Last year, 23-year-old Phoenicia Ratliff of Canton was kidnapped and shot by her ex-boyfriend before he turned the gun on himself. Just a week earlier, he had been arrested on domestic violence and stalking charges.
Ratliff was one semester short of graduating from Jackson State University. She left behind a two-year-old little girl.
“To know her was to love her,” her mother Suzanne Ratliff said. “She was always smiling — you never knew what was really going on with her because she smiled through everything.”
Her tragic case illustrates the reality of a startling statistic: that the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. And one national study on intimate partner homicides showed women are more likely to be murdered with a gun than all other means combined.
In Mississippi, where gun laws don’t mirror the prohibitions placed on domestic violence offenders in federal law, the statistic sounds a loud alarm bell.
Under federal law, anyone convicted of a domestic violence crime, whether a misdemeanor or felony, is not allowed to purchase or possess a firearm. The same goes for anyone with a domestic abuse protection order (a specific type of restraining order) against them. The law is commonly referred to as the Lautenberg Amendment.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia have their own laws mirroring these federal prohibitions, but Mississippi does not.
Across the state, officials are hesitant to take away offenders’ guns, and in some cases even charge abusers with other crimes, such as simple assault, to avoid the task, a top law enforcement official told Mississippi Today.
In Forest Municipal Court, for example, Judge Norman Brown has ordered guns returned to domestic violence offenders, according to four sources, including current and former employees of the police department.
“He has literally handed the suspects their guns back in court … and that’s with us showing there’s a history of a conviction, not just being charged,” said one former Forest police officer who now works with another agency.
The officer remembers one particularly violent individual who had multiple run-ins with the law, including assault on a law enforcement officer and at least one misdemeanor domestic violence conviction.
“He still said that’s (his) right to own a gun,” the officer said.
Brown declined to answer questions from Mississippi Today, saying he does not discuss cases.
In Grenada, guns are never seized from individuals convicted of domestic violence or who are the subject of domestic abuse protections, according to an individual who works in the county court system.
These crimes aren’t being prosecuted at the federal level, either. Since 2013, the U.S. Southern District of Mississippi’s office prosecuted only three cases dealing with the unlawful possession of a gun by someone who had previously been convicted of a domestic violence crime. There were no cases prosecuted for the illegal possession of a firearm for someone under a domestic violence protection order in that same time period.
“We do train both law enforcement and prosecutors on due process requirements associated with the Lautenberg Amendment,” said Colby Jordan, director of communications for the Attorney General’s office.
The office declined to answer any other questions about the issue, including whether Attorney General Lynn Fitch would or would not push lawmakers to develop an accompanying state law or what the office is doing aside from training on this issue.
Efforts to align state and federal laws have proved futile in recent years. Last year, the National Rifle Association and global pandemic stomped out even the earliest conversations, according to Luke Thompson, former president of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police and the former chief of police in Byram.
The idea was to modify the existing state statute prohibiting possession of a weapon by a convicted felon by adding “or otherwise prohibited by” the relevant federal law.
“Any type of gun legislation in Mississippi is met with a great amount of resistance, and the (National Rifle Association) got a hint on that and bashed it real quick before we had a chance to have discussions with people and say, ‘This is what we’re trying to do,’” said Thompson.
The National Rifle Association did not respond to Mississippi Today’s request for comment on the issue.
After being painted as “pro-gun control” and supportive of “far-left” gun laws, Thompson penned a letter in February 2020 to Speaker of the House Philip Gunn and all House Republicans explaining his position.
He described a situation that captured the problems that arise because of the lack of a state law. Officers in his department responded to an incident in which a man fired a round from his gun through the ceiling of his home during an argument with his estranged wife. During the investigation, his officers discovered he had a domestic violence conviction and seized his weapons.
“Due to domestic offense being a state misdemeanor, federal authorities would not prosecute the possession case,” Thompson explained, going on to describe how he did not return the weapons to the offender, even when the offender and his lawyer began repeatedly contacting him over a five-year period and accusing him of illegally seizing the guns.
So Thompson set out to add the federal law language to the state law detailing which people cannot legally own or buy a gun.
“The intent was to give police chiefs an option when federal authorities would not assist and to keep local law enforcement officers safe,” he continued in his letter.
Although he never heard back from Gunn or other lawmakers, House Judiciary B Chairman Nick Bain said he’s aware of the issue Thompson was trying to address.
“I’m aware of an inconsistency there. I’m not opposed to talking about it, but I don’t want to go into a situation where we’re having more gun control than what is needed,” said Bain, a Republican from Corinth. “But I’m not opposed to having a discussion about it with our federal prosecutors, federal authorities and local state authorities.”
Bain’s counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Brice Wiggins responded similarly, saying he was open to a debate about possible legislation.
Advocates have kept their distance from the issue in recent years, though they see firsthand the failure to remove guns from the hands of abusers.
Wendy Mahoney, executive director of the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said she remembers having some talks years ago.
There was always pushback, she said. She remembers one person questioning where law enforcement would put the seized guns. Then last year, she saw what happened to Thompson when he brought the issue to lawmakers.
“I don’t think we have the support to even have an open conversation right now, even though we know … in most domestic violence situations, when a gun is involved, the correlation is very high with imminent danger and death,” Mahoney said. “That should be enough to have that conversation.”
The gap in federal and state law led former U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst to launch an initiative last year to combat what he said is a “lack of knowledge” among law enforcement and courts about federal restrictions on firearm ownership. The initiative, named “Operation Phoenicia” for Ratliff, continues today under the current U.S. attorney.
“Operation Phoenicia” involves educating and training law enforcement and judges about federal domestic violence laws in addition to other efforts to crack down on domestic violence offenders with guns.
Hurst, along with his then counterpart in the northern district of the state, vowed to prioritize prosecution of these crimes, and the efforts continue under his successor, acting U.S. Attorney Darren LaMarca. The plan is to begin by identifying individuals in the city of Jackson who currently have a domestic violence protective order or a domestic violence misdemeanor and calling them into the office to put them on notice.
“We tell them it is a federal crime for them to possess a firearm and we tell them, ‘If we catch you, we will prosecute you federally,’” Hurst said.
They are also issuing what is referred to as “call-outs,” or working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to put domestic violence victims on notice if their abuser is attempting to buy a gun.
But as of March, no such cases have been prosecuted yet, nor have any call-ins taken place due to the pandemic, according to LaMarca. Call-outs have been ongoing through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The office is also working to ensure local state and local officials understand certain standards must be met in a domestic violence crime in order for federal prosecution to occur. For example, one deals with whether there was use or attempted use of force, while another deals with the type of relationship the victim has with the perpetrator.
LaMarca said he is collaborating with state and local officials to more fully identify certain specifics of domestic violence offenses, the relationship between the two involved individuals and the amount and type of involvement the offender has with the legal system. By doing that, officials can better understand whether the offense in question falls under the Lautenberg Amendment.
Mahoney, whose organization works with domestic violence shelters and victims, said the mixed messages and lack of enforcement around domestic abusers with guns creates fear and distrust in victims.
