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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

By all measures, this is due to the kind of neglect and mismanagement one would expect to see in an underdeveloped or war-torn country, not in a city inside a state that is part of the most powerful country on earth. And Jackson is the state's largest city and as well as its capital!

It must be so embarrassing for the politicians who have been running Mississippi. They've done a truly terrible, horrible job on this.

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As much as we like to blame government, and politicians - at the end of the day, ll... We are the government. We are the politicians. We are the inept, lazy society who has let it come to this. We are the ones fighting amongst ourselves, unable to converse and work with opposing viewpoints.

Not necessarily. Jackson is a typical blue city in a red state. Even before all the gerrymandering, a single city won’t have enough political power at the state level. Given the political differences, state officials can withhold funding or hold back on maintenance without much repercussions.

I can name numerous blue cities in red states that, you know, have municipal water systems that work properly and have for decades. Stop blaming the Republican boogeyman for problems that are due to city-level incompetence and corruption. Jackson is most definitely not a well-run city that’s being held down by the white man. It has lots and lots of problems of their own design.

Democrats are using their party in order to associate themselves with the victims. This is an all-black city within a virulently racist state. That's the problem it has, and if you filtered cities by blackness, you'd find crumbling infrastructure and bad water everywhere. Comparing them to wealthy blue suburbs/cities within poorer red states is not useful.

White people in the state are trying to get funds to go to where they live, not where other people live (just like everyone does), and additionally they live in a revanchist mythology of Jackson being overrun by blacks with the help of the Democrats, and tell stories of how beautiful Jackson was to their grandparents. That would be enough to seal off any possible empathy.

Jackson is just big Flint. Or Dixmoor: https://news.google.com/search?q=dixmoor+water

In the 60s and 70s, ghettos grew to encompass entire cities while the middle-class retreated to subsidized enclaves. In the 2000s, the grandkids moved back into the city for work and to imitate people on television who seemed cooler than them. Maybe this is the next phase of the cycle.

I could not disagree more. The proletariat has no voice in a country where actual bribery has been legally upheld by the highest court.

Governments in the US are set up explicitly to represent minority interests, usually those of owners of large amounts of property, over the interests of the public at large.

You're assuming that the people of Jackson have a voice in their government. The city is majority black, and in Mississippi that's more enough than enough reason for the rest of the state elected representitives to reject any aid to the city.

That sounds true, but the Mississippi state legislature is 29% black. That's not a majority, but it seems difficult to justify the view that the state government isn't helping these people because of racism in light of this fact.

How is our inability to converse and work with opposing viewpoints relevant to a situation occurring in a state entirely dominated by a single viewpoint? There are many, many problems (most problems?) whose causes have nothing to do with a lack of unity or civility (relative to when?) in US national politics or whatever.

This is a strongly blue city inside a strongly red state. That seems like differing politics could be relevant.

>This is a strongly blue city inside a strongly red state.

This is a strongly black city inside a strongly white supremacist state.

Let's just put the cards on the table here - this tends not to happen in majority white areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism_in_the_Un...

> We are the government. We are the politicians.

Huh? No we’re not. What are you talking about?

It’s a Southern thing. Alabama isn’t much better. It’s the worst place to have a child in the entire country. We have people without access to fresh water or sewer systems. We have people living in conditions worse than anything I ever saw in Haiti. And we keep voting to actively make it worse.

Wait till you find out about rural Alaska.

Many people in the (few) remaining villages without running water don't want it, and certainly don't want to pay anything for it.

I guess your idea of America is from movies - immigrated here 24 years ago from a so called third-world country and I can tell you it’s rather unsettling when you see the bowels of America especially in the southern parts (I live in Louisiana).

Honest question - why do we send so much foreign aid but don't fix our own backyard? This has been going on for decades and there must be an opportunity cost here. Sure some things cannot be solved by just throwing more money at it, but a lot of things can be.

I remember this was a popular topic in pro Ron Paul 2008 reddit discussions.

More people are eager to help Ukraine than our own states. They'd be ashamed infact.

When you say "send so much foreign aid", how much do you think we send? It's around 1% of the federal budget (maybe not this year, but until 2021 at least). In contrast, the federal government "sends" 16% of its budget to states (in 2019 at least), and obviously the rest of government spending is intended to at least indirectly benefit people in US states.

Ironically, googling sources for this is difficult because almost every result is about how Americans think we send 10-25% of the federal budget as foreign aid, but the actual number is far less.

