As far as Mary Alex Thigpen knew, the truckloads of mulch she’d just had delivered would sit at Belhaven’s Laurel Street Park until she could find enough volunteers to spread it.

Thigpen, the executive director of the Greater Belhaven Foundation, then got a call from a neighborhood resident. Employees with the city’s parks and recreation department were putting down the mulch with shovels and rakes.

“It just kind of made me laugh because I didn’t tell anybody at parks and rec about the mulch,” Thigpen said. “But I guess they saw it and thought it was theirs?” 

Thigpen’s story illustrates a widespread issue facing citywide efforts to rid Jackson of litter, blight, dilapidated housing and overgrown weeds: No matter how many resources are available, many stakeholders are not on the same page. And not everyone knows who — between the mayor, his departments, the council, local nonprofits or individual citizens — is responsible for what.

“People are tired of waiting for someone else to do it, and they’re starting to do it on their own,” said Ashlee Kelly, a Belhaven resident who has been involved in volunteer clean-up efforts across Ward 7. 

That’s the case across the city, but in Ward 7, most of the seven candidates running for council believe that Jacksonians need to get better coordinated when it comes to pursuing quality of life improvements in the city. The 14-mile ward encompassing Fondren, Belhaven and downtown Jackson is one of two council areas this election season where the incumbent has chosen not to run again. 

During a voter forum last month at Millsaps College, five of the seven candidates agreed that city clean-up is important for economic development and crime reduction.

Some of their ideas were ambitious. Democratic candidate Quint Withers, an accountant and Realtor, said he wants to switch the city’s street lights to LED so they last longer.

Bruce Burton, an attorney also running in the Democratic primary, thinks the city should install cameras across the ward to catch illegal trash dumpers. 

And independent candidate Ron Aldridge, a government-relations attorney and current chair of Fondren’s Business Improvement District, said the city needs to be working more with its neighborhood associations. 

But what will these candidates be able to realistically accomplish if they win? Aldridge told Mississippi Today he knows his ideas do not technically fall under the purview of the city council.

“It doesn’t matter,” Aldridge said. “That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m just telling you. I’m not someone that waits.” 

As a voter, Kelly looks to see if candidates have an accurate understanding of these roles and responsibilities. In Jackson, city council candidates often do not realize the statutory division of power between the city and the mayor. 

“People make a lot of promises, and they don’t realize there’s really basic functions,” she said. “If you do anything out of the scope, it’s great, but it’s also a part-time job. You have to be realistic about what you can do.” 

Under state statute, the mayor of Jackson is the city’s full-time chief executive office, overseeing city departments, appointing department heads and drafting the city budget. 

The council, on the other hand, works part time and essentially functions as the legislative branch of the city government. Working together, the council has the ability to write and pass ordinances, subject to the mayor’s veto. Likewise, the council can vote down the mayor’s budget. 

For the newcomer, outgoing Ward 7 councilperson Virgi Lindsay’s advice is, “You have to get in there and do it. It is the consummate of on-the-job training.” 

For instance, Lindsay said she is frequently calling the city about abandoned houses in the southern part of Ward 7. But as a council person, she has no power to order any city department to tear down the houses. 

What Lindsay can do, however, is ensure the city is funding the right departments, which she said the council worked to do by increasing solid waste’s budget. 

But in the past, council members have disagreed over the extent of their powers, causing a breakdown in the city’s ability to function. This happened most notably when, during a years-long dispute over entering a new garbage contract, the council and the mayor sued each other, hiring separate attorneys, something a specially appointed judge said should not have happened.  

“So, in effect, we have City of Jackson vs. City of Jackson,” Judge H. David Clark said in 2023. “That raises a few problems in itself. George cannot sue George.” 

Since the council approved the long-term contract with the mayor’s vendor in 2024, city spokesperson Melissa Payne said there’s been “way less contention between the council and the mayor, and I think he appreciates that and wants to keep it that way.”

Inspired in part by the disagreement, Working Together Jackson, a nonprofit, held a “candidate school” last month about the council’s roles and responsibilities. Two candidates in Ward 7 – Withers and Kevin Parkinson – attended.

Chevon Chatman, a WTJ organizer, said she encourages candidates who win to attend the city’s free legal training on the council’s statutory obligations. 

“People don’t know the council is a legislative body and does not have control over the pothole on your street,” she said. 

When candidates have an accurate understanding of their roles, Kelly said they can provide more detailed campaign goals to voters. 

“When they say education and economic development, I want to squint a little bit because it’s like, where are you going with this,” she asked. “What do you mean by economic development? That’s such a broad term.” 

Mississippi Today was able to interview four candidates for Ward 7 by press time: Democrats Parkinson, Withers and Turner Martin, as well as independent Aldridge.