“If you’re not taking away their firearm, you’re invoking more fear” in an already fearful victim, she said. “It makes the victim question, ‘Is the system really on my side to help me?’”
Two South African immigrants are suing a Mississippi farmer over an alleged bait-and-switch scheme where they were recruited for falsely advertised agricultural jobs and then paid less than the federal minimum wage for their work.
Plaintiffs Dennis Appel and Christopher Boshoff were recruited in South Africa to migrate to Mississippi for jobs operating farm machinery on Kyle Mills’ farm in Winona. The pair allege that when they arrived in 2019, Mills instead made them work an average of 95 hours a week driving tractor-trailer trucks, delivering grain and fertilizer to farms across the Southeast.
Mills told the federal government that his business needed temporary foreign farm workers because he could not find U.S. workers to take the job. The suit alleges that he had no intention of hiring U.S. workers, but instead wanted foreign workers to drive for his trucking company so he could pay them significantly lower wages.
Mills paid the two plaintiffs $11.33 an hour — the hourly wage rate set by the federal government under the H-2A visa program for agricultural work — and not the $18.25 paid to local truck drivers.
Boshoff and Appel collectively spent thousands of dollars on transportation and H-2A visa costs to take the job. The lawsuit alleges that Mills refused to reimburse their pre-employment costs, a requirement under the H-2A program, after they arrived. Without the means to return home, they felt they had no choice but to work for Mills even though the job was not what they signed up for.
“When properly used, the foreign worker program protects companies, U.S. workers and foreign workers,” said Amal Bouhabib, a lawyer from Southern Migrant Legal Services who is representing the plaintiffs. “But when employers lie about the work, U.S. workers miss out on good job opportunities, foreign workers are exploited, and law-abiding employers are at a competitive disadvantage.”
The lawsuit, filed today in U.S. District Court in Greenville, alleges that Mills obtained Appel’s and Boshoff’s visas under false pretenses and violated federal minimum wage laws by paying them 40% less than the minimum wage for truck driving. The Mississippi Center for Justice and Tennessee-based Southern Migrant Legal Services filed the suit on behalf of the two immigrants.
“Our clients deserve to earn a fair wage for the work they did,” said Rob McDuff, an attorney at the Mississippi Center for Justice representing the plaintiffs. “When employers are allowed to hire and then underpay foreign workers, it creates a cycle that favors the use of the H-2 program and depresses wages for all Mississippians. We hope this lawsuit will help ensure the system is working fairly for all workers.”
Beginning in the 2024 school year, all Mississippi elementary, middle and high schools will be required to offer computer science courses.
This week, Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law “The Mississippi Computer Science and Cyber Education Equality Act,” which sets out a timeline for schools to incorporate the curriculum.
The law, which the authors say will likely designate $1 million of new state funding for the curriculum, garnered bipartisan support in the Legislature and was backed by C Spire, which committed another $1 million to help schools with teacher training and implementation of the curriculum.
“Getting computer science in all Mississippi classrooms represents a tremendous opportunity to give our young people exposure to the fundamentals necessary for their future success in the workforce,” said C Spire CEO Hu Meena.
Currently, more than half of high schools in Mississippi do not offer computer science courses, yet there are 1,519 open computing jobs in the state with an average salary of around $72,000, according to code.org.
Mississippi adopted standards for a computer science curriculum in 2018, but there was previously no requirement for schools to offer computer science courses.
“We look forward to continued collaboration with educators and other partners in the expansion of computer science offerings to prepare our students for postsecondary study and for careers in this rapidly-changing career field,” said Nathan Oakley, chief academic officer for the Mississippi Department of Education.
The legislation also includes scholarships for teachers to be trained and receive computer science endorsements through Mississippi State University’s Research and Curriculum Unit.
Sen. Scott DeLano, a Republican from Biloxi, authored the Senate version of the bill and worked with his House counterpart Rep. Kevin Felsher, also a Republican from Biloxi, to ensure its passage. DeLano said he heard from businesses coming to Mississippi that are in need of workers trained in these skills.
“We know jobs for the future are going to demand more and more computer science, so we want to make sure that all students have at least the basic fundamentals required to be able to take advanced courses or help assist with training in the future as they move through their career path,” DeLano said.
He and others are also in talks with other businesses in hopes of shoring up more support.
Mississippi’s relatively small number of families receiving federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Family benefits will receive a monthly increase in payments of $90 under legislation Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law this week.
“Listening to some of the parents and grandparents talk about how the extra benefits are going to help their children, I think it is good,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, D-Jackson. “It has been a long time coming.”
The increase is the first since 1999 for families in Mississippi receiving the welfare benefits.
The bill, authored by Sen. Joey Fillingane, increases the benefits from $170 per month to $260 per month for a family of four. The TANF benefits are paid solely through federal funds.
Norwood praised Mississippi Department of Human Services Executive Director Bob Anderson for advocating to the Legislature for increasing the benefits.
Anderson’s actions came on the heels of the scandal that occurred during the administration of former Gov. Phil Bryant, where former DHS Director John Davis and others were indicted on charges related to siphoning off the TANF money designed to help “the poorest of the poor” for personal use. State Auditor Shad White alleges that millions in TANF funds were being directed to nonprofits that were supposed to provide services for the needy, but instead the funds being diverted for personal use.
The state receives a federal grant each year of $86.5 million for TANF. Of that amount, $30 million is diverted to Child Protections Services that oversees the state’s foster child program.
While Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation, only between 2,500-3,000 families are normally in the TANF program, Anderson said earlier this session. In addition to increasing the benefits, Anderson has said he wants to re-evaluate the criteria for determining eligibility.
“We are in the midst of this pandemic,” Anderson said earlier this session. “We think this is an opportune time to provide this assistance for our TANF families… for the poorest of the poor in our state.”
The $260 per month for a family of three is higher than the benefits for all of the surrounding states except Tennessee, which provides $277 per month. Arkansas is the lowest at $204. In Mississippi, a family would receive an additional $24 per month for each child increasing the size of the family by more than three.
“There are so many people in need of additional assistance. So many are doing without,” said Rep. Alyce Clarke, D-Jackson. “Any little thing we can do to help is a blessing.”
Mississippi will receive about $6 billion from the federal American Rescue Act — an amount equal to the entire annual state general budget, and an amount state leaders say could change Mississippi for the better if spent wisely by state and local governments and bureaucrats.
“Clearly this is something that is transformative to Mississippi,” Hosemann said, saying state leaders are trying to get a grip on exactly how much money is coming to the Magnolia State and the rules for spending it. “… It is a good problem to have. Part of our process in my own mind is not only using this over the three years, but how to make this have an effect over the next five, 10 years or longer.”
While state and local leaders are still trying to suss some particulars on what money is going where, the money includes:
$1.8 billion to the state, to be spent by the Legislature
$97 million for Mississippi’s metro cities of Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Moss Point and Pascagoula, with Jackson receiving the largest share at $47 million
$258 million for smaller Mississippi cities
$577 million for the state’s 82 counties
$1.6 billion for K-12 education, with most directed to local school districts using existing formula’s for federal money disbursement. For perspective, the state K-12 budget is a little more than $2 billion a year.