US foreign aid is mostly synonymous to defense spending. They give money to other countries with the agreement that they will buy from the American weapons manufacturers. So, in a sense this "aid" is just a give out to the US war industry. Even when the money is earmarked as food and medicine aid, the beneficiaries are (surprise) the American agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, respectively.

I suspect a lot of foreign aid is actually used to stabilize parts of the world so they don't turn into hotspots for things like terrorism. Not that there isn't a wish to improve the lives of others, but it is easier and cheaper to maintain the status quo.

Ukraine accepts aid.

States reject aid.

People are willing to help, but people have to be willing to be helped.

This is a city water department that has failed, not a state facility. Those in charge should be ashamed, indeed, but that shame is at a city level as far as I can tell.

In the US states tend to have the most power. The federal government can coax states by offering more money (for instance, funding 90% of highway projects), but can’t usually force states to take any specific action. There are exceptions but in general, if you want an action to happen the state needs to be OK with it.

Cities may have a lot of autonomy or almost no autonomy, depending on the specific state and city. It’s constitutional for a state to take over a city’s services, and it’s not uncommon for there to be a huge overlap in services provided between different political entities.

In this specific case it sounds like the state encouraged the development of suburbs for people to commute into Jackson, but did little to invest in Jackson’s infrastructure. The primary means of fixing infrastructure is through property taxes, and those taxes also pay for roads and parking for commuters who don’t pay (as they’ve moved outside the city limits). Basically from my understanding the suburban development and urban flight is causing Jackson to need to pay more for infrastructure on less income.

Ultimately, a state that allows its most important city to falter has a problem at the state level. Even if the city has problems as well, the state has the political tools to fix city issues, if it cares to. In this case the state could have taken income taxes from the suburbs and used it to invest in city infrastructure, but has consistently chosen to cut taxes instead.

This is exactly the point. The goal is to take poorer people and problems (need for school funding, crime, older infrastructure) and concentrate them in a location where you can say “hey, they need to solve their own problems.” Then all the suburbs get great services and low taxes, while all the social and infrastructure problems can be ignored. The suburbs then fight like hell to make sure they don’t pay a dime for any of this stuff, while working hard to ensure that public transportation never exists to allow people to access the economic opportunities in the suburbs (AKA “bring crime into their neighborhoods.”) Cities can raise taxes to pay for their needs, but businesses and wealthier people just move across the city line. The poverty and lack of education inevitably breed local political corruption, and everyone outside the city gets another opportunity to feel righteous about writing the poorer cities off.

That might be a valid explanation for some of the more difficult and expensive problems, but providing water and sewer services to a low-6-figure population is hardly a problem requiring innovation or massive amounts of money per person.

My own city has about 28% fewer people than Jackson, yet is able to run a sewer and water department whose operation is funded overwhelmingly by water/sewer bills (averaging $115/resident last year) and capital projects funded by a Water Fund the city has banked (averaging $50/resident last year). These are not “gotta call Uncle Sam for help” figures.

This so eloquently describes the whole picture, esp in red states

In the US, cities tend to run their municipal water systems. That's why they're called municipal.

You're welcome.

Right.

Im in awe at the mental gymnastics some are doing in this comment section trying to blame “racism” and Republicans.

This was caused by incompetent city government, period. Blame Jackson’s city council, mayor or even the voters themselves for not fixing this. But it doesn’t make any sense to blame “racist”, “white supremacist” people who don’t even live in Jackson.

In the US, states and the federal government are the legal and political actors. Counties, cities, and other sub-state levels of government only have power to the extent that the state allows for. Cities are literally creatures of their state, not independent political entities within a state.

Of course those in city government have a duty to run the city government as well as they are able, but it's worth keeping in mind that cities can be supported or hobbled in that according to the desires of the state. Even states where city and state are nominally part of the same political faction, there is often tension -- c.f. NYC and NY state.

If the city and state are run by opposing political factions, things can get pretty tough for a city. Add in race, and that gets even worse. majority black, majority Democratic city in a majority Republican, majority white state is going to have a tough time.

The city of Flint, MI didn't have a water problem until the governor took control of the budget, appointed a special administrator, who promptly switched that city over to a polluted water source.

Actually, Detroit cut them off before the new source was ready to come online.

"The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department sends Flint a letter terminating their water service contract, effective in 12 months, or April 2014, which means Flint must find an alternative source of water until the Karegnondi construction is completed" [1]

In addition, the water was not polluted. When they switched to the Flint River source, they failed to add corrosion controls, so the accumulated corrosion in Flint's existing lead pipes quickly dissolved, allowing lead from the pipes to seep into the water.

