By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black
(WIB) – When Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, went to Jackson, Mississippi, in 2021, he was supposed to visit a school. But when he went to Wilkins Elementary on a Monday afternoon, there were no kids around — water pressure issues led the schools to switch over to remote learning, and later in the day, a boil notice was issued too. During his tour of the building, Regan was shown how, due to low water pressure, the toilets in the bathrooms couldn’t even be flushed.
Regan was in Jackson to tout the Biden Administration’s just-passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure act, which included nearly half a billion dollars for Mississippi to spend on water infrastructure — investment that Regan was seeing first-hand that Jackson, in particular, desperately needed.
“I’m excited to be here. I’d be more excited if the halls were filled with children. But this is the reason I’m here,” Regan said, according to the Mississippi Free Press. During his visit, Regan talked about the need for investment in Jackson’s deteriorating water system, including the kind of direct federal support from the EPA that was standard until the 1980s.
“We’re going to look at what is working from our existing program infrastructure so that we can get the money out as quickly as is possible,” Regan told the Free Press in response to a question about the possibility of returning to that kind of direct support instead of funding infrastructure through loans that impoverished cities like Jackson often struggle to pay back. “But all of the money won’t go through the traditional means. Some resources would have to go through new programming to be sure that we tackle those legacy issues.”
Regan appeared to be clear on the state of Jackson’s water system and the need for increased and even novel investment in order to modernize it. But the EPA itself actually gave Mississippi a thumbs up for its distribution of federal funds over the year prior. In a report, the agency said there were “no findings” that the state hadn’t unfairly distributed federal funds — and the EPA said this just days before a series of storms took Jackson’s water system from a failing one to a failed one, causing a full-blown crisis in the 80% Black city.
The “no findings” report is one of many revelations about the lead-up to the 2022 Jackson water crisis included in a new report from the Project on Government Oversight that makes the case that if the EPA had been a more effective watchdog, it could have compelled Mississippi to invest in Jackson’s water system before it failed so catastrophically.
“Years of financial oversight reports show no warnings from the EPA to Mississippi regarding massive, unmet infrastructure needs in Jackson and failures by the state to adequately fund improvements with available federal money,” according to the report.
If everyone seemed to know that Jackson’s water system was on the verge of failing, why did it take a natural disaster — a foot of rain fell on parts of the state, causing the Pearl River to flood, inundating the Jackson water plant and making it completely inoperable — for any money to be funneled to the city?
Jackson, with its tax base that is both shrinking and poor, couldn’t take on loans to modernize the system, which would have cost $1 billion. And the state of Mississippi didn’t make it any easier for Jackson to get any infrastructure funding, according to the report.
“Jackson originally was awarded 82 percent less loan subsidy per capita when compared to all other disadvantaged communities,” between 2015 and 2022, according to an EPA inspector general report quoted by POGO.
As with its civil rights investigations under Title XI, the EPA is often reluctant to be critical in its review of state’s investments of federal funds.
“States don’t like us to write findings,” is how Johnnie Purify, Jr., who works in the agency’s regional office that’s in charge of Mississippi, put it to POGO. Rather than alienating states by being a highly critical federal partner, the EPA goes easier on local governments with its oversight capacity in the hopes that states will remain willing to work hand-in-hand with the agency rather than developing the kind of adversarial relationship that now exists between Louisiana and the EPA.
After the 48-day crisis, which left some parts of Jackson without any water at all for periods of time, the city finally received $600 million — not loans — to fix its system.