Mississippi Gov. on Jackson water crisis: ‘Privatization is on the table’

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) said that he is open to numerous long-term options in an effort to restore the city of Jackson, Miss., water system, adding that privatizing the system is “on the table.” 

“As we turn to long-term problems in the future, I want to clarify a few things: There are indeed problems in Jackson that are decades old, on the order of $1 billion to fix,” Reeves said during a press conference on Monday. “The crisis we intervened to solve is not one of those problems.”

“Privatization is on the table,” Reeves added. “Having a commission that oversees failed water systems as they have in many states is on the table. I’m open to ideas.”

Reeves also said that the city’s water system has made major improvements in the past week. Officials informed him that an old water plant is pumping out clean water for the first time in decades, according to the Mississippi Free Press. 

Reeves said that his hope is to remove the boil water advisory for Jackson within days.

Flooding had exacerbated existing problems in Jackson, leaving 150,000 residents in the city without potable water to drink. The most immediate cause of the problem was flooding from the Pearl River that ran into the streets and caused problems at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant.

However, the city’s water system has had problems for some time, including a lack of clarity in the water, leaks and line breaks in the city’s distribution system, and broken monitoring equipment, among other things.

“We know that it is always possible that there will be more severe challenges. This water system broke over several years, and it would be inaccurate to claim it is totally solved in the matter of less than a week,” Reeves told reporters.

“… There may be more bad days in the future. We have, however, reached a place where people in Jackson can trust that water will come out of the faucet, toilets can be flushed and fires can be put out.”

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said in an interview on Sunday that there is no timeline for when city residents will have access to drinkable water. 

“I think it’s still too early to tell,” Criswell told host Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that officials’ main focus now is to get bottled water out to city residents affected by the outage.

“I think that having EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and the Army Corps of Engineers — we had a really good conversation on Friday about what it’s going to take in the assessments that they’re doing,” Criswell added.