Jackson Jambalaya

It's what's underneath the roads that is going to sink Jackson.

Looks like they never spent very much on paving roads. Is it any wonder the roads look like goat trails?

The 68.3 miles in 2009 was 20 year bond money. Thin skinned all over the city and roads back to crap again.

Free Water!!
About 6 months ago we saw the firing of 3 employees who had taken money for "free hookups" to their patrons.
Are those who have received this "free" water ever been issued meters? Or had their meter-less hookups discontinued?
Inquiring minds, and those of us who pay water bills, want to know....

For many years repaving was not allowed for Federal funding but a few years ago that was changed and some can not be spent for this. I bet much of this repaving is now Federal money.

This example should be a lesson to the entire State about ignoring spending on infrastructure. Every year road go unfixed it becomes more expensive to fix them.

For the most part the whole state does the same thing. The big difference is that in the burbs the money held back for not maintaining streets can be used later in election years so that politicians can look good and people can be convinced that the local government is "responsive". Jackson could do the same years ago.. but not anymore. After paying all the salaries and handling it's other long-term obligations, there's not enough money generated for Jackson's coffers to fix the crumbling streets in a city that has annexed more than it's shrinking tax base can handle. Since maintenance was never a real priority for the city back in the 70's and 80's, now in most cases it's too late for maintenance. These streets don't need maintenance, they need FIXING. Where's the money? Not in Jackson.

"It's what's underneath the roads that is going to sink Jackson."

So, if I'm to understand comments like that, there's no point in maintaining or fixing anything since it's a lost cause and maybe the feds will eventually come to the rescue. Or do I have it wrong?

Didn't know the feds had the ability to wave a magic wand and make Yazoo Clay disappear. But, I'd bet that if The Donald said he was going to do it, there would be plenty of his followers that would believe it could be done! Just like a wall. Or shipping out the illegals. It would happen because he said for it to.

But short of The Donald taking it on, there is little the feds could do either. What would help, though, is for continued maintenance so that water could be prevented from getting thru the pavement and causing the swelling/shrinking.

Guess we had better put our hopes in The Donald. At least there we can laugh when it doesn't work!

How bad is it going to have to get before the feds rescue Jackson?

Why did we start in 1998?

Chapter 9 cometh.

um, does anyone have any idea where the road tax $$ collected was spent? Who stole it?

No one in Jackson would vote for the Don (Donald Trump) They be all Democrats.

@9:41 - ah, the 50 million dollar question. It's actually worse than that when you consider all the public works employees that are employed to work on the roads. What are they doing/what have they been doing for the past 25 years? Guarantee you that the number of public works employees has not gone DOWN in the last 25 years.

Little FYI: Jackson has left around 100m on the table because of poor revenue collection practices. Democrats running anything is a receipt for disaster.

The road money had to be spent to pay for the free water that Jacktown provides its citizens. Last year, the City failed to collect $9.3 million in water bills. The mayor raided the road money.

Not sure what any of this has to do with Trump. Some fools go off on bizarre rabbit trails no matter what.

If you want to take an educational ride, try riding north from Fondren all the way to the rear of Target. Buckle up and hold on tight! And don't stare at the drivers in Gold Pontiacs with forty inch rims. They can see YOU clearly through those black windows.

One of the largest problems is the politics of Jackson I work in project management for one of Four Asphalt contractors in the tri-county area. For any of us to get any work and do it at a price that the city can afford as well as contractor make money you have to meet almost 40% minority participation. I have no problem with the EOB policies they problem is there are no contractors in the tri-county area that can meet those requirements. And the ones that are in the the area specialize in paving a driveway here or there not in the repair and repaving of roads. There was a City wide bid out on paving streets several months back and If my memory serves me right No one bid on the work due to the EOB requirements you had to meet in the contract. Wave the EOB requrements for a time and you will see a lot happen in the city.

7:09 - You totally have it wrong since nobody in this thread suggested the feds come in.

Harvey Johnson will undoubtedly go down as the worst mayor in Jackson history. From failing completely at economic development to this garbage, his stupidity is unmatched. No one has done more to set the city back.

