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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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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