$429 million for Mississippi’s colleges and universities
$166 million for capital projects statewide, primarily for rural broadband access projects
Note: Story continues below chart.
Millions more will go directly to state agencies such as the Departments of Health, Mental Health and Human Services — with state leaders still working to learn those amounts and details. Hosemann said an estimated $3.4 billion will go to individual Mississippians through stimulus payments, tax credits for children, enhanced unemployment other benefits.
Half the money is expected to arrive by the middle of May, with the other half coming within a year later. Governments have until 2024 to spend it.
Fewer strings
Unlike past federal COVID-19 relief or stimulus funding, the money coming to states from the $1.9 trillion act passed by Congress has relatively few strings attached or directives on how it’s spent and a much longer, three-year deadline to spend it. And some of the money is earmarked directly to cities, counties and even state agencies and institutions.
“That’s probably one of the best provisions I’ve seen in a relief package in quite some time — going directly to the counties and cities to be put to work right away instead of any federal or state bureaucracy calling all the shots,” said Gulfport Mayor Billy Hewes, president of the Mississippi Municipal League. His city, the second-largest in the state with a population of about 72,000, is set to receive about $18 million from the plan.
The federal law says local governments can spend the money on water, sewerage and internet infrastructure, but the U.S. Department of Treasury appears to have large discretion over the spending, and Gov. Tate Reeves and other state officials say they are working to get more specifics.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba did not respond to request for comment on the Rescue Act money. Hewes and other local leaders said cities and counties across the state have great infrastructure and other needs, and “we are going to do our best to apply it effectively.”
“Government closest to the people governs best,” Hewes said.
Hewes said the law does not appear to allow local governments to use the money for road infrastructure, something he hopes gets “fixed” by the treasury. He said other federal and state dollars — including in this package and in the last round of COVID-19 relief — have been allocated to broadband internet access, and many cities have greater needs for road work.
“Quite frankly, we are perplexed that roads and streets were left out of that allowance for how it can be spent,” Hewes said. “As president of the municipal league, and hearing from mayors across the country, there is a universal appeal that the treasury expand that definition of infrastructure to include roads, and we are all at a loss why that is not in the act.”
‘Pot of gold for cities’
Many mayors and county leaders this week were trying to glean more info, and in particular confirm how much their governments will receive.
Greenwood, a city of about 15,000, is set to receive about $3 million. Mayor Carolyn McAdams said that’s the number she’s heard and, “I’m hoping that’s the pot of gold we’re getting.”
“We’re still waiting to hear all the stipulations,” McAdams said. She said she would like to be able to use some of the money to provide “an across the board raise” for city employees who have had to “work doubly hard during the pandemic.” She said she understands this may not be allowable for the money and that it’s “one-time” money perhaps better suited to projects than recurring expenses.
“Trust me, in cities and towns, there are lots of ways to use that money, no shortage of needs,” McAdams said. “Right now we are in the middle of repaving streets. It would be nice to do a few more, add more sidewalks. We need improvements to our wastewater treatment plant — we have lots of old infrastructure … our ballparks need work on them … This money will be very usable.”
Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs said the Rescue Act money for local governments “is great news … and it couldn’t have come at a better time.” His city is expected to receive $4.88 million.
“From what I understand there might not be too many restrictions on it, other than it can’t be used to replace money cut out of a budget,” Flaggs said. “We’ll see … they may change some things, and we’re waiting to see all the stipulations.
“I’ve told my board, we need to only spend this on one-time expenditures,” Flaggs said. “I’m a conservative and I believe spend one-time money on one-time expenses, so you don’t inflate your budget. Things like infrastructure, or buying items like police cameras we’ve been trying to get. I hope we can use it on marketing, tourism.”
Flaggs said he’s pleased with the amount allocated to his city, adding, “they didn’t have to give us anything.” He said he’s unsure what calculus was used because he saw some cities larger than his receive less money.
Harrison County Supervisor Connie Rockco, whose county is set to receive more than $40 million, said her county’s leaders have not discussed the money and are awaiting more details.
“They haven’t even said the check’s in the mail yet, so there’s a hesitancy for us to get overexcited,” Rockco said. She said that, personally, she’d like to find ways to directly help small businesses in the county that have been hurt by the pandemic.
“Mental health, children’s services — there are many needs out there, many things that have been neglected by society as a whole,” Rockco said. “In our county, we also have an extreme need for fire services, because our county is growing so quickly, bursting at the seams. We have all sorts of needs, but we will have to see how it can be used.”
In Congress there was intense partisan debate over the Rescue Act pushed by Democratic President Joe Biden, and it passed along party lines.
Republican Hewes, a longtime former state lawmaker and former candidate for lieutenant governor, said that, as a mayor, he’s not focused on the broader politics of the act.
“Going from the state level of government to the local level, you take a large leap from the philosophical or theoretical to more pragmatic,” Hewes said. “A road we need to pave in the city is not a red road or a blue road. It’s a blacktop, and I need green to fix it, that’s what it comes down to.
“We as local leaders gave (Congress) some input through many of our associations and our delegations, and this is what came out of the machine,” Hewes said. “Rather than editorialize, I think folks on the local level just want to use what’s provided to us as best we can. There is an opportunity here to make a substantial impact, not unique to Gulfport or to Mississippi, but universally across the country.”
Mississippi Today reporter Alex Rozier created the searchable chart in this article.
The fragility of Jackson’s water system, plagued by decades of outmigration, deferred maintenance and declining federal support, was on full national display in February after a historic freeze left at least 40,000 without running water for weeks.
City officials are asking for state and federal support to help raise the $1 billion they say is needed to fix the system, which failed to produce safe drinking water for more than a month after the storm.
Mississippi Today spoke with several national policy experts about how other American cities have navigated large-scale water funding shortages and how Jackson could move forward. The experts offered several solutions, chronicled in the article below, but ultimately agreed that the absence of a more involved federal government leaves few answers for Jackson.
“A lot of these systems that are on the brink of falling apart, they’re just one extreme event away from a crisis,” said Dr. Newsha Ajami, director of the Urban Water Policy program at Stanford University. “That’s what happened in Jackson. It’s a cumulative effect of not investing in our infrastructure for so many years. Aging infrastructure, all of these extreme events that we’re experiencing, it’s all coming together.”
Some signs of short-term relief have trickled in during the past couple weeks. Jackson is set to receive $47 million from the American Rescue Plan, the name of the new $1.9 trillion stimulus bill President Joe Biden signed last week. Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith introduced a bill in Congress that would steer infrastructure funds towards the city.
But those measures still leave Jackson a long way from the necessary funding to repair and revamp its water system.
Federal water infrastructure support has plummeted since the 1970s, when the U.S. sent funds to cities to help comply with the newly-passed Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts. In 1977, federal support accounted for 31% of governments’ total water utility spending, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By 2017, that share had dropped to 4%.
Now, such spending largely comes in the form of loans rather than grants, mainly through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act that supports specific projects, as well as an annual allotment called the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which last year totaled $2.7 billion for the whole country.
