Policy Practicum: Repairing the State and Local Relationship in a Red State / Blue City Context

Catalog description

Policy Client: Mississippi State Conference NAACP (Charles Taylor and Frank Figgers). As anyone in Jackson, Mississippi will tell you, the city has a terrible relationship with its state government. Chronic mistrust flows in both directions, and for at least the past 25 years, state/local acrimony has been both a cause and symptom of state actions to withdraw authority and funds from Jackson. Current measures to intervene in the governance of Jackson's infrastructure and take over the city's downtown police and courts system mark new escalation in state/city tensions. So far, these deepening tensions have been answered with the typical modes of conflict: adversarial litigation and polarized politics. But those interventions have only power and blame at stake, without fostering cooperative solutions to the city's immense challenges. Jackson has serious, urgent human needs: an old, failing water system that would need heroic reinvestment even without the extreme flood and freeze events now made more common by climate change; a devastating violent crime and homicide rate; a poverty rate above 25% (among the highest rates in the country); a population more than 26% smaller than it was in 1980 (and all the blight associated with such a fall); and more. Challenges that significant (especially in a state facing disinvestment and poverty from border to border) will mean that neither the city nor the state can act effectively alone. But after so many years of antipathy, state and local cooperation will require nothing less than a restorative process. As one small start toward that longer work, this policy lab will work to understand the origins and consequences of Mississippi and Jackson's legal and political relationship. Mediation, after all, requires mutual understanding the setting of baseline facts. Our group will confront the question "how did Jackson and Mississippi…