JACKSON, Miss.—Ted Henifin is thinking about 2075. He might not be alive to see it, but the date lives somewhere in the back of his mind. The water system of the City of Jackson, over which he currently has authority, won’t belong to the federal government forever. Whatever comes next, after his uniquely durable authority disappears, will have to do what the Jackson water system that preceded it could not: build a utility that can survive for decades.
But few utilities in the nation have seen more entrenched warfare over just who will control them.
For the third time in four years, a bill to regionalize the Jackson water and sewer system and indefinitely transfer control of the utility to an appointed board is drawing criticism from numerous corners. And yet its survival in the Mississippi House indicates it may have the best chance yet of becoming the blueprint for Jackson’s water and sewer authority—however dim a chance that may be.
But Henifin, the federal receiver appointed to lead the Jackson water system out of crisis in 2022, has a deeper set of concerns than which political bloc holds a majority on the board. In a Feb. 17 interview with the Mississippi Free Press, the JXN Water director laid out an extensive structural critique of the bill’s design, issues he argued could doom the proposed utility to repeating the same mistakes that led to the collapse of Jackson’s water infrastructure in the first place.
“As a whole, without major changes in this bill, it’s potentially going to drive the system right back to where it was,” Henifin said.
Meanwhile, advocates for the City of Jackson to retain full control of its water and sewage system—stripped from the city after the failure of O.B. Curtis in late 2022—appear split. Some are incensed at another attempt to construct an authority above and beyond the mayor and city council, others convinced that the Mississippi House’s proposal of a Jackson-heavy board will prove the best deal the city will get in the face of a skeptical state government.
The Jackson City Council tepidly endorsed the legislation at a Feb. 16 town hall, bolstered by new Mayor John Horhn backing the proposal as a way to maintain city control over rates and expenditures at the new utility. But the shape of the bill in the Senate, provided it survives at all, may prove to be to few observers’ liking in the end. Byram and Ridgeland, included for their services provided as part of the Jackson water and sewage system, stand opposed to some of the bill’s elements, with their leadership resenting that their share of the board would need the approval of the Jackson City Council.
After publication, the City of Jackson’s Director of Communications Nic Lott responded with a statement, challenging the report, Henifin’s response to the bill and involvement with the future governance of the utility.
“The Mississippi Free Press (MFP) article on the Jackson water authority bill repeats a familiar and misleading narrative that blurs the failures of the past with the hard choices we are making now to stabilize this system and return it to accountable, local control,” the statement read in part.
Lott added that Wingate was pursuing a forensic audit of JXN Water’s operations, in addition to demands for improvement on how the entity proceeds with water billing. “It is especially troubling that Mr. Henifin, an unelected federally appointed manager who currently controls JXN Water and has broad discretion over no‑bid and limited‑competition contracting, is now placing his thumb on the scale to try to kill legislation that would place future water operations under a public authority bound by Mississippi law, open‑meetings requirements, and conflict‑of‑interest rules,” he wrote.
And ultimately, Sen. Joel Carter, R-Gulfport, told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 23 that if the various parties—particularly the affected cities—can’t agree on a structure, the bill is dead in the water.
“I told the Jackson delegation—I said, ‘If y’all can’t (all) get on board with this, I’m not getting hammered at the well on this bill,’” Carter said. “I don’t have a dog in this fight … until those people come to the table, that bill’s dead.”
‘It’s the Best One We’ve Had So Far’
What began as a grand coalition in the Jackson water crisis has long since splintered, now best described as a patchwork of factions rarely communicating and virtually never seeing eye to eye. The open warfare between City Hall and JXN Water chilled with the departure of former Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, but the relationship between Mayor Horhn and Ted Henifin is no more functional than with Horhn’s predecessor.
U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate, once a close ally of Henifin, his appointed receiver, now communicates with the leadership of JXN Water only in public, but still saves his most pointed critique for the City of Jackson, writing in his Feb. 23 approval of a rate increase for JXN Water customers that the City’s continued intransigence towards a spike in water bills had descended into the realm of “fiscal fantasy.”
