, moving products around the country and that sort of thing. So both of them have an above average knowledge of this field and above average interest in what goes on here and we’re very fortunate to have both of them handle this topic for me.

Excellent. Is there anything kind of that we can talk about that is coming up in the session as it pertains to transportation or is it just the usual?

Well you’ve got the ARPA Funds. Everybody’s talking about the ARPA Funds. These are the dollars that come down from Washington as a result of Covid and we have a substantial amount of money there that we’re going to be looking to spend. The good news is I guess is that we have quite some time to decide how those dollars are going to be spent. They put a lot of conditions and restraints on the expenditures of this money. They didn’t just give us 1.8 Billion dollars and say go spend it like you want too.
There’s another infrastructure bill on top of that. As y‘all well know the IIJA bill. What does that stand for? Interstate and infrastructure and something act. I forget what the J Jobs that’s what it is. The Interstate and Infrastructure Jobs Act. That’s another billion dollars that’s come down and so between those two pots of money we’ve got about two point billion dollars. On top of that we have another billion dollars in excess revenue. So we’ve got over three billion dollars that we can to spend on a lot of different things around the state.

Obviously the infrastructure money’s got to be spent on infrastructure. But the ARPA Funds and the excess revenues we can spend on a lot of different things. Now it’s my understanding that the ARPA Funds carry with it a condition that you can’t spend it on roads and bridges. They wanted that infrastructure money to be spent on roads and bridges but you can spend it on things like water, sewer and other infrastructure type needs that we’ll be looking to do.

We’ve received a lot of requests from around the state cities and counties notifying us of bridge needs, road repairs that sort of things so we’ll be looking into all of that this coming session. What I started to say a minute ago is we’ve got three years to do that though. We’ve got until 2024 to make those decisions. So all those decisions do not have to be made this session. Some of them will be. We are aware that some are urgent needs around the state. I’ve had conversations with Brad White. He has provided a list to me of needs we’re looking at and we’ll be looking to obviously meet some of those needs this session.

The conditions to spending these dollars as I understand are decisions have to be made by 2024 and the project has to be finished by 20206. So we will have to decide. We have three legislative sessions still. The 2022 session which we’re in right now. Next year will be 2023 and the next will be 2024. So we have three legislative sessions to make decisions about how these dollars are gonna be spent. And then once you award the dollars to the projects the projects have to be finished by 2026. Completed.
Broadband is a big topic of discussion within those dollars. We’ll be probably looking at ways to expand broad band around the state. Water and rural water particularly are issues that are at the top of the list. Trying to make sure our citizens have good drinking water. So all of those considerations weigh in here. Broadband, roads, bridges, infrastructure, the water, tourism. All these are different groups that are asking for money that we’re gonna have to decide how we’re gonna spend that. But we certainly have the opportunity here to do a lot of improvements on our roads and bridges.

I would also like to reference what we did in 2018. Many people will recall the special session of 2018. We had in August of 2018. We had a special session. There were three big topics that we handled there. One was how to spend the BP money that came in from the oil spill down on the coast. The other was implementation of the lottery. And then the third item was road and bridge plan which I’m very proud that members of the house are the ones who brought that plan forward. What that did was take a portion of our use tax a 100 million dollars every year and we give 50 million to the cities and 50 million to the counties and put the additional 20 million in the Emergency Road and Bridge Plan.

Every year under that plan since 2018 we’ve been putting a 100 million a year. I’m beginning to see the results of that. I know a lot of people if they’ll look around their counties and their cities they’ll begin to see. Well kind of funny I guess. People called me complaining a bridge was in need of repair and so we closed the bridge to repair it and then they called to complain the bridge was closed. You had to tell them the bridge was closed because we’re fixing it. And I have noticed in Hinds County where I live all around the county you see brand new bridges popping up because of this plan that we passed in 2018. I feel like the House of Representatives stepped up in 2018 to give a good recurring source of revenue for our cities and our counties to repair their bridges and their roads.

This ARPA money is one time-money just to give everybody an idea how we make our decisions. You spend recurring money on recurring projects. You spend one time money on one time projects. Bridges need to be a one-time project. When you fix a bridge you hope it stays there for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. It’s not something that comes back every year that needs to be fixed. So we have an opportunity here with this ARPA money to do some of those one time projects.

We spent a lot of time talking about transportation and I know you spend a lot of time traveling around the state. Anywhere that anytime you’re going through get the opportunity and gotta stop at this place for a burger or whatever it may be? Any local favorite that you’d like to tell us about?

Well I love eating locally. I will tell you that. Whenever I travel the state of Mississippi I always ask “What’s the best local privately owned restaurant?” I try to avoid the chains because I find the local people do a better job. I like to eat. That’s a hobby for me. You can’t weigh as much as I do if you don’t eat. I like to keep it up. I’ve done a lot of searching around the state. I’m not going to identify any one particular place but I will tell you I can pretty much find the best eating place in whatever town I’m in. I will say this too to my friends who live in other states that come here to visit for a state our size we have some phenomenal eating establishments. No doubt about it. I tell them there’s a reason we’re the most obese state in the country and I’m fixing to show you why.

That’s exactly right. And lastly just many of our MDOT employees and folks around the state too are not necessarily continuously plugged in. Obviously it’s my job to stay informed and aware what’s going on legislatively. Any direction you would give folks out there who want to reach out or get more information about activities going on legislature specifically your office?

Yeah. My office contact information is 601-359-3300. So anyone who has a question about an issue feel free to call. I have policy staff people who are assigned. One of them is assigned to deal with transportation issues. So if anyone has a need or question we’ll be glad to try to help. I would encourage everybody to stay abreast in what’s going on in the legislature. I tell people all the time you don’t have to be astute about what’s going on in Jackson but you need to be aware. The people in Washington and the people in Jackson are making the rules. You need to know what they’re doing.

There’s so much information out there nowadays that didn’t exist 50 or a hundred years ago. It’s so easy to pay attention with what’s going on with the Internet. You can actually watch us in action. There’s a webcast link on the Mississippi legislature website. Just type in Mississippi Legislature and it will take you right to a link where you can actually watch live to what’s happening in both the house and the senate. There’s plenty of information being put out by the media on websites and over the phones so it’s very easy to pay attention to what’s going on in Jackson.

So I encourage people to be involved. Like I say you don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to be astute but you do need to be aware of what’s going on and not just from the transportation standpoint. But just as a citizen. As a citizen. You need to know what your legislature is doing. It affects your quality of life. Your education. The spending issues. All the things we do down there. So they need to have interest more than just about transportation issues. There’s a lot going on. We have thirty three committees like I said. We’ve got a lot of issues that take place.

Excellent. Well, Speaker Gunn, we really appreciate you coming to speak with us today. Like we said you’re a very busy guy this time of year. We sincerely appreciate it.
I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk. If we can ever help you we stand ready to do so.
Alright that wraps up a great first episode of The Extra Mile podcast legislative session. Before we get out of here we want to thank Speaker Gunn again.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker

To keep with MDOT remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter @MississippiDOT and as always remember to drive smart out there on Mississippi highways.

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