by Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 24, 2009
GREENVILLE, Miss. -- In the blur of his campaign, it was just another overnight stop: a Holiday Inn Express in Greenville, dead in the heart of this forsaken land called the Delta.
In the lobby, atop the front desk, a card in a plastic frame greeted guests. It served as an alert, a quaint warning of sorts: "You may be wondering why our water is brown -- it's the cypress tree roots, in the springs underground. Y'all can drink our water and bathe without fear. For no one lives longer than the folks around here."
Barack Obama passed the card on the way to his room. There, the bathroom sink and shower offered exactly what the card predicted: a stream of yellowish-brown water, to be found in every room. It came from a Greenville city well, which pumped the same alarming-looking water into all the homes and businesses in the area. City leaders and hotel employees emphasized that although it looked bad, the brown water met all federal and state safety standards, and that residents commonly drank it and bathed in it.
The next morning, Obama walked past the warning card again, on his way out of the hotel and into an SUV that would ferry him to a restaurant for a breakfast speech. He found himself sitting in the vehicle with Greenville's mayor, 33-year-old Heather McTeer Hudson, who had come to believe that the brown water was seriously harming her city's image, impeding its efforts to lure new businesses. She hoped to get rid of the color with a filtration system that several American and foreign cities had used to take care of their own brown-water problems. But struggling Greenville had no money to pay for such a system, another complication in an array of infrastructure quandaries for which Hudson was hoping to obtain federal assistance. As their 10-minute ride began, Obama said to the mayor, as she recalls, "Tell me about Greenville's needs, the Delta's needs."
She mentioned what she regarded as the key to her agenda -- the link between improving Greenville's old water, sewer and road systems and luring new employers to the hurting city, which had witnessed a decline of about 10 percent of its population in recent years, dipping below 40,000.
At a street corner, staring out a window at some boarded-up buildings, Obama asked her how many jobs had been lost in Greenville.
In the past 10 years, 8,000 people have lost their jobs, she answered.
The restaurant was nearly in sight. Hudson raised the point more important to her than any other: Obama should not forget her city. "I hope you come back to the Delta and Greenville after you are elected," she said.
They soon arrived at the restaurant, another establishment that served brown water to anybody who asked for a glass. Obama's visit constituted an expression of thanks: Greenville and the rest of the Mississippi Delta, upward of 65 percent African American, would be providing him with vital support that day in his statewide primary-election victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton. He spoke to an overflow crowd, recounting the discussion he'd had just minutes earlier in the SUV. "The mayor, as we were driving over here, was telling me a little bit about some of the challenges of the Delta generally. . . .," he said. "One of the challenges, I think for the next president, is making sure that we're serving all the communities, and not just some communities."
He promised the audience the same thing he had assured Hudson: He would not forget them, and he would be back.
* * *
In recent weeks, as even staunch supporters of the Obama administration's $787 billion two-year stimulus package have questioned the program's lagging pace of job creation, a small but increasingly restive group of African American municipal officials in Southern states have complained that not enough money is reaching communities like those found in the chronically impoverished Delta. Their ranks include Hudson, who frequently encounters constituents steadfastly loyal to Obama but nonetheless asking when help from his administration is coming.
Hudson's life has changed significantly since the president's election. The White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs has made her a regular participant in conference calls with other mayors and leading county officials. But with her new access to the powerful in Washington have also come reminders of the expectations that follow any charismatic figure entrusted with the presidency. "I know things have been a little slow for some people," she says. "People see me in our Wal-Mart here and ask, 'We have a new president: When is it all going to get started? When are there going to be jobs?' . . . People here were anticipating that there was going to be a big package of jobs and money with a wrapped bow signed 'Obama' at the bottom."
In other parts of the rural South, local government representatives have also given voice to the mounting frustrations of their communities. The objections are wide-ranging -- everything from stories of confounding red tape in the stimulus program's application process to a general lament that federal officials have sometimes overlooked small communities devoid of the kinds of staffing, computer resources or technical expertise needed for preparing sophisticated grant proposals.
