Editorial Roundup: Mississippi
Vicksburg Post. May 13, 2023.
Editorial: TORNADO Act could save lives, but we need more
Sen. Roger Wicker announced this week the passage of the reintroduced Tornado Observation Research Notification and Deployment to Operations (TORNADO) Act through the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
After hearing the stories of people hit by the Rolling Fork tornado on March 24, we have to say this act would be a positive step toward preventing another high-casualty event for such a small town. Rolling Fork lost approximately 1 percent of its population in the tornado, and even more people than that were seriously injured.
Survivor after survivor told The Post and other news outlets the following sentence in the aftermath of the storm: “We had five minutes to find shelter.”
The TORNADO Act, in essence, would require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to update its methods for predicting and communicating weather alerts to residents. Imagine if updates had been in place prior to this natural disaster.
Every time bad weather is forecast, the news springs into action. We call our local emergency management personnel (in our case the incomparable John Elfer) as well as the National Weather Service office in Jackson to get the latest information to readers.
No matter what kind of weather is in the forecast, both NWS and Elfer preach the same thing: Have more than one way to get weather alerts. Don’t rely on Facebook or your computer or cell phone alone. Have a weather radio at your disposal and have the means to get the most localized information possible.
In a place like Warren County, where you’re surrounded by tiny municipalities and unincorporated areas, it’s easy to focus on the larger map dots during a weather event. Just think — when was the last time the TV meteorologist said “Yokena” or “Fitler” when reporting severe weather?
People still live in these smaller areas, and the TORNADO Act is designed to increase the reliability of severe weather reporting tools through NOAA in order to keep people safe.
Increased accuracy in reporting is only the tip of the iceberg, however.
For many in Rolling Fork, as the NBC special report published on vicksburgpost.com this week detailed, five or 10 or 20 more minutes wouldn’t have made a difference in saving homes or lives. The closest verified storm shelter is 53 miles away in Morgan City, and it only holds 20 people.
The state of Mississippi doesn’t comprehensively track tornado shelters that are open to the public, and a list of the largest safe rooms isn’t available online. Warren County doesn’t have a storm shelter — something it has in common with eight of the 15 counties surrounding Sharkey County.
There is still more to be done in order to keep people in our part of the world safe in a severe weather event. But the TORNADO act is a good start. Maybe for their next act, Sens. Wicker or Cindy Hyde-Smith — our District 2 Congressional Rep. Bennie Thompson — will introduce legislation to fund storm shelters and the infrastructure to support them in Mississippi.
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Greenwood Commonwealth. May 16, 2023.
Editorial: Report Alarming But Mostly Old News
If there’s value in stating the obvious, State Auditor Shad White mined it for all its worth with his recent report on the financial troubles of Mississippi’s capital city.
There wasn’t a whole lot new in what White’s agency uncovered from reviewing the annual audits of Jackson conducted by private accounting firms since 2003. (By law, the state auditor is not allowed to conduct its own audits of municipalities.)
The report found that Jackson has dramatically decreased in population, that its debt has significantly increased, and that its water system — the largest drain on the city’s treasury — has been a leaky mess, with scads of people getting away without paying for some or all of the water they have been consuming.
News media accounts, though, have already amply laid all of this out and then some.
One of the major surprises in the auditor’s report was actually a positive. The property tax burden on Jackson businesses and residents, once population loss and inflation are factored in, is about the same in 2021 as it was in 2003. Usually, when a metropolitan area loses as much population as Jackson has — 18% in those 18 years — those who remain are socked with a heavier tax load. That apparently has not been the case.
What has been the case, though, is a water system that is not only structurally disastrous but financially so as well.
One of the more interesting statistical tidbits White produced was a comparison of Jackson’s water system to that of two similarly sized Southern cities — Savannah, Georgia, and Pasadena, Texas. In 2021, the most recent year reported, Jackson’s water system posted a nearly $28 million loss, while the water systems in the other two cities turned a profit of about $10 million each.
There are at least two reasons for the disparity. Jackson doesn’t collect enough money, and it uses a whole lot more water. The average consumption per person in Jackson was 547 gallons per day, compared to 413 gallons in Savannah and 134 in Texas. It is hard to believe that the average consumer in Jackson takes that many more showers or waters the lawn that much more. More than likely, the disparity is a reflection of the well-documented leaks that abound throughout the system and the city’s slowness in plugging those leaks.
