Resolving Jackson’s water woes rests on a plan, funding, and being ready ‘to pull the trigger’

 

Chris Lockhart, a board member for Pearl Riverkeepers, points Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022, along the Eubanks Creek in Jackson, Miss., where raw sewage has pumped into the creek, which empties into the Pearl River. Blair Ballou/MCIR

By Jerry Mitchell
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

The number one thing the city of Jackson needs to do to solve its water crisis?

Hire the right experts to develop a first-class plan so the city can get all the funding it needs to repair its crumbling system, said Rengao Song, a water quality and treatment expert who works as an adviser to the Louisville, Kentucky, city water system.

“You have to be ready to pull the trigger,” he said. “The city can’t just say, ‘Well, we need this much money to help.’”

He said Jackson has a chance to obtain federal funding from the $1.2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. President Biden even talked of the capital city’s water woes in pushing the legislation.

Many states have already allocated this funding; Mississippi hasn’t. It has not decided how to spend the $1.8 billion it received.

Of that money, $459 million is earmarked for water improvements across Mississippi, which is problem. The city of Jackson is one of many in line, and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has said publicly the city needs $1 billion to fix its water system and $1 billion to fix its sewer system. And the Mississippi Rural Water Association told lawmakers water districts need $1.4 billion in upgrades to their systems across the state.

When MCIR asked for the details on this, city officials shared a report that showed replacement for water lines in each city precinct would run between $7.3 million and $11.3 million. Repairing one water treatment plant would run more than $20 million; the other, $15.6 million.

The cost of failing to deliver the water may be even greater. More than 40% of the treated water never makes it to customers, according to the Mississippi Department of Health.

The city’s report detailed 135 sewer collection system failures affecting 127,000 residents and businesses. The price tag for those repairs? $30 million.

Leaks in these aging lines mean not only water leaking out of the pipes, but unwanted water going in and causing sewer pipes to overflow.

On Jan. 9, that happened in Lefleur’s Bluff State Park when “a tremendous amount of rain overwhelmed the system,” said Chris Lockhart, a board member of Pearl Riverkeepers, which monitors the river.

That rainwater blew off a manhole cover, causing sewage to empty into Eubanks Creek, which feeds into the Pearl River. The ground remains covered with toilet paper and waste.

(Left) Because of leaks in the sewer lines, rainwater caused sewage to overflow into Eubanks Creek, which empties into the Pearl River. Courtesy of Chris Lockhart (Right) The trash from raw sewage overflow can be seen Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022. Jerry Mitchell/MCIR

About four months earlier, another sewer line erupted, flowing into the creek, Lockhart said. “When it’s not contained in the pipes like it’s supposed to do, it makes its way into somebody’s drinking water, somebody’s fishing water, somebody’s swimming hole downriver.”

Those leaks are among the many that contaminate the Pearl River. In the first quarter of 2020, about half a billion gallons of raw sewage leaked into the river, according to a city report.

Since 2012, the city of Jackson has been under a consent decree from the EPA because of this sewage problem.

“Over the past four years, it’s only gotten worse,” said Abby Braman, executive director for the Pearl Riverkeepers. “It’s extremely frustrating to us.”

The Savannah Street treatment plant puts so much partially treated wastewater into the river, “it could fill four NFL stadiums,” she said.

Pearl Riverkeepers is now pushing state lawmakers to use American Rescue Plan Act funding to make these repairs.

“You have citizens that literally don’t have clean drinking water and don’t have an operating sewer system,” Braman said. “We feel like this is something the state should prioritize.”

Experts say water and sewer pipes should be replaced on a rotating basis each year, but that hasn’t happened in Jackson, which has been devastated by falling tax revenues. More than 100 miles of pipes are more than a century old.

Eric Rothstein has worked on some of the nation’s biggest drinking water disasters, including Flint, Michigan. “My specialty is water financing,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like the Zelig of utility finance disasters.”

