The water crisis in Jackson is both serious and embarrassing. It reflects poorly on Mississippi’s capital city. It is hurting business, education and the normal delivery of government services. It portrays the state in a negative national spotlight.
Whoever heard of a federal emergency declaration and calling in the National Guard because a municipal water system has gone kaput? Those types of drastic measures are normally reserved for tornadoes, hurricanes, floods or other unpredictable natural disasters.
The water crisis in Jackson is almost totally manmade. Sure, the high water of the past week — which ended up not being as high as originally anticipated — contributed to the failure of Jackson’s water distribution system. This, however, has been a disaster in the making for decades, eventually reaching its climactic collapse due to an incompetent municipal administration and an indifferent state government.
Even before the taps went dry, Jackson spent a month under a boil water notice because of equipment problems and labor shortages that weren’t getting addressed. Restaurant owners and other businesses that were having to pay extra just to ensure their customers and employees had safe drinking water grew increasingly outraged. The loss of all water services in most parts of the city was the last straw. Gov. Tate Reeves and other state officials had to step in and do something.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jackson’s mayor who has great difficulty in accepting responsibility for his missteps, said he was glad for the help but that it shouldn’t have taken a monumental crisis to get it. Maybe he has a point.
Lumumba and other Jackson leaders have been telling the Legislature all along that the capital city, which for some time has been losing most of its wealthier population to the suburbs, no longer has the tax base to finance the massive upgrade that its drinking water and wastewater treatment systems have needed. Until now, the Republican-dominated Legislature has been unmoved by most of those calls, in part because its membership is predominately from areas outside of Jackson, and in part because a Democratic-dominated city is doing the asking.
But Lumumba and some Jackson mayors before him have also made a mess of things. They have allowed the water systems to go for long stretches without preventative maintenance. They have been more interested in finger-pointing than coming up with a workable plan to turn things around. They have been unable to do the most simple things about running a utility, from making sure all their customers are billed to having enough employees to do routine monitoring and repairs.
If the Legislature has been unresponsive in the past to Jackson’s requests for additional funding, a big part of the reason is that the majority of lawmakers have no confidence that those running the city would use the money wisely. That lack of confidence is not confined to the Capitol building either. Residents and businesses in all parts of Jackson have lost faith in their city leadership, so much so that they would welcome a state takeover of some of the services that local governments normally provides.
Who can blame them?
If you lived in a major city where there’s not enough water to flush commodes or take a bath ... if you had to constantly worry when there is water whether it’s safe to drink ... if your city had the highest murder rate in the nation ... if your nerves were shot from hitting potholes ... if you wondered how much longer you will have garbage collection, then you might start thinking about one of two options.
Pleading for a savior or moving.