“If Jackson alone has a $1 billion need, and the total EPA State Revolving Fund is $2.7 billion, that starts to give you an order of magnitude of how big the problem is versus how much money is actually available,” said Dr. Martin Doyle, Director for Water Policy at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.
As for many cities with rupturing infrastructure, the decline in federal support has coincided with Jackson’s sharp decline in population, which has shrunk by 20% since 1980.
Ajami, Doyle, and others discussed with Mississippi Today the ways other cities have tried to boost water infrastructure funding, such as consolidation and privatization, as well as different approaches to water billing.
Consolidation of regional water systems
For many cities, capital improvements such as upgrades to treatment plants and large-scale pipe replacements are simply unaffordable for their tax bases. Those cities instead focus what money is available towards regular operations and maintenance. But as bigger projects get pushed back, their costs only grow.
Dr. Newsha Ajami, director of the Urban Water Policy program at Stanford University
“The cost of recovering from the crisis is much higher than the cost of prevention,” Ajami said.
One successful cost-saving solution is consolidating utilities with neighboring towns and cities, similar to the way school districts merge to save money.
In 2014, after the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, a court ordered the creation of a regional authority that assumed the city’s water and sewer services. The Great Lake Water Authority took on $4 billion in debt from the city, and Detroit officials said the change allowed it to make infrastructure upgrades it couldn’t otherwise afford. Similarly, Raleigh, N.C., saw a decrease in maintenance and operation costs after combining utilities with nearby municipalities in the early 2000s.
“That starts to increase the scale of the operation, which means that you’re able to gain some efficiencies,” Doyle said.
In the U.S., there are more than 50,000 water utilities that operate independently, meaning they each have their own management and set of personnel, from engineers to customer service. When places combine utilities, they’re often able to serve the same populations at a lower fixed cost.
Despite the cost-saving potential, some city officials are unsure if Jackson and its neighbors could come to such an agreement, especially considering political and racial differences.
“I think it would be a difficult political thing to put a regional water system together, just because there’s a lack of trust issue,” said Jackson city councilman Ashby Foote. “A lot of the surrounding communities, I don’t think they would let Jackson run it, and I don’t think the city would vote to relinquish control of the systems.”
Foote and Jackson councilman De’Keither Stamps cited disagreements such as control over Jackson’s airport and the recent decision by West Rankin County officials to break off and build its own wastewater facility.
“Now (West Rankin) has to spend all this money to build a new sewer plant because of relationships and politics,” Stamps said. “How does that benefit the end user?”
Privatization of Jackson’s water system
While not as popular, privatization is a similar solution to consolidation, explained Doyle, who explored water-funding solutions for shrinking cities in an article for the American Water Works Association journal. Private water utilities, which serve 15% of Americans, can combine functions just as a regional utility would and can also provide more resources and expertise. Research also shows they are less likely to violate the EPA’s health-related drinking water statutes than public utilities.
The main concern around private utilities is cost. If a company took over Jackson’s water system, it would have to justify any rate increases with the state’s Public Service Commission; however, Doyle’s paper cites that “it is not uncommon for water rates to increase by greater than 10% when public systems are privatized, and in some cases, rates have reportedly almost doubled.”
Doyle said while it’s unclear how much more a private utility would cost Jackson, it should be considered a “tool in the toolkit.” Ajami and others were more skeptical.
“I don’t think privatization is going to solve the water problem for Jackson,” Ajami argued. “It’s probably going to make water more unaffordable. Their system will be upgraded, I’m just not sure that will lead to more affordable water rates for Jackson.”
Former Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. said he turned down the idea while in office.
“That idea was thrown out, I rejected it,” said Johnson, who was mayor from 1997 to 2005 and again from 2009 and 2013. He asserted that private companies don’t have the same accountability as elected officials, and that cities can get locked into long-term contracts without a way out. “The driving force there is the bottom line, it’s not service.”
Jackson City Council President Aaron Banks said that whether it’s consolidation or privatization, Jackson leadership needs to be open-minded.
“I think we have to explore all those options,” Banks said.
Balancing affordability and water revenue
Mississippi Food Network CEO Dr. Charles Beady Jr. prepares to load a case of water into a waiting vehicle March 6 at St. Luther M. B. Church. Nearly 1000 cases of bottled water were donated by the Mississippi Food Network for the giveaway in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Despite the city’s long list of needed system improvements, officials know that raising water rates could make the service unaffordable in a place where 1-in-4 residents live below the poverty line.
Even if Jackson leaders had the political will to raise customers’ rates, paying for a $1 billion municipal bond would add $55 to $60 a month in charges to every household, or about a full day’s work on minimum wage, according to associate professor Manuel Teodoro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
In 2017, Philadelphia took an innovative approach to address affordability: its Tiered Assistance Program, the first of its kind in the country, allows low-income residents to make payments based on earnings rather than water usage, and it also provides a path for debt forgiveness. Like in Jackson, many Philadelphia residents had built up water debt and weren’t contributing to the city’s water revenue. Since TAP began, the city simultaneously reduced water bill debt and increased the number of customers paying for the service.
Henrietta Locklear, vice president at financial consultant firm Raftelis, worked on Philadelphia’s assistance program and told Mississippi Today that such a system could work in Jackson should the city decide to increase water rates.
“The role is really more to say, ‘We have to have rate increases, and we know it’s going to affect some of our customers detrimentally, and we’re offering assistance to help customers in need,’” Locklear said.
Adjusting the water billing formula
Another way to stabilize revenue could be to adjust the city’s billing formula. Ajami, the Stanford policy expert, explained that while Jackson’s first priority is addressing emergency repairs to its system, the city should also aim to maximize its future water funding.
Jackson, like many cities, charges residents based on both water usage and tiered pricing, which adds a fee after a certain threshold. Customers are charged $3.21 per hundred cubic feet, and then a $7 flat fee is added after 300 cubic feet, or a little over 2,000 gallons, according to a city spokesperson.
Cities rely heavily on volumetric, or use-based, pricing because the more water a utility treats and delivers, the more strain it puts on the system. Yet volumetric pricing can leave a utility with varying revenue returns, Ajami said.
“If you use a gallon or 10 gallons, I still need to operate the treatment plant, I still need to maintain the pipes, I still need to operate the pumps,” Ajami said. “If people use less (water), they’re paying less, and then I have less money to do all those things.”
She said that Jackson would benefit from some combination of its current system and a “decoupled” rate — a common format for energy bills — which includes a fixed rate that pays for the utility’s routine operating costs.
Doyle added that the varying, volumetric nature of water bills stands out from other government revenue streams.
“A lot of the services we get are not use-based,” he said. Many roads, for instance, are mostly paid for by property taxes, not by how much a person drives. “Same thing for jails, same thing for city governments, same thing for school systems.”
In light of affordability issues, Doyle and Ajami both wondered why the U.S. has no federal safety net for water bills.
“You can get money from the federal government to assist you in being able to pay for household food and energy,” Doyle said. “You can’t get that for water, and that’s kind of weird.”
Ajami agreed, pointing to the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that helps pay for energy bills, and the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program that helps with phone bills.
