Time to Think Ahead

People don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan. Anyone needing evidence of that adage’s truth needn’t look much further than Jackson’s decrepit, and worsening, infrastructure. Staring down the barrel of an Environmental Protection Agency consent decree, the city now faces the very real possibility of shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade its sewer system.

Think the EPA is playing around? Just ask St. Louis, Mo., which is spending nearly $5 billion to fix its sewer problems after getting a similar decree. Mind you, whatever Jackson spends on the sewers will be on top of the $100 million the city has already spent since 1999. In other words, roughly $13 million per year went to making what amounts to Band-Aid fixes.

As is always the case when infrastructure languishes, Jackson’s problems have accumulated over many years and many administrations. Consider the situation in Raymond at the Hinds County Detention Center, where the building is in such disrepair that the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office is having problems keeping the doors locked. For a period, escapes were so common that the situation would have been laughable if it were not so terrifying (see: the July 30 jail uprising).

While the jail’s present condition resulted from decades worth of do-nothing neglect, the Hinds County Board of Supervisors has waffled in the past few months to correct them. First, the board called for a new jail. Then, it backtracked to make quick fixes in the meantime. That’s wise, but it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that there won’t be more problems. Unfortunately, when it comes infrastructure projects, it’s hard to know what success, or even progress, looks like. What has $100 million bought the city’s sewer and wastewater system?

This week also saw what some people might consider a milestone, the signing of a document between the local Levee Board and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that could put breaking ground on a flood-reduction project for the city as little as 18 months away. If you’ve followed the coverage of flood control in the pages of this newspaper, you know how evenly we’ve distributed blame for holding up flood control for 30 years by stubbornly sticking to plans that were dead-on-arrival.

Luckily, Jackson has escaped a second deluge on the scale of the 1979 Easter Flood—so far—that wreaked billions of dollars in damage when calculated in today’s money. The operative phrase here is: “so far.” Given the schizophrenic weather patterns that climate change induces, this year’s drought could just as easily be followed by a flood next year.

What is clear is that it’s time to end the far-too-common practice of rolling the dice and hoping nothing bad happens. When those bets fail, we’ll all have to pay the price.