State Rep. Ken Morgan, R-Morgantown, helped stop the state this week from borrowing $50 million to create the “one lake” project in Jackson.
Morgan and others, including the Marion County Board of Supervisors, have concerns about what the project to dam up the Pearl River and create lakeside homes and shops in and around Jackson would mean for places downstream like Columbia.
That’s a legitimate concern that needs to be addressed before moving forward with this long-running plan.
With Morgan speaking against the bill, it fell short of the 60 percent of votes needed. It could still come up later, though. The federal government is paying two-thirds of the $340 million project. The state was going to issue bonds to pay part of the remaining $112 million. Property taxes in Rankin and Hinds counties would pay for some of the rest.
Admittedly, the specifics of exactly what the project would mean for downstream communities that rely on the Pearl River for recreation is unclear to us. But that same lack of clarity is obviously felt by many members of the House who voted against it.
There are flooding problems in heavily populated areas of North Jackson and Rankin County. However, it seems those could be accomplished through other means than building a dam and a lake, and there is also a large part of the project motivated by the desire to build lakefront housing for the wealthy in the Jackson metro area. Is that something the state’s taxpayers need to be taking more debt to subsidize?
The legislature’s PEER committee, which investigates issues of public spending, said in a 2010 study that correspondence from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineeers “made clear that the Corps did not believe that any of the lakes plans would pass muster as a viable flood control plan or would be environmentally acceptable.” The Corps, before getting leaned on by elected officials, preferred levees instead, which would be cheaper but not lead to economic development.
Andrew Whitehurst, water program director for the Gulf Restoration Network, wrote in a column for the Jackson Free Press last year that, “The drainage district and Pearl River Vision Foundation have friends in Washington, D.C., and Jackson, and have bent the federal and state public works processes toward a lake development that may or may not reduce flooding, but would be a triumph of cronyism. Dredging and damming the Pearl is an economic-development project being sold as flood control.”
The full environmental effects need to be impartially evaluated, not by agencies being pushed to approve by politicians influenced by the powerful Jackson business lobby, before a decision is made.
Morgan did right by downstream residents of the Pearl and the state’s taxpayers by delaying the state funding.
— Charlie Smith
