Jackson residents live with an aging water system and sewer system in need of repairs, streets with potholes and, now, a change in vendors that left them wondering when their household trash would be picked up from city streets.
Re-election is three years away, but could the uncertain state of trash collection affect the mayor and city council’s chances of winning another term in office?
“When you talk about garbage that sounds like a minor thing or one that wouldn’t affect the trajectory of someone’s career, but stuff like garbage is what irritates people,” said Marty Wiseman, Ph.D., emeritus professor of political science and emeritus director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development at Mississippi State University.
While a city certainly has other important issues to deal with, the collection of trash is a highly visible city service and an in-the-face reminder of how well or not so well that basic service is handled, he said.
“What can you say about a city that can’t even pick up the garbage?” Wiseman said, suggesting how a resident might think. “Then it becomes personal.”
If a problem gets solved quickly, residents tend to forget and forgive, he said.
“What was it Richard Nixon said,” Wiseman asked and then continued, “the public memory is two weeks.”
The city of Jackson is among nine in the state with the mayor-council form of government. Hattiesburg, Biloxi, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, Laurel, Meridian, Tupelo and Greenwood are the others.
“The mayor has significant power,” Wiseman said. “He has all of the day-to-day administration, picks the department heads and the council confirms them. The department heads serve at the pleasure of the mayor.”
“It’s called the mayor-council form of government and the authority goes to the mayor,” he said. “That’s why it’s called a strong mayor form of government.”
The council is the legislative body that establishes broad policy and local laws as ordinances and resolutions.
A mayor and council can get crossed up when the council wants to run the city beyond its power to do so, Wiseman said.
In the case of trash collection, it fell to the mayor and his administrative team to put out a request for proposals for trash collection, evaluate the responses and present a contract for the city council to approve. He did that but the council rejected his recommendations several times.
The city’s contract with Waste Management expired on March 31. Residents were left with Richard’s Disposal operating under a disputed emergency contract as legal action continues between the mayor and city council over a contract.
Nathan R. Shrader, associate professor of government and politics at Millsaps College, believes it’s early in the second term of the mayor and council members and voters might not remember all of the details of the disagreements over the garbage contract but they will remember it was a complicated issue that caused relationships to become embroiled.
“It’s certainly something he’ll have as his legacy,” Shrader said of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
Shrader wonders how the mayor and council will rebuild trust so they can do the work of the city.
“There’s going to be lingering hostility and they’re still going to have to work together on other contracts, economic development and roads,” he said. “It doesn’t bode well on the trust factor.”
Voters elect the mayor and city council and expect them to deal with complicated issues while they attend to their jobs and raise their families, he said.
“It’s like a microcosm of what we’re seeing in Congress, but it’s not partisan,” he said. “It’s playing out in a personal way.”
Shrader considers the lowest point of the garbage contract failed negotiations was when the mayor accused Council Member Ashby Foote of Ward 1 and Council Member Kenneth Stokes of Ward 3 of taking bribes and then Stokes accused Lumumba of being on drugs, all without evidence.
Foote admits the litigious actions of the mayor and council weaken trust in the city leaders.
“It undermines people’s confidence in city government when they see us getting contentious on an issue, trash collection, that you take for granted,” he said. “That doesn’t build confidence. Politics is supposed to be about the art of the possible.”
Shrader suggests voters consider that studies show elected officials who are women are far more capable of solving problems in a less rancorous way than their male counterparts.
“Maybe we need to remember that women as compromisers and in leading discussions and negotiations are more effective than men.”