“In a way you’re all subsidizing access to communication, which is important,” she said, “but if we have something like that, why can’t we have something similar for water?”
Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
A “barometer” of segregation
Jackson leaders in the past few weeks have asked state and federal officials to provide the city with money to begin repairing its water and sewer system.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba met with newly-appointed EPA Administrator Michael Regan to discuss funding avenues, and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson pledged to support any request for federal help.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told Mississippi Today that state legislators “want to help.” Yet Hosemann, as well as Gov. Tate Reeves and Sen. Hyde-Smith, have criticized the city’s management of its past funding without mentioning other systemic causes that led to the crisis.
Mississippi Today reported on Wednesday that legislative leaders killed the city’s main ask to improve its water system: allow the Jackson City Council’s proposal to increase the city’s sales tax by 1 cent to be placed on to a citywide ballot.
“If you talk to a city councillor in Memphis, in New Orleans, in Birmingham, in Newark, they’ll tell you the same thing: the federal government has deserted local governments when it comes to infrastructure improvement, and we’re witnessing that now.”
Harvey Johnson Jr., former Jackson mayor
Activists and academics who spoke with Mississippi Today described the way racism has fueled the inability of the 82% Black-city to address infrastructure needs, from white flight to a lack of state support.
Yet even with more state-led enthusiasm, Mississippi alone can’t afford Jackson’s funding needs, said former Jackson city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.
“While we always talk about, ‘We want more help from the state,’ the state doesn’t really have a big pool of money available to flow down to municipalities for this,” Priester said.
Priester and Johnson, Jackson’s former mayor, emphasized that the federal government’s deflated water funding has only inflated the city’s need. For instance, Jackson is struggling to fight its way out of an EPA consent decree for violations under the Clean Water Act, and last year received a $500,000 fine for violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“There’s no resources coming from the federal government to help local governments to meet those standards,” Johnson said. “If you talk to a city councillor in Memphis, in New Orleans, in Birmingham, in Newark, they’ll tell you the same thing: the federal government has deserted local governments when it comes to infrastructure improvement, and we’re witnessing that now.”
Ajami agrees that political willingness is part of the issue, adding that the disconnect between Americans and how they receive water may be why there’s a lack of political pressure.
“Because it’s easy to access water for a majority of Americans, people don’t think about the complexity of the system that brings water to us,” she said. “You drive on the road, so if there are potholes, you experience them. You don’t see water pipes. It’s a hidden infrastructure that we don’t value as much, while it’s the most essential resource we depend on in our daily life.”
Ajami also underscored the impacts of funding shortages on a city’s poorer and disadvantaged citizens: they can’t afford to rely on bottled water or a filtration system, and they’re left with an aging infrastructure that their local government can’t afford to fix.
“We’re getting this segregation not just between households and not just between neighborhoods, we’re getting this segregation between cities.”
Dr. Martin Doyle
Cities have fallen into a cycle where the inability to afford repairs compounds the effects of the broken system, which is largely what created the desperation Jackson felt this past month. That’s why, Doyle explained, water utilities have become a good indicator of disparities across the country.
“Paying for water in a rich city is, on a per population basis, very cheap,” he said. “Paying for water in a poorer city on a per population basis is really expensive. So we’re getting this segregation not just between households and not just between neighborhoods, we’re getting this segregation between cities. That’s why I think one of the best barometers of how that big sorting in America is actually taking place is in the water utilities.”
Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe contributed to this story.
The Mississippi Senate, which has resisted an effort to provide a 1-cent sales tax for the city of Jackson to pay for improvements to its water system, voted Thursday by a 23-15 vote to allow Lee County to impose a 3/4-cent sales tax increase.
Senate Local and Private Chair Chad McMahan, R-Guntown, whose district consists of a large portion of Lee County, said before the sales tax could be imposed, it would have to be approved by voters during the next general election in 2023. In addition, Lee County supervisors, whom he said supported the bill allowing the sales tax increase, also would have to place on the ballot the projects that would be financed with the sales tax increase.
While the bill passed Wednesday does not list any specific projects to be funded through the sales tax increase, Lee County supervisors have recently proposed a sales tax increase within the county to finance a new county jail.
The Legislature has been reluctant to allow local governments to increase the statewide sales tax rate of 7%. Currently, there are two local governments with a local option sales tax on general items. The city of Jackson currently has a 1-cent sales tax for street improvements, and for decades the city of Tupelo has had a ¼-cent sales tax to help finance a surface water supply system.
This session, the city of Jackson has requested another 1-cent sales tax increase to help finance improvements to its aging water system that broke down during the February winter ice storm, leaving more than 40,000 people — mostly Black — without running water for weeks.
Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, filed a local and private bill to allow the city of Jackson to impose the additional 1-cent sales tax.
But House Local and Private Chair Manly Barton, R-Moss Point, said he does not plan to take up any requests for local-option sales taxes, including the Lee County proposal and the city of Jackson’s 1-cent increase, and that has been a consistent House position in recent years.
Barton said that the Lee County bill will die on the House side, as the Lee County delegation is not united in support for the tax increase.
“We have been very hesitant to do general sales tax increases for other cities — in fact, we turn them down every year,” Barton said. “We had four or five requests this year. A lot of times the bills don’t even get filed. We work with them on local food-and-beverage, hotel-motel taxes, but there’s just no appetite to do general sales taxes. We’ve been pretty consistent.”
Barton added, “Part of it is the precedent.” He said that if lawmakers allow a city to add a local sales tax, “… we’d better get ready to do 20 or 30 of them for other cities next year. That has just not been the policy here, with our leadership.”
Senate Hob Bryan, D-Amory, who also represents a portion of Lee County, agreed with Barton and spoke against and voted against the local option sale tax increase for Lee County. He said every county in the state had a jail or access to a jail that had been funded without the aid of a local option sales tax and questioned why Lee, an affluent county, needed the sales tax increase when others did not.
“If we let Lee County do this, every county and every city will be up here asking for a local option sales tax,” he said.
In addition, Bryan said the sales tax is an unfair tax, forcing low wage earners to spend more of their income on basic items than more affluent people.
He said the county would be asking the low wage earners to pay a larger percentage of their income to finance the jail if the jail was built with sales tax revenue.
McMahan countered that the sales tax is the state’s fairest taxing method.
While the House has a bill to allow Jackson to impose the additional sales tax, no similar legislation has been filed in the Senate. And no senator representing Jackson has endorsed such a proposal.
The bill allowing Lee County the local option sales tax, which needed a three-fifths majority, passed by one vote. And 14 of the senators in the 52-member chamber did not vote or voted present.
None of the five state senators representing the city of Jackson supported their city’s proposed sales tax increase — the chief reason the Senate never considered it.
Four of them met privately with Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann on March 12, and none of those senators — Democratic Sens. Sollie Norwood, Hillman Frazier, John Horhn and David Blount — told the lieutenant governor they supported the sales tax increase, according to several of the meeting’s attendees. Sen. Walter Michel, R-Ridgeland, could not attend the meeting but was said to oppose the sales tax increase.
