Who Broke The Water

Chokwe Lumumba was a little boy when the City of Jackson started losing control of their water purification and distribution system. I say that because not a day goes by when I don’t run into somebody, either in person or on the internet, who blames him for the system collapse a few years ago, and it’s just not accurate. If you want to be mad at the guy, I can give you a list, but the water system isn’t on it.

After he left office and became “city lawyer for hire,” I used to see Dale Danks at Scrooges, and I’d buy him a drink because I owed him quite a lot for the things he did for my home. He told me, more than once, that between the drinking kind and the flooding kind, water was the bane of his existence as the Mayor of Jackson.

When Kane Ditto took over, it became clear that we needed extra purification capacity, so he started looking at systems that ended up being installed under Johnson. That system didn’t function as advertised, a fact I don’t blame Johnson or Ditto for, as they’re not engineers.

The EPA sent Ted Henifin to Jackson to save us when the President’s office made money available for us—and the entire world knew what a shit situation we were in. Some people think Henifin is a filthy liberal trying to steal money from the government. Some people think he’s a filthy conservative trying to steal money and power from Jackson’s black administration. Although I don’t know him well, I don’t see any reason to believe any of that is true.

Ted’s education and career remind me an awful lot of my nephew Campbell Cooke. Campbell’s not particularly political, either. He has private beliefs and convictions, but he doesn't make them part of his career, and from what I have seen, Henifin hasn’t either. He’s about my age, and he’s been at this job for quite a while, so he’s served under both Republican and Democratic presidents. It doesn’t seem to have had much impact on his job performance.

Jackson has had some extremely conservative mayors. Thompson and Melton come to mind. We’ve had really just two liberal mayors, the two Lumumba’s. Everybody else has been a moderate, whether white or black. In my experience, Real Estate Developers and Real Estate Lawyers make the best mayors. It’s a baseline administration position, and those are careers dedicated to administrative decisions.

Henifin says we haven’t been charging or collecting enough water fees to maintain our system for at least twenty-five years. I would suggest it might be closer to fifty. Going through our system, he found scores of homes with water connections but no water meters. He also found pipes that were never installed correctly or to spec. That makes me think there might have been some corruption or plain incompetence forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago.

Before signing off on the EPA releasing control of Jackson Water, Henifin wants to get us in a position where we’re charging and collecting enough water usage fees to maintain the system. That sounds reasonable to me. At the moment, we’re receiving a little over three million dollars a month from the federal government to cover the shortfall. That can’t go on forever.

The Mayor has been making noises that not releasing control of JXN Water to the Mayor’s office is a sign of white conservatives trying to take control of Jackson. While there may be white conservatives trying to take control of Jackson, I don’t think this is an example of it. Henifin and his staff work for the EPA, not Tate Reeves.

Some people are upset about the $40 a month “water access fee” that’s recently appeared on their bill. That kind of charge isn’t unusual, and like he said on television, we have to pay these bills somehow.

The Mayor and some of the council are upset because Jackson has become a city of mostly poor people, and poor people struggle to keep up with increases in basic costs like water. But if we go back to a system of not charging enough to maintain it and start delaying maintenance for twenty, thirty, or forty years again, then there may not be a build-back-better program to bail us out next time.

I’d like to think the city could maybe set up some sort of water bill relief subsidy for the poor that would pay into the JXN Water system, but right now, I don’t know if they have the money for it.

Blaming the other party isn’t going to get us out of this. Blaming the other race isn’t going to get us out of this either. Major system failures like this often create a cascade effect where other cities start to have failing water systems as well, not to mention the pretty serious wastewater problem we already have that’s far more interconnected between cities than anybody is willing to admit.

Of the people involved, I trust Henifin much more than Reeves or Lumumba. Three years ago, I wondered if there was a solution to this issue, but now I feel pretty confident. Running a city has much more to do with dollars and cents, engineering, and science than with culture and politics. People will complain and the increase in water bills will hurt people, but having safe, reliable water service is more important.