[1] https://www.freep.com/pages/interactives/flint-water-crisis-...

This gets really close to the racial and ideological divide in MS, you have a very white conservative state government and a very black liberal city government, the former isn't going to bother trying to help the latter very much. As a poor city on the economic decline (and makes Detroit look nice), I'm not sure what we would really expect when natural disaster strikes (look at what happened to New Orleans during Katrina).

> not in a city inside a state that is part of the most powerful country on earth

Why not? There are plenty of ecological catastrophes in China and were in the Soviet Union when it existed. I suspect “powerful” isn’t exactly the variable you’re trying to describe, and you actually mean something like “most developed”. But stories like this prove that the US indeed isn’t the most developed country in the world.

Whenever there is a heavy rain in one of China's cities (e.g. Beijing or Wuhan), the whole city simply floods...like up to your head. It took a country like Japan to dig huge drainage tunnels to figure out how to avoid that problem in that region (so I would conclude, Japan is the most powerful country if judged solely by infrastructure quality).

The Richest Third World Country In The World?

You would think that, but history tells us that in Mississippi nothing will change.

except climate

Us Southerners love to shoot ourselves in the foot. We do it every single election cycle and then make disparaging remarks about states like California.

Jackson, Mississippi is 83% black. About 90% of black voters vote Democrat. Mississippi is a Republican state.

So, not really, the people affected vote for change, and the rest of the state decides to give them the shaft.

California does certain things better, but we also manage to burn down half the state every summer.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-wildfires-grow-...

Today we're in the middle of a power shortage, to the extent that EV owners are asked not to charge their cars.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/california-electric-vehic...

Some small towns have literally run out of water.

https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/06/california-...

I'm not trying to excuse the negligent mismanagement of Jackson's public water system, just pointing out that there are serious infrastructure problems nationwide. The bill is coming due.

I am not arguing that California does anything better, but it’s odd hearing Southerners complaining about California whilst also reaping the rewards of California’s success. We receive a great deal of money from California and we don’t use that money responsibly. And then we disparage California. It’s so strange.

As a Californian, I've been pretty disappointed by the efficiency of our government and the amount of corruption here. Infrastructure is collapsing. It is not a good idea to not criticize your own local and state government, I really don't give a shit what people of Alabama think about California. We need to get our collective heads out of the blue vs red game and just look at the facts of how governments are running. Used to be that local newspapers were popular, not anymore. No one is watching.

For the amount of taxes I pay, I expect way more from our governments. California should have cities that look like Zurich, not SF and LA.

> but we also manage to burn down half the state every summer.

That's an exaggeration, and the drought has been really bad for the last few years.

> Today we're in the middle of a power shortage, to the extent that EV owners are asked not to charge their cars[*].

[*] Between 4 and 9PM.

People are voluntarily asked to reduce power consumption between 4 and 9pm on the hottest days of the year. We're out of power!

California has a lot of problems, but the state government at the moment is actually operating quite effectively at trying to solve them. Including the issues with the electrical grid (for example our one nuclear plant getting emergency funding to stay online to help meet our environment goals while the grid is transitioning).

They could easily handle this with some smart metering, so people could just dry their clothes or charge their EVs in the morning or at night.

Smart metering is installed and rates vary with the time of day. Some people can afford to not care about that so asking people not to charge their cars might help.

Just absolutely restrict 240V during peak times then.

From the perspective of your electrical meter, there is no difference between running 2 120V appliances on separate busses vs running a single 240V appliance assuming they consume the same overall wattage. So this would be a very difficult thing to enforce.

That’s what a meter with more intelligence is used (and ya, it would need tighter coupling with the panel where 240V circuits are formed).

240V are what run electric stoves. I guess no cooking either. Why don't we just have a functioning grid like civilized society?

Urban decay. Maybe the state will step in to save Jackson, but maybe not. There isn’t a quick fix to reverse the situation in Jackson. Even with dedicated funding and committed resources it would be a multi-decade effort to save the city. The state government may just let the city rot away and disappear.

> Urban decay

Aka "the white people moved out of the town and the rest of the state doesn't care about it now"

It's the state's capitol and largest city (by more than 2x the population of its second biggest city), if the state isn't willing to help in that situation, I'm not sure what the state government is there for. Small towns I can see slipping through the cracks, but not your largest/capitol city.

Now it's possible the state just doesn't have the resources to fix it, I wouldn't be surprised about that (and reading an article that appears to be the case, they're even getting $429 million from the federal government for it and they're saying it might cost billions to fix). But that's different from just deciding not to.

