Mississippi Today

With billions on the table for water infrastructure, small communities risk being left out to dry

Published

2 years ago

June 23, 2023

Seth Petersen was at his grandmother’s funeral, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

Three hours away in the village of Luck, Wisconsin, where he served as director of public works, there was an emergency. Petersen was getting calls repeatedly, asking for his expertise.

Petersen and two other employees were responsible for drinking water, wastewater, street maintenance, park and cemetery maintenance and picking up stray dogs, he said. The job never stopped.

“Seth, what the (expletive) are you doing?” his brother-in-law said to him as he came back to the family gathering from another call. “Why are you living like this?”

Petersen left that job at the end of last year. Now, he helps train water operators in small communities for the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

Luck is not an outlier. In small and rural communities across the U.S., water system operators are stretched thin, covering around-the-clock responsibilities to keep water running safely and reliably despite aging and underfunded infrastructure.

The consequences of a water system falling behind have received the national spotlight, infamously in Flint, Michigan, and most recently in Jackson, Mississippi, where majority-Black communities bore the brunt of mismanagement and aging infrastructure.

Thousands of under-resourced systems risk a similar fate, and small water systems — defined by the EPA as serving fewer than 10,000 people, and making up more than 90% of the nation’s community water systems — are in a particularly precarious position.

Their staffing is often sparse and underpaid. Infrastructure, in many places, is crumbling and underfunded, and though there is a fresh infusion of federal money on the table, it’s a challenge to access.

The American Rescue Plan Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other programs represent a historic investment in the country’s water infrastructure, totaling billions of dollars.

But the total available funding, even after it’s all been doled out, still won’t be enough. One report from 2020 estimated that the U.S. would need to invest nearly $3.3 trillion in water and wastewater infrastructure projects between 2019 and 2039 to keep systems updated.

Many communities will also face increases in their water bills to keep up with infrastructure and staffing needs. Yet raising the price of water may prove unworkable in rural and historically-underinvested communities like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, some of the most impoverished in the country.

No one in the U.S. should have to worry about having safe drinking water, said Chris Groh, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

“But a town doesn’t take care of itself.”

Small community water systems falling behind

Over the last two decades, water systems in the ten states bordering the Mississippi River violated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for drinking water more than 438,000 times.

That figure includes thousands of instances of heightened levels of harmful chemicals in water each year. Nitrates, trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which have all been linked to various cancers and other health hazards, were top contaminants in the EPA’s violation data in 2022.

Nitrates are an indicator of agricultural runoff, common in rural areas. And trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids appear as byproducts of the water treatment process, when chlorine reacts with organic contents.

Addressing these issues can require expensive treatment technology. But in the last two decades, small and large utilities alike have reined in the number of violations.

However, an Ag and Water Desk analysis of EPA Safe Drinking Water Act violation data nationwide found small water systems have been slower to reduce their violations than larger systems. And these violations only represented those reported; there could be many more incidences of unreported issues.

In the ten states along the Mississippi River, both small and large water systems saw increases in violations newly reported during 2022. For small water systems, that increase was more significant.

That disparity is, at least in part, an indicator of the disadvantages facing small and rural water systems, according to Jennifer Sloan Ziegler, a Mississippi-based engineer serving as vice president of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Environmental and Water Resources Institute.

And recent injections of federal infrastructure funding won’t be enough, she said. They’re not sustained funding, she added, and “the sad thing about it is: It still doesn’t catch us up.”

‘I don’t have a day off’

The working conditions that drove Petersen to leave his position in Luck are a trend reflected in small communities across the country.

“I don’t have a day off,” said Nathan Taylor, lead operator of a small water plant in Wax, Kentucky. The days he’s not on-duty, his phone is constantly ringing as issues come up at the plant, he said.

Ziegler pointed out a water operator she knows nearby in the Mississippi Delta, whose responsibilities span four different water districts — “a huge, huge area,” she said.

Water system operators serve as a first line of defense for a community’s public health, and must have working knowledge of chemistry for licensing tests.

Yet operator pay in many small communities is about neck-and-neck with wages at the local McDonald’s. Other trades, like construction, often pay far more.

“You can go swing a hammer for 25 bucks an hour,” said Petersen, in Wisconsin, “…and you can ice fish all winter.”

A workforce survey last year in Kentucky found water utilities in the state pay as low as $10 per hour for an entry level position, with an average closer to $18. But 72% of managers reported losing staff to better pay in another job opportunity or other, often larger utilities.

The water workforce nationally is also aging overwhelmingly. Seventeen million workers are expected to leave the industry in the next decade, Ziegler said, and bringing young people into the profession has proven challenging.

“We’re losing people,” she said, and “we’re not getting them back.”

Federal money on the table, if you can get it

Widespread water workforce shortages make accessing infrastructure funding an even bigger task for small water systems’ overworked staff, despite desperate needs.

And the application process for federal funds often looks very similar in a village of 1,000 or a city of half a million, according to Ziegler.

“It is extremely extensive,” she said. “Not just the application, but the amount of background documentation that you have to provide them. It takes… I would say, months, to get it together.”

