The Ugly Politics of Jackson, Mississippi’s Ongoing Water Crisis

Three years ago, a man with white hair and a ruddy grin went around one neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, daring residents to drink the tap water. He’d buy you a drink, but only if you had a glass of water first. He’d buy your groceries, but first you had to take the case of bottled water out of your shopping cart. Residents of the capital city had been under a boil-water notice for weeks, and it had just been lifted: Distrust was still high, and the water was still brown. Not everyone took Ted Henifin up on the drink, but Jacksonians were more than willing to let this guy buy their groceries—even if it meant going back for the bottled water.

In August 2022, Jackson entered a state of emergency after flooding overwhelmed the city’s fragile infrastructure, leaving residents without running water to drink, cook, brush their teeth, or even flush their toilets. Periods of low pressure and subpar service were nothing new for Jacksonians, 27 percent of whom live in poverty and 82 percent of whom are Black. They have been deprived of resources by the state legislature, which is overwhelmingly white and conservative, for decades—forever, really. 

By November, the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency had filed a complaint against the city for failing to comply with the Clean Drinking Water Act and proposed a federal intervention to stabilize the water system. The city government and the Mississippi State Department of Health agreed to place Jackson under receivership and appointed Henifin, who came to Jackson from Virginia, as interim third-party manager.

When Henifin first took over from city officials, under the auspices of the newly minted utility provider JXN Water, many in Jackson were simply relieved to see some investment in their perennially neglected infrastructure. Just a year before, Mississippi lawmakers had withheld the $1.8 billion the state received from the American Rescue Plan Act from the capital city, despite the mayor’s urgent request that the governor disburse the funds to cover immediate repairs. When the infrastructure finally collapsed, Congress allocated a combined $600 million specifically for recovering Jackson’s water system. 

This was a boon for Jackson at the time. However, as of this spring, JXN Water has exhausted those funds. As the third-party manager threatens to raise bills for a second time in two years, the city and its constituents have no recourse under the federal receivership. Residents are starting to feel that their interim third-party manager has overstayed his welcome. Some even suspect that the arrangement that was meant to save their city could be used to undermine it.

Downtown Jackson tends to be desolate. Many state agencies have moved their headquarters to surrounding suburbs at the behest of the legislature. But just after lunchtime on June 16, residents flooded into the federal courthouse for a status conference on the water overhaul. 

The crowds were here at the invitation of U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, who called for a public hearing after Jackson’s City Council voted unanimously against JXN Water’s proposed hike this past April. Just over a year before, the council had abstained from voting on JXN Water’s first rate hike. 

This was an about-face that left Henifin feeling somewhat betrayed by the council members, who he says have treated him with Southern hospitality in the past. Henifin felt that city officials were using the stipulated order for “political cover,” an opportunity to curry favor with their constituents without having to make the tough calls municipal governance requires. Under the terms of the order, Henifin only needs approval from Judge Wingate to carry out decisions on Jackson’s water system. “You’ve got a federal judge running the show, and he clearly has the ability to raise the rates based on the stipulated order,” he said. “I think they took the easy way out.”

As several council members explained, they previously abstained for that precise reason. They thought their vote “didn’t matter” or “wouldn’t make any difference.” Under the conservatorship, the City Council’s decision would be merely symbolic without Judge Wingate to back it up. Now they were hoping to send him a message: Henifin should explore other options to cover costs because Jackson residents could not shoulder any more of the burden. 

For much of the public hearing, which extended into a second day, Judge Wingate and Ted Henifin lectured the cost-strapped citizens on why a rate hike was unavoidable to cover daily costs and debt obligations. “I’m not really apologetic about charging what it costs to get water to people and sewer away from people,” Henifin told me the week before. People have to be “willing to pay back” to get the water system on track after decades of underinvestment in infrastructure.

After around three hours of court proceedings, residents were finally allowed to comment on the increase. Many of the residents who spoke emphasized that they always paid their bills on time, but a further rate hike would push them to a financial breaking point. “The residents have already paid this debt 50 times over through buying bottled water, enduring boil water notices, paying repeated plumbing costs,” longtime resident Brooke Floyd told me. “If people don’t have money and they can’t pay, are you really going to recoup the cost with this rate increase?” 

Floyd is the director of programs and community-led governance initiatives at People’s Advocacy Institute, a Jackson-based nonprofit. Earlier this spring, People’s Advocacy Institute and the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign filed a motion requesting that the Judge modify the Interim Stipulated Order to require more public accountability from Henifin and set out a timeline to return the water system to city officials. “Our water system must remain publicly owned and locally governed,” Floyd wrote in an announcement of the intervention. “Anything less invites the same political forces that starved our infrastructure in the first place.”

