Douglas Carswell, the president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, made a good point recently when he said state officials should be careful with their handling of the many problems in Jackson, the state capital.
Jackson made national news last year when its water system collapsed. The city became the first in the nation to get a federally appointed “water czar,” who is in charge of working up a plan to spend at least $800 million in federal assistance to repair the infrastructure.
Along with the water system, too many of Jackson’s roads are in poor shape. Its schools are struggling, its tax base is declining and the city has one of America’s highest per-capita homicide rates.
In response, the state Legislature is considering a number of ways to help. Carswell’s concern is that these efforts could be counterproductive, and he can use experience as a guide when making his case.
Carswell, who is from Great Britain, is a former member of Parliament. In a Feb. 21 online column, he recalled an effort by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to fix problems in areas of the country run by what Carswell called “the looney left,” where local officials “were often so incompetent they could not run a bath.”
Carswell believes Thatcher’s assistance may have helped in the short term, but it also delayed permanent solutions for local problems.
It delayed a reckoning, he said, “when people in those badly run areas had to face the consequences of how they voted.” It also played into the hands of local politicians “whose whole schtick was to foster grievances, as opposed to run things competently.”
These themes are playing out in Jackson today. Obviously things had gotten so bad with the water system that the city needed emergency help. But now that help has arrived, will residents hold local elected officials accountable for this massive failure? The short list of Jackson’s problems is a cry for new local leadership.
As for fostering grievances, just watch Jackson TV stations, where some officials regularly put on a master class. That runs both ways, as the inability or unwillingness of Jackson’s Black Democratic leaders and the Legislature’s majority-white Republicans to communicate prevented earlier discussions about solutions to the city’s problems.
Legislative Republicans, in their eagerness to set things right in Jackson, have gone too far with some proposals. The best example is the idea to give Capitol police jurisdiction over the entire city rather than just a few blocks of downtown, and to appoint more judges for Jackson instead of letting residents elect them.
Mississippi needs a functioning capital city, and so a Jackson in crisis does deserve extra attention and money from the state. But whatever their motivations, lawmakers must resist the temptation to seize too much authority.
“No conservative would want the federal government to step in and run our state,” Carswell correctly observed. “We should be cautious about having the state government intrude too far into municipal affairs either.”
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