Jackson is a black city in a state run by white supremacists. What is happening there is exactly what the state wants to happen.

Jackson has 150k residents in a state with 3m total residents. It’s also a state that is historically associated with libertarianism. The state is usually not responsible for local municipal infrastructure.

I’ve read various estimates on the cost to “fix” Jackson but these estimates are just to address infrastructure problems right now. It’s probably an order of magnitude more money to reverse the downward spiral and turn Jackson into a growing city.

It’s not as if Mississippi is a thriving state with cash to spare. Take away federal funding and federal welfare and it’s a third world country deep in poverty. The total annual spending by the Mississippi state government is $23 billion.

For most of the southern states in the US, their ideology demands that disasters disproportionately impact the poor for the sin of being poor. In order to do this effectively, the various state governments actively avoid supporting, maintaining, or improving infrastructure past the bare functional minimum during good times. They know that for all of their crying and complaining about welfare and handouts, the federal government will be right there to write them a check to fix their shit when times are tough, and they'll turn around and use that money to pad the pockets of themselves and their political donors. That money has to trickle down through the state legislature's pockets before even making it to the city.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K7fgB0m_y2I

Phil Ochs - Here's to the State of Mississippi (1965)

>It must be so embarrassing for the politicians who have been running Mississippi.

Water systems are run by the cities, not the state.

It's fair to say that maintenance has been put off for long before the current city leadership took office, but it's also fair to say that the current leadership knew the system was failing (it's failed several times over the last few years) and didn't even develop a plan of action.

As the House member whose district includes Jackson put it:

>U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson said the state bears some blame for neglecting Jackson for decades, but if the capital city cannot properly run its water system, “I would not be in favor of the city being given back the authority to run it.”

Thompson said he has been talking with the mayor and other city leaders and repeated, “I have not seen a plan,” about a long-term fix for the water system.

https://mississippitoday.org/2022/09/02/bennie-thompson-jack...

He's also said that, like everyone else, he can't even get details on what went wrong this time.

>“I think it would be advantageous for the city to come up with a plan, and to share that plan with as many sources of help as possible. I know there’s a water problem with the city of Jackson, but nobody has shared the facts on the problem with me, as one of the Representatives, as well as what the cure or the plan for correcting it.”

https://yallpolitics.com/2022/08/23/thompson-jackson-shouldn...

But Mississippi is one of the poorest states in that country.

Mississippi's GDP per capita is roughly between Spain's and Portugal's, so by global standards, the state is actually quite wealthy -- definitely wealthy enough to ensure everyone has drinking water in all its cities.

Spain has a fairly substantial shantytown outside Madrid. There are also urban areas there (including, I think, some fairly touristy ones) which just discharge all their raw untreated sewage into the rivers and sea because somehow none of the governments have managed to build sewage treatment for them, so I do wonder about the quality of their drinking water. In general, there seems to be more regional inequality and poverty in the developed world than most people realise.

Yes. There are more than a few shantytowns throughout Spain, but keep in mind that they tend to be inhabited by Gitanos (often called Gypsies or Romani in English) who haven't yet fully integrated into mainstream Spanish society. Gitanos are in fact systematically marginalized by governmental and other institutions in Spain.[a] And also, yes, there's quite a bit of dysfunction and corruption in Spain -- more than in its fellow EU members to the North.

That said, I have a hard time imagining Spanish politicians ever neglecting infrastructure in a major city (let alone the largest one, the capital, Madrid) to the point that the city's entire population finds itself without access to drinking water.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitanos#Marginalisation

These are the people that have been running the city:

  - (D) Harvey Johnson Jr. [2009-2013]
  - (D) Chokwe Lumumba [2013-2014]
  - (D) Charles Tillman [2014]
  - (D) Tony Yarber [2014-2017]
  - (D) Chokwe Lumumba [2017-Present]

From the article:

> “No one is taking responsibility” for the crisis, she said. “You have the governor and the mayor blaming each other. They just keep going back and forth. Both of them knew the water needed to be fixed. This has been going on for years.”

May be they need to elect different people at both state and local levels.

From the NYT article it looks like the state legislature holds the purse strings on any federal funds that might help:

"the State of Mississippi received $75 million to upgrade drinking water systems across the state, with an additional $429 million coming available over the next five years. But that money is in the hands of the state Legislature, not Jackson officials."

> on any federal funds that might help

Why do they have to be federal funds? Mississippi is a poor state within the US but if you look at global comparisons it has a robust tax base. There’s no reason it needs to depend on federal largesse for the basics. It just needs better governance.