Smaller systems are at an inherent disadvantage. Larger utilities, with more ratepayers and bigger budgets, often have experts on staff to go after competitive funding pots.

“Their applications are shiny,” Petersen said. “And they’re written by someone with a Master’s degree.”

During his tenure as director of public works, Petersen worked through the application process to access federal infrastructure funding for Luck’s streets. Even with help from a consultant and phone calls with the state, he described it as overwhelming.

“You don’t even know where to begin,” he said. “Things are this far behind.”

Luck didn’t get that money. And in cash-strapped communities, paying large sums for the help of consultants in applying for funding that isn’t guaranteed is a big gamble.

“Let’s just be honest. If they can’t afford to upgrade and maintain and operate their systems with the money they have,” Ziegler said, “do you think they have money left over to hire somebody, to pay somebody to put together this application…? They don’t.”

Poorer communities facing higher water bills

Without sustained infrastructure funding, communities in turn face a rising water rate. In many rural areas, it’s a bill they can’t afford.

In Martin County, Kentucky, where communities are built along snaking creeks and between the rolling mountains of Appalachia, residents still don’t trust the tap.

Decades of water district mismanagement, including chronic reports of discolored water and burdensome service shutoffs, eventually culminated in a state takeover. In 2020, authorities shifted control to Alliance Water Resources, a private firm, hoping to get the county’s water provisions on the right track.

At the peak of the crisis, the system’s aging water lines were leaking up to 90% of the water they were carrying, according to the estimates of Craig Miller, who now oversees the county’s water operations as division manager for the firm. For Martin County, that meant tens of millions of gallons of water going to waste every month.

In the years since the change in management, Martin County’s water system has made progress. In a recent stakeholder workgroup meeting, Miller reported improvements in water loss, as well as new hires and licensing for staff.

“There’s a good story here,” Miller said in the meeting. “But it is not over.”

Improvements came with a 24% rate increase, effective last year, piling onto already steep prices. More than a fifth of Martin County lives below the poverty line, according to recent census data.

“That’s a huge burden on our poorest people,” said Nina McCoy, an advocate with Martin County Concerned Citizens, in the workgroup meeting. She pointed out that local water rates are far higher than in wealthier Louisville, where median income is 50% higher than that of Martin County.

The region’s mountainous terrain piles onto water infrastructure challenges, said Lindell Ormsbee, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who’s paid close attention to the state’s water system struggles. And as in many rural areas, there are miles of water lines for relatively few homes, compared to cities like Louisville.

In Eastern Kentucky, many counties have historically relied on taxing the coal industry to fund water and other infrastructure needs. As the coal industry has declined, that funding has dried up, Ormsbee said, turning the burden over to ratepayers.

Even if systems are able to access one-time federal infrastructure funding, once it’s spent, they’ll return back to current levels of funding. In small communities, Ziegler said, that just won’t be enough.

“They’re serving less affluent areas. They’re serving older populations on fixed incomes,” Ziegler said, citing high rates of poverty in the rural and disadvantaged communities of her state of Mississippi. “Their customers cannot afford to pay more.”

Connor Giffin is an environmental reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal and a corps member with Report for America. Kae Petrin contributed data reporting.

This story, published in partnership with the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, part of Mississippi Today, is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, funded by the Walton Family Foundation.

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

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1977

Published

19 hours ago

March 8, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2025-03-08 07:00:00

On this day in 1977

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today
March 8, 2025

March 8, 1977

Henry Marsh — Henry L. Marsh III became the first Black mayor of the Confederacy’s capital.

Henry L. Marsh III became the first Black mayor of the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.

Growing up in Virginia, he attended a one-room school that had seven grades and one teacher. Afterward, he went to Richmond, where he became vice president of the senior class at Maggie L. Walker High School and president of the student NAACP branch.

When Virginia lawmakers debated whether to adopt “massive resistance,” he testified against that plan and later won a scholarship for Howard University School of Law. He decided to become a lawyer to “help make positive change happen.” After graduating, he helped win thousands of workers their class-actions cases and helped others succeed in fighting segregation cases.

“We were constantly fighting against race prejudice,” he recalled. “For instance, in the case of Franklin v. Giles County, a local official fired all of the black public school teachers. We sued and got the (that) decision overruled.”

In 1966, he was elected to the Richmond City Council and later became the city’s first Black mayor for five years. He inherited a landlocked city that had lost 40% of its retail revenues in three years, comparing it to “taking a wounded man, tying his hands behind his back, planting his feet in concrete and throwing him in the water and saying, ‘OK, let’s see you survive.’”

In the end, he led the city from “acute racial polarization towards a more civil society.” He served as president of the National Black Caucus of Elected Officials and as a member of the board of directors of the National League of Cities.

As an education supporter, he formed the Support Committee for Excellence in the Public Schools. He also hosts the city’s Annual Juneteenth Celebration. The courthouse where he practiced now bears his name and so does an elementary school.

Marsh also worked to bridge the city’s racial divide, creating what is now known as Venture Richmond. He was often quoted as saying, “It doesn’t impress me to say that something has never been done before, because everything that is done for the first time had never been done before.”

He died on Jan. 23, 2025, at the age of 91.

