Jackson Out of Sight as Mississippi Goes to the Polls

[Celerity]

The state’s water crisis hasn’t fully abated, but nobody’s talking about it on the campaign trail.

https://prospect.org/environment/2023-09-21-jackson-water-crisis-mississippi-polls/

FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell, right, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, second from right, and Jim Craig of the Mississippi State Health Department, second from left, listen as Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, left, speaks about work being done, during a visit to the O.B. Curtis water treatment facility in Ridgeland, Mississippi, September 2, 2022.

This week, 60 Minutes profiled football legend Deion “Prime Time” Sanders. Coach Prime shook up the college football world by moving from a coaching job at Mississippi’s Jackson State University, a historically Black college, to a post at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The program was determined to capture the differences between Jackson and Boulder, and how Sanders reacted to moving from a predominantly Black city to an overwhelmingly white one, “a place with a water crisis to the kind of hipster college town where there is a shop devoted to kites.” Paired to that audio was 20 seconds of damning video, depicting a derelict house and a resident carrying bottled water, a nod to Jackson’s water crisis, up against beauty shots of Boulder.

That 20 seconds was enough to cue outrage from Coach Prime’s former colleagues back East at Jackson State. They jumped all over 60 Minutes for showing the city in the worst possible light. Sanders himself had delivered a strong message about Jackson and its water crisis almost a year ago. “The residents of Jackson are resilient,” he said in a USA Today interview. “I mean, when you just sit there and think about Jackson is the darn state’s capital and we dealing with this issue, we dealing with raggedy streets and, I mean, unpaved situations and, even at HBCU level,” he added, “it’s unbelievable.”

President Biden plans to funnel $600 million into the city to deal with the water crisis, announcing the first $115 million allocation to get to grips with system disinvestment in June. The water crisis in the state’s capital and largest city may be old news to Mississippi residents. But it is not surprising that Jackson’s woes, like Flint, Michigan’s before it, keep the city in the headlines. But unlike Flint, Jackson has not been a top issue in this year’s Mississippi governor’s race. That’s very different from the 2018 Michigan governor’s race, where Gretchen Whitmer, a former Democratic state senator and county prosecutor, and Bill Schuette, the Republican attorney general, had wars of words over who bore ultimate responsibility for the fiasco after the city switched from its longtime water source to the polluted Flint River.



The 2023 Mississippi governor’s race would appear to be a prime opportunity to propel Jackson’s crisis, as well as the water problems faced by similarly situated communities, to the top of the state’s agenda. But political culture works differently down South. Neither Republican Gov. Tate Reeves nor Democrat Brandon Presley, a utilities commissioner in the northern tier of the state, has had much to say about the Jackson crisis. And there seems to be little pressure on them to tackle the subject. A name-calling contest— “liar” is the most frequently used epithet— is under way, but Jackson isn’t on the radar at the moment. The controversies over rural hospital closures, expanding health and maternity care facilities deserts, and a welfare funding diversion scandal have pushed Jackson out of the election-cycle frame.

snip