As I have said before, I used to hang around in Jackson, Mississippi. Had friends there, had occasional work there. Met a girl there and we had this long distance thing going before it eventually went the way of all long distance things. Or most of them anyway.
Jackson was a nice place in those days some 25 years ago. Probably would not have taken too much for me to have moved there.
Thank God I did not.
My late law school classmate Hugh and his then wife lived in a country club neighborhood. Hugh and I played many rounds of golf over at Colonial Country Club. Pretty nice track. Nothing great. But pretty nice. Hugh told me back then that the club was struggling financially. It was having trouble retaining members and/or attracting new ones.
Just like Jackson/Hinds County itself. The Jackson metro area started experiencing membership retention issues (amongst the white members primarily) about that time. Anyway, poor Hugh up and died in 2011. Laura, his widow, sold the house and moved away about the time that the Colonial Country Club was being foreclosed on.
As I recall, the property was bid in at foreclosure by a real estate developer who had great plans for the property as real estate developers tend to have. The first plan was to bring in a golf course designer and revive the old course. That didn’t work. The second plan was subdivide it and sell high end houses and rent high end apartments. The property would be anchored by a shopping center.
An apartment complex was built out there. One of my friends that has remained in the area there says it is her understanding that the remaining property has pretty much gone to waste and is completely grown over.
At this point Gentle Reader would be forgiven if s/he was wondering just where the heck I was going with this.
Perhaps you have heard about Jackson’s water woes. I will not recount them here. But last week they ran a story about a burst pipe that is spewing 60 million gallons of water a day. A DAY. And has for years. Like since 2015. Now there is a Jim dandy sinkhole around the breach and a resultant pond about the size of a swimming pool.
The area around the leak, if you want to refer to a 60 million gallon day geyser as a “leak” is guess where? The old Colonial Country Club golf course.
As best as I can tell it’s out around #4 on the old course/nature preserve.
If you need a metaphor for incompetent city government you may look no further.
God knows the City of LIttle Rock is hardly a well oiled engine. But it ain’t Jackson.
For example here are 2 small recent examples of what is like to live somewhere that is not a complete banana republic. The city is repaving Kavanaugh Boulevard down below my house. Kavanaugh is a major artery in town. This job has been a major pain in the ass, with the smell of tar everywhere, closed off lanes and huge equipment blocking the road. But guess what? That’s planned maintenance. They do not do that in Jackson.
Secondly, we lost power Friday night as a hot storm blew through. We reported the outage and the lights came on 2 hours later. I cannot complain. I would have no room to complain had they still been out Saturday morning seeing as how this storm was the same one that was to blow Rolling Fork, Mississippi off the map around 2 am that day. We were merely inconvenienced. We were lucky.
I don’t mean to suggest that Little Rock is Berlin. But Little Rock basically works.
And even when you consider the unused green space off Fair Park Boulevard that used to be a beloved golf course and is now mainly a monument to Frank Scott’s arrogance and hubris, you have to give him one thing.
It hasn’t leaked millions of gallons of water for damn near 10 years. And Little Rock ain’t Jackson.
