Xavier Bishop

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I started attending post disaster meetings at the Emergency Operations Center in Pascagoula. The meetings were held to inform everyone about activities related to the recovery effort and to allow us to share the plight of our cities with those involved in recovery assistance. Among the people present at those meetings were the city managers of Pascagoula and Gautier, the mayor of Ocean Springs and members of the Jackson County board of supervisors. It was from those meetings that we began a relationship that continues today.

Because we all represented Jackson County, collectively we became known as the Jackson Five. Over time we went from meeting daily at the EOC, to meeting weekly in Gautier, then bi-weekly, until simply meeting on an as needed basis.

Today it’s mainly the four cities of Jackson County who get together - the “Quad Cities” you might call us. We seldom meet as the Jackson five. Maybe it’s because the problems the five of us shared immediately after the storm have now diminished, or maybe it’s simply because county government has needs that are so different from municipal government, but we no longer meet with the county administrator the way we once did.

Regardless of the reason, by meeting and working together over the last 18 months, the quad cities have accomplished some notable outcomes.  Starting out we met simply to make sure we were all receiving the same information about the recovery, and to make certain the services that one city received, we all received.  Recently however we met and exchanged information to ensure that a greater proportion of disaster recovery funds came to each of our cities instead of going into the unincorporated areas of the county. Everyone agrees that without cooperating and working together the way that we did the outcome would have been entirely different.

What that experience has shown us is that we have a lot more in common than we tend to think about, and that the fates of our cities are tied much more closely together than ever before.  For these reasons our practice of working together needs to continue.  This requires of course that we maintain our dual identities as both individual cities and as the region known as Jackson County.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds however given the way isolation has characterized our relationship in the past. But Katrina has changed that. More than at any other time in our collective history we have common needs and common problems that require common solutions. 

To some it may sound as though I’m suggesting a form of metro government or somehow suggesting we lose some of our individual identity. I’m not. In fact each of the four cities in Jackson County and indeed all of the cities on the Coast must work to keep their unique character and identity.  It tells the story of who we are and explains how we became the cities of the Coast.  But the rebuilding of coastal Mississippi is so important that if one city fails at it, to a great extent we’ll all fail.

Consider this: if just one of the four cities in Jackson County doesn’t succeed in the current recovery it will greatly hamper the success of the others. Why? Because we’re linked by both geography and identity. It’s the same way one or two bad neighborhoods can keep a city from prospering and reaching its full potential. It creates a stain that spreads until ultimately it starts to affect the more successful areas.

The bottom line is this: We can’t afford to return to the politics of isolation that characterized our past.  In Jackson County and along the Coast we have to see ourselves both as unique individual cities and collectively as a region whose identity and economy are closely linked together.  Again, this doesn’t necessitate that we sacrifice our identity or erase the past. It simply means that we recognize our singly most common denominator – our future, and then work together to attain it.