In Jackson, a crisis of water – and a broken social contract

This isn’t how Marie McClendon envisioned her Friday afternoon. Ahead of her vehicle is a long line of cars, idling in an abandoned mall’s parking lot in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s a dystopian scene, albeit with National Guard members scurrying about the open space to offer aid. Each car receives two cases of bottled water. She fans herself, shakes her head, and moves up in line.  

Ms. McClendon grew up in Meridian, a city about an hour and a half away from the Mississippi capital here in Jackson. Ms. McClendon, her fiancé, and her daughter relocated to Jackson six years ago. Access to clean, safe drinking water has become a defining issue during their family’s time here. In fact, residents have been under a citywide boil-water notice since at least late July. As their family learned, the city’s boil-water notice was just a hint of the challenges to come.

Early last week, as the region flooded, the city’s O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant failed, leading to a chemical imbalance in the city’s drinking water supply. The system failure indefinitely eliminated Jacksonians’ access to clean drinking water. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state emergency the next day; roughly 600 National Guard members were deployed to help distribute bottled water to the city’s residents. President Joe Biden then declared a national emergency that authorized the coordination of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to join in the city’s aid.

Even amid the state and federal efforts to help, those who call Jackson home say they’ve begun to feel left behind. The sense of being second-class citizens in their own state’s capital is particularly stinging because this is a heavily Black city, so the water failure cuts along racial lines. And although the case of Jackson is extreme, such gaps based on race as well as income persist even in a nation where access to clean water is mostly taken for granted. A 2019 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council found that drinking water systems that constantly violated federal safety standards were 40% more likely to occur in places with higher percentages of residents of color.

“I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” Ms. McClendon says, pointing to guard members as they heave cases of water into the car in front of her. “With this being the capital, the government should have never let it get this far.”

Decades of demographic change

Unlike last week’s flooding, the city of Jackson’s dysfunction didn’t occur overnight. Its water system woes were decades in the making, local officials and urban planning experts alike say.

In 1960, Jackson boasted a population of roughly 148,000 – of whom 64% were white, 36% African American. But in a decade marked by civil rights bills and school desegregation, as well as the resulting racially charged backlash across the country, a white-led exodus from Jackson and other American metropolitan cities ensued. In later decades, while Jackson reached a 1990 peak of roughly 200,000 citizens, rising crime became a factor that contributed to further losses of Jackson’s middle-class population to the surrounding suburbs.

The tax base that was the city’s foundation – which funds Jackson’s water and other public systems – began to disintegrate. Today, income for roughly 1 in 4 Jackson residents is below the federal poverty line. Its racial demographics have also shifted. About 16% of the city’s roughly 163,000 population today is white; 82%, Black. 

“This is a set of accumulated problems based on deferred maintenance that’s not taken place over decades,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said in a press conference last week, referring to the underfunding the city experiences as officials work to help systems keep pace.

Mayor Lumumba estimated that the city’s water system requires up to $1 billion in repairs.

Former city employees worry that the mayor’s recent estimate is too low, given that the Jackson water system encompasses more than 1,500 miles of water mains across its sprawling space.

Mukesh Kumar ran Jackson’s Department of Planning and Development from 2017 to 2019. Until a recent move to Waco, Texas, he was also a professor of urban studies at Jackson State University. In his recollection of internal conversations during his time employed with the city of Jackson, Dr. Kumar recalls officials citing estimates of up to $2 billion in needed investments. 

The city’s annual budget hovers around roughly $300 million.

Chronic underfunding for infrastructure was matched, experts say, by a deeper fraying of the social contract between the city and community.  

One way to view a city, Dr. Kumar says, is as a set of institutions that creates an enabling environment in which a community can thrive. If functioning well, one basic result of this social contract is to confirm and support the dignity that citizens have.

“Water systems, police, the roadways – they all end up being part of that enabling infrastructure. ... That’s what that social contract often presents,” Dr. Kumar says. “Once you lose that, it takes a long time to rebuild. It’s a very slow process. It’s not something that happens overnight.”

A recent survey by Blueprint Polling, an associate company of the Mississippi-based Chism Strategies, suggests that city and state elected leaders alike face a tough road ahead in regaining citizens’ trust. Of the nearly 500 Jackson residents who were included in the phone survey last week, roughly 55% agreed that Governor Reeves’ handling of the crisis was either totally unacceptable or poor. Mayor Lumumba registered slightly better with the survey’s respondents, as nearly 47% of those included said that his response was either totally unacceptable or poor.

“They’ve lost my trust”

The poll suggests a breakdown in trust – the core of that unspoken social contract. In interviews, Jackson residents confirm that feeling.

“It’s very bad,” says Kim Baptiste, a Jackson resident who recently relocated from Dallas, of the current state of the city. “How can you fill a pot with dirty water to boil it? That’s just crazy.”

It’s Friday afternoon, and Ms. Baptiste is hoping to have the water turned on in her new apartment in town, even if the water has been deemed unsanitary. That’s what’s brought her to the front steps of Jackson’s Water and Sewage Administration’s office during her lunch break. (Over the weekend, the city said water pressure has been restored to most city customers.)

In a rush, she strides over to the building’s doors and jerks on them twice. It’s part of the same abandoned mall complex from which National Guard members are distributing bottled water. However, the building’s doors are locked. A Water and Sewage Administration employee walks over to Ms. Baptiste and the others standing outside to tell them the office closed early for the afternoon due to the office’s air conditioning system not working.

Ms. Baptiste describes the afternoon as one that’s typical of her time in Jackson so far.

Cathy Johnson, a lifelong Jackson resident, is also locked out of paying her water bill today. Like Ms. Baptiste and others, she, too, was turned away during the time she’d taken from her lunch break. “It’s sad that you go to get the feds to come in and fix your stuff,” she says.

To win back public trust, the effort must stretch beyond city leaders, Dr. Kumar says. It’s an investment that should be made collectively. “Meaning that the city of Jackson doesn’t just belong to the people who live in the boundaries,” Dr. Kumar explains. “It’s a problem that exists for the state, that exists for the country as a whole.”

The road to recovery for Jackson likely consists of a 10-to-20-year project that will call for the replacement of old pipes and upgrading treatment plants. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that nearly $75 million in federal water and sewer infrastructure funds would be made available to Mississippi this year through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.  

In the eyes of many here, the federal funding came too little, and too late.

After her wait, Ms. McClendon is at the front of the bottled water distribution site. She’s hot, tired, and busy – and she knows it likely won’t be her last wait for bottled water in coming days.

She leans over her steering wheel and sighs. “They’ve lost my trust,” she says, referring to the city. “They shouldn’t have let it get this far.”