“This Court allowed the City a significant indulgence: the opportunity to conduct an independent financial review. The resulting hearing, however, was a study in administrative irrelevance; rather than addressing the ‘Sword of Damocles’ hanging over the water system’s solvency, the City’s financial expert, Michael Thomas, presented an analysis that was fundamentally untethered from the crisis at hand,” Wingate wrote in part. “The Court will not sanction continued noncompliance, service degradation, or financial insolvency in the name of additional analysis.”
What Henifin and the Jackson City Council can agree on is that neither was consulted for the design of H.B. 1677, to their mutual displeasure.
For Jackson, the concern is primarily one of political control. Rep. Shanda Yates, I-Jackson, wrote a bill including the customary board picks allotted to the governor and lieutenant governor that have been a controversial inclusion going back to the 1% Sales Tax Committee more than a decade ago, permitting the State a hand in the operations of its capital utility.
But unlike the last two attempts at constructing a regional utility, Yates amended H.B. 1677 to give direct Jackson appointees a strong plurality on the board, and requiring City approval for a flat majority, diluting the direct control state leadership could wield over the organization.
It was this structure which enticed some public speakers and the City Council as a whole to endorse Yates’ bill, even over the concerns of Roschelle Gibson, an alderwoman from the City of Byram, worried that the necessity of Jackson’s approval for their pick meant a lack of uncontested representation.
“ I don’t think anybody’s gonna stand up here and tell you it’s the perfect solution or the best solution any of us could dream of,” said Drew Martin, Jackson city attorney, at the town hall. “But as the mayor said, it’s the best one we’ve had so far. It’s the best one we have today, and it does give the city majority voice on that process.”
For activists like Danyelle Holmes, an organizer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition and the Poor People’s Campaign, long in opposition to the sole authority exercised over the Jackson water system by Henifin and his federal order, the concessions to Jackson were not enough to excuse what she sees as a more permanent usurpation of power that should belong to the City itself.
“This proposed authority would have power to set water rates and make governing decisions, but residents would not be able to vote most of the members out of office … Water is not a luxury. You can not live without water. Families in Jackson are already stretched thin. People are already choosing between groceries, medicine, rent, and electricity,” she said at last Monday’s town hall. “Residents did not break the system, and yet they’re the ones who will carry the financial burden to stabilize it. So the question is simple and fair: What protections exist in H.B. 1667 to prevent residents from being overburdened by future rate increases?”
Henifin, for his part, is getting used to being the bad guy. He spoke only briefly at the town hall, coming down hard against criticism of JXN Water’s work on the city’s long-broken billing system and his attempts to force past-due revenues out of the public.
“There’s been a culture here of folks not paying their bills,” he stated, the next sentence drowned out by boos. Both at that meeting and on social media after the fact, that sentence has been interpreted as a strike against the city’s poorer, Blacker populations, the ones for whom activists and advocates are most concerned with the burden of growing water bills.
Henifin said nothing could be further from the truth. “It’s widespread,” he told this reporter. “It cuts across every economic, social, racial (category).” Indeed, JXN Water’s attempts to collect on old debts started in the wealthier segments of the city, and it’s the white, well-to-do enclaves of Northeast Jackson that Henifin says have the most egregious nonpayers of all.
“ Little did we know, we’d find all these no account holders in Country Club, in Eastover … Country Club had fourteen separate non-accounts. Eastover, I don’t even know how many we had. We had some people in Country Club bragging about not having an account. In million dollar houses!”
A Path to Insolvency?
As sour as the relationship between Henifin and the City of Jackson may be, the water administrator’s strident reservations with the bill have little to do with the particulars of who might have a plurality on the board.
In an interview on Feb. 17 at the headquarters of JXN Water, Henifin laid out numerous structural issues he said could seriously damage the future of safe, reliable water and sewage service in Mississippi’s capital.
