Jackson Free Press

It might have sounded good last week when Mayor Tony Yarber stood before reporters and declared a state of emergency to try to squeeze more funds for infrastructure repairs out of official coffers (see page 9). But if there's anything Jackson doesn't need to continue, it's needing to panic at the 11th hour before the city administration and others weren't more proactive in fixing and planning for problems before they became a crisis.

Perhaps the most damning statement in that story is this comment from Judy Hughes to the Feb. 24 city council meeting: "The City has known this problem that we're having for almost five years and has done nothing about it."

She's right. Part of Jackson's culture has long been a get-to-it-later attitude that allows serious problems to blow up into even worse emergencies before taking action. What we need is a sense of urgency all the time about our problems, not sudden panic and certainly not official proclamations that could even make things worse.

Yarber's emergency declaration could be seen as stage drama, or even straight-up politics, or a sign that he is really waking up to residents' infrastructure concerns. But that doesn't mean that it was the right approach. Yes, Jacksonians are concerned about water, sewer and other infrastructure problems, but we have been for a long time. And perhaps what residents are most concerned about now is what it's going to cost the taxpayers because due diligence wasn't paid along the way by our various elected officials when, say, a pricey contract was signed with Siemens (see cover story, page 15-18).

(Not to mention, we'd like to see the Yarber adopt the same urgent tone about actually sharing Siemens documents with the public so we can be fully involved in formulating a solution. He promised us transparency; we now need it delivered.)

Mississippi Department of Health spokeswoman Liz Sharlot's comments about the emergency declaration are also telling: What we need more than an emergency declaration is for the city to find an engineer to develop a plan before applying for funds.

What that says to us is that the city needs to do the hard, steady work day in and day out to deal with our problems in a smart way—while avoiding drama of all kinds, especially the created type that comes from being miffed about being asked for public records. Just provide the dang records the law says that the public gets to have, and then get back to doing the day-in-day-out work of running a city well—including getting in front of problems.

To us, whether under past mayors or the current one, sudden "states of emergency" say a lot about how the city is being run, or not run. We urge the mayor and other city leaders to take a hard look at themselves and how they're managing our resources—and then make sure we have the information we citizens need to keep our public servants in check. Hand-waving and drama are a waste of everyone's time and money.