He worked as a consultant for Jackson, noting the city is hardly the first to have suffered such a fate, “letting systems fall into disrepair. These systems are underground and easily forgotten.”

He said the city of Jackson represents “everything that can go wrong — billing problems, metering problems, difficulty in retaining qualified personnel.”

Billing problems have been so catastrophic that between 2014 and 2021, the city missed out on more than $83 million in water billing revenue, according to city officials.

Officials blamed much of that on metering woes. Last year, Jackson received a $90 million settlement from Siemens as a result of faulty meters, but that failed to solve the city’s water billing woes.

A third went to lawyers. What happened to the rest is less clear.

A Clarion Ledger analysis concluded that half went to the city’s general fund, to the Public Works enterprise fund or to pay down city debt. Another $10 million of the settlement remains, earmarked for water meter and billing fixes, but city officials say they need another $37 million to pay for all these changes.

In August, the city began installing new water meters.

As for its two water plants, the city is supposed to have 24 Class A workers running them. That number has fallen to five or six, violating the city’s consent decree with the EPA.

City officials say that Class A operators make about $14 an hour, despite having college degrees. Those without a degree can become Class A operators with a GED and six years’ experience and also pass the exam, according to Mississippi Department of Health standards. In both cases, applicants must have at least one year of working experience in a Class A plant.

The Jackson City Council recently boosted these salaries, as much as $10,000 a year for some, hoping to retain these operators, whose average salary across the U.S. tops $48,000 a year.

Jackson’s water treatment operation continues to struggle. In April, an electrical fire caused two service pumps to fail at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, resulting in a temporary loss of water pressure. In November, the city issued a boil-water notice after unsafe chemicals were used to treat the drinking water.

The Clarion Ledger reported that two-thirds of all water samples taken in Jackson since 2015 have contained at least a trace amount of lead.

Song said if lead contamination is a concern, faucet filters “are the way to go for customers.” Some of the more expensive filters utilize reverse osmosis to remove contaminants.

For more than 26 years, Robert Miller worked for the water system in Louisville, Kentucky, 17 of them as chief financial officer.

After he retired in 2008, he decided to move to New Orleans to assist in rebuilding their water system following the destruction from Hurricane Katrina. “My job was to rebuild the administrative side,” he said. “The city was about six weeks behind in paying their bills. They hardly had any money in the bank.”

While there, he said, “reforms to business processes, improvements to financial planning and program of rate increases helped the water system go from junk bonds to A and A+ rated bonds with more than a quarter billion dollars in the bank” by the time he left.

After Lumumba took office in 2017, the mayor’s transition team lured Miller to work for the city of Jackson.

“When I met him, I became convinced that he was the type of transformational leader that comes along once in a generation,” Miller said. “I wanted to become part of his team.”

Miller managed the water and sewage plants through two winter emergencies, when the temperature dropped to 13 degrees each time.

Asked what advice he would give the city of Jackson these days, he replied, “All of the advice I had for Jackson I gave while I was there.”

He retired again in 2020, returning to Kentucky.

“It is disconcerting to read of the struggles that the citizens of Jackson continue to endure as the city works to resolve the problems with billing and collecting for water and sewer service,” he said. “However, it is important to keep in mind that these fixes take time to implement.”

Rothstein said the American Rescue Plan Act brings hope to Jackson.

“My experience is that Atlanta, Detroit and even Flint had leadership pay consistent attention to these issues,” he said. “Atlanta faced a huge problem with its consent decree. The mayor there took on the moniker of being the ‘sewer mayor.’ He showed a commitment to the right thing and ultimately gained support.”

Song said the number one priority for water plants is “to make sure the water is safe to drink. That cannot be compromised.”

Unlike items we buy that can be recalled, “we can’t recall water,” he said. “We can’t tell people, ‘Sorry the water you had yesterday is bad.’”

 
 
 

Email Jerry.Mitchell@MississippiCIR.org.
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This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and funded in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. It was also produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes MCIR, the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University, Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Today.

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