The Jackson Analogue

In August 2022, Jackson, Mississippi — the state's capital and largest city — lost its drinking water. Not for hours; not for a weekend. For months, the 150,000 residents of a majority-Black American state capital could not reliably turn on the tap. The governor called in the National Guard. Bottled-water distribution points opened. The school year was disrupted. International news covered the story. The immediate cause was a failed water-treatment plant. The underlying cause was a half-century of fiscal erosion, driven by the departure of Jackson's wealthier, whiter residents — and of the tax base that followed them. That process is the process Amendment 2 is now proposing to accelerate in Baton Rouge. Louisiana voters would do well to study the warning.

I. Jackson's trajectory, 1950–2020.

Jackson in 1950 was a racially segregated but economically diverse Southern capital with a population of about 98,000. By 1980, post-integration and post-federal-desegregation-orders, Jackson's population had grown to 202,000 — but the demographic trend had already begun to shift. White residents moved, in increasing numbers, to suburbs in adjoining Rankin, Madison, and Hinds counties. Some of those suburbs — notably Madison and Ridgeland — grew from modest bedroom communities into wealthy independent cities with strong property-tax bases.

Jackson's public schools, under federal desegregation supervision, integrated on paper. In practice, the population that was subject to that integration shrank, because the families with the resources to leave did leave. By the 1990s, Jackson Public Schools enrolled a student body that was over 90% Black and majority low-income. By 2020, Jackson's population had fallen to roughly 149,000 — a decline of more than a quarter from its peak — and its median household income had fallen with it.

II. The infrastructure consequence.

Municipal infrastructure is paid for by the people who use it. When the people who generate most of the property-tax revenue move outside the municipal boundaries, the people who remain are left to maintain the same infrastructure on a smaller tax base. The arithmetic is not complicated. It is simply that the pipes, roads, fire stations, and water-treatment plants built for a city of 200,000 cost roughly the same to maintain regardless of whether 200,000 people live there or 149,000 do.

Jackson's water system was originally designed and financed by the larger and wealthier city it had been. The remaining city could not raise enough revenue to maintain what the prior city had built. Deferred maintenance accumulated. The Environmental Protection Agency issued compliance orders. Boil-water notices became routine. The catastrophic failures of 2020 (a winter freeze) and 2022 (the O.B. Curtis plant failure) were predictable culminations, not surprises.

III. Why Baton Rouge is watching.

The parallels between Baton Rouge and Jackson are imperfect but substantial. Both are Southern state capitals. Both have populations between 150,000 and 250,000 in their core municipalities. Both are majority-Black. Both have experienced, over the last quarter-century, significant departure of wealthier residents to newly-incorporated or newly-growing independent cities in their surrounding parishes or counties. In Baton Rouge's case, that process accelerated with the 2024 Louisiana Supreme Court ruling permitting the incorporation of St. George. Amendment 2 would accelerate it further, by adding an independent school district to the existing independent city.

The judge who blocked St. George's incorporation in 2022 expressly warned that the $48 million revenue loss would cut 45% of Baton Rouge's discretionary general fund — the portion that pays for streets, traffic, parks, the riverfront, the River Center, and the State Capitol grounds. He was reversed. The $48 million loss is now real. The fiscal mechanism that produced Jackson's water crisis is now operating in Baton Rouge, on a time lag.

Adding a school district on top of the city split accelerates the timeline in two ways. First, it removes an additional roughly $94 million annually from the East Baton Rouge Parish School System — a number that dwarfs the city-level revenue loss. Second, it increases the demographic imbalance, which in turn accelerates the departure of additional middle-class families from the parish school system to private, parochial, charter, or out-of-parish options. That departure reduces the tax base further. The downward spiral is self-reinforcing.

IV. What Jackson did wrong — and what Baton Rouge can still do right.

The Jackson story is often told as an infrastructure failure. It is also, importantly, a story of decisions that were not made when they could have been. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, Jackson had several opportunities to restructure its relationship with the surrounding suburbs, to consolidate services regionally, to push back on the annexation patterns that concentrated property wealth outside the city limits. It did not take them, for reasons of political economy, state-level indifference, and the difficulty of reversing trends already in motion.

Baton Rouge still has the window Jackson missed. Amendment 2 is a decision point. A NO vote on May 16 does not solve every underlying challenge facing East Baton Rouge Parish. But it keeps open the possibility of a parish-wide response to parish-wide problems, which is the only kind of response that has any chance of working. A YES vote closes that door — constitutionally, permanently — for an entire generation.

V. A note on tone.

The argument here is not that the people of St. George intend Baton Rouge to fail. Most of them do not. The argument is that the structure Amendment 2 creates is the same structure that produced Jackson's failure — even when the individuals involved intended no such outcome. Structural consequences do not require structural intentions. They require only the structure.

Jackson's water crisis did not happen because any particular resident of Madison or Ridgeland wanted Jackson's pipes to burst. It happened because when enough people with enough resources arrange themselves on one side of a jurisdictional line, the other side of the line eventually fails. That arithmetic is not a moral condemnation of the people on the richer side. It is a description of how things break.

Vote NO on Amendment 2.