In some cases, communities have felt outright ignored. In Alabama, Shelia Smoot, a Jefferson County commissioner, says that although her county has been relatively fortunate in obtaining federal funding over the years, many small towns and cities outside her jurisdiction have given up for the moment on applying for stimulus money, foiled by deadlines they couldn't meet and requirements and forms they didn't fully understand.
"You're talking about some of the poorest places in all the country where [local officials] don't have computers or sufficient broadband," Smoot says. "You're talking about places with few [city staff] people. . . . They call me with questions: 'Where do they go? What do they fill out?' We need more federal people on the ground from Washington holding their hands, and we don't have anybody from Washington down here. . . . I don't call that stimulus; I call that same thing, different day."
Recently, in a private conference call with White House officials, leaders of the National Conference of Black Mayors, of which Hudson is the president, vented the same frustrations as Smoot's -- particularly about the absence of a reliable guide for communities desperate to access federal aid. "We've heard that concern expressed, and it's not limited to the rural South," says David Agnew, an official with the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, who, in talking about economic stimulus questions with mayors nationwide, has had regular discussions with Hudson about Greenville's aims and where the city might be able to apply for funding for specific programs. "We've worked closely with organizations representing cities and towns to get the word out and also worked directly with hundreds of cities and towns to help them access Recovery Act funds. So the information is out there -- and we will continue to push it aggressively."
Within a couple of weeks of Obama's election, buoyed by her new hope and expectations, Hudson had completed her city's wish list for stimulus funding. It contained proposals for 17 shovel-ready projects to improve roads, bridges, sewers and -- for $12 million -- the brown water.
By then, Hudson had become convinced that the water problem was reinforcing negative stereotypes about the quality of life in the Delta, scaring off prospective investors and businesses. "A lot of out-of-state people we want to see come here and bring their businesses here see our water and they say, 'That's just Mississippi -- what do you expect?' " she says. "They think if we can't get the brown out of our water, we can't be trusted to do other things. . . . I get questions from businesspeople and their spouses a lot: 'What's wrong with your water?' They wonder whether they can give their children baths in it. . . . They wonder if they can get their clothes clean. . . . Brown means dirty to them. Basically, brown water is often the difference between somebody moving to your community or not."
Until a few years ago, city officials had resigned themselves to the brown water, and, before Hudson took office, Greenville voters had rejected a proposal for the city to fund the project on its own. "Most of them don't mind the water," the mayor says. It has always been a part of Greenville, pumped from 12 city wells out of the area's Cockfield aquifer, a subterranean water bed that includes layers of prehistoric plant material through which the water must pass to get to the surface. The plant material continually releases dissolved solids that bind to the water molecules, making the elimination of the brownness a formidable challenge.
The water receives a standard chlorine treatment that, in ridding bacteria and the threat of potential viruses, also removes some of its color, though not nearly enough to substantially alter its brownness. Three years ago, convinced that her city needed a novel approach to the problem, Hudson commissioned a pilot treatment of the water. A corporation specializing in water projects proposed a solution for Greenville that it had employed in several other small American cities. Known as ion exchange, the technique sends a city's raw water through a special resin that removes the organic materials responsible for creating the color.
The tests produced exactly what Hudson hoped for: bottles of perfectly clear Greenville water that served as proof that the brownness in her city's supply could be eradicated.
But funding such a project always has been a challenge for Greenville and other Mississippi communities. According to Keith Allen, director of the Bureau of Public Water Supply for the Mississippi State Department of Health, about 150 water systems in the state face the same problem, and about 50 percent have water even darker than Greenville's. As Greenville and the rest of Mississippi waited to hear in January and February about stimulus requests made to the new administration, Allen knew that Mississippi already had $56 million worth of shovel-ready municipal water projects lined up before Hudson's request.
By then, the mayor understood that, for her program to be realized, the administration would need for starters to allocate sufficient stimulus money to cover those proposed projects ahead of hers. Given the magnitude of the change sweeping the country, she was hopeful. "I wouldn't say I thought it was a likelihood or certainty, but I talked to people about what we had in mind with it and I was excited," she says. "And a lot of my excitement came from what was coming from President Obama. Everything he said on that day he was here in the Delta and during the campaign created so much excitement and optimism. It made me believe anything was possible."
