For many residents of Warren County their only source of clean drinking water is the county’s five rural water districts.
Officials with the districts say the toughest job they have is meeting the challenge of ensuring the water they provide their customers is safe to drink.
Warren County’s rural water districts are responsible for providing that safe source of drinking water to more than 25,000 customers, and to do that, the State of Mississippi has developed a series of laws that give the boards the autonomy to act as a local government. The state has established health regulations and standards to follow to ensure that flow of clean water continues.

Warren County’s five rural districts:
• Culkin, formed in 1958 and serves 12,000 customers.
• Eagle Lake, formed in 1965 and serves 650 customers.
• Fisher Ferry, formed in 1966 and serves 5,115 customers.
• Hilldale, formed in 1964 and serves 5,193 customers.
• Yokena-Jeff Davis, formed 1965 and serves 2,800 customers.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on Water Districts.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 48,218 people live in Warren County, and about 35,757 of them are connected to either to the City of Vicksburg or a rural water district for their drinking water.
There are about 1,300 community water systems in the State of Mississippi, according to the Mississippi State Health Department, and rural water districts operate approximately 640 of those systems.
Three of the county’s systems, Eagle Lake, Fisher Ferry and Hilldale, provide water to their customers using wells drilled into local aquifers. Culkin uses well water and buys some of its water from the City of Vicksburg. Yokena-Jeff Davis buys all its water from Vicksburg.
While the Culkin Water District traces its origins to 1958, most of the rural water districts in the state began forming in 1962, said Jason Barrett with the Mississippi State University Extension Service’s Center for Government and Community Development, adding some rural districts got their start from neighborhood groups who decided to share a well.
“From 1962 to 1964, there were 22 counties with rural systems,” he said. “The number really started to grow in 1973, when the Farmers Home Administration (now U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development) approved a $127 million loan program for rural water districts.”
Barrett compared the rural water districts to electric cooperatives, because, “every customer on that system is a member and is a part owner of the system.”
Community water districts fall under the jurisdiction of two state agencies, the Public Service Commission, which oversees public utilities and is responsible for approving applications to form or expand water district boundaries and rates, and the Mississippi State Health Department, which is responsible for water quality and inspecting water lines.
To establish a water district, people in the proposed area must file a petition showing the proposed boundaries with the Public Service Commission for approval.
At the Health Department, “any community or public water system falls under the Mississippi Bureau of Water Supply, which makes sure the systems are in compliance with state regulations and operate within the regulations,” Karen Walters, the bureau’s director of compliance and enforcement said.
She said the bureau’s oversight on the water districts includes two areas, engineering, which involves examining the district’s water distribution system and approves plans for system expansion, repair and replacement projects and water quality, which involves periodic testing of the district’s water quality.
“Engineering inspects the systems annually,” Walter said, adding all construction projects must be approved by the engineering division before work can begin.
“Water samples are tested each month, usually at the Health Department’s lab in Jackson, where the technicians look for evidence of coliform bacteria,” she said. “If evidence of bacteria shows, the water is tested for E. coli in the water.”
The water districts are non-profit organizations administered by a board of at least five directors elected by the district’s customers. The directors must each post a $10,000 bond, and the boards are subject to the state’s open meetings and open records act, which means the meetings and the water district records are open to the public.
Under state law, the board members serve without pay, but the directors for two districts, Hilldale and Culkin receive a monthly check for attending meetings, and two members on Eagle Lake’s board of directors are paid.
A water district can acquire land and equipment and sell and issue bonds to fund projects in the district, enter into leases and sell any of its property.
And the boards have a list of problems to overcome.
“We’ve had a problem with brown water, because we’ve got iron in the water,” said George Hunt, president of Hilldale’s board of directors. “We have iron in the water and calcium chloride.”
He said Hilldale has been improving its treatment systems in an effort to remove the color and better treat the water.
Yokena-Jeff Davis board president Gwen Hogan, said the district’s biggest problem is water loss. She said the water the district buys from Vicksburg is run through a meter, and the district pays the city on the amount of water registered by the meter.
“We pay for the water as it comes through the meter and then we sell it to the customer” she said. “If we buy a million gallons more than we sell, we have to pay for it.” In other words, if the district buys 2 million gallons and sells only one million, it owes the city for 2 million gallons.
“It keeps us from having as much income as we should have from the amount of water we buy,” she said. “We need that (money) to make improvements in the water district.”
“We have been working on water quality now for a long time,” said Malcolm Dove, Fisher Ferry board vice president. “That’s a continuous process. We are working on it constantly and trying to keep the equipment up to date. We don’t have a lot of problems as far as our lines.
“Our biggest thing is making sure we get a good quality of water out there to our customers and to have it 100 percent. We’ve been able to that now for the past 4 to 5 years. We’ve been lucky, I guess you could say.”