I found it outrageous to be reading an article about Centreville, Illinois in the Guardian but I’m glad I did. I presume the purpose of the article is to point out what a nasty, racist place the United States is but I took something different away from it. IMO it illustrates everything that’s wrong with our government and politics.
Centreville has a flooding problem. Here’s a snippet from the piece:
Sharon Smith has to plunge her toilet to get it to flush. On rainy days, wastewater spills into her yard from nearby drainage ditches. Twice in the last year her house has flooded, leaving behind the sickening smell of sewage, she said.
Her carpets are ruined, the floorboards are buckling, the bathroom wall is pulling away from the tub, she said. In the laundry room, the worst-hit part of the house, the smell of mold lingers. “I want to move, because this flooding is ridiculous,†said Smith, 59.
For decades, residents of Centreville, a nearly all-Black town of 5,000 in southern Illinois, just a 12-minute drive from downtown East St Louis, have been dealing with persistent flooding and sewage overflows. The smell of it is in the air all over town after a rain, and bits of soggy toilet paper and slicks of human waste cling to the grass in neighborhoods where children used to play on warm days, locals said. Kids don’t play outside any more. Gardens don’t grow.
and its conclusion:
Patricia Greenwood, 71, estimated that she spent at least $500 a year on bleach, sandbags and other items. But nothing ever gets the smell of mold out of the walls in her home. Her brother, who lives across the river in St Louis, stopped by her house last July, shortly after a flood, and noticed the mixture of mud and feces smeared across her lawn. “I wish I had enough money to buy you a house and get you out of here,†she remembered him saying.
“Who wants everybody to know that your house smells? That your room is caving in? Who wants to tell people you have bugs? You want to be like everyone else, to sit on your porch. You don’t want them to know that you want to vomit when you walk inside,†Greenwood said.
Greenwood said that when her family moved to Centreville in the 1960s, things were different. “If all of those white people were still here, this wouldn’t happen,†she said.
Let me provide a little context. Centreville is in downstate Illinois, is the poorest town in the state, and 95% of its inhabitants are black. Median income is under $20,000. Its mayor, police chief, and all of its city council are black. Its rate of violent crime is the highest in the state.
Centreville is in St. Clair County which is about 2/3s white and 1/3 black with a population of about 250,000.
The mayor of Centreville has declined to meet with our U. S. Senator, Tammy Duckworth. He won’t talk to the press. I haven’t been able to discover what he’s being paid (I assume he’s not a volunteer) and it’s being alleged that he’s been raking it in from kickbacks from major building projects in the town.
When your sewer backs up, it’s primarily your responsibility to get it repaired. After that it’s the city’s responsibility, then the county’s. The state has practically no role and the federal government even less.
Centreville lies entirely in the floodplain of the Mississippi. I have written about this at length. The floodplain floods. Land is cheap in the floodplain for that reason. If it didn’t flood, Centreville’s residents probably couldn’t afford to live there. Subsidizing living in the floodplain is a mistake.
Practically everybody involved in this story is a Democrat from the residents of Centreville to its mayor and city council to the members of the county board and its chairman to the governor of the state, its primarily Democratic legislature, and both of its U. S. senators. Why aren’t Centreville’s problems being resolved? Everybody seems to be looking for somebody else to solve their problems. I think that racism is a factor in the poverty of Centreville’s residents but not the reason its problems aren’t being solved.
Centreville is not DeTocqueville’s America.
Don’t they actually have a zoning problem?
And, isn’t it the governor’s job to ask for disaster assistance for flooding?
Why isn’t FEMA involved? I suspect like anybody would that It’s just like Indian reservations, they’d pay them to stay there rather than come into the nice neighborhoods.
As I wrote in the post the entire town is in the floodplain. It shouldn’t be there at all but there’s nowhere for the people to go. They can’t afford to stay and they can’t afford to leave. That’s why a major housing development program was started there but any major housing development program provides an opportunity for graft. At some point the graft becomes the primary objective of the project. That’s pretty clearly where they are.
Zoning is primarily a city responsibility, secondarily a county responsibility.
But my real point is about the roles and responsibilities of the people of the town, the elected officials, and the various levels of government. It may feel good to blame your problems on racism but when you elect officials whose primary motivation is graft, racism probably isn’t the basic problem.
That the town is very poor is an issue; that’s why there’s been some talk of incorporation with another nearby town. But the basic problems are bad politics, bad government, and looking around for someone else to solve your problems for you.
Before 1987, Centreville did not have sewers, it relied on septic tanks and cess pools. State and federal money built up and connected the town to sewers that in turn connect to the East St. Louis sanitation system. In 1987, the city had 9,800 people and the mayor announced that now they had a sewer system, they could develop vacant land for new residential and commercial uses. It now has 4,999 people.
Have to wonder if everybody would be better off without the sewers; it doesn’t seem to have helped development to pay for operating costs, and they are dependent on another system’s function. The typical tools would be for state/federal government to block building permits until capacity issues are resolved, along with lawsuits against East St. Louis and Centreville with fines imposed to provide incentives to bring their facilities into regulatory compliance.
The County is a cess pool of corruption — vote harvesting, vote-buying by the County Democratic Party, and witness tampering.
Timing is everything. By 1987 the deindustrialization of the U. S. was already under way. The only commercial uses for decades they might have expected were distribution warehouses. There’s no shortage of places to put warehouses. When I was in Italy a year or so ago, the area I was in which used to a prime agricultural area in Italy, had lots of new construction—practically all distribution warehouses.
Which raises the question of why the state government is not interceding as you suggest? I would propose that they don’t want to upset the applecart—St. Clair County is second only to Cook County in how reliably Democratic it votes. They’ll vote Democratic regardless of non-performance.
I think the primary issue is probably that Centreville is legally responsible for any failure to maintain the sewer lines, but the traditional sticks from going after them don’t work because they couldn’t afford the repairs if they wanted to. And any block on new development would be meaningless either because its not an attractive area/situation to develop or they have limitations due to flooding. Could be other culprits, these sewer lines seem pretty new to be having foreseeable problems, was the work bid out properly? Also could be downstream problem in East St. Louis. I also believe there is legal authority to go to a court and force a tax or rate increase in the communities responsible, but that’s not attractive either.
I think the issue with this type of electoral corruption is that you get the wrong kind of Democrats. A Democratic state’s attorney made most of the investigations and referrals to the feds that brought this stuff to light.
Where I live there has been a steady effort to buy out those living in floodplains and it’s converted to parks.
I thought the money came from FEMA but don’t know.
You’ll only know that after the fact. To take a far-fetched example, what if you’ve got a crooked Speaker of the Illinois House? It’s hard to imagine but picture it. The extent of his deceit can only really be known after he leaves office. My solution to that is term limits.