Hopes to Boost Trust Lease Revenues : Mississippian Sees Land as Key to Grade A Schools

To Dick Molpus, a young politician on a crusade, the issue is clear, and the answer is obvious.

Public education in Mississippi, long in a dreadful way, continues to rank last or near-last in most national ratings of public education. That is the issue.

It happens that the state of Mississippi holds 644,559 acres of land set aside in the 19th Century for the benefit of public schools. That, in Molpus’s view, is the answer.

Molpus, Mississippi’s secretary of state, has launched an aggressive drive to extract the maximum from the school trust lands, a historically wasted resource, with the aim of multiplying revenues for local school districts. He thinks that income from leases on the surface acreage alone could triple to $21 million in four years. Leases on the mineral rights of the same lands present unknowable possibilities.

Someday, Molpus and his allies predict, the school trust lands could provide enough income to pay for the bulk of public education in Mississippi. With trust land money and other recent reforms, Molpus, the father of two young children, sees the day when Mississippi will lead the nation in providing educational resources for its children. “They won’t have Mississippi to kick around any more,” Molpus promises.

But there is a bitter struggle ahead. Trust land leaseholders, ranging from big landowners to small tenant farmers, see the effort to increase revenues as a threat, and many have vowed to fight it at every turn.

There is profound political tension in Mississippi these days between a new breed of progressives, such as the 34-year-old Molpus, who have made education their banner issue, and the guardians of the status quo. Molpus’s crusade over school trust lands has dramatically heightened the tension.

The land was granted to Mississippi by the United States in 1804, when Mississippi was still a territory, in accordance with the Jeffersonian ideal that the budding Republic depended upon an educated people. As the new territories were surveyed and bound into states, the 16th section of every township, 640 acres, was set aside for the purpose of benefiting schools.

But in Mississippi, that land was mismanaged over the years, and the idea of the 16th-section land as a public trust was essentially lost. Local officials managing the lands often handed out long-term leases at giveaway prices as political patronage; leases were passed down through generations of families. The 16th-section land took on a status somewhere between private property and state freebie.

‘History of Poor Judgment’

“The 150-year history of 16th-section lands in Mississippi,” said Molpus, “is a history of poor judgment, neglect, nepotism and outright fraud.”

In 1978, reformers here sought to recapture the trust lands as an education resource with a law that passed control of the leases from county supervisors to local school boards. (The broad supervision of the trust lands rested in the state land commissioner’s office, and after that office was abolished last year, with the secretary of state.)

School boards, it was presumed, would aggressively negotiate deals that would yield the most income for schools.

Some did, but many more did not. Tens of thousands of acres of trust land continue to be leased at giveaway prices, despite a provision in the 1978 reform law requiring that the land be leased at 5% of its fair market value.

Golf Course Land

In the suburban community of Pearl, for example, the Niknar Country Club’s golf course stands on trust land, 72 acres of gentle knolls. It is a pleasant little course, conveniently located off Highway 80.

In the mid-1960s, Niknar signed 25-year contracts with the Rankin County Board of Supervisors leasing the land to Niknar at 13 cents an acre. The deal brings the Pearl Municipal Separate School District $9.36 a year for the golf course property.

Similar property nearby was recently leased at a rate of roughly $30,000 a year.

Up in Lowndes County, near the Alabama border, one leaseholder pays $10 a year for his 640 acres of prime farmland, much of which he sublets.

Daughter Inherited Lease

In Neshoba County, school board president Gerald Winstead and his wife lease 20 acres of trust land for nine cents an acre, yielding $1.80 annually. The property was once leased to Mrs. Winstead’s father, who handed the lease down to his daughter.

Outside the town of Louisville, farmer Bennie Kirk contracted with the county supervisors to lease 99 acres of residential farmland. He pays 15 cents an acre.

Such low-priced leases are common across the state and involve not only individuals, but churches, community organizations and even the federal government, which maintains part of a military base on school trust lands in southern Mississippi.

“In Mississippi,” said Bob G. Singletary, president of Niknar Country Club, “16th-section land was just a way of life.”

It is a way of life that Molpus means to end.

