[The state’s water crisis hasn’t fully abated, but nobody’s
talking about it on the campaign trail.]
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JACKSON OUT OF SIGHT AS MISSISSIPPI GOES TO THE POLLS  
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Gabrielle Gurley
September 21, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ The state’s water crisis hasn’t fully abated, but nobody’s
talking about it on the campaign trail. _

FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell, right, Mississippi Gov. Tate
Reeves, second from right, and Jim Craig of the Mississippi State
Health Department, second from left, listen as Jackson Mayor Chokwe
Antar Lumumba, left, speaks about work being done., Rogelio V. Solis /
AP Photo

 

This week, _60 Minutes_ profiled football legend Deion “Prime
Time” Sanders. Coach Prime shook up the college football world by
moving from a coaching job at Mississippi’s Jackson State
University, a historically Black college, to a post at the University
of Colorado in Boulder. The program was determined to capture the
differences between Jackson and Boulder, and how Sanders reacted to
moving from a predominantly Black city to an overwhelmingly white one,
“a place with a water crisis to the kind of hipster college town
where there is a shop devoted to kites.” Paired to that audio was 20
seconds of damning video, depicting a derelict house and a resident
carrying bottled water, a nod to Jackson’s water crisis, up against
beauty shots of Boulder.

That 20 seconds was enough to cue outrage from Coach Prime’s former
colleagues back East
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Jackson State. They jumped all over _60 Minutes_ for showing the
city in the worst possible light.

Sanders himself had delivered
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strong message about Jackson and its water crisis almost a year ago.
“The residents of Jackson are resilient,” he said in a _USA
Today_ interview. “I mean, when you just sit there and think about
Jackson is the darn state’s capital and we dealing with this issue,
we dealing with raggedy streets and, I mean, unpaved situations and,
even at HBCU level,” he added, “it’s unbelievable.”

President Biden plans to funnel $600 million
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the city to deal with the water crisis, announcing the first $115
million allocation to get to grips with system disinvestment in June.

The water crisis in the state’s capital and largest city may be old
news to Mississippi residents. But it is not surprising that
Jackson’s woes, like Flint, Michigan’s before it, keep the city in
the headlines. But unlike Flint, Jackson has not been a top issue in
this year’s Mississippi governor’s race. That’s very different
from the 2018 Michigan governor’s race, where Gretchen Whitmer, a
former Democratic state senator and county prosecutor, and Bill
Schuette, the Republican attorney general, had wars of words over who
bore ultimate responsibility for the fiasco after the city switched
from its longtime water source to the polluted Flint River.

The 2023 Mississippi governor’s race would appear to be a prime
opportunity to propel Jackson’s crisis, as well as the water
problems faced by similarly situated communities, to the top of the
state’s agenda. But political culture works differently down South.
Neither Republican Gov. Tate Reeves nor Democrat Brandon Presley, a
utilities commissioner in the northern tier of the state, has had much
to say about the Jackson crisis. And there seems to be little pressure
on them to tackle the subject. A name-calling contest— “liar” is
the most frequently used epithet— is under way, but Jackson isn’t
on the radar at the moment.

The controversies over rural hospital closures, expanding health and
maternity care facilities deserts, and a welfare funding diversion
scandal have pushed Jackson out of the election-cycle frame.

But others are thinking about how situations like Jackson affect other
sectors of the economy. Last year, the Mississippi Economic Council,
the state chamber of commerce, conducted an online survey
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public and private business and community leaders and found three
“issues of concern related to the business climate of
Mississippi.” Most states share two of the three top problems that
MEC identified: a lack of qualified workers and ongoing COVID-19
impacts. But one was unique to the state: the image of Mississippi
cited by a quarter of the leaders surveyed.

If business and community leaders are concerned about how the image of
Mississippi affects the economy, then Jackson’s crisis, and water
quality and infrastructure more broadly, tarnishes that image and
complicates the governor’s position as a conduit for new economic
opportunities from outside the state.

There’s another factor that compromises the economic development
picture: Among college graduates who study at Mississippi’s state
public schools, only half remain in the state three years after
graduation. About 60,000 millennials, nearly 10 percent of the
total, have left
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state since 2010. There is also high out-migration
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African Americans.

6.3 percent of Mississippi residents are served by community water
systems with a serious drinking water violation in the past year, the
third-worst rate in the nation.

Beyond contaminated water, Mississippi’s wider health profiles in
areas like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease—all cited by the MEC
report—simply hinder economic development. What company is going to
take a second look at business opportunities in a state where
residents in the state capital really don’t want to drink the water?

