Podcast: High school football and those loathsome Mets
With high school football season about two weeks away, Tyler takes questions from Rick about the upcoming season. Who’s hot? Who’s not? And which players could contend for Player of the Year in Mississippi?
Stream all episodes here.
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Mississippi now leads the world in mass incarceration
Mississippi is now the world’s leader in putting people behind bars — more inmates per capita than any state or nation, including China, Russia and Iran, according to the World Population Review.
“Is there a political price to be paid for foolishly sticking with a failed system that’s made us the world capital of mass incarceration?” asked Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “What’s it going to take for Mississippians to realize that the mass incarceration we have carried out for decades has made us less safe, rather than safer?”
Across the U.S., the number of those in prison in the U.S. is 16% lower today than before the pandemic, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, but Mississippi’s rate is skyrocketing, rising more than 1,500 in less than six months. That population now exceeds 18,000 — the highest rate since April 2020.
“We have perfected throwing people away for long periods of time,” Johnson said, “and yet after decades and decades of this approach, Mississippians are more fearful about violent crime than any time I remember.”
In September 2013, Mississippi had as many as 22,490 inmates behind bars. In the years since, reforms and an aggressive Parole Board, headed by a veteran law enforcement officer, reduced the number of inmates to the lowest level in two decades. On Feb. 7, that population fell to 16,499, according to MDOC.
But with Gov. Tate Reeves’ new board chairman, a former Chevron executive he put in charge in January, that trend has reversed itself.
On Aug. 1, the prison population hit a high of 18,080.
If this current trend continues, Mississippi would top 19,000 inmates before the end of the year and would surpass 22,000 inmates before the end of 2023.
That additional prison population would cost taxpayers more than $100 million a year, based on the $53.72 per-day cost computed by the state’s legislative watchdog.
“We’re stuck in this futile cycle of throwing more money at prisons,” Johnson said. “Even with the Department of Justice breathing down our necks, we can’t handle the people we have.”
The Justice Department began investigating the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman in 2020 after MCIR and ProPublica reported on the increases in grisly violence, gang control and subhuman living conditions. In April, the department reported that the prison’s conditions violate the Constitution.
The department is investigating other prisons as well.
Promises, Promises in Prison Reform
When Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, signed House Bill 585 into law in 2014, the measure drew widespread praise from conservatives and liberals alike because it promised to reduce the prison population, save millions — $266 million, to be exact — and reinvest some of the money into programs for offenders.
Instead, all of those savings went back into the state’s coffers, helping to pay for huge phased-in corporate tax cuts enacted in 2016, because the state was struggling to meet revenue estimates.
Last year, Reeves signed legislation aimed at expanding parole eligibility to 3,000 more inmates, believing it could be a “net positive for Mississippi.” He later bragged about the significant reduction in inmates at Parchman.
“I believe in second chances,” he said in an April 22, 2022, tweet. “I trust my Parole Board appointees to make wise decisions.”
But since his appointment of a new chairman in 2022, the numbers of paroles have declined.
When Steven Pickett chaired the board between 2013 and 2021, he said about six of every 10 inmates who appeared before the Parole Board earned their release. The board typically saw about 5,000 inmates a year.
Now the board is rejecting far more requests. So far this year, about three-fourths of inmates who have appeared before the board have been rejected for parole.
At the same time Mississippi is filling up its prisons, the state is lagging in programs that would help ensure that inmates don’t return.
“The Mississippi Department of Corrections can’t have a rodeo or enough GED classes, because we don’t have the staffing,” Johnson said. “We probably can’t support more than about 12,000 incarcerated, but we’ve got 18,000.”
Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain convinced state lawmakers to raise salaries of correctional officers in the 2022 legislative session.
While hiring officers has proved a struggle, he said Tuesday, “We’re gaining ground. We’re going to show the Justice Department we’re moving along.”
By fall, he hopes to have 80 schools for inmates to gain certification in engine repair, plumbing, welding, carpentry and other fields.
By doing this, “we’ll reduce recidivism, and we’ll reduce violence,” he said. “About half of the 4,400 inmates we release each year will have a skill or trade.”
He ran a similar program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary and saw the recidivism rate drop to less than 10%.
He called Mississippi’s program “way more intense. We’re meeting a need.”
Rather than hiring teachers on the outside, he’s using inmates certified in these fields to teach, he said.
He praised the Parole Board. “We don’t want gangsters getting out,” he said.