Corinthian Sanders, another Democrat, was unable to speak by press time due to a personal matter. Neither Taylor Turcotte, a Republican, nor Burton, a Democrat, returned multiple calls. 

Martin, an employee in the city’s Department of Human and Cultural Services, said his experience writing resolutions helped him understand how power is divided between the mayor and the council. 

Specifically, Martin authored a resolution related to the maintenance of the Arts Center of Mississippi, a building downtown that he manages. Based on his experience at the Arts Center, Martin said he thinks the city needs to fill some gaps in its services, especially when it comes to maintenance on its property. 

“There’s literally no one I can call,” he said. 

When trash builds up outside the Arts Center, Martin said it is not technically the responsibility of anyone in the city to pick it up. The custodians work inside the building, while parks and recreation maintains and trims the landscaping. 

“Regardless of how these departments are supposed to work, if it’s not being enforced by the executive branch, there’s very little the council can do,” he said.

Downtown Jackson Partners receives funds through the area’s business improvement district to provide landscaping and other services, but Martin said he does not think they should have to conduct upkeep of city properties. In areas with established improvement districts, property owners pay an extra fee on top of taxes for services aimed at promoting business. The fee is collected by the county and distributed through the city to the district designees, such as Downtown Jackson Partners.

“We have a balcony at Thalia Mara, so if an unhoused individual sleeps on that balcony for weeks because we can’t afford to have full-time security, who’s responsible for that,” he asked. “There’s no one to call except for an organization that already wears so many hats in terms of keeping our downtown beautiful.” 

At the same time, Martin said he would like to see the city doing a better job of advertising the services it does provide, such as its monthly “Roll-Off Dumpster Day” at the Metrocenter Mall. Aldridge mentioned this, too. 

Parkinson, a former principal of Midtown Public Charter School, said people misunderstand the role of the city council in one of two ways.

“They think that the city councilor is the king or queen of their ward and that by some form of strong authoritarianism or maybe a magic wand, whatever the city council person says for their ward will automatically be done, and that is not how that works,” Parkinson said. “The other way that people mess it up, though, is they say, ‘Well, we have a strong mayor system, so as a city council person, there is nothing that I can do.’” 

What the council should do, Parkinson said, is focus on building relationships with each other and with the mayor. But that doesn’t mean going along to get along. 

“Unified doesn’t always mean rubber stamped,” he added.

Withers had a similar opinion. He said the city council needs to compromise for the common good, but he doesn’t see that happening right now.

“The council can probably advocate with the administration and help hold hands with the right people,” Withers said. “That role can exist as long as you can talk to those department heads, but my best understanding now is that they’re siloed.” 

For example, while code enforcement falls under planning and development, the Jackson Police Department has started a neighborhood enhancement team to help tackle some of the city’s blight. 

Parkinson said that it’s great so many Jacksonians are working to fix the blight, but on the bureaucratic side, these efforts are made more complicated by the number of entities involved. 

“Even for something as simple as a house we could all agree needs to be demolished … there’s so many partners,” he said. “I think a lot of people don’t realize that a lot of the blighted property is actually owned by the state through tax forfeiture.”

All four candidates said they had canvassed the ward’s 18 neighborhoods, though Aldridge said he has done that primarily through an outreach ministry, not his campaign, that he’s been involved with over the last two and a half years. 

They’ve seen the blight with their own eyes, and all concur the issues in the southern part of the ward are greater — and more forgotten about, due in part to population loss. 

“There’s an inverse graph of less resources to tackle these things while the issue itself is growing,” Martin said. 

Parkinson identified the Savanna Street neighborhood as an area of particular need. The street has burned-out houses, and last year, a tree fell on a man, killing him in his home. 

“Two things can be true,” Parkinson said. “There’s a lot of people working really hard and trying their absolute best and are making some of an impact. … And it is woefully insufficient. It needs to be accelerated. We all need to get on the same page. It has to be a priority of the mayor. That’s just a reality. The city council has to support, and we need the state to step up.” 

Years ago, Aldridge said he was involved with efforts by nonprofit Keep Mississippi Beautiful and local affiliate Keep Jackson Beautiful to clean the green spaces at the High Street and Pearl Street entrances off I-55, which he said are vital to the city as the first things people see when they drive into downtown — home, he said, to some of the state’s greatest museums. 

It was a “total effort,” Aldridge said. The litter was picked up, the weeds were mowed, and the oak tree canopy, which was coming down into the road, was trimmed.

But now, Aldridge said the street looks as if that work never happened. 

The post ‘Be realistic’: Concerned about blight, Jackson’s Ward 7 council candidates learn who’s responsible appeared first on Mississippi Today.