During Wednesday’s final vote on the Lee County sales tax increase, Norwood and Michel voted yes; Frazier voted present; Blount voted no; and Horhn did not vote.
Did you know the first person to ever be diagnosed with autism lives in Mississippi? Don Triplett of Forest, now in his late 80s, was patient number one.
A new documentary, “In a Different Key,” by Caren Zucker (award-winning producer at ABC news) and John Donvan (journalist, broadcaster and debate moderator) debuts at the Oxford Film Festival and tells Triplett’s story along with a brief history of autism.
Some of the stars of the movie are the citizens of Forest, who show us all that it truly does take a village to show kindness and compassion to children and adults with autism. “In a Different Key” tells a powerful story and shows us a better way. It’s based on Zucker’s and Donvan’s Pulitzer-Finalist book of the same name.
A bill to allow Jackson to raise its citywide sales tax by 1 cent for water and sewer system repairs is dead in the final days of the 2021 legislative session.
A historic winter storm in mid-February froze water plant equipment and burst many pipes in the capital city, leaving at least 40,000 residents — mostly Black — without water for nearly three weeks. City leaders, who have neglected funding the system for decades, say they need major investment from the state and federal government to repair the system, which is estimated to cost at least $1 billion.
The Jackson City Council attempted to take matters into its own hands, passing a proposal in early March to raise the city’s sales tax by 1 cent. That new revenue — an estimated $14 million per year — would be used to back large bonds for repairing and replacing the city’s water and sewer system. But state law requires approval from lawmakers before the local sales tax increase could be placed on a citywide ballot. State Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, filed a bill on behalf of the city to acquire legislative sign-off on the 1-cent proposal.
That bill will die without committee consideration, House Local and Private Chairman Manly Barton, R-Moss Point, told Mississippi Today — a blow to the capital city’s main legislative ask as it struggles to afford water system repairs.
Barton said killing the bill is based on precedent — with the 2013 exception of allowing a previous 1-cent sales tax increase for Jackson — of not allowing cities to add on to the state’s sales tax.
“We have been very hesitant to do general sales tax increases for other cities. In fact, we turn them down every year,” Barton said. “We had four or five requests this year. A lot of times the bills don’t even get filed. We work with them on local food-and-beverage, hotel-motel taxes, but there’s just no appetite to do general sales taxes. We’ve been pretty consistent … Of course there was the one for Jackson some years ago — there were conditions set on that and a committee — but we have otherwise been pretty consistent.”
Barton continued: “I think the 1-cent tax would generate about $14 million for Jackson, but it’s a really big hole they’re trying to fill with infrastructure. What I did say is I would do everything I could to help find revenue somewhere else if we possibly can.”
City leaders all along have said the intended purpose of that $14 million a year in new revenue would be to back large bonds, possibly giving the city hundreds of millions they could use in the short-term for infrastructure upgrades.
“This bill, which includes a one percent tax, will support repairing infrastructure after decades of neglect,” Bell told Mississippi Today. “We’ll still need additional support, but this is a first step at a time of urgent need. Sadly, our plan hasn’t been accepted by those in leadership, which further makes our road to recovery difficult.”
Earlier this month in private meetings with both House Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba asked for support of Bell’s bill. The 1-cent sales tax increase was the mayor’s main ask of the Republican leaders, along with state bonds that could help the city make emergency repairs on its water distribution system.
Local and private legislation like Bell’s bill traditionally requires support from all or most lawmakers of the locality in question — an unwritten but decades long-standing rule inside the Capitol. In this case, not all of Jackson’s House and Senate delegates were on board with the measure.
After his meeting with Lumumba, Gunn publicly expressed concern about allowing Jackson to raise its sales tax, prompting questions about whether Bell’s bill ever stood a chance of passing out of the House chamber.
“It creates a precedent, if you will, that may be a dangerous area to go to as far as other cities around the state wanting to do the same thing,” Gunn told Scott Simmons at WAPT earlier this month. “And we may get in a situation where the tax burden (on Jackson residents) is just too great.”
Even had the bill passed the House, it faced a difficult road in the Senate. Hosemann, the Senate’s presiding officer, met privately on March 12 with four of the five state senators representing the city of Jackson. None of those senators — Democratic Sens. Sollie Norwood, Hillman Frazier, John Horhn and David Blount — told the lieutenant governor they supported the sales tax increase, according to several of the meeting’s attendees. Sen. Walter Michel, R-Ridgeland, could not attend the meeting but is said to oppose the sales tax increase.
“I am not in favor of (the 1-cent increase),” Horhn told Mississippi Today. “I think it will place too much of a burden on the city’s taxpayers. I believe it inhibits businesses from coming into the city. And it also hurts the efforts to retain and to expand businesses already here.”
Norwood told Mississippi Today he was “open-minded,” but that many of his constituents “have expressed disdain for (the sales tax increase), but I am still not done surveying it.”
Frazier told Mississippi Today he was still studying the possibility of the sales tax increase, “but I have not heard many positive comments about it from the folks in my district. They say it is regressive, and they already are paying an extra 1 cent for infrastructure.”
When asked if he supported the sales tax increase, Blount would not commit. “We are discussing all options, state and federal sources,” he said.
In another indication that the senators opposed the proposal: No one filed a Senate bill similar to Bell’s House bill that would garner legislative approval of the tax increase.
Lawmakers are working to end the current legislative session soon after this coming weekend, and it is unclear what funds, if any, they will appropriate to the city of Jackson. Republican leaders have remained tight-lipped as they are in closed-door meetings this week hammering out the state’s general fund budget.
The closing days of any legislative session are usually when lawmakers pass large packages that send state bonds to local governments. Neither Hosemann nor Gunn have publicly said they wouldn’t support a modest bond package for Jackson, and every lawmaker representing the city of Jackson in both the House and Senate support that effort.
Janna Avalon, a 72-year-old retired newspaper editor, lived out the mid-February ice storm and weeks-long water outage just feet from South Jackson’s empty water tower.
The one million-gallon tank, one of several across the city, is meant to store water at a high elevation, utilizing gravity to pressurize the delivery system, especially during service interruptions.
But contingency plans are a myth in a system as chronically broken as Jackson’s.
So for the better part of the last month, Avalon and her husband Billy heaved buckets of water they retrieved from government tankers, kind neighbors or rainfall into their home to flush their toilet or wash dishes.
Most Jacksonians lost running water altogether after back-to-back winter storms the week of Feb. 14 stunned unprepared utilities across the Deep South, and the Avalons were some of the roughly 43,000 people whose taps remained dry for more than two weeks. City officials were still telling most residents, 82% of whom are Black, to boil their water a month later.
“Water is the most intimate relationship you have with the government … when the water is of poor quality or, in your case, just not delivered, it’s a profound betrayal of trust.”
Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
In the Avalons’ spacious backyard — beyond a wooden playset, garden and plum trees, plastic flamingos and decorative stone statues — the water tower adds its own charm. Avalon said it reflects colors in the evening sky, prolonging sunsets.
“It’s got all these great little attributes,” Avalon said, “except water.”