With this new training program for inmates, “we’re going to turn the curve,” he said. “We already have people from Alabama coming to see how we do things.”
Alternatives to Prison Part of the Solution
Cain has also started an alcohol and drug program at the once-shuttered Walnut Grove Correctional Facility that houses 32 inmates in a 90-day addiction program.
Pickett said such programs play an important role in treatment for Mississippi inmates, three-fourths of whom are battling alcohol or drug problems or both.
For example, he said, if a parolee is caught with meth and has failed to report to his parole officer for two months, what should the Parole Board do?
Send him back to prison? Or to treatment?
Locking him up in prison for a year won’t cure his addiction, Pickett said. “All we are doing is putting him in a place that’s dangerous. Meth is just as prolific in prison as it is on the streets. It’s very, very sad.”
The other option would be the Technical Violation Center.
State Public Defender Andre de Gruy said the state needs to do a better job of utilizing this center.
“Now that we’re number one in mass incarceration,” Johnson said, “we ought to stop and take a collective timeout and have a long conversation about whether we’re satisfied and whether we’ve had a good return on the billions we’ve invested.
“Are we locking up more people because there’s something about Mississippians that make them morally deficient or more likely to commit crime? Or is there something more to this story?”
Email Jerry.Mitchell@MississippiCIR.org. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
This report was produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Today. We’re also making it available to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting through a Mississippi Poverty Reporting Collective funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and managed by Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity.
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for our newsletter.
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In ‘South to America,’ Imani Perry seeks to understand a region ‘so varying it can seem endless’
Imani Perry’s argument in “South to America” will feel familiar to any Southerner, or to anyone at all, who has ever been startled by the cheerful dismissals of the region you sometimes encounter elsewhere in the United States. “I’d never want to go to the South,” people up north have said when I told them where I’m from, as if it is a singular place uniformly deserving of disinterest or contempt. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Ala., argues that this tendency to treat the South – and especially its brutal history of racist exploitation and violence – as excisable from the rest of the country is a convenient fantasy.
The argument will also be familiar to anyone who has read much about the modern history of “the South” — a label that can sometimes feel more theoretical than lived, given the diversity of the place. As Perry writes, “The South is so varying it can seem endless. And yet you will still know ‘Southern’ means something over and against other regions.”
Writers’ journeys here are often a quest to understand our under-examined, intentionally obscured or distorted history, from Tony Horowitz’s “Confederates in the Attic” (a book Perry criticizes for its softness on white Confederate re-enactors and their devotion to Lost Cause mythology) to Clint Smith’s recent “How the Word is Passed.” Perry is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of books on Lorraine Hansberry and the Black National Anthem, and she is very clear about the tradition she follows: “South to America” was directly inspired by Albert Murray’s book “South to A Very Old Place,” first published in 1971.
Murray was born and raised in Mobile and educated at Tuskegee University before moving to New York and making a career as an essayist, novelist and critic. During and after the civil rights movement, as Black writers and intellectuals debated whether the path forward was separatism or integration, Murray argued for the centrality of Black culture to American culture, and the unworkability of Black nationalism.
When “South to A Very Old Place” was published, the civil rights movement had wrought massive changes across the country, but their full significance was unclear. And though civil rights leaders had long highlighted the segregation and economic marginalization that characterized Black life in northern cities, the boundaries of the South were perhaps not as blurry as they are today.
Perry’s view of the South as synecdoche-of-sorts for America feels salient in 2022. We remember the Confederate flag hoisted in the U.S. Capitol – a scene never witnessed during the Civil War – on Jan. 6. The man who carried it was from Delaware, a slave state that remained in the Union, though that fact is perhaps unimportant in an era when the Confederate flag flies across the country, no longer always or even often purporting to represent “southern pride.”
Lawmakers in Wisconsin and Arizona join Georgians and Texans in plotting new ways to limit suffrage. The religious right, rooted in Southern evangelicalism, is ascendant. In the days after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the battle-worn and exhausted clinic escorts, helping the final patients make it to their appointments before the clock ran out on legal abortion in the state, repeated some version of a bitter line: “Welcome to Mississippi, America.”
The southernization of American political life may also help explain why parts of Perry’s journey, 50 years after Murray’s, trigger similar reflections. In Atlanta, Murray visits a restaurant and is served uneventfully by a young white waitress. He thinks about what she would say if, say, Newsweek interviewed her about desegregation. He wouldn’t be surprised if she told them how “a white girl shouldn’t have to serve Negroes, and all that crap.” But then he asks: “Is what she says when interviewed on desegregation as a specific issue really more significant than the way she is acting right now with me sitting here?”
