Posted on 09/04/2022 9:56:24 AM PDT by TigerClaws
There is a another side to this catastrophe that has not been reported in the national news.
* Half of the plant was built in 1992. The other half in early 2007. It is NOT an old plant. It was not maintained and allowed to fall apart. Buy a Lexus but don’t replace the oil, transmission fluid, and timing belt and see what happens after 200,000 miles or so. The plant is no different.
* The city entered into a bad deal with Siemens in 2013 to replace all water meters for some new-fangled ones that would allegedly bring in more money. What it really was was a $90 million bond deal that allowed the Mayor to pass out the bond fees to his friends and stuffing minority subcontractors who weren’t licensed or qualified down Siemens’ throat. The meters didn’t work and blew up the water/sewer billing system. Bond services aren't subject to bidding laws so its an easy way to give your lawyer and consultant friends a quick $50-200,000 which the Mayor did.
* As happened when New Orleans under Landrieau installed new billing system software, thousands of residents got crazy bills or no bills at all. The Yarber administration literally told people not to pay their bills and instituted a moratorium on cutoffs. When you tell people you won’t terminate service no matter what, guess what? They don’t pay their bills. It never occurred to leadership to tell customers to pay a monthly minimum. 14,000 customers had stranded bills (no bills at all) if that tells you anything. Lumumba continued the moratorium on cutoffs. A moratorium has been in place half the time he has been in office.
* This resulted in a water/sewer department that made a profit of $7 million a year to losing $20 million a year. Public utilities are usually a money maker for cities. A city has to work real hard to lose money on these services but lose money Jackson did.
* Media says white flight decimated city finances. Uh huh. Check the city audits. On the overall budget side, the city is getting more revenue than ever. Read that sentence twice. It gets more money than every. It’s just losing nearly $20 million on its utility. The audits are on the city website.
* The city sued Siemens and settled for $90 million. $30 million went to attorneys, including the Mayors friends at a Birmingham law firm that did the real legal work and his Jackson lawyer friend, Winston Thompson, who is a criminal defense lawyer and had no business being on the case. $14 million shored up the water/sewer finances. Some was used to repaid the $90 million bonds and their ever ticking interest rates. Some was spent on other stuff.
* None of the Mayor’s staff have any management experience. He was a criminal defense lawyer in a two man firm. His Chief of Staff was a professor at JSU. His first Chief Administrative Officer was a music professor at JSU. His current CAO came from Energy but from the marketing department, not operations. The Public Works Director who was JUST reassigned after the flood was an architect. They are down to one engineer in public works and his speciality is roads and traffic. The previous Mayor had two knuckleheads for a CAO as well. One was a former deputy who never ran anything but was his bud while the other one never ran anything either. Getting the idea?
* They got caught two weeks ago not even posting online the openings for the Class A Water operators they so desperately need. They don't have Class A operators but can't seem to advertised for the jobs. They fail performing basic management tasks in the water/sewer dept.
* Worst off all. They Blew off the Health Department of years. MSDH finally called the EPA in winter of 20. EPA inspected plant in Feb. 2020. EPA was appalled at how poorly maintained and staffed the plant was. The EPA placed the city under an emergency administrative order. The Mayor hid it from the City Council, media, and public for over a year until yours truly busted it in the. Media. The Mayor refused to discuss it in the open but would only discuss it behind closed doors with the Council. He even blamed the public and media for being ill informed about it when he is the one who covered it up and refused to discuss it.
How incompetent is the leadership? A fire took place at the plant April 2021. 9 months later, several pumps were still down. The problem was the electrical panel controlling said pumps was damaged in the fire and not replaced. He blamed supply chain issues. The media filed FOIA's w/Health Dept. and found out the city had not even ordered the panel until the state told it to order the part and gave it a 30 day deadline in December. The city finally ordered the part on the last day of the deadline in January. The part arrived around May.
The city repeatedly blew off EPA mandates and deadlines in the order and continues to do so.
The plant did not flood. Period. The problem is the flooding upriver changed the chemical composition of the water entering the intakes at the reservoir. The lack of staff and failing equipment meant the water leaving the plant was barely treated.
Yep, that is Nigeria from A to Z.
