Tuesday will mark six months since the one-year emergency trash contract between the City of Jackson and Richard’s Disposal Inc., was made, ending the trash crisis that went on in April.
Since then, trash has been picked up in the city, but questions about what will happen once the emergency contract ends next April have been rampant. When asked, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has consistently cited “ongoing litigation” as the main reason why he can’t get into details. There have been multiple lawsuits over the crisis involving the city, the Jackson City Council and Richard’s Disposal.
At his Monday press conference, Lumumba again cited “ongoing litigation” when asked for details on where the city stood on the contract. He did say that “sincere conversations” have been made between his administration and council members.
In a phone interview Monday, Ward 1 Councilman Ashby Foote opened up more on the matter.
“The mayor has been in conversations with (Ward 6) Councilman Banks and he wants to put off doing an RFP and is trying to cobble together an agreement that would extend the emergency contract until the end of the city council and mayor’s terms, which would be June of 2025,” Foote said.
Emergency trash contract:Update: Agreement reached. Garbage collection to resume in days
Foote said he would not be in favor of that route. He has consistently been pushing for the city to start a request for proposals and has brought up the matter at each of the city council meetings since the summer. As far as why he wouldn’t support the mayor’s proposal to extend the contract to 2025, Foote said it “reward the mayor for lack of taking action.”
“You shouldn’t be rewarded for bargaining in bad faith. There was a clear understanding that we would do an RFP when the emergency agreement was reached on the 17th of April and now for him to change his mind and say ‘let’s extend it for another year and half or year and a quarter’ means he wasn’t bargaining in good faith in early April of 2023,” Foote said. “There’s a moral hazard in just going along with that. It means we’ll just have more bad behavior and you need to be good for your word or otherwise you don’t really have a successful government operation.”
When asked if the mayor had any comment on Foote sharing the conversations between the city and the council on the emergency contract, Melissa Payne, Jackson’s director of communications, again cited “ongoing litigation.”
Ward 6 Councilman and Council President Aaron Banks could not be reached for comment.
Mayor says Jackson Zoo is not moving
Hinds County District 2 Supervisor David Archie wants to relocate the Jackson Zoo from it’s location in West Jackson to the golf course at LeFleur’s Bluff State Park.
Archie brought up the topic, which failed in a 2-3 vote, during Monday’s board meeting. He wanted to use $7.8 million originally intended to build a water tower in west Jackson to move the zoo. He said he had not discussed his plans with anyone in the city.
Lumumba said the zoo is not going anywhere. He also confirmed that he has not talked with anyone in the county about Archie’s proposal.
“It has not been in any conversation, nor have they tried to talk to us. I think that one of the supervisors mentioned that he was going to put some money towards it and just move it. I don’t know what he thinks the zoo is, I don’t know who he thinks owns the zoo, I don’t know how he thinks that process works. But there has been no effort to communicate with us on it,” Lumumba said.
The city took over the zoo in 2019. Since then, attendance has been gone down tremendously. During budget talks, the city council discussed potentially closing the zoo in an effort to save money for the city, but multiple council members were against the idea. The council ended up funding the zoo in this year’s budget.
Jackson Zoo‘The city has thousands of other needs’ councilman says about potentially closing Jackson Zoo