Other than an Explanation of Benefits, what's an EOB?

8:14. Without a doubt. Under his watch downtown became ghosttown, the roads became suitable for only a 4x4, the fumbling on Farish and the convention center, and many many more. It's as if he enjoyed the status of mayor but hated the work OF mayor.

I defy anyone to drive Riverside Drive from Bailey Jr. High to LeFleur's Bluff at the posted speed limit. Unless you have a military issue Humvee, you'll destroy your suspension and possibly the undercarriage of your vehicle. It has been this way for years and is an artery for three schools (Bailey, Murrah, and Power). Why hasn't the city fixed this road?

Oh, yeah. Harvey Johnson was mayor. That answers it.

Even the high points on this chart are embarrassingly low. It tops out at a measly 68.2 miles under Melton and in only three years of the last 17 does it crack 20 miles. Pathetic.

And where are our august city council members on this? Why have they not been championing road reconditioning?

8:36 - from the context of the rest of that post I suspect the "E" and the "O" stand for "Equal Opportunity", i.e., based-based redistribution of funds regardless of actual qualifications.

10:27pm and 7:19am are spot on.

Money that use to be spent on infrastructure is not being spent on social programs, attorneys and political cronies. That is why both Jackson and the State of Mississippi have no money for infrastructure.

The cost of car tags in the city limits of Jackson are some of the highest in the state. Where does all of that money go?
Maybe if the people in Jackson and the elected officials didn't spend so much money and time collecting rocks, bricks, and bottles the roads would be a little smoother. How about storing some of those things in the pot holes?

It is the current culture of leaders in Jackson to depend on a handout. In 2010 the legislature allocated dollars for Jackson to spend on infrastructure as it pertains to water pipes. Harvey missed the deadline for the money and screwed up the budget thinking he was a shoe in for the money. He did zero work to get the funds and was denied. He missed the deadline and did not file paperwork. Seems like this will continue to be the culture. Run the city into the dirt until a federal tax payer picks up the bill. Sad. Read all of Jambalaya's wonderful work about Johnson here.

http://kingfish1935.blogspot.com/search?q=Harvey+Johnson+water

Question. Could we just start a para-government organization that could fix these streets and potholes? Pay out in tax credits, and other creative soft income vehicles? Recruit volunteers of Jacksonians willing to want to make their own city better?


At some point, we all are going to have to realize that, if we want to fix our Capital City (which we should all be invested in, it's embarrassing and almost symbolic of our State the status of our Capital City), we are going to have to come together as Mississippians and just do it. If we wait around for us to finally "fix all our problems" and have all the money in hand, it probably wont happen for the next 40 years.

2009 Stimulus Funds
http://www.jacksonms.gov/index.aspx?nid=254
$3,355,477: U.S. Department of Transportation
Transportation Metropolitan Planning Organization Entitlement Program
Funds available in the Department of Public Works to resurface 2.5 miles of Northside Drive from Jackson city limits to Medgar Evers Boulevard and 2 miles of Maddox Road from Highway 18 to John R. Lynch Street.

http://sp.mdot.ms.gov/programs/recovery/ARRA%20Documents/ARRA%20Highway%20Distribution.pdf

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Highway and Bridge funds can be used on defined system of roadways which generally include interstates, US routes, state routes, some rural roads and some city streets. These funds can also be used for some transportation Enhancement Projects. Mississippi received $354,564,343 to be used for transportation projects.

@ 12:31 PM - Many potholes in Belhaven have been "citizen fixed" with nothing more than a bag of quickcrete and a bucket. I doubt the Greater Belhaven Assoc is capable of comprehensively repairing Eastover Dr, though.

You can't use the Yazoo clay comments as the sole reason the roads are garbage in Jackson. That soil is prevalent all over Rankin County and Madison County especially around the Reservoir. Their roads seem to be in much better shape.

So, the small bit of repaving has come from Federal funds that had to be spent on roads.12:31, that is what has been to the public educational system; create a another private one. Problem is the city owns the ROW the road sit on and you would be charged to use their property. Just call it a day and move on.