In 2020, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave Mississippi’s
drinking water infrastructure a “D.” That was before Jackson’s
water system collapsed after a 2021 winter storm, and again after
floods in 2022. Each event left residents without water for weeks. The
Environmental Protection Agency’s 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure
Needs Survey and Assessment
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that over the next two decades, the country has $626 billion in
drinking water system needs for treatment plant upgrades, pipe
replacement, storage tanks, and the like. Mississippi’s share of
that is about $8 billion.

The state will see nearly $5 billion
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the next five years from the bipartisan infrastructure bill; about
$430 million will go to improving water lines and pipes. According to
a United Health Foundation report
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6.3 percent of Mississippi residents are served by community water
systems with a serious drinking water violation in the past year, the
third-worst rate in the nation. Jackson, the largest water system in
the state, skewed that rate.

But a Harvard Law School Mississippi Delta Project 2022 study of local
water funding disparities has noted
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poorly maintained drinking water systems are a feature, not a bug, of
water infrastructure in the state overall. According to the EPA’s
current Enforcement and Compliance History Online data, 23 other
municipalities in addition to Jackson have drinking water systems that
are in serious noncompliance with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
The two largest are the predominantly Black and high-poverty cities of
Indianola (north of Jackson) and Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta
county of Coahoma, which has a total of four water systems in
violation. Ten smaller systems have been in violation as long as
Jackson.

For some residents, one possible factor for the corresponding lack of
urgency on the campaign trail outside Jackson could be explained by a
perception the crisis is at least on its way to being solved. With
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and other community leaders
vociferously protesting the governor’s and state lawmakers’
interference, and groups like the NAACP filing suit, the Justice
Department and the EPA have restored some semblance of order. In
addition to hundreds of millions in new funding, a third-party
administrator has come in with a short-term privatization plan (which
may morph into a longer-term one) that is poised to begin the work of
rebuilding the system.

But concerns remain about transparency and accountability features to
ensure that federal funding is actually distributed to historically
disinvested communities to update their aging and ineffective water
systems. The P_rogram on Human Rights and the Global
Economy_ (_PHRGE_) at Northeastern University’s School of Law, the
Center for Constitutional Rights, Food & Water Watch, and Jackson
residents plan to present a report
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drinking water access and affordability at a United Nations Human
Rights Committee session in Geneva next month—another gut punch on
the international stage. The report showcases testimonies from Jackson
community members about continuing problems with water quality, and
customer service missteps, such as failures to offer boil water
notices in Spanish. Transparency in water system operations and
federal and state funding disbursements continue to raise questions
during the interim oversight period.

For other Jacksonians, the key reason why the city is out of the
public consciousness has everything to do with race and candidates
prioritizing the votes of white Mississippians, many of whom are not
well-disposed toward the predominantly Black Democratic bastion.
One-third of Jackson’s residents are poor. Gov. Reeves and Mayor
Lumumba are embroiled in an epic feud over control of the water
system, if the “oily, discolored, grainy, blackish or brown, with a
bad taste or smell” liquid that has come out of residents’ taps
(as described by Jackson residents in the report to the U.N.
committee) could properly be called water.

Privatization, which appears to be fast-tracked, also has not emerged
as much of an issue in the campaign. Some believe it is being pursued
to wrest control away from a Black city. A long-term privatization
plan, one that many people in the community oppose, could lead
to higher bills
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ratepayers. The governor has expressed support for privatization
currently under the auspices of JXN Water and Jacobs Solutions, the
private water management company that now runs the city’s two water
treatment plants and is seeking a contract of up to ten years.
The _Jackson_ _Advocate_ reports
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the company intends to keep on some workers who are currently members
of the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees/Communications Workers
of America, AFL-CIO Local 3570, but only if they agree to leave the
union—and their state retirement benefits—behind.

As water issues pile on to existing health care problems, there are
also major economic obstacles that should make any serious Mississippi
chief executive think long and hard about some very fundamental
obstacles that the state faces. As Deion Sanders points out, the
situation facing Jackson is unbelievable. The Jackson water crisis is
a key focal point in the image that Mississippi projects to the
country and the world—an image that demands a first-class makeover,
starting with the capital city.

_Prospect senior editor GABRIELLE GURLEY writes and edits work on
states and cities, transportation and infrastructure, civil rights,
and climate. She was awarded the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication’s 2021 Gene Burd Award for
Excellence in Urban Journalism._

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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_Used with the permission. © THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, Prospect.org,
2023. All rights reserved. _

_Visit The American Prospect [[link removed]] to subscribe or
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* water supply
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