Dick Molpus
Dick Molpus, sixty, is President of The Molpus Woodlands Group, LLC (MWG), a timberland investment management organization headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi. MWG buys and manages timberland across the United States for clients.
A Philadelphia, Mississippi, native and a 1971 business administration graduate of the University of Mississippi, Molpus served for a number of years as vice president of Manufacturing for Molpus Lumber Company.
In 1980, as Mississippi Governor William Winter's first appointee, Molpus was selected as Executive Director of the Governor's Office of Federal-State Programs, an agency in disarray from the previous administration. For his success in bringing managerial efficiency to that troubled agency, Molpus was selected in 1983 as Mississippi's Public Administrator of the Year by the American Society of Public Administrators.
Dick Molpus was among several younger staff members known as the "Boys of Spring" who helped guide Governor Winter's historic Education Reform Act of 1982 to passage. In 1983, in a race involving seven opponents, Molpus was elected secretary of state of Mississippi; he was re-elected by significant margins in 1987 and 1991. During his tenure Molpus converted the secretary of state's office from an agency that was a tax drain of $200,000 into one garnering a profit of over $2 million per year.
As secretary of state Molpus also served as lands commissioner of Mississippi and in that capacity supervised over 600,000 acres of 16th Section commercial, residential, and timber property that had been set aside in the early 1800s to raise money for the public schools. By forcing renegotiation of some 5,000 below-market leases, he increased by more than $24,000,000 the amount of revenue from those properties to the public schools .
He also successfully led efforts in the Mississippi legislature for sweeping lobbyist law reform that required lobbyists to report all money spent on public officials. In addition, he proposed and led to passage substantial election law improvements, including a measure allowing citizens to register to vote by mail.
In 1993 he was recognized by his peers through his election as president of the National Association of Secretaries of State. As president of that organization, he founded Project Democracy, an effort chaired by former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to increase voter participation in the United States.
In August of 1995 he won the Democratic nomination for governor of Mississippi. In November, after a strongly contested race, he was defeated in the general election by the incumbent governor.
On January 8, 1996, after completing his third term as secretary of state of Mississippi, Molpus began a timberland investment management organization. Today, The Molpus Woodlands Group, LLC, and its sister operating company manage for investors more than 850,000 acres of timberland in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York valued at approximately $905 million. The Molpus companies employ sixty-six people with fourteen offices located strategically across the U.S. Molpus Woodlands and its sister operating company, Molpus Timberlands Management, LLC, are vertically integrated management companies with in-house CPA's, attorneys, foresters, biometricians, and GIS specialists, along with silvicultural and harvesting experts.
Dick Molpus and his wife, Sally, were the founders of Parents for Public Schools, which now has chapters in twenty-five cities in fifteen states across the country. That organization steadfastly supports local public schools and works with parents to ensure high standards for those schools. In 2004 he received from the National Education Association the H. Council Trenholm Memorial Award for his work on behalf of public schools.
In 2005 Molpus was inducted into the Mississippi Business Hall of Fame, and in 2008 he was honored as a Champion of Justice by the Mississippi Center of Justice. He currently is a member of the Board of Directors of the Wilson Research Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson, Mississippi. He was co-chairman of the highly successful 2006 Jackson Public School Bond Campaign that brought $150 million for renovations and new schools in Jackson. In addition, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Harwood Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Bethesda, Maryland that seeks to spark fundamental change in American public life.
In 2007 he became the founding chairman of the United States Endowment for Forestry and Communities, a $200 million endowment funded by the U.S./Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement. The endowment is focused on improving forest health and assisting timber-reliant communities in the U.S. In 2009 he completed his term as chairman, but remains on the Board of Directors. Molpus is also a founding board member of the National Alliance of Forest Landowners (NAFO), which is dedicated to protecting and enhancing the economic and environmental values of privately owned forests through targeted policy advocacy at the national level.
Dick Molpus has been married to the former Sally Nash of Corinth, Mississippi, for thirty-nine years. They reside in Jackson, Mississippi.
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