Avalon grew up in Jackson and has lived in her home, where she raised her five children, for 28 years. Despite ongoing utility hiccups, she’s intent on staying. She asks why she should have to move — and contribute to the city’s population decline of 20% since 1980 — to access basic human services. Why city and state government officials can’t or won’t improve conditions where she already lives. Why her water bills are unreliable, why nobody reads her water meter, and why there is a “huge city water tower in our backyard and there’s no water in it.”
The questions seem simple, but the answers are complex, and the dysfunction is causing a rift between Jacksonians and their leaders.
“Water is the most intimate relationship you have with the government,” said Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “It comes into your house. You take it into your body. We put our children in it, and we prepare food with it. And when that fails — when the water is of poor quality or, in your case, just not delivered — it’s a profound betrayal of trust. And it shakes you to your core.”
Jackson residents Janna and Billy Avalon discuss their water woes on Mar. 1, 2021, just as they started to see a trickle at their kitchen tap after two weeks without water following mid-February ice storms. Credit: Anna Wolfe / Mississippi Today
Many Jacksonians lacked access to clean drinking water long before the most recent storm. In fact, on a good day, officials advise pregnant people and children under five not to drink from the tap, a phenomenon that’s been the case for the last five years.
“And most people in Jackson don’t even know,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, a longtime reproductive rights activist in Jackson and director of Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, told Mississippi Today during the recent outage. “The city and the state have done nothing to provide water to those populations. This whole time they should have been providing water for pregnant people and children under five. This whole time.”
And yet, when Jackson water customers do receive a bill (because consistent and accurate billing has also been a problem), they’re sometimes paying exorbitant amounts for water that’s unsafe to drink.
Every city water bill notifies customers of the hazard of high lead levels first found in Jackson’s tap water in 2016, caused by recurring faulty water treatment techniques that remain unaddressed.
Only a year ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency order stating that the city’s water system presented “imminent and substantial endangerment” to its customers and could contain E. Coli.
Water outages and the presence of harmful contaminants when the water does reach the tap are two different scenarios with unique sets of threats, but they both stem from decades of underinvestment and deferred maintenance within a dysfunctional and outdated water treatment and delivery system.
The city is faced with two colliding but distinct funding problems: One, the city’s infrastructure is only getting older and past administrations did not plan for inevitable future capital investments, as is true in many aging cities. Two, the loss of customer base and pervasive billing troubles have left the water department without a feasible revenue model for regular operations and maintenance.
“This is like a triple or quadruple whammy, what’s going on,” said Alan Mallach, senior fellow at D.C.-based Center for Community Progress. “One layer is the fact that older cities — completely leaving aside race, poverty, all that — are at a disadvantage to young cities.”
“Then you get the second layer,” Mallach continued. “You have this whole phenomenon which has been going on really since the 1950s, where older cities, central cities, have essentially been abandoned by large parts of the middle class, especially the white middle class, for the suburbs.”
Winter storms in past years — 1989, 1994, 2010, 2014 and most recently 2018 — have tested the city’s outdated water delivery system and caused widespread water main breaks and outages. Each time, the city has scrambled to make band-aid repairs, only to wait until the next catastrophe. Jackson isn’t alone in taking this approach, said Teodoro, the Wisconsin professor.
“The nature of local politics is that city governments will tend to neglect utilities until they break because they’re literally buried,” he said. “One of the things that is a perennial challenge for governments that operate water systems is that the quality of the water system is very hard for people to observe. But the price is very easy for them to observe.”
Not even EPA orders — including a decade-old consent decree over the city’s wastewater system that continues to release raw sewage into the Pearl River — have resulted in much meaningful action. City water and sewer systems are not like corporations, Teodoro said; the authorities can’t just take their license away. And imposing large fines only punishes the taxpayers they are supposed to be protecting. “In the end, there’s very little you can do,” Teodoro said of regulators.
“They just want to keep on letting stuff break until we break and go away. That’s what it feels like.”
Laurie Bertram Roberts, a longtime reproductive rights activist in Jackson and director of Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund
This year, Jackson officials said, issues were particularly pronounced at the water treatment plants, which are not enclosed and protected from the elements like plants typically are up north.
Jackson Public Works Director Charles Williams told the media that the screens through which water from the reservoir is filtered had frozen, rendering the plant incapable of taking in water, causing pressure to drop across the system. Operators didn’t discover the issue until the weekend after the storms. They also encountered malfunctioning raw water pumps.
Also, the 10 million gallon basins where filtered reservoir water is stored before it is chemically treated contained two feet of sludge due to an overdose in chemicals that occured over time when water wasn’t coming in — a possible human error, Williams said. The city took two basins offline to clean them the week after the storm and cleaned the third a couple weeks later.
In addition to needed equipment upgrades, the city is sorely lacking the personnel needed to operate the plant in its current condition. City officials rely on these operators to notify them of an event, such as sludge build up, that they need to address. Jackson employs three high-level operators at each of its water treatment plants, when each facility really needs six of these top officials, Williams told Mississippi Today. In 2018, there were 60 unfilled positions in Public Works, Clarion Ledger reported.
“You have to maintain what you have until you’re able to make improvements,” Williams said. “But once again, you have to have funding.”
Two generations of white and wealth flight out of Jackson has reduced the built-in revenue that officials say the water system needs just to maintain full operations, including hiring personnel — let alone to make a dent in an estimated $1 billion worth of needed upgrades.
The city’s bungled attempt to revamp its water meter and billing system through a $90 million contract with German-based manufacturer Siemens only worsened the water department’s cash flow — not to mention public confidence — while any outside investment in the capital city has come at a crawl.
“And we all know why,” Roberts, the activist, said. “Nobody wants to invest in Jackson because of who runs Jackson and who lives in Jackson. Because white folks don’t dominate here anymore. They just want to keep on letting stuff break until we break and go away. That’s what it feels like.”
With a population that’s 82% African American, Jackson is the single Blackest large city in the nation. Roughly 1-in-4 residents live in poverty, and in some west and south Jackson communities, the hardest hit by water outages, the average household pulls an income of $25,000 and as low as $15,000 in some pockets.
The capital city has lost roughly 40,000 residents since the population peaked at about 200,000 in 1980, after an initial wave of white residents left to avoid putting their children in integrated schools. Half of the decline occurred in the last two decades as more middle-class Black families moved, and the city’s white population continued to drop from 52% in 1980 to 28% in 2000 to 17% in 2019, according to U.S. Census data.
As the customer base declines, the system might clean and pump out less water, but the same infrastructure remains under the surface of Jackson’s 111 square miles, an area geographically larger than Seattle, Baltimore or Cincinnati. Parts of Jackson’s 1,500 miles of water mains are over 100 years old.
Of course, pipes under streets in front of abandoned properties — about 4,000 by one 2019 count — still require maintenance.
Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
At the same time, family resources are diminishing with inflation. Household buying power fell just slightly in the 1980s and was relatively stable through the 1990s. But since 2000, the annual median household income in Jackson has dropped about $6,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars, a roughly 15% decrease, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of Census data.