First and foremost were the strict rules governing rate increases and major expenditures, a last-minute amendment that requires 3/4ths of what was once a 12-member board to agree on any expenditures above $5,000,000—a fraction of the yearly budget—and any rate increases. With the board cut down to 9 members in the version that passed the House, that would mean the mayor and their two direct appointees would have an unbreakable veto over the most important decisions of the proposed authority.
“ All you need is to have two holdouts and you can control everything that revolves around rates or contract awards over $5 million … which puts us right back where we were,” Henifin said. “And I’d say it won’t take long to get back into the failing water system if you can’t get the resources.”
The inability–-or simple unwillingness—of elected officials to meaningfully increase water rates commensurate with the rising cost of infrastructure maintenance is a nationwide problem, and nowhere have the consequences been more stark than in Jackson. As of 2025, 80% of all water utilities across the country failed to recoup enough revenue to even pay their expenses. As far back as Dale Danks, mayor of Jackson from 1977 to 1989, told the Mississippi Free Press in a March 9, 2021, interview that his attempt to raise water rates was the direct cause of his defeat at the ballot box.
Jackson will get its most recent round of water rate increases, a 12% bump, or roughly $9 per month for the average account holder. But the Jackson City Council fought the measure tooth and nail, preferring instead to demand JXN Water reduce expenses or increase its collection rate, although Henifin has repeatedly produced documentation showing that the Jackson water system was on the path to insolvency with its current rate structure even at a 100% collection rate.
“ Horhn, in his (town hall) introduction, said we got here by kicking the can down the road. But you’re fighting us on a rate increase that’s proven to be needed! We’ve jumped through every hoop that anyone’s thrown in front of us. No one has said it’s not needed, or come up with an alternative,” Henifin said.
Yates demurred in a statement to the Mississippi Free Press when this reporter asked her about Henifin’s concerns on Feb. 20. “The goal of the ¾ vote requirement for rate increases and large expenditures was to ensure that any major decision had broad approval of the Board,” Yates wrote. “As you know, Byram and Ridgeland are currently opposed to having their appointees subject to approval from the Jackson City Council – how that will shake out in the end is still unclear.”
Dollars and Cents
Beyond the board, Henifin noted that basic restrictions on how the new utility operates were missing in the bill, leaving the door open for self-dealing and exploitation. No provision in the bill prevents contracts being awarded to board members themselves, or to their families or businesses. Nor does the new entity have to follow Mississippi procurement law, with its restrictions on bidding.
Yates suggested discussion as public purchasing restrictions were ongoing. But she added that the bill reflected the current lack of restrictions JXN Water still operates under. “Candidly,” she continued, “the way it is currently written tracks with what JXN Water is currently doing and Henifin has stated several times it is necessary to make repairs in an expeditious manner.”
But Henifin’s mandate is both extraordinary and temporary, derived from the worst water infrastructure disaster in modern American history. And even Henifin acknowledged he “ gets beat up all the time about non-competitive procurement— (the bill) says it should be competitive, but then they get to write all their own rules and regulations … And there’s nothing that prevents the authority from doing business with any board members,” Henifin concluded, wryly adding, “Not that that would happen in Mississippi.”
Additionally, the bill authorizes the lease of Jackson’s water assets to the new utility, rather than transferring them to the utility outright. Such an arrangement presents its own challenges, but Henifin’s primary concern is that the bill specifies no upper limit on the cost of the lease.
“ The leasehold itself isn’t limited in dollars … the authority’s gonna lease it from the city. Do you think the city hasn’t got their sight set on making a little bit of money off of that?” Henifin asked. He suggested a simple fix would be to limit the lease to a trivial amount, leaving all of the utility’s revenue to pay for the system itself.
Yates dismissed the concern. “There is no reason to believe that the Authority would agree to enter into a lease that allows the City to ‘extract funds from the system,’” she wrote. “Should that ‘what if’ occur the legislation could always be amended.”