We call this strategy–increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies–the Curley effect. But it is hardly unique to Curley. Other American mayors, but also politicians around the world, pursued policies that encouraged emigration of their political enemies, raising poverty but gaining political advantage
Yes but Jim Curley is to this day projected as a great guy, he loved ‘de poo peoples’. He is the inspiration of one of the two classic US political novels of the 20th century ‘The Last Hurrah’ and besides his dishonest autobiography there have been at least two full academic biographic works which are generally favorable. Make the right noises and the libs will love you forever.
And you are a racist idiot. Tell us how non-black democrat city leadership has done any better! It is horrible policy as well as corruption, not skin color causing the problems. (look at the white house) Take your racist crap and shove it.
The Curley effect ... worth researching.
Negro+politics equals third world incompetence and total lack of responsibility. Blacks have been poisoned by the religion of politics and are the most comprehensively wrecked cohort in the population. They are the American’Palestinian Arabs’. Taught they are the perpetual victim vlass who has no responsibility for their actions or the Hobbesian squalor of their lives. Politics is supposed to magically make their lives rational, peaceful, prosperous and safe. No contribution is required other than’voting right’. I have been around a long time and I can tell you black people in the cities of the South are far worse people than they were decades ago enduring Jim Crow. They are now in most cases, irrespective of class, morally depraved and without any sense of ethics and decent conduct. The Mayor of Charlottesville is a good example, four children and never married, ranting endlessly about getting rid of ‘racist history’, as though that will mke her coracialists happy, well adjusted and wwise.
You seem to be having trouble dealing with the truth.
Why? The sheeple there will vote this failure back into office and blame whitey on all their problems. It is much better than the truth.
I’d love to see the whole area turn into a cesspool.
It is just like the colonies that whites have given their independence, they all turn out the same and become shit holes. I have challenged anyone to show me an example of anything different. Show me one thriving and successful well run black country or area anywhere.
The condition is only racist because it is nearly exclusive to one race. Truth sucks but there it is. Not sorry.
It has been my observation black politicians run cities with a heart full of revenge and malice against whitey. Never with a sense of service or responsibility. Exhibit A. Detroit’s Coleman Young.
Good primer on this issue. Thanks for posting it.
That is a great link.
It’s not incompetence, it’s theft. I live in MS about 70 miles from Jackson. The city has been given hundreds of millions over the last 30 years to deal with the water system and 95% of it has ended up in the hands of crooked politicians and their friends. The only thing that’ll fix this is to frog march the mayor and his cronies out in handcuffs.
The obvious is that demonizing skin color doesn't cut it as a cause celebre. There are PLENTY of useless white libtards destroying their political habitats. More than there are black libtards destroying theirs. Deciding to stand and fight back based on skin color as causation is intellectually and morally vacant. Who cares what color the corrupt worthless politicians are? But I repeat myself.
is there a non black run democratic city?
Wait!
Portland and Seattle?
Bookmarked. May I share amongst the national engineering community?
It takes calculus at a minimum to design, build and maintain a Lexus or a water treatment plant. For example, it took the mathematics of Rene Descartes (d. 1650) for engineers to design, build and maintain Apollo 11 in 1969.
AND THIS-——
<><> EPA placed the city under an emergency administrative order.
<><>The Mayor hid it from the City Council, media, and public for over a year.
<><>The Mayor refused to discuss it in the open
<><>only discussed it behind closed doors with the Council.
<><>He even blamed the public and media for being ill informed about it
<><>when he is the one who covered it up and refused to discuss it.
Yep, just a few days ago, the mayor was ratcheting up his cost estimate for fixing the water system - to nearly One Billion Dollars. Hoping, no doubt, that the dems in D.C. would rain money down on Jackson and enable another orgy of corruption and theft. I think the state's success thus far in stepping in and restoring water pressure by simply replacing a few pumps and some fire-damaged wiring has sort of busted the scam.
It’s an anonymous email, not his, from what I can tell. But it certainly rings true.
Jackson has always been run by Dimocraps since I was born. My favorite slimy mayor of Jackson was Dale Danks. I was just looking at the mayors of Jackson from my growing up years, and they were all Democrats and all were born outside of Mississippi.
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