Mississippi was the most confederate of the Confederate states. Jefferson Davis was their Senator and then President of the Confederacy. After the civil war and the end of reconstruction, it was a hotbed of reactionary violence. There maybe a robust tax base, but you have to ignore the entire history of the state (which is majority white) and city (which is majority black and the descendants of slaves). I'm not as familiar with MS, but there is a great video on how this works in Lousiana - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38

Historically (back to reconstruction), the Federal government is the guarantor of Black rights in the South and they provide significant funds to the majority black/liberal cities to make up for the fact that the state governments do not provide. Generally the state government is funneling money out of these areas.

I'm not an expert in any way on the reasons, but it seems like all large transportation and infrastructure projects in any state have some level of federal involvement.

> Why do they have to be federal funds?

Federal/state/local tax revenue is split about 54/27/19. The US federal deficit is another 19% on-top of that.

For whatever reasons, good or bad, the US funnels tax dollars through the Federal level. They're basically a middle man. Which means large projects almost always require some Federal funding.

27 + 19 is 46%, that’s hardly nothing. Again if you compare other countries a lot of places do a lot more with less. It’s governance issue, not a resource issue.

Local funding mostly goes to schools. I'm not sure about state funding. Most of the "flex" is at the Federal level. Especially given the fact they can spend money that is literally just printed. Local and State have to pass laws and collect revenue.

The fact of the matter is that our current tax structure relies on the federal pool for infrastructure spending. That's just the way it is. Whether you like it or not. Personally I'd love Fed tax dollars shift more directly to state and local. That would be one plausible path to help achieve "better governance".

> Again if you compare other countries a lot of places do a lot more with less.

Everything in the US is radically overpriced for a lot of reasons. We spend more on health care per capita and don't even get universal coverage out of it. It's embarrassing.

Does Jackson have that tax base though? My understanding is that the wealth is just outside of the city borders

> the State of Mississippi received $75 million to upgrade drinking water systems across the state

$75mm is about Jackson, Mississippi’s annual tax take, not including $40mm for sewers and water [1]. Apparently they need $2bn to modernise their water infrastructure [2]. Financing that at 8% is about $160mm a year in interest alone; unaffordable.

This reeks of overbuilding. The solution has to involve reducing the infrastructure footprint.

[1] https://www.jacksonms.gov/meetings/presentation-of-fy-2021-2...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120166328/jackson-mississipp...

I’d be willing to bet it was built from scratch on less than $2 billion in inflation adjusted dollars. The US has insane costs when it comes to infrastructure. Too many greedy little fingers in the pies, too much paperwork and litigation, too many people with effective vetoes.

Local water systems really shouldn't depend on federal funding. Unless there's some kind of interstate impact, that should be entirely a state and local issue. Mississippi could certainly afford to keep water flowing, they just chose not to prioritize it.

It is the job of the mayor to look out for their city, lobby for it. They can also sue the state government. An impoverished city like Jackson, that's a hard problem.

I think the problem is quite deeper than just funds. Jackson has been in decay economically.

And none of them will be held responsible. Why? Just look around this thread where the (D) behind the name and the color of their skin is protection against it. There's a algorithm for assigning responsibility: start at the lowest level connected to the problem and if the people in charge are from your favored party, you climb up one level of government. Repeat this process as many times as needed until you find someone from the other party, then that's the person responsible.

Also notice how much soft bigotry this thread is seeped in, with quite a few treating the leaders of Jackson like low IQ children who can't be held responsible for their actions. Maybe the problem isn't that they're morons like so many apologists here think but maybe they're actually somewhat smart and just crooked or incompetent. Yes, even smart people can do bad things and they're also quite capable of making errors, sometimes very large errors.

The bigotry is encoded in the weird belief that you can destroy a city water system in 10 years unless you try your hardest, like in Flint. I can't think of a Democrat I like, but wrecking and abandoning a city to its poor, then blaming the poor for its condition is an old story.

Y'know, sometimes, when two people or groups are blaming each other for something...

One side is stating the factual truth (it's the other side's responsibility)...

...And the other side is blowing smoke to avoid doing things they don't want to do, for whatever reasons.

In this case, I guarantee you that the reasons the Mississippi state government doesn't want to help include both racism (Jackson is majority black) and political partisanship (as you can see, Jackson votes blue).

The two Lumumbas are father and son, not the same person, hence why the latter goes by his middle name Antar as well usually.

This is a problem that developed over a very long time, not just since white people completely abandoned Jackson.

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