A pot of unspent federal money could have prevented Jackson’s water crisis

By Lylla Younes

On August 29, 2022, as many as 180,000 residents in Jackson, Mississippi, lost access to clean drinking water. More than 12 inches of rain had fallen across the region, causing the Pearl River to flood. Jackson’s main water treatment plant was overrun.

While blame for the crisis has largely fallen on the state and local governments, a new report by researchers at the Project for Government Oversight, or POGO, highlights a breakdown in communication between different arms of the EPA: The agency has been diligent about flagging drinking water issues in Jackson — suing the city in 2020 for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act — but its supervision of the state’s use of federal dollars for water infrastructure updates has been limited.

When Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, it established a program whereby municipalities could use federal funding to update their beleaguered water infrastructure. The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund is administered by state environment departments, which review applications by local governments and distribute funding in the form of loans each year. The EPA is responsible for making annual reports on where the money is going. In the case of Jackson, the reports seem to have functioned as a “rubber stamp” of Mississippi’s management of the fund, POGO researchers wrote.

Mississippi has historically enjoyed generous allocations from the fund, with more than $260 million allotted between 2017 and 2021 alone. Jackson, which is more than 80 percent Black, has not reaped the benefits. Today, brown-tinged water continues to flow out of taps across the city.

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