JACKSON, Miss.—Crumbling infrastructure, blight and crime-prevention strategies were among the issues seven Jackson City Council candidates discussed while speaking to South Jackson residents during a March 10 forum.
Malcolm May, Jonathan Cottrell, Ray McCants, Emon Thompson, Daniel LaPatrick Walker, Lee Scott, and Kevin Parkinson each attended the forum, discussing their solutions to the capital city’s challenges.
The Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods, the American Medical Response and the nonprofit group Southern Echo partnered to host the forum at the Willowwood Community Center.
Councilman Brian Grizzell, the incumbent for Ward 4, was in Washington D.C., on the day of the forum and was not able to attend but sent a representative to speak to his constituents. You can find the full list of candidates running for the Jackson City Council here.
Candidates Who Attended The Forum:
Malcolm May (Ward 4)
Jonathan Cottrell (Ward 6)
Ray McCants (Ward 5)
Emon Thompson (Ward 6)
Daniel LaPatrick Walker (Ward 6)
Lee Scott (Ward 6)
Kevin Parkinson (Ward 7)
Malcolm May: ‘Fix The Foundation’
May is a lifelong Jackson resident and formerly worked for the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department. He said he was motivated to run for the position because the street where he lives is used as an illegal dumpsite and he wants to see more unity among elected officials.
May, a Democrat, said during the forum that the “root of Jackson’s problem is that our elected officials don’t get along. Until we fix that, it’s like putting a bandaid on cancer. You can’t fix nothing until you fix the foundation.”
When asked about new housing development in Jackson, May said that South Jackson is the area most primed for new housing stock. “You’re sitting on a goldmine. Where can the city grow? It’s got to come this way,” May said.
Jackson’s lack of affordable and market-rate housing stock has been hotly debated among Jacksonians in the past year. Some residents have complained that a lack of affordable housing exacerbates homelessness in the capital city, and others say that a deficiency of new, market-rate housing pushes those who might want to buy a home in the capital city to look to the suburbs.
However, developers and nonprofits seeking to bring both affordable housing and market-value homes to the capital city have experienced pushback from residents who fear that new development in their neighborhood may negatively affect their quality of life.
“My initial concern right now is ‘Who’s moving over there?’ What kind of residents are they putting in that property?” Northwest Terrace community resident Shirley Lee told the Mississippi Free Press in January about an affordable-housing initiative developers have planned near her neighborhood.
Jackson Housing Authority Executive Director Allison Cox attempted to assuage those fears while speaking with Ward 2 residents during a Jan. 9, 2025, community meeting at Fresh Start Christian Church. “It’s not public housing, it’s not Section 8. It is a tax-credit development. It will be nice. It will be well managed,” Cox said.
Ray McCants: ‘Policing Is Reactive, Not Proactive’
McCants has a background in “marketing, community organizing and youth mentorship.” He said that he has experience working with youth at the Henley-Patton-Young Detention Center and “understands the crime problem that we’re facing.”
In regards to public safety and crime prevention, McCants, an Independent, said he would like the City to take proactive crime-prevention measures like investing in community initiatives rather than relying solely on law enforcement, which he described as “a reactive organization.”
He advocated for young sports leagues and said residents should support social programs like the Jackson All-Star Band and the Better Kids and Convos initiative hosted at the Southside Barber and Beauty Shop on McDowell Road. “Empower other organizations,” McCants said.
The City of Jackson has renewed its investment in community-based crime-prevention efforts.
It established the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery in 2022 with funding from the National League of Cities and the Wells Fargo Foundation. Over the past three years, the office collaborated with the Jackson Police Department and community-based crime-prevention organizations to collect data about gun violence victims and perpetrators, OVPTR Executive Director Keisha Coleman told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 26.
That data helped the City figure out which communities are the most vulnerable to gun violence and which organizations are directly supporting the populations that are most at-risk.
“They are the ones that go out and do the mediation, actually taking the guns out of the hands of youth and then not only taking the guns, but then taking the youth under their wings and saying, ‘We got other options and let’s explore those options,’” Coleman said following a Feb. 26 press conference announcing $50,000 grant awards for Operation Good, Strong Arms of Mississippi and Living with Purpose—three youth-focused, community-based organizations working to prevent gun violence.
