One of the great privileges of being a newspaper publisher and column writer has been to interact with great men. The late John McGowan was one of them.
John came to me 27 years ago seeking support for his plan to solve Jackson’s flooding problem once and for all. His plan called for the construction of two long lakes through the Pearl River Basin from the reservoir spillway to Lakeland Drive. He called it the Two Lakes Plan.
Two Lakes would have controlled the Pearl River water level to within a foot, allowing development right along the edge of the new lakes. It would have changed Jackson forever.
I was immediately captivated by the plan, having always been amazed that the center of our tri-county metro area is a big swamp. The development potential was huge. It could turn Jackson around.
Immediately, environmental advocates and the U. S. Corps of Engineers said it couldn’t be done.
Doggedly, with his masterful mind and expert engineering, McGowan proved them wrong, step by step, calculation by calculations. He was always careful not to embarrass the Corps engineers. He thought that would blow up in his face.
From the get go, I believed in John and his plan. He had already proved his hydraulic and engineering genius in the oil field, where he bought tapped out oilfields from the major oil companies on the cheap, then turned them into gold mines. He did it because he was so much smarter than everybody else.
And it was the way he talked and explained his plan. As a journalist, I have heard a million pie-in-the-sky plans, most of them malarkey. After 30 years in the news business, plus four years on Wall Street, I had a nose for what was real and what was fake.
For one thing, when a person has really mastered a concept, he can explain it in layman’s terms without missing a beat, responding to all questions with aplomb. It’s not something you can fake when grilled by a veteran journalist.
I became an advocate of Two Lakes and promoted it on the editorial pages of the Northside Sun. Jackson’s flooding problem was real and potentially catastrophic. This was a plan a good community newspaper should advocate and we did.
To muster support for such a major undertaking, required not just engineering prowess but finely tuned political skills as well. John proved to be a master at getting the powers to be in line to support the plan.
Even though the engineering for Two Lakes proved sound, the environmental advocacy groups were too powerful, even though the plan involved acre-for-acre mitigation. For every wetland acre transformed, another wetland acre somewhere else had to be set aside. But this was not enough for the environmentalists.
My attitude was this: Mississippi is a huge rural state covered in forests with no shortage of wetlands. There was no need for the center of our metro area to be wetlands.
In the end, John chose compromise and revised his Two Lake plan into a One Lake plan. The flooding benefit and the development opportunities were cut in half, but something was better than nothing. The flood control benefits were still huge compared to the status quo.
The biggest problem with the One Lake plan is that it also cut John’s enthusiasm in half. His heart was never in One Lake like it was in Two Lake.
Nevertheless, John had gotten the massive wheels of the bureaucracy grinding and One Lake is slowly but surely trudging to reality.
I always wondered who would survive longer, the bureaucracy or John’s body. We now know the answer. It’s very sad to me that John never lived to see construction begin on the plan that sprang solely from his brilliant vision. He came so close.
In the course of getting to know John, I learned so much about so many things. He complained vociferously about absurd aspects of the federal EPA and the state DEQ.
One of his major complaints is that you couldn’t challenge the science of the EPA or DEQ in courts. They deferred totally to the bureaucracy. You could only challenge the legal process. Just in the past few years, the U. S. Supreme Court changed that, proving John correct once again.
John was also disturbed by the rise of huge pools of institutional equity funded by pension plans. These huge private equity funds have too much power, leverage and tax advantages, squeezing out the average businessman and undermining free enterprise. His concern will prove to be visionary.
I worked closely with John exposing an abuse of the EPA, throwing a Mississippi family in jail for absurd wetlands violations. Presidential candidate Rand Paul made this a chapter in his book. Eventually, the family was freed. Since then the U. S. Supreme Court has greatly curtailed the EPA’s power to call anything it wants wetlands.
John McGowan was extremely generous, the opposite image of the money-grubbing capitalist. He cut everybody in on the deal, making 120 people millionaires. I loved the name of his company: McGowan Working Partners. That said it all.
John McGowan was a genius who greatly enhanced the lives of all around him. His life serves as a warning to us all: We must have an economic and social system that encourages and nurtures geniuses. They are the engines of our prosperity as John proved.
