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Rebuilding trust: How Ted Henifin hopes to repair the relationship between Jacksonians and their water system

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Rebuilding trust: How Ted Henifin hopes to repair the relationship between Jacksonians and their water system

Eager to spread the news of a massive federal investment in his city’s drinking water system, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba called several town hall events over the last few months to update his constituents.

But to the residents in attendance, the $800 million coming to Jackson is far less tangible than the problems right in front of them, as many directed the same, commonly heard refrains towards Lumumba: What is with my water bill? Why am I being charged for water that’s unsafe to drink? Who’s going to fix the sewage spewing onto my lawn?

“I’m being charged for water I’m not even using,” one man said at a Forest Hill High School town hall in February, saying the water he was being charged for was leaking across his yard.

A woman in attendance said her monthly bill went from $55 to over $200, which she eventually just refused to pay. At another town hall in December, a resident said he got a bill in the thousands even though the water from his tap was brown.

Unable to speak to each person’s problem, Lumumba echoed a hopeful sentiment: While the city didn’t have the resources it needed before, it does now, and help is on the way.

While much has happened for the future of Jackson’s water since last fall – a federal takeover that placed a third-party team in control of the system’s improvement, the $800 million investment provided through several federal funding streams, a grant program that’s already eliminated $8 million in resident’s water bill debt in less than a week – the process of restoring trust among residents in what comes out of their taps is a long road ahead.

“I mean we’re going on, what, 40 years of distrust in Jackson’s water system?” said Brooke Floyd, a coordinator with the JXN People’s Assembly.

Floyd, a Jackson native, mother, and former teacher, said she distrusted the water even as a child, recalling her grandparents boiling the water for as long as she remembers.

“People are centering this on (the current) administration, but this is a deep-seated distrust that goes for years,” Floyd said. “So, I think it’s going to take some time for residents to understand, and it’s going to take some showing; you have to show people that the billing is going to get straightened out, and that our water is safe and that the pipes work, all those things.”

Last November, a federal judge appointed Ted Henifin to be the one in charge of lifting Jackson’s water system into a state of self-reliance.

Henifin recently sat down with Mississippi Today to talk about his game plan, as well as rebuilding trust in a water system among the people who have to pay for it.

Henifin said restoring credibility comes down to three changes: fixing the billing system, providing consistent water pressure by replacing small water lines and finally clarifying the existence of lead in Jackson’s distribution system.

Henifin’s plan

After working for 40 years in Virginia, it wasn’t until getting to Jackson that Henifin realized being a municipal utility worker could earn him public notoriety.

“People will recognize me pretty much everywhere I go, which is a little weird,” Henifin told Mississippi Today at his office. “I’ll be going out to dinner and people will say, ‘Oh, you’re the water guy.’”

But Henifin is in a city where such basic services – whether it’s garbage pickup, sewage disposal or drinking water – regularly leave residents without guarantees. He’s also in a position where few very, if any, municipal water professionals have ever sat.

In one of the largest federal interventions of a local utility system in American history, the U.S. government equipped Henifin with far-reaching authority that allows him to bypass local and state regulation, as well as nearly a billion dollars to spend on projects and a $400,000 personal salary.

His new title is chief executive officer of JXN Water, a nonprofit established to carry out the federal order put in place in November.

Although he’s heading a non-public entity that can avoid public record laws and government procurement rules, Henifin said he’s committed to transparency.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba speaks to Jackson residents concerning the city’s water during a town hall meeting at Forest Hill High School in Jackson, Miss., Feb. 1, 2023.

At the December town hall, Henifin waited afterwards to greet attendees, handing out his phone number to anyone who asked. While he said connecting with people directly is important for him to build credibility with Jackson residents, he admitted it’s been a little overwhelming at times trying to get back to everyone who reaches out.

But restoring trust is more than just being a personable face. Henifin said he wants residents, who will have to fund the water system once he’s left and the federal money has dried up, to feel that they’re paying into something worthwhile and that they’re being charged fairly.