Jonathan Cottrell: ‘Get Public Works Back’
Cottrell, a Democrat, is a Jackson firefighter and business owner. He previously ran for the Ward 6 Jackson City Council seat in 2017 when he worked at the Mississippi Department of Health. He said he was motivated to run again because of crime in his community. “I’m back here again to finish what I started,” Cottrell said.
“We have to see how we can get public works back into Jackson so we can have more people on the ground to fix the situation we have in our communities,” Cottrell said when asked about strategies that could improve the conditions of Jackson’s roads and bridges.
The City of Jackson has been without a public works director since Sept. 4, 2023, when then-Director Khalid Woods stepped down, and it has been void of any engineers since Jackson’s sole City Engineer Robert Lee vacated his position in March.
The Jackson City Council voted 6-1 on July 30, 2024, to award engineering firm Al-Turk Planning and Development, LLC, with a contract to handle the City’s public-works projects. The one-year contract cost the City $700,000 for the services, WLBT reported on July 29.
Louis Wright, the City of Jackson’s Chief Administrative Officer, currently serves as the City’s interim public works director. Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes, the sole person to vote against the July 30, 2023, measure, voiced his concern about the vacancies within Jackson’s public works department.
“My concern is not having a public works director,” Stokes said on July 30, 2024. “There’s backwards thinking that we’re going to hire Mr. Turk and yet we have all these issues in the public works division.”
Emon Thompson: ‘South Jackson Is Not Forgotten’
Thompson is a Democrat who previously ran for a seat on the Hinds County Board of Supervisors. He has been a board member for the City of Jackson Planning Board for five years. He said he is running for office because “we have seen our streets crumble, we have seen crime rise and we have seen the integrity of our leadership disappear.”
While discussing solutions to Jackson’s issues, Thompson said that his goal is to “make sure that Ward 6 and South Jackson is not forgotten.”
He said that, if elected, he would initiate a 90-day blight elimination period on property owners after a building structure burns down.
“Blight is what brings crime to your facility. I want to impose a 90-day term–if a building burns down, you got 90 days to get rid of it or you get fined,” Thompson said.
The City of Jackson has wrangled with how to best clear the thousands of blighted commercial buildings and dilapidated homes in the capital city for over a decade. Population decline since the 1960s has depleted Jackson’s tax base, leaving the City with less funds to address problems like crumbling roadways and derelict properties.
That, coupled with the City’s historically understaffed code enforcement team and Mississippi’s convoluted property tax forfeiting process that nefarious investors often abuse, has left residents grappling with abandoned structures that have been falling apart in their neighborhoods for years.
The State of Mississippi owns many of the blighted properties in the capital city and across the state. When a property owner is delinquent on taxes, the state takes ownership of that property after three years of it sitting on the city, and then county tax rolls.
The State of Mississippi does not maintain or keep up that property during the time that it owns it but is concerned with getting the property back onto the tax rolls, Mississippi Secretary of State Public Lands Division Bureau Director Tyrone Hickman said in an April 11, 2024, interview with the Mississippi Free Press.
In 2017, then-Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann held a press conference announcing a partnership between the State, the City and the nonprofit organization Revitalize Mississippi for blight elimination using federal funding administered by the Mississippi Home Corp.
“Blight is a cancer, and it’s spreading rapidly in this city. And it requires aggressive therapy, or we’re going to lose it,” Revitalize Mississippi Founder Jim Johnston said during the July 17, 2027, press conference.
While Secretary of State Michael Watson told WLBT on Feb. 25 that the City of Jackson ultimately did not use all of the available funds because they wanted “to control” how the funds were used, Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba has disputed that claim.
Recently, state lawmakers like Reps. Ronnie Crudup Jr., and Grace Butler Washington have lobbied for and secured capital for Jackson to clear blight; the Legislature’s Capital City Revitalization Committee has discussed policies to further support those efforts.
Daniel LaPatrick Walker: ‘We Need To Save The Airport’
Walker, a Democrat, is a water treatment engineer and former City of Jackson Deputy Director of Public Works. He said his experience working in the City’s public works department gives him an edge over the other Ward 6 candidates. “You need somebody to go in and already know how to do the job. I’ve done it,” Walker said.
Walker said that before the City can focus on economic development, it must prioritize fixing crumbling roadways and sorting out what will happen with the water infrastructure once JXN Water’s interim third-party manager Ted Henifin leaves.