At the Nashville airport, Perry approaches a vending machine and realizes a white man is waiting to restock it. “You can g’on and get you something,” he tells her, smiling. Perry thinks that based on his demographics, “the odds are he wouldn’t feel so warmly about me,” and that she would likely be “irked by the things he thinks about the world.” And yet there is still “the softness with which we could speak to one another.” “Whatever it is that I’m saying about the South as America includes that too.” A point that was optimistic in 1971 now feels nearly tragic.
Murray beautifully rendered the speech of southerners, especially Black southerners in his hometown and from his university days at Tuskegee. Entire pages are filled with lengthy quotes from people he just let talk and talk. He compares the voices taking turns during a living room chat to a jazz ensemble. Perry seems to have spoken to fewer people, and her conversations with people she meets for the first time on her journey – as opposed to people she has long known as family friends or fellow writers – are often short. Their significance is sometimes derived from a heavy dose of speculation, like when a Lyft driver in Virginia becomes a symbol of toxic white evangelicalism after a strange but apparently brief exchange.
Perry notes that her politics are quite different from those of Murray, who believed in an American identity built through all of its constitutive parts: a “nation of multi-colored people.” (When Toni Morrison reviewed “South to a Very Old Place” for the New York Times in 1972, she criticized his disinterest in “the Afro part of Afro-Americans:” “The history of black Americans neither begins nor ends in Mobile, Ala.; its true meaning will stay hidden from any black who does not know that there is another place even Souther and much, much older.”)
Perry instead draws connections between the Black South and the larger Black diaspora. In addition to 12 states and the District of Columbia, she travels to the Bahamas and Havana to show the historical and cultural linkages between the South and the Caribbean, and to gain perspective through distance. “We say the only difference between Black folks in various parts of the diaspora is where the boat stopped, but we don’t say that the boats, and the marches through land, didn’t ever stop…. There are rhythms that would be found here and there, though a different blend. This is, I think, the thing that Albert Murray got wrong about the South, even as he described those rhythms with a seriousness and a precision unlike anyone before and likely since.”
In Mississippi, Perry focuses on the city of Jackson, highlighting the historical ironies that surround those of us who live here to such a degree that we sometimes become inured to them. Jackson, Perry writes, “is part Chicago and mostly Mississippi, a place where, like the first Chokwe Lumumba, people reverse-migrate, either to start a revolution or because life in the North was too cold.”
She describes the history of the New Afrikan People’s Organization, for which Lumumba was vice president, with “the goals of self-determination, land ownership, and an independent nation-state for New Afrikans” in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Though the Black Power movement is often conceptualized as non-Southern, she points out that it is a Deep South capital that is led by a “scion of Black nationalism,” the younger Chokwe Lumumba. And Jackson, “unapologetically Black,” is the capital of the state with the country’s largest Black population and largest number of Black elected officials, and home to two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Perry vividly describes the Sonic Boom of the South marching through the city streets). All this in the American state most synonymous with violence and murder in the name of white supremacy.
Yet today the life expectancy for Black men in Mississippi is less than 67 years. Perry mentions, too, the Central American and Mexican poultry factory workers detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the largest raids in history.
“We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different… There’s an honesty to Mississippi about all of this. The triumph is not in ends, it is in the fact that we are still here.”
Perry is a featured panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on Aug. 20.
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Judge denies bond for UM student charged with murder in Jay Lee case
A Lafayette County Circuit Court judge on Tuesday found police had probable cause to arrest Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., a 22-year-old University of Mississippi graduate, for the murder of Jimmie “Jay” Lee.
Judge Gray Tollison then denied bond to Herrington as Lee, a 20-year-old Black student who was well known in Oxford’s LGBTQ community, has been missing since July 8.
As sheriff’s deputies led Herrington down the front steps of the courthouse and into a squad car, nearly a dozen protesters – many of them students who were friends with Lee – shouted in unison: “Where is Jay?”
Over the course of nearly six hours, the prosecution laid out a theory that Herrington and Lee had a casual relationship. Lafayette County Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Kilpatrick argued that following an argument in the morning of July 8, Herrington “lured” Lee to his apartment, strangled him, and then “staged a cover up” by driving Lee’s car to Molly Barr Trails and disposing his body somewhere in Lafayette or Grenada counties.