When Molpus entered office this year, he ordered school boards across the state to identify and classify the trust lands leased under their authority, and to provide proof that the lands were leased to the highest bidder, or at 5% of market value.

He has also instructed the school boards to renegotiate any leases that were contracted at giveaway rates, which Molpus maintains violates a provision of law prohibiting the donation of state lands.

Under Mississippi law, school board members can be held personally liable for violations committed by the board. Molpus has given recalcitrant boards until Feb. 1 to comply with his order. After that, says Molpus, “I intend to take those boards that don’t comply to court.”

The final step of Molpus’s plan will be implemented this spring, when he will ask school boards to renegotiate leases signed before 1978, when leases were dispensed by county supervisors. The boards will be asked to investigate some long-term leases dating back to the 19th Century.

Molpus’s drive has many leaseholders in a panic, fearful that they will lose homes and farms and businesses if the leases are renegotiated.

But Molpus insists that no one will be dispossessed. “A leaseholder will have to pay 5% of the fair market price,” Molpus said. “That’s $50 a year per acre on a $1,000 appraisal. Now, nobody’s going to lose a house over that. . . . The holders of the 200- to-300-acre plots are using these people (small-acreage tenants) as a front. It’s a Machiavellian game.”

Some bolder leaseholders have vowed to fight their local school boards if they try to renegotiate, declaring that even if their lease rates are unfairly cheap, their contracts are binding.

Suit Filed, Dropped

“I’ve got a legal document that is signed and sealed by the (Lowndes County) Board of Supervisors,” said Saunders B. Carson Jr., who leases 640 acres for about a penny-and-a-half per acre. “If this is not a legal document, what is? I feel like anybody trying to touch anything like this is going against the law. I’ve always thought we should go in a lawful manner in the United States, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to be unlawful.”

Bennie Kirk of Louisville sued his school board when it tried to renegotiate his lease of 99 acres at 15 cents an acre. The case was dropped when the school board agreed to let Kirk’s lease rate stand.

“They try to make you feel like some kind of bear trying to cut the school kids’ throats,” said Kirk. “(But) it’s a valid lease. It’s a binding, legal contract. I think people are using this for a political stairstep. It’s just a political deal for him (Molpus) to get ahead.”

So far, it’s not clear whether the trust lands issue will hurt or help Molpus’s political career. “You know that saying,” he says, “friends come and go, but enemies are forever.”

But for Molpus, who was drawn from the family business into politics in the early 1980s by stumping the state for former Gov. William Winter’s education reform package, it is an affordable risk.

“This guy (Molpus) has got young children who are in the public schools, and his family is in pretty good financial shape,” said state Assistant Atty. Gen. Mack Cameron. “So I don’t think he’s worried about what he’ll do next if he loses his job.”

In an effort to avoid confrontation over the leases, some Mississippians have suggested selling the trust lands and putting the proceeds into a trust fund to benefit schools. Experience with school trust lands in other states suggests that might be a mistake.

In 1853, California was granted 5,534,293 acres to be held in public trust for schools. Most of that was gone by the turn of the century, sold to encourage settlement and fatten the state treasury. Now, less than 700,000 acres of trust land remain in California.

“The best stuff was sold,” said William V. Morrison, a staffer with the California State Lands Commission. “We were left with what everyone thought was unusable property. Much of it is in the desert. Want to buy some desert property?”

California’s trust lands raised about $14 million last year for the state teachers retirement fund. The sum would have hardly made a dent in the state’s public education expenditure, which was roughly $13 billion.

Of 27 states granted school trust lands, only 10 retain all or most of the land. In Mississippi, most officials agree it would be a mistake to sell the trust lands.

“If you hold on to the land, you never lose that,” said Cameron. “If you convert it to money, somebody’s gonna steal it.”

But there is no telling yet how far Molpus can take his crusade. There are literally thousands of 99-year leases on trust property in Mississippi, and renegotiation of those leases may not stand up in court.

“We’ll be well into the next century before we can get out of these old leases,” Molpus said. “But I’m going to take it as far as I can.

“You know, in most things, you’re dealing in shades of gray all the time. With this, to me, it’s all black and white. . . . Our business is to get the most money for the schools. This land is set up to benefit one group--the school children of the state of Mississippi.”