“The billing system’s not helping us whatsoever at the moment, sending out terrible bills and continuing to struggle answering calls,” he said. “The trust-building where (residents) connect to us, which is really billing, is the big piece.”

While it’s a widely accepted practice for cities to charge customers based on how much water they consume, Jackson hasn’t had a reliable metering system in place for years due to the fallout from a failed Siemens contract, and residents are constantly burdened with inconsistent or incorrect bills.

As part of a debt relief program – funded through a new social safety net grant created under the CARES Act – Jackson last week began offering to correct water bills for customers who felt they were given incorrect charges. In less than a week, the city corrected $8 million in residents’ debt.

Recognizing the damage the broken water meters had done to the whole system’s credibility, Henifin in January laid out a novel approach in a financial proposal he was required to submit by the federal order: charging residents based on their property value. He conceded then that, as far as he knew, the only city to try something similar was Milwaukee with its wastewater system.

According to an analysis he presented, this system wouldn’t change much for the lower-income and average rate-payers: the median single-family household would see a $50 monthly bill; lower-value property owners would pay slightly less; and and higher-value owners would pay slightly more, with bills capped at $150.

What would change, Henifin explained, is that residents would be getting the same bill amount every month, taking away the monthly mystery that has haunted Jackson customers since the Siemens fiasco.

But on Wednesday, lawmakers passed a bill in the Senate that would ban charging customers for water in a way that doesn’t include consumption. The bill is headed back to a committee for further debate.

Henifin called out the Legislature’s efforts to interfere during a recent town hall at Millsaps college.

“There are so many things we pay for that aren’t directly connected to our use,” he. “We all pay for schools, not all of us have children. We all pay for trash, some people put out tons of trash, some people only put out a bit.

“We’re just stuck in this, ‘water has to be based on consumption’ mindset, but so many other things that are for society we pay for without even giving it much thought, because it’s all about a community that’s supporting the other members of the community.”

Lumumba has yet to comment on the idea, saying he hasn’t seen Henifin’s proposal.

The JXN Water CEO will spend the next few weeks and months at roundtables with community members to hear their thoughts on his idea, among others he put in his January financial plan.

Trusting the water

In 2015, test results for lead in Jackson’s water system showed samples above the “action level,” or legal limit, of 15 parts per billion (ppb). Just months later, the state Department of Health found that nearly a quarter of homes it tested had lead levels above 15 ppb.

The Environmental Protection Agency has since required the city to issue quarterly notices to residents, reminding pregnant women and children to take extra precautions before drinking the water. The EPA requirement is still in place for Jackson because the city has yet to complete a corrosion control plan to ensure no lead or copper dissolves into the water during the treatment process.

“How can you have trust if you have to have that statement on everything you put out about the water?” Henifin said.

He said the system to complete the corrosion control, which the city has put off completing for years, should be in place this summer, which would then allow the city to stop sending the quarterly notices.

But even after fixing the treatment process, the city will still have to ensure there’s no lead in the water lines of the distribution system. Henifin said he has a contractor set to do an inventory analysis of Jackson’s piping to determine if there are any lead service lines, and said that information should be presented to the public within a year.

Jackson is facing multiple lawsuits that allege the city exposed residents to lead, including one representing 600 children that alleges a coverup dating back to 2013.

Danyelle Holmes, National Social Justice Organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign, said that even with the city upgrading its water lines, there is still a concern of the presence of lead in the city’s homes, especially in poorer neighborhoods where pipe replacements are less feasible.

“If they’re old pipes they need to be replaced,” Holmes said. “We know that in south Jackson, and in west Jackson as well, a large portion of those homes are old homes, and those are the homes that we’re concerned will be disproportionately affected.”

In the city’s latest quarterly notice, it disclosed that during the July-December testing period it found the 90th percentile of results showed 6 ppb of lead; while 15 ppb is the legal limit, health experts say that no amount of lead is safe to consume.

Last year, a series of tests conducted by the Clarion Ledger and Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting found positive results for lead throughout Jackson, with the highest being about 6 ppb at Jackson State University.

