Water crisis in Jackson reflects vicious neglect

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves speaks on COVID-19 testing in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. on September 28, 2020.

In sweltering heat, 150,000 residents of Jackson, Mississippi, the state’s capital and its largest city, now have no running water after suffering under a “boil only” order for weeks. The last catastrophe came after extreme rainfall in Jackson swelled the Pearl River and swamped the city’s outmoded water treatment plant.

This was a disaster waiting to happen. Why wasn’t the system rebuilt years ago? In deep-red Mississippi, every statewide elected official is a conservative Republican--and while Jackson is the state capital, it is also a poor, majority-Black city that Republican officeholders find easy to short-change.

Republican state lawmakers blocked the city’s efforts to raise money for its infrastructure with a sales tax hike while passing tax cuts – skewed to the wealthy –at the state level. A Republican-controlled state legislative committee blocked a 2021 bill that would have allowed the issuance of a bond to help pay for infrastructure improvements. The Republican governor, Tate Reeves, instead called for the city to do a better job collecting water bill payments.

In the emergency, Mississippi will get immediate help from the federal government. And the state will get significant funding from the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law by President Joe Biden, which allocates about $429 million to fund water system improvements in the entire state of Mississippi.