Everyone stood as U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate walked back to his courtroom after a 15-minute recess to continue Thursday’s status conference with Ted Henifin and federal, state and Jackson officials.
What exactly the judge wanted to talk about next was anyone’s guess. Wingate just received an hour-long update from Henifin and his company, JXN Water, on their progress in repairing the city’s long-problem water system. Wingate oversees this work and calls status conferences for updates on JXN Water’s repairs. Henifin must also submit a quarterly report to the court.
No one could have imagined that Wingate would spend the next hour questioning officials with the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice about their decision to host two public meetings to hear from Jacksonians about the city’s water system and its future. The meetings were set for Thursday at 6:00 PM and Friday at 10:00 AM.
A letter from Mayor Lumumba leads to Wingate’s interrogation
Wingate sat down and minutely questioned federal officials about why exactly they decided to organize the meetings and why they didn’t let his court direct them. He questioned whether the public meetings would do more harm than good, suggesting there was no way to verify whether the residents were truthful, or whether they were Jackson residents at all.
“I don’t see how this would be helpful,” Wingate said, adding that he thought the meetings gave the impression that the EPA and DOJ are “investigating” the current state of the water system and JXN Water.
Matters became even more dramatic when Wingate produced a letter from Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba on March 27, calling the mayor “antagonistic” and “not a friend of the effort to resolve this mess.”
Lumumba has consistently criticized Henifin for a host of things he sees JXN Water failing in, including, most recently, their communications, transparency, construction and bill collection efforts. It’s a far cry from statements Lumumba originally made when Henifin was first appointed in November 2022, calling him “instrumental in lending his expertise” after Jackson’s water crisis.
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Wingate questioned whether the mayor’s March 27 letter prompted the EPA’s decision to hold the public meetings. In the letter, Lumumba requested “continued monitoring of JXN Water’s progress” by the EPA. The mayor took issue with Henifin’s lack of communication with the city, lack of timely progress on repairs, inability to “initiate competitive procurement processes” for residents and Henifin’s approval of the Mississippi Legislature’s efforts to overhaul the system when his appointment expires.
Attorney Karl Fingerhood, the DOJ’s senior counsel for the Environmental Enforcement Division, bore the brunt of Wingate’s questioning. Strikingly by surprise — other federal officials, whom Wingate kept calling Fingerhood’s “brain trust,” gave him notes to respond to the judge’s questioning — Fingerhood repeatedly said that public meetings had taken place before and that they were a way for the EPA and the DOJ to get feedback. He also said that both agencies said at previous public meetings that they would return in the future to hear more from residents.
Henifin’s position on Lumumba’s letter
But that wasn’t what Henifin thought. The third-party water manager told Wingate he believes the meetings were a direct response to Lumumba’s March 27 letter. Some of the feds asking for feedback during the public meetings echo complaints Lumumba made in his letter, Henifin said, such as communication problems.
Time and again, Fingerhood denied that the meetings were influenced by the mayor’s letter, but Wingate seemed unconvinced.
Wingate did not understand the need for the public gatherings when he already allowed a two-day court hearing where at least eleven community activist groups and several residents gathered in his courtroom, even though this took place over a year ago in July 2023. shared their grievances about Henifin and JXN Water. About a week after these hearings, Wingate wrote a scathing opinion in response, defending Henifin and calling its critics “uninformed” and “racist.”
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The judge suggested that the same people who showed up for his hearings in July 2023 would be the same people who showed up at the public meetings on Thursday and Friday. And he again called Henifin and JXN Water’s positions “unreasonable,” “misinformed” and “racist,” as he said he did.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: MS judge angry at EPA-DOJ public meeting on Jackson water system