“In 2022 you do not need a body,” Kilpatrick said in her closing statement. “It’s not the 1870s.”
The preliminary hearing occurred on Tuesday as part of the bond hearing because Herrington was entitled to hear the evidence that Oxford police used to obtain an arrest warrant.
The prosecution argued that Herrington should be denied bond because his charge – first-degree murder – will likely be elevated to capital murder as police uncover more evidence; some of which is still being processed at a private crime lab. Kilpatrick also argued Herrington was a flight risk, noting that a forensic search of his MacBook showed he had searched for flights from Dallas to Singapore.
Herrington’s defense attorney, state Rep. Kevin Horan, disputed that Herrington, who has $1,910 in his bank account, could afford to flee the state. In his closing statement, Horan said the prosecution’s case amounted to “suspicion, conjecture and speculation.”
“We’re not supposed to be sensational in these cases – we’re supposed to come in and treat everyone the same … no matter how many cameras are up there or how many people are outside,” Horan said, gesturing to the windows of the second-floor courtroom. The protesters’ chants could be heard throughout the proceeding.
The hearing began with Kilpatrick calling Lee’s mother and Oxford Police Department Detective Ryan Baker to testify.
Stephanie Lee recounted all the signs that led her to realize Jay was missing on July 8. The first sign, she said, came around 7 a.m. when Jay, who had texted her, “Mom, it’s your birthday,” did not respond to the smiley-face emoji she sent in reply.
Baker testified he arrested Herrington on July 22 based on the “totality of the evidence.” This included Snapchat messages, Google searches on Herrington’s computer, and DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department K-9s who he said identified the smell of a dead body in Herrington’s apartment, car and moving truck which belongs to his company, T&T Moving. Other evidence included video surveillance on July 8 of a man that Baker identified as Herrington running from Molly Barr Trail, where police believe he parked Lee’s car that morning, then retrieving a shovel and wheelbarrow from his parent’s house in Grenada.
The most damning evidence in Baker’s testimony was a Google search that Herrington made on July 8, minutes after Lee sent a Snapchat message saying he was coming over. At 5:56 a.m., Herrington searched, “how long does it take to strangle someone gabby petito.”
Gabby Petito was a 22-year-old who gained national attention last summer when she went missing; it was later determined she was killed by strangulation.
After Baker read the Google search, multiple people gasped in the courtroom, prompting Kilpatrick to ask him to repeat the line.
Baker then testified that 156 seconds later, Herrington made another Google search: “does pre-work boost testosterone.” Kilpatrick argued in her closing statement that Herrington “probably” took pre-work — a type of energy booster typically taken before exercise — prior to killing Lee.
During Baker’s cross examination, Horan argued that the K-9 evidence – without accompanying DNA evidence or bodily fluids – is not admissible in court in Mississippi and that OPD could not prove the dogs utilized by DeSoto County had ever successfully identified the smell of a dead body.
Horan then called four witnesses who testified, in an effort to obtain bail for Herrington, to his connections to the community in Grenada. Herrington’s mother, Tina Herrington, read several pages listing Herrington’s religious and academic accomplishments, including that Herrington was voted “most likely to be president” when he graduated high school in 2018.
Emily Tindell, the principal of Grenada High School, testified that Herrington and his family have “the best of character in Grenada County.”
During the hearing, Tayla Carey, Lee’s sister, sat in the front row next to her mother. The hearing was a “rollercoaster,” she said.
“I’m mad, I’m sad, I’m irritated,” she said. “I’m all over the place, honestly. I just want justice, I just want peace.”
Spectators steadily left the courtroom as the hearing continued. Before the hearing started, dozens of people were protesting outside the courthouse, including LGBTQ rights activists fron across Mississippi.
The next step in the case is the grand jury hearing; the date has not yet been set.
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Leflore County jury declines to indict Carolyn Bryant in Emmett Till’s death
A Leflore County grand jury has found insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for her role in the kidnapping and lynching death of Emmett Till.
District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said the jury considered charges of kidnapping and manslaughter, but returned a “no bill” indicating they would not indict Donham, according to a news release from his office.
“The murder of Emmett Till remains an unforgettable tragedy in this country and the thoughts and prayers of this nation continue to be with the family of Emmett Till,” Richardson said in a statement.
Donham is in her late 80s and had a last known address in North Carolina, the Associated Press reported.
Till, who was from Chicago, was murdered at the age of 14 while visiting his family in the Delta in 1955.