She waited for a letter from federal or state authorities that might contain good news.
* * *
Even amid her frustrations about the bureaucratic struggles experienced by other rural Southern communities, Hudson appreciates the lavish attention the Obama team has shown her. "I went from nothing with that last administration to more access than I could dream of with this one," she says, her profile having risen in Mississippi to the point where local newspapers speculate that she may be a candidate in 2011 for statewide office. Her regular conference calls have been only a part of her White House contacts. Even before Obama took office, she participated in Washington meetings that included soon-to-be White House chief economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. A month after the inauguration, she was part of a White House gathering of mayors, where Obama greeted her. "He smiled at me and said, 'Oh, this is my young Mississippi mayor,' " Hudson recalls. "I was --" and she stops herself in mid-sentence, throwing up her hands, the portrait of a devoted admirer momentarily dazzled.
Still, she is anything but a seduced newbie, which is why she wasn't surprised by the mixed response to her wish list. During the spring and summer, she received letters indicating that four projects had been approved, including two road programs that will bring Greenville about $1.4 million in stimulus funding. But one of the ways Washington says no is to say nothing at all. Having heard nothing favorable for months from federal or state officials about one of her pet projects, she has come to see the reality: There will be no money for the brown-water project. "Not this year," Hudson says.
Several other Mississippi cities hoping to receive water funding also have been bypassed for now, as the state's water challenges simply dwarf the stimulus package's offerings. The recovery act allocated $19.5 million to Mississippi for all of its municipalities' drinking-water projects, a small fraction of the amount needed to fund even the state projects ahead of Greenville's application. In the wake of the disappointment, Hudson said she saw only one answer to her city's financing quandary: "Mississippi needs to be getting more money for these things. There needs to be more attention paid in general by the federal government to the needs of small rural communities." But aware that the administration had spent only about $100 billion of the stimulus funding at that point, she held out hope that next year would bring better news.
That same summer week, she and other municipal officials participated in another conference call with the White House. Two aides from the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs told the group that, as part of his effort to reach out, Obama soon would hold a town hall meeting in Virginia on health-care reform. Hudson swiftly responded, as she and two other participants in the call recount. "I'm glad for Virginia," she told the group. "But I would like the president to come here to Mississippi, too. I know this is not a political stronghold for him, but if you're talking about health care, there are more health-care disparities here than anywhere else. . . . The Delta is ground zero for all these problems you've been talking about. . . . Come to a rural area and see what we face."
"Mayor Hudson was on fire," remembers Alabama's Smoot, who also took part in the call. "I felt like she was a kindred spirit."
Hudson had not finished. "The president will always be welcome here," she said, adding: "The president should come down here and see things."
"Amen," Smoot exclaimed to the others. "Alabama says amen to that twice."
A few hours after the White House call ended, Hudson was still thinking about the conversation, allowing that she had tried her best to sound firm but gracious. As the sun slowly fell on Greenville, she drove around her city. She pointed at empty lots that she wants included in the area's renaissance, a transformation that will be realized, she believes, if and when the staples of American commerce, such as major chain restaurants, set up shop. But that will happen, she says, only after Greenville has bolstered its infrastructure, including dealing with the brown water. She gestured at a barren gash in the landscape and smiled.
"This is where my Red Lobster and Olive Garden need to be," she said. "But you know that big places like that won't be coming here if it's brown water they're getting. . . . I'd tell that to the president, too."
If Obama returns, he will see the same brown water pouring out of the bathroom tap at the Holiday Inn Express, should he choose to brush his teeth there. He'll find the same framed card sitting on the front desk, with its same down-home assurances about the peculiar-looking water colored by the prehistoric plant life.
It is that very sense of permanence, of futility, that the Delta must always fight, Hudson regularly tells her out-of-town guests. She drove past the Holiday Inn Express and said: "We want the president back here so he can get a sense of all of the Delta's possibilities. He would be the most important of all the guests -- the one who could lead the change. We don't think that's too much. He said he would come."