Debt Service Concerns
Another looming concern with the proposed utility is the way the city’s utility debt will be managed. Yates’ proposal would transfer just under $200 million in debt to the new authority, an unambiguous win for Jackson, freeing the city from the crushing weight of debt, allowing it to improve its bond rating and borrow money at more favorable terms.
But it would be the utility’s job to handle that debt, and Henifin has serious doubts the mechanisms floated for just such a task are equipped to handle it. The bill authorizes the Mississippi State Department of Health and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to loan the new authority on extraordinarily generous terms: 40 and 30 year terms, respectively, at zero percent interest with maximum principal forgiveness.
However, MDEQ and MSDH do not operate their own massive loan programs. Rather, these agencies are the local stewards of the State Revolving Loan Funds, federal programs intended to inject funds into local water and sewer systems in the form of low-interest loans, the slow accrual of which was intended to create a self-perpetuating scheme of state-level funding for municipal water and sewer projects.
While significant funds are hypothetically available from the SRF programs, extensive guidelines restrict their use. All in all, the most recent final Drinking Water SRF priority list includes a constellation of statewide Mississippi water infrastructure totalling $104 million dollars. Even broken up into chunks, swallowing the debt of the new entity would be one of the most significant undertakings in state SRF history—without even introducing further system improvements to be funded through the loan program.
And Henifin stressed that some of the debt—roughly $42 million in total—is already in the form of SRF loans, lent at the most favorable terms imaginable, meaning there is nothing to gain from refinancing it.
Yates noted that the largest amendment to the bill served precisely to address the issue of debt service. “There is language in the bill that references non-system revenue being used to pay towards debt service,” she wrote. “The current work up in the bill involves using a portion of existing sanitation fees that are already collected from customers as part of their water bills. This money would be used to cover the cost of sanitation fees and any excess would be dedicated toward debt service … According to the current bond insurers, this is part of what is needed to make a restructure/re-fi of the debt possible.”
Here, Henifin echoed Wingate’s own judgment: fiscal fantasy. “As written, HB1677 allows a municipality with a population greater than 100,000 to dedicate a portion of the fee they collect for garbage service to pay debt service on water, sewer, or storm drainage system debt,” he wrote. “The current (individual garbage service) rate is $37 per month, or $444 per year.” Assuming 100% collection that means that “billed sanitation is approximately $1.6 million per month or $19.2 million per year.”
Then, the other half. “The debt service on bond debt is $17 million per year. It would take 88% of the current fee-based revenue to generate $17 million per year: $32.56 per month or $390.72 per year per account.” Covering the debt service fully would leave only 12% of Jackson’s garbage bills to pay for its own garbage services. “So either the city will be only putting $53.28 per year per account towards sanitation or they will need to significantly increase the sanitation fee,” Henifin concluded: a roundabout way of raising water rates after all.
In Henifin’s eyes, municipal garbage fees are a particularly poor way to equitably raise funds, almost exclusively affecting single renters and homeowning families. “ The only people who pay garbage fees in the city are basically single family. They don’t do commercial. Commercial’s done on your own. Multifamily’s done on your own.”
Taken together, Henifin’s individual concerns over the proposed entity begin to coalesce into a vision of overlapping, escalating complications: Without serious backing, the new entity could face an increasingly expensive water and sewer system, with a board paralyzed against increasing revenue thanks to the input of a single elected politician, potentially cannibalized by a lack of ethical guardrails against enriching its own members and separate city funding pools, expecting salvation from a federal loan program ill-equipped to properly fund it.
Its backers, those from the City and from the Legislature, seem willing to acknowledge the bill’s imperfections—or at least, that it is imperfect. But they argue that the opportunity for a Jackson-controlled water system may not come around again, and that the board-to-be is capable of self-correcting any problems with the authority’s design.
If Yates’ bill dies, as Sen. David Parker’s did in years past, simple politics will likely be to blame—it may wither on the vine as nothing more than a casualty of back and forth retribution over the death of school choice. But if it survives, it may just lay the entire foundation for the next 50 years of capital city water and sewer policy—strengths, flaws and all.