The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, founded by members of Till’s family, has been demanding justice by charging Donham as an accomplice in his death.
Family members from the foundation were not immediately available for comment Tuesday. On Twitter, the foundation wrote justice for Till will continue.
The grand jury met last week and heard more than seven hours of testimony from witnesses who detailed the case investigation since 2004, according to the district attorney’s office.
Last month, the original unserved arrest warrant for Donham was found in the basement of the Leflore County courthouse in Greenwood. The FBI was notified about the discovery and there were discussions between Richardson’s office and federal partners, according to the district attorney’s office.
“Although prosecutors do not arrest people nor do prosecutors serve arrest warrants, the existence of the 1955 warrant along with additional information confirmed the decision to present this matter to the next regularly scheduled Leflore County Grand Jury,” Richardson said in a statement.
In July, an unpublished memoir of Donham was shared with and reported on by The Associated Press. In it, Donham said she didn’t know what would happen to Till after she accused him of whistling at and grabbing her in 1955.
Her former husband Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from his family’s home and brought the 14-year-old to her in the middle of the night to identify. In the memoir, Donham said she denied it was him and claimed Till identified himself.
The FBI investigated Till’s case from 2004 to 2007, and in 2007 the case was presented to a different Leflore County grand jury by former District Attorney Joyce Chiles. The jury declined to indict Donham for manslaughter.
In 2017, a state and federal investigation was reopened based on information that Donham may have recanted previous statements given during the 1955 trial of her former husband or during the first FBI investigation.
The recent investigation, which ended in December 2021, did not result in new charges.
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Union president wins discrimination complaint against federal corrections facility in Yazoo City
An independent arbitrator has sided with the first Black woman union president at a Yazoo City federal prison who faced gender discrimination, retaliation and violation of her union contract.
Cyndee Price, president of Local 1013 of the American Federation of Government Employees, was awarded $300,000 in compensatory damages, over 1,000 hours worth of overtime back wages and additional legal fees, arbitrator Ed W. Bankston ordered July 14.
“It’s been like hell for the past two years,” she said about her experience as union president.
Price became president in June 2020 and is the first Black woman to serve as union president at any federal prison in the country, according to the national branch of AFGE.
In her role at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Price said she called out prison management at Federal Correctional Complex Yazoo City for not providing staff and inmates with masks and following federal guidance to minimize the virus’ spread. She also reported management for misconduct to multiple agencies.
The former Michigan resident grew up around unions and to her, unions have a purpose. She became a union steward in 2013 and wanted to be someone who can speak for others in the workplace.
“What made me want to step up is I hate bullies,” Price told Mississippi Today.
Duties of a union officer can be like a full time job, which is why Price applied for 100% official time. Official time is paid time off for federal employees to perform union duties, such as negotiating contracts, meeting with administration and helping staff with complaints.
“Everything that we’re responsible for doing as a president, you can’t do that while overseeing 700 people and dual responsibilities,” she said.
Official time is part of federal law and the union’s contract.
As president, Price said she faced retaliation and gender-based discrimination by prison management.
In her grievance, Price said former prison Warden Shannon Withers and Assistant Walter Vereen did not grant her official time, saying it was no longer Bureau of Prisons policy.
She said the decision was gender-based because her predecessor, a man, had been granted official time and male union presidents at other federal prisons had been granted official time.
“It continues to be the practice of management under the direction of the Complex Warden, Shannon Withers, to allow management under his disciplinary authority and directions to engage in patterns of unethical behavior, and practices, unilaterally circumventing and repudiating the parties’ (collective bargaining agreement),” her Sept. 25, 2020 grievance states.
Former BOP Southeast Regional Director J.A. Keller said he denied Price’s grievance because it was improperly filed, according to arbitration records. He also reiterated what the warden had told her: it was no longer policy to grant official time.
Because she wasn’t granted official time, Price said she took the work home with her. She worked on union matters on top of caring for two young children and a sick husband.
Price will receive back pay for 1,080 hours of overtime work. Bankston, the arbitrator, ordered the BOP to grant 100% official time for as long as Price is a union official.
In his decision, Bankston said Withers unilaterally chose to end the use of official time and he didn’t have the authority to do so. The union argued denial of official time is an unfair labor practice and violation of its agreement.
In her grievance, she also alleged the wardens and regional director directed other staff to retaliate against her by writing her up, following her and subjecting her to eight investigations and potential removal from her job as a case manager. Price has worked for the prison for 11 years and she said she had a clear work record until she became union president.