A federally appointed water czar is in charge of fixing the problem. He has more than $800 million with which to work.
That will go a long way to stopping the leaks and putting the infrastructure back in order. But in order to cure the operating deficits, it’s going to require a lot more revenue coming in from users. Ted Henifin, the water czar, proposed tacking the cost of the water system onto property taxes. The idea, though, got shot down by a public revolt that culminated in the state Legislature this year mandating that water bills everywhere be based on actual consumption.
Henifin’s property-tax solution would have been a quicker, cheaper way to boost collections, but it wasn’t politically palatable. Thus, Jackson is left with continuing to replace its 50,000 faulty residential meters, cracking down on residents who have bypassed the meters, and being more dogged about collecting outstanding bills.
It will take a minor miracle for Henifin to pull off this turnaround. Here’s hoping he is a miracle worker.
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Columbus Dispatch. May 13, 2023.
Editorial: ‘Well-treated’ bondage is unfortunately an enduring myth
Since 2005, students in the African American history class at Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science have staged a program in conjunction with the Eighth of May, the day Columbus slaves were emancipated by federal troops – May 8, 1865. Through spoken word, song and dramatic performance, the program explores aspects of the local Black community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The program, which this year featured performances by the Columbus Middle School choir, produced something else of value: a conversation about the living conditions and opportunities of Lowndes County’s 16,730 slaves at the time of their liberation.
Addressing that topic, Dispatch columnist Slim Smith wondered about the realities of those freed slaves on the day of their emancipation, noting that while there was an exodus of freed slaves in parts of the South, the Black population of Lowndes County actually increased by more than 5,000 between 1860 and 1870.
Columbus residents Bob Raymond and Dick Leike also took up that topic in separate public forums: Raymond in a Dispatch Letter to the Editor, Leike in a podcast by British journalist Jack Boswell.
It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
But what happens if the memory of the past is more myth than reality? Do we profit from that?
Each in his own way, Raymond and Leike presented accounts of Black reality before and after May 8, 1865 that distorts history and defies reason.
In his letter, Raymond wrote, “The majority of (freed slaves) returned (to the plantations) after several weeks and signed labor contracts with their former owners. You can judge the quality of life and pre-war treatment of the slaves by the percentages that signed these contracts compared to the antebellum census record numbers. It can be assumed that the plantations that lost a large number of former slaves were either run or owned by less compassionate people.”
The idea that large numbers of freed slaves returned to the plantations because they were well-treated by plantation owners, has no basis in fact.
For most, returning wasn’t a choice in any real sense of the word. On May 9, 1865, the suddenly freed slaves of Columbus were penniless, illiterate (it was a crime to teach slaves to read/write), held no property beyond the clothes on their back, had no access to capital and could be forced into virtual slavery through Mississippi’s notorious Black Codes passed that same year, which said Blacks who had no job or assembled with other Blacks could be arrested on the spot for vagrancy. (The law did not apply to white people in the same circumstances.)
If unable to pay the fine (and few were), those arrested could be contracted out to white people who agreed to pay the fine. The law allowed the white employer to charge those unpaid contracted workers for the cost of the fine along with living expenses, ensuring that those held would not be free for months, even years, as those costs accrued for people who were paid no wages. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Slavery by Another Name,” Delta native Douglas Blackmon documented this convict labor practice that continued until World War II.
Freed Blacks didn’t return to the plantations because they had been well-treated. They returned because they had no real choice. Theirs was a nominal freedom because a person who has only one option, has none.
In Boswell’s podcast, “Off The Beaten Jack,” Leike, a descendant of plantation owners, said, “Maybe slavery wasn’t to everybody what it is made up to be today. Maybe it’s not a good analogy, but if you have a good racehorse, you are not going to mistreat it.”
That slaves may have been treated as a “good racehorse” provides no solace. A human being deserves far better than to be treated as a financial asset, livestock or otherwise. Can anyone seriously disagree?
Misleading narratives such as Raymond’s and Leike’s seek to sanitize the real horrors of slavery. They are further evidence of the value of events like the Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration, which are committed to telling the real story of Black America, no matter how disturbing it has been at times.
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