By July 1, 2025, Jackson will have a new mayor. Voters turned out en masse to ensure two-time incumbent Chokwe Antar Lumumba did not continue leading the city. Democratic challenger John Horhn, a 30-year state senate veteran, defeated Lumumba by an overwhelming 75 to 25 percent margin.
Just four years earlier, Lumumba won the Democratic primary with 70 percent of the vote. What happened?
What happened is that Jackson Public Works Director Robert Miller resigned at the end of Lumumba’s first term. After Miller left, the wheels fell off.
The scuttlebutt was that Miller resigned because Lumumba refused to go public with the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s scathing report on the imminent failure of the city’s water system. A year later, the EPA report was published after a Freedom of Information request. By then, the city was suffering from incessant boil water alerts, costing a million dollars a day.
Miller was a star. He had done a bang-up job in New Orleans and it was a coup that Lumumba was able to lure him to Jackson. Miller’s good management allowed Lumumba to coast to a second term election.
It’s always the cover up that gets you in politics. If Lumumba had released the EPA report and come clean with Jackson citizens, perhaps Miller would have stayed, and the water and garbage disasters could have been averted. Life is unpredictable.
But without Miller’s steady hand, Lumumba swept the water disaster under the rug until it reared its ugly head. Jackson became the first major city in the country to go for weeks without clean water. It was a national embarrassment.
Without Miller’s steady hand, Lumumba picked a huge garbage contract fight with the city council. Garbage piled up for weeks in the street. Another national embarrassment.
Embarrassing the nation is not good for your political career. It attracted attention. One agency that noticed was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which likely wondered why Lumumba was so determined to have the garbage contract to one and only one company.
That led to Lumumba getting caught up in an FBI sting operation and indicted on corruption charges. This gave Lumumba the appearance of being not only incompetent, but corrupt and incompetent. The voters had enough.
As I pointed out in my column last week, Jackson voters will easily re-elect incumbent mayors when things are running smoothly, but they are quick to boot out incumbent mayors when things go bad. Ask Harvey Johnson, the late Frank Melton and Tony Yarber, all booted out by Jackson voters over the last 16 years.
When Lumumba was first elected, I gave him some advice in this column. I encouraged him to do a nationwide search and find the absolute best city manager in the nation and pay him whatever it took to lure him to Jackson.
Lumumba’s hiring of Public Works Director Robert Miller partially fulfilled my advice and earned Lumumba a second term. If he had followed my advice entirely, he would still be mayor and Jackson would be thriving.
Ironically, Lumumba’s colossal failure was a windfall for Jackson. The disaster was so bad that the state and federal government stepped in. The feds took over the Jackson water department and allocated $850 million to turn it around. Talk about manna from heaven. God works in mysterious ways.
The feds, under the direction of the federal judge Henry Wingate, ended up hiring one of the best water managers in the country, Ted Henifin, paying him $400,000 a year. That may seem like an outrageous sum, but he has been worth every penny. Remember, just one day without water cost the city over a million dollars per day. You get what you pay for.
Democratic nominee John Horhn still faces a serious general election candidate, Rodney DePriest in the June 3 general election. But odds on favorite is Horhn, since Jackson has traditionally been a Democratic bastion.
If Horhn should win, he should follow my advice: Do a national search for the best city manager in the nation. Pay him/her whatever it takes. Then let that person do their job.
If Horhn did that, state and federal leaders and officials would line up to help turn around Jackson. The whole state, indeed the nation, would love to see Jackson become a Cinderella story. But you can’t bite the hands that feed you.
That means Horhn’s role would be to cozy up to state and federal leaders and get everybody on the same page. Build a big team.
A good start would be to stop fighting over regionalization of the Jackson airport. True, the state should compensate Jackson in some way for the airport, but Horhn should work out an amicable deal and quit fighting this. We all know the Jackson airport is a mess. Jackson no longer dominates the metro area. Instead, it is a co-equal with Madison and Rankin counties. Accept that reality and start working on building partnerships and alliances.
This will not be easy for Horhn to do. There is no doubt he has seen plenty of discrimination in his career. But turning around Jackson will require that he look forward to the future and not backward to the past.
