Jeremy Myers, left, of the Aids Healthcare Foundation delivers water to Shaun Brown in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022.
Steve Helber/AP Photo
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who wasone of 10 Republicans to join Senate Democrats topass last year’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, told CNN the facility deteriorated in part because “there have been tax base problems with population decline” in Jackson.
Yet he added there is “money in the pipeline,” with the $429 million Mississippi will get from thenew bipartisan infrastructure law to upgrade water and sewage systems. But he said more federal help will be needed now to “to salvage the lives and homes and futures of our major city.”
Jackson is emblematic ofthe type of communities Biden said he wanted to help with his Justice40 Initiative, which aims to deliverfederal dollars into areas long overlooked for federal investment. Many of those neighborhoods are communities of color that face steeper socioeconomic hurdles as a result of racist practices, such as redlining.
The lack of investment in Jackson follows a familiar pattern seen in many majority-Black cities in the South, Midwest and other parts of the United States, said Joan Wesley, an associate professor of community development and housing concentration at Jackson State University. Jackson’s infrastructure struggles began decades earlier, as tens of thousands of white residents departed for the suburbs.
Jackson is now 82 percent Black and heavily Democratic — a blue dot in a deep red state with a Republican legislative supermajority and governor. That’s created the feeling that it’s been neglected by GOP state officials.
“Governments need to understand that they’re governing for everyone and not just a select group of people or their supporters,” said Wesley, who works on environmental justice issues across the Gulf Coast. “It just appears that it’s shaking out that way. It certainly looks that way.”
Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, did not respond to a request for comment.
Environmental justice advocates have urged the Biden administration to devise creative ways for getting dollars into places like Jackson. They fear a repeat of the episode when GOP governors declined incentives to expand Medicaid coverage as part of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
The Bezos Earth Fund, created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is funding a project led by three environmental justice organizations that will track federal investments, assist communities in preparing grant applications and set up a “quick strike” force of lawyers targeting states that strangle funding to cities, said Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.
“Part of our job as well is to make sure that we keep our eye on everything and that the state legislature absolutely knows that we are watching,” said Wright. She is leading the effort along with WE ACT for Environmental Justice executive director Peggy Shepard and Robert Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University.
Wright said too few local officials are even aware of Biden’s pledge to push investments to areas with high pollution levels and economic distress. That also reveals a shortcoming for the Biden administration, she said: Simply repeating the president’s vow doesn’t necessarily translate to better results.
Most federal dollars first go through state legislatures and governors who might not be aligned with the president’s goals, Wright noted. That means local communities must put pressure on state governments while navigating complicated federal programs for grants that don’t have to go through state capitols.
“The money always seems to go to the white suburbs,” she added. “Sending money to Mississippi even to fix Jackson will not happen unless there’s some oversight with the federal government.”
Changing those dynamics, Wesley said, “requires the citizenry to be ever-vigilant,” which for Jackson represents a tall task given the apparent racial and partisan divides in how the state disburses money.
Even Mississippi’s plan for spending federal stimulus dollars, approved in April, requires additional oversight for how Jackson upgrades its water and sewer systems — and includes a requirement unique to Jackson that itspend those funds by 2027.
An SUV rests in flood waters in this northeast Jackson, Miss., neighborhood, Aug. 29, 2022.