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

Mississippi Today

Judge tosses evidence tampering against Tim Herrington

Published

1 day ago

March 7, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Molly Minta – 2025-03-07 15:08:00

A Lafayette County circuit judge ended an attempt to prosecute Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., the son of a prominent north Mississippi church family who is accused of killing a fellow University of Mississippi student named Jimmie “Jay” Lee, for evidence tampering.

In a March 7 order, Kelly Luther wrote that Herrington cannot be charged with evidence tampering because of the crime’s two-year statute of limitations. A grand jury indicted the University of Mississippi graduate last month on the charge for allegedly hiding Lee’s remains in a well-known dumping ground about 20 minutes from Herrington’s parent’s house in Grenada.

“The Court finds that prosecution for the charge of Tampering with Physical Evidence commenced outside the two-year statute of limitations and is therefore time-barred,” Luther wrote.

In order to stick, Luther essentially ruled that the prosecution should have brought the charges against Herrington sooner. In court last week, the prosecution argued that it could not have brought those charges to a grand jury without Lee’s remains, which provided the evidence that evidence tampering occurred.

The dismissal came after Herrington’s new counsel, Jackson-area criminal defense attorney Aafram Sellers, filed a motion to throw out the count. Sellers did not respond to a request for commend by press time.

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

Mississippi Today

JXN Water is running out of operating money, set to raise rates again

Published

2 days ago

March 7, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Alex Rozier – 2025-03-07 11:33:00

JXN Water is losing money at a rate it can’t sustain, according to a financial outlook it released last week, as the federal dollars it received to run day-to-day operations are set to run out next month.

Ted Henifin, who manages the third-party provider, told Mississippi Today on Thursday that the funding shortfall may extend repair times for line breaks, and that the utility will look to once again raise rates on customers’ water bills. Henifin explained that various factors — such as debt payments, higher-than-expected operating costs, and slower-than-expected collections gains — have left the water utility in a precarious position where it’s now losing $3 million a month.

“Gone from a water disaster to a bit of financial disaster or so,” Henifin described.

Workers with Gould Enterprises, LLC, JXN Water contractors, repair a water line at the t-section of Beacon Place and Queensroad Avenue in the Bel-Air subdivision in Jackson, Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.

The federal government set aside a historic $800 million for Jackson to fix its water and sewer systems in 2022, with $600 million of that tied specifically to the water system. That included $150 million of “flexible” funding, which JXN Water has used mostly for line repairs as well as on a contract with Jacobs to run the day-to-day operations of the system. The rest of the $600 million was intended for bigger, capital projects.

But the $150 million, Henifin said, is on track to run out in April. He said JXN Water will look for grants and low-interest loans to hold its operations together, as well as work with Congress to free up some of the $450 million — the amount intended for larger projects — for operations spending.

The water provider is also set to impose an almost 12% rate increase on customers’ water bills this spring — just under $9 per month for the average resident — the second rate hike in as many years (the utility a year ago raised rates on average $10 per month). While the 2022 federal order requires it to put rate increases before the Jackson City Council, JXN Water only needs the approval of overseeing U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate.

Ted Henifin, the City of Jackson’s water system third-party administrator, speaks about the company that will be running the city’s water treatment plant operations during a press conference at Hinds Community College in Jackson, Miss., Friday, February 24, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

In addition to higher-than-expected operating costs, such as fixing line breaks, Henifin said the utility was also unsuccessful in retiring some of the city’s debt due to federal constraints over how it spends the $450 million pot. As a result, JXN Water is paying $1.5 million a month, or half of its total losses, in debt services.

Meanwhile, the utility’s revenue collection rate of 70% is an improvement from a year ago, when it was under 60%, but it’s still far below the national average. Last year, Henifin told Mississippi Today in order to make the water system self-sustainable by the time federal funding runs out, the rate needs to reach 80% in 2025 and 90% in 2026. The financial report says there are 14,000 accounts that receive water but aren’t paying bills.

Henifin admitted on Thursday, though, that even if collection rates were at 100%, JXN Water would still be losing money.

“It’s really the running out of the federal funds and not having closed that gap on local revenues,” he said. “Error on our part maybe that we didn’t focus on this earlier, but we were really trying to get the water system working.”

Last week’s financial plan added that a decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over whether to release SNAP recipient data is expected within the next two months. JXN Water last year introduced a first-of-its-kind discount for SNAP recipients, but both federal and state officials appealed an order from Wingate to release the names of those recipients, preventing the utility from automatically applying those discounts.

Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson Credit: Mississippi House

To help free up funding for the utility, Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, wrote a bill which would allow JXN Water to become a water authority for the purpose of accessing tax-exempt bonds or loans. The bill now just needs to pass a floor vote in the Senate.

Henifin added that, after some initial uncertainty, JXN Water’s current funding won’t be impacted by the Trump administration’s recent freezing of federal grant funds.

He also said the funds they do have access to are being used to make major improvements, such as fixing the membrane trains, filters and sediment basins at the O.B. Curtis treatment plant.

“I think it’s a pretty bright future,” Henifin said. “If we can just get over this little cashflow hump we’re in good shape.”

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