“We are a city with very high levels of poverty, and it’s difficult for us to raise the rates enough to do large scale replacement type projects and not make it unaffordable to live in the city of Jackson,” said former city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.
Yet the cost of Jackson’s poor quality water is still passed on to families who don’t trust the tap and purchase bottled water — which can cost a family of four $50-$100 a month — to drink instead.
“These would be hard problems, but we could solve them if it wasn’t for racism.”
Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
The city raised water rates in 2013, but the Siemens deal penned the same year came with an onslaught of problems, including the installation of faulty water meters and meters that measured water in gallons instead of the correct cubic feet. This made any benefits of the rate increase virtually impossible to see.
The results have been nonsensical. Over the past several years, the city has mailed exorbitant bills to some customers and none to others. Sometimes, the charges weren’t based on how much water a household used and other times, city officials advised residents to “pay what they think they owe.” Past officials said the city lacked the manpower and expertise in the billing department to manually rectify the account issues with any speed.
In trying to protect people during the persistent billing blunders, the city has at times instituted no-shutoff policies, which demonstrate compassion but haven’t helped to compel payment.
Today, more than 8,000 customers, or nearly one-sixth of the city’s customer base, still aren’t receiving bills. Nearly 16,000 customers owe more than $100 or are more than 90 days past due, a city spokesperson told Mississippi Today. Jackson water customers owe a total of $90.3 million.
As a result, the city continues to miss out on tens of millions of water revenues. In 2016, when officials first uncovered the issue, the city’s actual water sewer collections during the previous year was a startling 32% less than projected — a roughly $26 million shortfall.
It’s a vicious cycle: revenue shortfalls make it harder for the city to purchase upgrades or hire the personnel needed to properly manage the billing system; the billing inaccuracies and sloppy accounting encourage a culture of nonpayment; the unpaid bills just further tank the revenue.
Frustration only grows as residents are expected to pay for subpar service within a utility that’s already largely taken for granted.
The city received just under $60 million out of last year’s $90 million Siemens settlement, about $33 million of which is restricted in reserves or bond covenants. Another $12.6 million went to repay the general fund, leaving about $14 million for emergency sewer repairs and a new billing system.
Lawyers got the rest — a little more than $30 million.
The story of Jackson’s failing infrastructure, national experts say, could just as easily describe the scenario in other major cities like Detroit, Toledo or Kansas City, whose leaders have had to look outside their own budgets to solve major crises.
A city rests within a state, after all, and decisions made at the state level and the impact those decisions have on the economy and public services affect what a city is able to accomplish.
“It’s really disingenuous to look at the politics and policies of any one American city in isolation from the state context in which it exists,” Teodoro said.
The residents who left Jackson in the late 20th century fled to surrounding suburbs such as Rankin County, the wealthier Republican bastion that produced many of Mississippi’s most powerful politicians, including Gov. Tate Reeves.
Less than a year ago, Reeves vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have provided relief to poor Jacksonians with past due water bills and propped up the city’s bond rating, a proposal he suggested perpetuated a “‘free money’ concept,” Clarion Ledger reported.
A similar bill, which would apply to all municipalities, is making its way through the Legislature this session. Lawmakers also killed a bill to assist Jackson with infrastructure bonds, but it still has a chance to pass legislation that would allow the city to propose its own sales tax increase to pay for water system improvements.
Meanwhile, Speaker Philip Gunn, another top lawmaker who lives in a Jackson suburb, spent the session trying to pass tax reform that would have actually increased the tax burden on the bottom 60% of the state’s income earners, according to one study, while significantly cutting the taxes of the richest residents.
The city is also still fighting the state’s 2016 attempt to wrest control of Jackson’s airport. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said during a recent mayoral debate that during a conversation with Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the state Senate leader who lives in the white pocket of northeast Jackson, the lieutenant governor asked the mayor to “give me my airport” in exchange for infrastructure funding.
This ongoing tension is the backdrop for the city’s current crisis.
Academics who have studied government water systems recommend they regionalize in order to spread costs among struggling cities and more affluent suburbs. There’s just one recurring hitch to securing such an agreement: “Racism makes all of this so much harder,” Teodoro said.
“These would be hard problems, but we could solve them if it wasn’t for racism.”
The history of racial conflict, Teodoro explained, creates a scenario where Black residents of the city fear losing control of their services to the same people who have systematically oppressed them. And white residents of the suburbs, who chalk the city’s problems up to incompetence, don’t feel responsible to help.
In the Jackson metro, not only is regionalization a tough sell, there are examples of the opposite happening. West Rankin Utility Authority recently splintered off to build its own wastewater treatment facility to become independent from Jackson’s Savannah Street Wastewater Treatment Plant.
It’s twofold: Systemic racism is an unmistakable underlying cause for Jackson’s stripped resources, and while it may be clouded by a mutual distrust today, racism continues to prevent future investment.
For Avalon, a white woman, understanding the decline of her majority-Black community is as easy as pointing to the state’s refusal to fully fund education or expand Medicaid.
“Racism is everywhere,” Avalon said. “We need to recognize what we’re talking about. If my kid goes to public school that’s not up to par, why? We’re all paying taxes.”
The storage tank on Avalon’s street wasn’t full of water, Williams explained, because as the system loses pressure on an ongoing basis, not just during storms, the tower is constantly drained to make up for the deficiencies. He said he didn’t know if that tank had ever been full.
Janna Avalon, a 72-year-old retired newspaper editor, questions the city’s management of resources, considering her home had been without water for weeks despite a water storage tower in her backyard. Credit: Anna Wolfe
South Jackson often bears the brunt of water crises because the area is one of the furthest away from the treatment plant, so water takes longer to travel there. What little water would have been inside the tower at the time of the storm was used up immediately by some of the roughly 70,000 people who live in South Jackson.
That’s a convenient explanation for Avalon, who says her community is always last to receive attention on a variety of issues. “We’ve been putting up with that stuff all my life in south Jackson,” she said.
Jackson City Councilman De’Keither Stamps pushed the council to ask the state for $60 million, in addition to an initial $47 million proposal, to build new water storage towers in South Jackson and Byram to build up capacity in those areas.
“You shouldn’t have to live your life in fear of the plant going down,” Stamps said. “You should have enough capacity within a short distance from your house to maintain yourself.”
On March 1, just as water was starting to trickle out of her tap, Avalon stood on her back porch as it rained and looked out at the empty water reservoir that engulfs the skyline. City contractors had just come out a few years ago to repaint its dingy exterior, she recalled. Some 100 feet up, a large black fowl crouched on top of the massive steel structure stamped with the City of Jackson seal.
“If they’re vultures, gosh, that’s a terrible omen,” she said with a chuckle.
Water pressure in the Avalon home fell again in the following days as city officials discovered the facility’s intake filters were clogged with clams, mussels, tree branches and other items and had to take the systems offline. The Avalons had to shut off their water again the following weekend because of a broken pipe on their property. They’ll expect outages to continue.
“It keeps coming back and slapping us in the face, and we can’t do anything about it,” Avalon said.
Check back for a follow-up story about solutions to Jackson’s water crisis. Reporter Alex Rozier contributed to this story.