“The water system has to get right. The roads have to get right as well,” Walker said, adding that South Jackson has “a lot of land” that the City can leverage for new business industry.
However, he is concerned with the status of the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport. “I don’t know if you realize but we need to save our airport,” Walker told the crowd. “The airport is a major business for us. That’s a money maker for the city.”
Currently, Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, a city-owned entity, owns the Evers airport and the Hawkins Field Airport.
Jackson residents sued then-Gov. Phil Bryant after he signed Senate Bill 2162 into law. The proposal, which Republican Sen. Josh Harkins authored, created the Metropolitan Area Airport Authority, taking control of the airport from the city to a nine-member board to include appointees from both Madison and Rankin counties, respectively.
Several members of the JMAA later joined the lawsuit that held up the implementation of the new board. “We considered this a hostile eminent-domain takeover; it is fashioned as a situation where nothing changed, but it is a distinction without a difference—it is still a taking,” Regina May, an attorney for JMAA, told the Jackson Free Press in 2016.
After a nearly eight-year dispute, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ended the lawsuit, saying that city-appointed airport board members failed to show they would be harmed by a change in the governing authority.
The Mississippi Free Press reached out to the City of Jackson Attorney office to inquire about the status of this case but did not hear back before publication time.
Lee Scott: ‘Every Person Deserves Dignity’
Scott said that he was motivated by his parents’ work to be a public servant. He is a Democrat and works in the nonprofit sector, mentoring youth and facilitating service projects throughout the Jackson metro area. “There are possibilities in our community,” Scott said.
When asked how the City could better serve its homeless population, Scott said that the City could repurpose vacant, abandoned property into housing to help get people out of encampments. “There are tons of encampments in our communities,” Scott said. “A lot of our churches and a lot of people in our communities are actually engaging our homeless population. How can we give them more resources to be able to do that more effectively?”
In recent years, city and state officials have mulled over how to best tackle homelessness in the capital city.
After Jackson Resource Center Executive Director Putalamus White shared her plans to open a 60-unit tiny-home village and homelessness resource center in West Jackson, Ward 5 City Councilman Vernon Hartley objected, saying that a new homelessness-outreach facility would attract more of the unhoused to Jackson.
“Once they start building that, what’s going to happen to the rest of the community? Spread the wealth. Don’t just put it in the poorest and blackest part of town. Put it over there in northeast Jackson,” Hartley told the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 29.
On March 10, Scott cautioned residents against rhetoric that marginalizes the homeless population, saying instead that they should be given access to services like workforce-development programs. “Every person deserves dignity. It does not matter how many zeros you have in the bank account,” Scott said.
“Every single person deserves dignity and we have to do the work of dignifying our homeless community in our city so they feel like they can be a part of the answer and not a part of the problem,” he continued.
Kevin Parkinson: ‘Hold 1 Percent Tax Commission Accountable’
Parkinson is a Democrat and former principal of Midtown Public Charter School. He said he was motivated to run for office “to make sure that every corner of this city is thriving.”
Parkinson said that two solutions to crime and public safety are addressing blight and improper lighting. “We need to remove some of the blight that we see throughout the city that doesn’t invite good things and we need to light it up,” he continued.
When asked about how to improve the condition of roads and bridges throughout the city, Parkinson said that the City’s One Percent Sales Tax Commission must be held accountable for making sure that tax dollar-funded projects are handled equitably across all communities. “Right now, the 1% sales tax is used for certain parts of our city but not all parts of our city,” Parkinson said.
While the City has completed repaving projects on main thoroughfares like Riverside Drive and Terry Road, some Jackson residents have shared grievances that street paving projects in the city’s predominantly white communities are prioritized while its predominantly Black neighborhoods continue to grapple with roadways littered with potholes.
During an April 16, 2024, town hall meeting, Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba told residents that the City raises about $13 million from the initiative and had a list of streets that the City would prioritize for the first round of neighborhood street repaving.
When asked about the Commission’s process for deciding which neighborhood streets to pave first, the mayor said the City polled citizens from established neighborhood associations about which streets in their neighborhoods most needed repairs. The City then reviewed those suggestions and determined which projects to tackle first, he said.
You can view the full forum on the Association for South Jackson Neighborhoods Facebook page. Mississippi’s municipal primary elections are April 1 with the general election to follow on June 3.