Their request echoed a letter that Jackson’s Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba had sent to the EPA a year before, outlining concerns with how Henifin and JXN Water were managing the water system. Among Lumumba’s complaints were Henifin’s failure to coordinate with city officials and skepticism that JXN Water had carried out a competitive bidding process when procuring maintenance contracts. Most significantly, he condemned Henifin for breaching his mandate of impartiality by publicly endorsing Mississippi Senate Bill 2628, which would remove the city’s ability to manage its own water system by creating a state-dominated regional authority to oversee it. (The People’s Advocacy Institute was co-founded by Lumumba’s sister and father.)

Ultimately, the EPA wrote off these concerns, responding that the agency “generally does not comment on proposed state legislation.” However, at the height of the water crisis, the agency filed an investigation into whether Mississippi’s state legislature violated the Civil Rights Act by intentionally depriving the majority-Black city of access to the $75 million in water funding allocated to Mississippi under Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Those concerns were written off, as well. “Although Jackson falls on the lower end of per capita funding,” the EPA decided, “there was no significant relationship between loan amounts per person and race over time.”

In the early days of the conservatorship, Henifin and Lumumba worked in cooperation. The mayor accompanied the third-party manager to local public schools, where water fountains were taped over, to introduce him as the expert who could get the city’s beleaguered water system back on track. The newcomer reassured residents that he wasn’t looking to lay off local workers or raise rates in a city that had already suffered. The pair presented a united front against an early iteration of S.B. 2628, which, in addition to giving the state a controlling share over the city’s water system, also threatened to divert the $600 million in congressionally allocated federal funds from the city. Henifin told the Mississippi Free Press that the money had created “a monster in the Mississippi Legislature.” 

The federal relief package stipulated $450 million through a state revolving-loan fund that was specifically designated for “capital projects” and $150 million of more flexible spending for “technical assistance.” (Henifin told me that money has been protected from federal budget cuts.) As Henifin settled into Jackson and started making decisions to address the crumbling infrastructure, the $150 million drained quickly—and the $450 million was tied up. JXN Water still needed to cover its operating expenses, so it raised the rate by 13 percent and tacked on a $40 availability fee. The hike didn’t help ingratiate Henifin in a city where the median income is $43,000—around 10 percent of his salary as third-party manager.

As progress stalled—or failed to materialize for many local residents—Lumumba began to question what the $600 million was being used for. JXN Water had brought in Jacobs Engineering, a national behemoth that has profited off other cities’ privatized water systems, to operate the water treatment plants. This upset local operators and officials who had hoped the contract could generate revenue for the cash-strapped city. Lumumba accused Henifin of failing to carry out a competitive procurement process and questioned whether JXN Water was actually improving water for the city. Henifin accused Lumumba of running a smear campaign and responded by spending $1.5 million of JXN Water’s supposedly strained budget to place advertisements on local TV and send mailers to customers’ homes. This was a battle for Jackson’s trust, and residents had to decide who had their best interest in mind: the outside expert or their elected officials. 

The feud reached a fever pitch after Lumumba’s letter, and soon the two men were sitting for dueling interviews with the Mississippi Free Press to explain their side of the rift. Henifin joked that he and the mayor couldn’t stand to sit in the same room as one another. At the heart of their dispute was a disagreement about the future of Jackson’s water. Lumumba was concerned that Henifin’s plan to use federal funds to retire the city’s debt and return the system to solvency was essentially fattening the calf for the state to take over under a regional authority. Henifin suggested that the city officials didn’t have the technical expertise or the capacity to oversee their own infrastructure.  

Lumumba and other city officials felt that control over this public resource was a matter of principle, while Henifin saw it as a practical problem that should be kept away from politicians. Investment in infrastructure often doesn’t come to fruition for 50 to 100 years, benefiting generations down the line but doing nothing to sway voters in the near term—as Kamala Harris and many other Democrats learned last fall when voters were largely unmoved by the success of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, arguably the centerpiece legislative accomplishment of the Biden administration. For Henifin, politics was one of the reasons the city infrastructure got so bad to begin with. “Jackson,” he said, “was not unlike a lot of other water utilities across the United States that are run as part of the city government by elected officials who tended to kick the ball down the road and not increase rates because it’s politically unpopular.”