Meanwhile, as to the State of MS: http://mississippitoday.org/2016/04/04/busby-roads-bill-likely-dead/. While you're tossing stones at Jackson, your state-wide elected officials (I can't say "leaders" with a straight face) are making the same mistakes. Maybe if they weren't too busy drafting unconstitutional bills, they would have enough time to fix our state infrastructure.

12:31, if there were any people like the ones you speak about in Jackson the city would not be in the shape it is in. Those people do not elect others that pocket all of the money.
Jackson has run all of those people out of the city.

State officials should take over the roads rather than the airport.

The 2009 jump was from Stimulus Money. The Obama Administration was more interested to spending the money fast on projects with little to no long term value so they could use the "look at we did" speech for the mid-term elections. The money had such short time constraints that overlay projects were the only projects that Jackson, or any other municipality in the State for that matter, could do and meet the strict obligation requirements.

Harvey Johnson's only gainful employment prior to being elected mayor was as a 'grant writer'. Trained, educated, certified, expert grant writer. Let's discuss.....

2:38

Then the state will start bearing the costs to repair their automobiles? Guess you're gonna tell me that the next thing they're gonna do is start feeding their children two meals every day?

2:08

12:31 here. What would those costs be?

I'm thinking for this organization, it could be road workers, volunteering to do these fixes off duty-- wages would be tax incentives for company, for the individual workers, based on number of hours volunteered, it could be credits at McDades or restaurants or whatever partnering Jackson organizations wanted to "donate".

Just trying to think way left field here.

Ethnic Owned Business, maybe?

Accidentally deleted this comment by anonymous :

City budgets have been sacrificed to keep the (primarily black) Democrat City Hall employment machine running. You can study all the sub-metrics about Jackson's decline you want but the only metric that does not decline is city employment and the costs to maintain mayoral spoils employment at levels higher than when Jackson's population peaked way back in 1976.. Yarber, and all those before him back to Big Daddy Kane, could have shown courage and right-sized but each and every one of them punted. Yarber's furloughs only kicked the can down the road. Jackson, on a smaller scale but with the exact same disasterous effects, is doing everything that was done to drive Detroit into the ground. We can only hope the State of Mississippi jumps in to take over sooner than Michigan did in Detroit.

5:57, the state does not want Jackson. Just not worth the cost of rebuilding it to what it was. The people chose the leaders. The people saw what the leaders were doing to the city and kept re electing them. What good would it do to rebuild Jackson then let the same people destroy it again?

Nothing matters other than getting a job with a smooth road to a cush retirement system. Period. Take over the schools, the state agencies, the municipal governments and the county governments and keep reelecting yourselves and your job providers and you've got an inside-the-park home run. How difficult is that to understand?

We watched it happen beginning with the public schools, then the 'Welfare Department', then followed by the Department of Employment Security and the county health departments, a majority of the municipalities in the state and over half the county governments in the state. It's all about the jobs. The jobs for themselves. Nothing else matters, least of all infrastructure.

Kane will have to be known and the worst mayor ever since he started the major downfall of Jackson. He made Jackson a real Democrat city with tending to everything but running a sound city. Yep, Kane started the killing of Jackson.

The 2009 stimulus money did have to be spent in a short time because the main purpose was to create jobs during the recession, not five years later. The reason so much of the money went into repaving streets and parking lots and rest areas was because no big infrastructure projects in MS were "shovel ready." That was not the federal government's fault. State and local governments will not pay for engineering, design, environmental, permitting, etc. with their own money. We have a crony system where the engineering firms expect to be able to draw out those preliminary phases and bill two to five years before construction, and the state and locals are fine with that as long as it is 75% or more federal funds. Everyone blames the project delays on federal regulations, but we saw after Katrina that they can design and build a major bridge in less than two years without waiving the regulations. The state DOT and MS engineering firms who milk the system were the ones trying to slow that process down on the Coast, not the feds.

The Kenyan crowed on ad infinitum about "shovel ready". See your $2500 per family health insurance reduction yet? Please go blow smoke up someone else's behind.