Restoring pressure: replacing lines, plugging leaks

Because of leaks throughout the distribution system, the city of Jackson loses about half of the water that it treats and puts out everyday. On average, water systems around the country lose about 15% of the water they put out.

Water pumped from a hole dug by a water maintenance crew on Pascagoula Street in Jackson to repair a broken waterline Saturday. Crews continue to repair waterlines across the city in order to restore water to homes after severe winter storms crippled the city and state.

Henifin’s team, led by former Jackson planning director Jordan Hillman, is finding major leaks throughout the city, he said, in some cases by detecting chlorine in puddles that wouldn’t otherwise be there. He projects that, through contracted work, they’ll be able to fix some of the larger leaks within the next two years.

The other issue, though, is the city’s small diameter water lines. The modern standard is that water lines should be at least 6 inches in diameter; Jackson, though, has over 100 miles of lines smaller than that.

Henifin projected it’ll take between five to 10 years to make the necessary fixes, with the goal of doing about 20 miles of replacements each year.

“Hopefully soon after we’ll get the anecdotal stories that people say, ‘Wow, the water’s great, it’s no longer discolored,’” Henifin said. “So, if we get a couple of those stories out by fall, I think by next year we could have some movement towards trust building if (we fix) the billing system, pipe replacement, and we get the corrosion control. Those three things should help to at least begin to build some trust.”

Optimistically speaking, Henifin added, if his team of contractors plug enough of the city’s leaks, Jackson could reach a point within the next year where it wouldn’t need the century-old J.H. Fewell, one of the system’s two treatment plants. City officials have for years hoped to retire Fewell, which would save Jackson “significant money” from not having to operate it, Henifin said.

What’s next

Pending the legislative session and feedback from upcoming community roundtables and city leaders, Henifin hopes to have the new billing system in place by October.

On Tuesday, Henifin also mentioned early talks of Jackson’s wastewater system, which is under an EPA consent decree, joining the drinking water system in the federal stipulated order. But he said that decision is at least a few weeks away.

Looking ahead, Henifin is already thinking about how he plans to leave the city. In his January proposal, he looked at the various options for long-term governance, and suggested the best option would be placing the water system under a corporate nonprofit, similar to JXN Water but with a board of governors made of local constituents.

Under that model, Jackson would retain ownership of the water system assets, and contract out its services. Henifin said while he hadn’t thoroughly researched it, he didn’t know of any water systems in the U.S. with a similar model.

He added that he didn’t think it’d be wise to give the city back full control of the system, citing local politics and obstacles in issuing contracts. He said he’s had that conversation with Jackson leadership, and thinks they may come around to the idea at some point.

“I don’t believe the city has demonstrated that they’re able to do this,” Henifin said. “With a track record like that, what would make any of us think that changes just because there’s an influx of federal dollars?”

On Wednesday, proposed legislation to create a state-controlled regional authority over Jackson’s water system died in the House.

Floyd, the coordinator with JXN People’s Assembly, said she’s encouraged by the work Henifin has done so far, and thinks he’s serious about winning over residents’ trust.

“There’s going to be a lack of trust with whoever is (running the water system),” Floyd said. “I don’t think people are really that worried with (Henifin) being from wherever and coming from the outside. When is the water going to be fixed and when is my bill going to be fixed? That’s the number one concern for everybody.”

In conversations with those affected by the ongoing water crisis, Henifin said he’s been surprised by the empathy he’s gotten from Jacksonians.

“The folks have very high expectations that I might be able to make a difference, but they also seem willing to be patient,” he said. “Much more so than if I was in their shoes and had lost water pressure for weeks during the summer and again at Christmas. I’ve found it actually to be increasing my personal pressure to succeed because so many people have been really nice about encouraging me.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate

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mississippitoday.org – @rick_cleveland – 2025-04-04 11:09:00

In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”

She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.

And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”

Rick Cleveland

Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.

If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.

Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.

She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.

Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”

Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.

She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.

“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”

Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”

Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”

She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.

Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care. 

In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”

Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.

At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”

No, I said, I did not.

“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.

Of course.

“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.

“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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