Harvey Johnson Jr., the first Black Mayor of Jackson, told me this is one of the greatest misconceptions about the city’s water infrastructure. While he was in office—he served as mayor between 1997 and 2005 and then again from 2009 to 2013—the city of Jackson invested roughly $150 million in water and sewer-related projects. Johnson repeatedly warned that the aging infrastructure needed to be addressed, but the state only agreed to loan the city $6 million. 

“My experience with regional authorities in the city of Jackson is we always come out with fewer representatives on that authority than our neighbors,” Johnson told me. “The legislature doesn’t see the value in the city of Jackson. And also, I think, don’t see the value of Black leadership or the value of people in the city of Jackson electing their own leaders.”

Johnson has been outspoken against the state legislature’s power grab and history of starving the capital city. After the water crisis, he outlined how a shrinking tax base as the result of white flight and the discretion taken from the city to direct local tax dollars exacerbated Jackon’s infrastructure issues in Jackson State University’s Journal of Rural and Urban Research. 

The Mississippi state legislature’s meddling in Jackson isn’t limited to its water system. In the past few years, state officials have sought to repossess the land a major stadium sits on, impose state-run Capitol Police and state-appointed courts, and grab control of the public school district. As with the water system, they have sought to impose a regional authority over the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, named after the civil rights hero, by claiming that Jackson is not competent to manage it. In an ongoing legal battle for the airport, the city is arguing that the state’s efforts to grab the asset are racially motivated. The case has established legal standing for city officials to challenge the discriminatory power grab as taxpayers.

It’s a pattern that is repeating across the South, where Republican legislatures attempt to snatch assets from Democratic strongholds, most of which are cities with majority-Black populations. Over the last 12 years, Republican legislatures have tried to take over their state’s major airport in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Preemption bills, where conservative state legislatures seek to roll back progressive local policies and grab municipal assets, surged across the country in 2020 in response to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“With the fact that Jackson is a predominantly Black city, I have some concerns for a state takeover,” Brooke Floyd told me. “We’re going to have a great water system finally—what Jackson residents have begged for—but then we’re going to share the revenue that we need.… One of the reasons that we are in the position we’re in is because of declining revenue.” 

When the status hearing resumed on the second day, Judge Wingate announced that he would hold off on a decision regarding the rate hike. In early June, Jackson elected a new mayor: the longtime state Senator John Horhn, who ran on a platform promising to use his relationships with legislators to finally improve conditions for the city. Wingate would give the new administration a moment to get up to speed but said his “pen is itching to move on this matter.” (Horhn was sworn in July 1.)

A longtime Jackson resident, Floyd has dealt with her fair share of water issues. She recalled an incident a decade back when she was working as a teacher for Jackson Public Schools and got hit with an exorbitant $15,000 bill. She remembered asking her husband, “What are we going to do? It’s water. You can’t live without water.”

During the height of the crisis, community organizations banded together to provide mutual aid for a city that had been abandoned. Floyd joined the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition to distribute cases of bottled water to residents. “Mississippi does this a lot,” Floyd said. “They cut services and then they lean on community groups and churches to do the job that they should do.”

According to Floyd, the situation has improved in recent years, but by no means are the water issues gone. Some neighborhoods, which have yet to be repaired, still have to deal with discolored water, sewage backups, and low pressure. When the water was in the hands of the city, there was at least “an air of it being a public utility,” so it felt like citizens had some say in the matter.

It frustrates Floyd that those overseeing the water system have downplayed residents’ concerns and met their skepticism with condescension. While she is not a water expert, it only takes common sense to know that when the bathwater comes out brown with particles floating around, you shouldn’t use it to bathe your kids, let alone drink it. To be told otherwise by JXN Water is an insult to residents’ intelligence.

“Give me a break,” she said, addressing those outside officials. “You drink the lemonade, or the sweet tea, made with this.”

After being appointed, Henifin got an apartment in Jackson. He often travels for work and tries to get home to Virginia for a long weekend at least twice a month. But, he tells me, he spends 20 to 25 days out of each month in the city. He claims to be “in the community quite a bit. Largely shopping, grocery shopping, going to dinner, going to lunch.” 

By his account, most residents are grateful to have their service restored, regardless of who is overseeing it. He views the “detractors” as a small but vocal minority that have had their voices amplified by national groups like the NAACP, or who are loyal to the mayor. 

Floyd says that she and the residents of Jackson have seen the fight for their right to clean water through many mayoral administrations and since long before Henifin showed up. “Water is not political,” she said. “Fighting for children to have a bright and beautiful future that they deserve here is not political to me.”