Price said these actions created a hostile work environment that filled her with anxiety.
“These managers here believe they are beyond reproach. And that’s what I was trying to report,” she said.
In the decision, the arbitrator agreed Price faced “adverse and unwarranted personnel actions with changed privileges, conditions, and terms of employment.”
A spokesperson from the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment, saying the agency does not comment on settlement offers, negotiations or terms. Keller, Vereen and Withers were not made available for interviews.
Price said Withers and Vereen no longer work at FCC Yazoo City. Withers is a warden at the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Florida and Vereen and Keller retired from the agency, a BOP spokesperson confirmed.
Since new leaders have come to the prison, Price said hasn’t experienced harassment and retaliation.
Despite the arbitration, Price expects the BOP to appeal the decision to potentially get out of granting her official time and paying her for the overtime hours.
She hopes newer prison and agency leaders will hold the people named in her grievance accountable. Price would also like the investigations the previous management launched against her to be removed.
Price said the new management is trying to turn things at the prison around, but she wants them to form a better working relationship with the union.
“I just want to do my elected duties in peace,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s about what is best for the employees.”
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Teachers, restaurant owners both call on politicians to work together to fix Jackson water
On the same day, in uncoordinated events, Jackson restaurateurs and public school teachers sent out the same message to local and state political leaders – fix the ongoing water issues in the state’s capital city that have led to boil water notices.
The Mississippi Association of Educators said the water crisis impacts the ability of students in the city of Jackson to learn.
“When the water system fails, JPS schools are forced to transition to online learning, destabilizing students’ learning environments and putting more economic strain on families who now must choose between taking off work or hiring childcare if that is an option,” a MAE position paper released Monday said. “Moreover, with the unplanned transition to online learning, access to free and reduced breakfast and lunch becomes an additional challenge for students.”
MAE said it “interfaced” with Jackson residents at various locations and through a phone survey and found more than 90% of residents had experienced tap water issues at both home and school. All said they spent funds to purchase bottled water.
MAE urged Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba “to issue a proclamation declaring that fixing the ongoing water crisis and securing safe and reliable water access in Jackson will be made the first priority of the administration.” The local government should develop a plan, detailing cost, to address the problem.
MAE also called for the Legislature and state leaders to devote substantial funds from the $1.8 billion in COVID-19 relief money received from the federal government to address the water crisis.
MAE said “The composition of the system is dangerous. Lead and galvanized and cast-iron pipes make up large portions of the city’s infrastructure. These aging pipes composed of dangerous and degraded materials will continue to block Jackson’s development efforts if they remain unaddressed.”
Also on Monday, about 45 restaurant owners and managers sent a letter to Gov. Tate Reeves, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Speaker Philip Gunn, Lumumba, Jackson City Council members and members of the Hinds County Board of Supervisors saying the constant boil water notices and at times interruptions in water supply were unsustainable. They asked the political leaders to put aside any differences and work together. Thus far, state and local leaders have not been able reach an accord on the water woes of the state’s largest and capital city.
During a news conference at the Iron Horse Grill, a local restaurant, about 20 restaurateurs raised their hands when asked if they had been contacted about moving out of Jackson to the suburbs.
The speakers said some of the restaurants are having to spend between $500 and $700 daily on ice, bottled water and other items, such as canned or bottled soft drinks to replace the fountain soda that is unavailable without pressurized water.
This is having to be done, said Pat Fontaine, executive director of the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, despite very narrow profit margins caused in part by the current level of inflation and labor and supply shortages.
The letter was described “as the first formal attempt to force attention on this crisis.”
The Legislature approved what is expected to be $25 million of the $1.8 billion in federal funds the state received to match $25 million the city of Jackson received in federal funds to deal with water and sewer issues. But those funds have been described as a small fraction of the money needed to deal with an aged water and sewer system. It has been estimated it will cost more than $1 billion to fix the antiquated and worn-out infrastructure system.
In addition, Jackson Mayor Lumumba has said the ongoing boil water notices are being caused by other issues – such as the lack of qualified staff to operate the complex Jackson surface water system.
“As a matter of fairness and practicality, if no solution is imminent, if this is to be the status quo, can restaurant owners expect to be compensated for their additional cost of operation and lost revenue?” the letter asked. They asked if they could get a discount on their City of Jackson water bill or an income tax credit from the state.
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