What a shrinking Delta town’s struggles tells us about failing water systems

COTTON PLANT, Ark. — In a small Delta town getting smaller, residents’ tap water has been under a boil order from the state Department of Health for nearly a year. With a dramatic loss of population and resources, local officials are in an ongoing battle to provide residents consistent access to one of their most basic needs.

The town’s struggles with maintaining public utilities are not unique. Across the country, rural communities with declining populations are struggling to maintain aging infrastructure built for much larger populations. On top of this, these systems face an uphill battle to secure state loans to fix their systems — a battle defined by dollars and bureaucracy.

Experts recommend that small systems consolidate into larger systems to create a larger ratepayer base, but officials in towns like Cotton Plant worry that consolidation means the end of their small town identities.

Cotton Plant was once a thriving, albeit small, farm town in the Arkansas Delta. Years of population loss — coupled with declining revenue — has left the city unable to fix its water system. It’s had two major line breaks over the past three years and has been on a boil order for nearly one year.

Complicating this is the town’s precarious financial situation. In 2024, the town’s water department still had an operating loss of nearly $98,000 on revenues of just $147,000. On top of that there was a debt expense of nearly $20,000 to state and federal agencies for loans received decades ago contributing to the deficit.

“It has been my biggest problem — no finance, no money … one headache after another headache,” Cotton Plant Mayor Clara Harston-Brown said.

“If the state starts letting us get grants … we could fix some stuff around here.”

But experts say Cotton Plant, like many towns operating small systems, faces many hurdles to acquiring funding.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Arkansas has doled out $4 billion for water infrastructure, much of which came from Biden-era appropriations. The money went to roughly 1,800 projects in Arkansas — but Cotton Plant didn’t receive a dime.

Even if Cotton Plant could qualify for another loan from the state drinking water revolving loan fund, there is no guarantee the town could service the debt. The water system already costs more than the revenue it brings in.

The town also doesn’t have someone who can put together a grant application for competitive programs. That’s unlike Helena-West Helena, a medium-sized Delta town that has its own aging, leak-prone water system.

John Edwards is the economic development director and general counsel of Helena Harbor, the town’s slackwater port. He’s also a former state representative and served as the U.S. Department of Agriculture director of rural development for Arkansas under President Clinton. In his current role, he works to bring in water funding for Helena-West Helena. The city has secured around $32 million in state and federal loans and grants over the past several years.

The most important step of getting funding, according to Edwards, is to land on the state’s project priority list — a ledger that determines which projects are considered for state funding. All a system needs is a general idea and the estimated cost of the infrastructure work needed.

The town’s request for $308,580 in 2023 did not score high enough and was not placed on the project priority list, according to an Arkansas Department of Agriculture spokesperson. It has since been added, along with hundreds of other small systems, under a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency ruling requiring replacement of lead pipes.

But getting on the project list is only half the battle, according to Edwards. After that, systems have to get together an engineering plan — which often involves hiring a qualified civil engineer — and conduct a rate study that details how much customers will need to fork over to repay any loans granted by the commission.

These steps, according to Edwards, can be difficult for small-town mayors, who don’t have a dedicated staff nor the local government expertise.

“When you’ve been around this stuff a long time, it becomes second nature. You don’t think about it much,” Edwards. “It’s been a real barrier for some communities … for someone who has little or no experience putting together loan or grand packages, it can seem very daunting.”

Even if all goes according to plan, the systems still have to pay back the money given to them by the state. If they don’t, they could have other state funds withheld.

Arkansas did just this starting in 2018, diverting money allotted to Cotton Plant for critical road work to servicing the town’s debt.

Workforce Woes

Chris Harris, the chief executive officer of the Lonoke, Arkansas-based nonprofit Arkansas Rural Water Association, said that there is billions of dollars in need for water infrastructure work in Arkansas alone, caused by years of neglect and a demographic shift towards cities that have hollowed out towns like Cotton Plant.

These systems were built for bigger populations. Now, towns are being forced to keep up aging systems with less revenue.

“A lot of people that have operated these water utilities have done their best to make sure that they have the lowest possible cost, and that’s always a good motto to have, but it has come back to bite some of them,” Harris said. “It’s going to be a problem across 90% of utilities — small, large, medium, whatever size it is.”

Water system improvements are facing the same inflationary pressures as other sectors. A project that may have cost a few million dollars in decades past now costs $15 or $20 million, according to Harris.

This need for investment is coupled with a labor issue. In Arkansas — and many other rural states across the country — trained water system operators are rare and in demand. Cotton Plant Mayor Harston-Brown hopes to hire a full-time water operator by the end of the year, but she is not sure she could get a qualified operator to take the job in Cotton Plant as she doesn’t have the budget for high wages.

Becoming a qualified water operator in Arkansas is a time-intensive and expensive process. Operators have to take multiple tests, many of which contain math problems they may not have seen since high school. Only 37% of the state’s aspirants passed their qualification testing in the first quarter of 2025, according to the Arkansas Department of Health.

Harris said that water operators are often paid little and are overworked. In smaller utilities like Cotton Plant, operators are expected to be on duty “24 hours a day, seven days a week, including any and all holidays,” said Harris.

Lance Jones, the Arkansas Department of Health’s director of engineering, said in 2024 there were 2,100 licensed operators in the state. That number has remained the same for decades.

Although in theory that means there were three operators for each of the 700 public water systems in the state, Jones said many systems in larger cities require more, leaving few for rural water systems to pick from.

“(Operators) have to work away from their families, not making what a steel mill worker would make, or somebody working in a retail store,” Harris said. “That’s when they start to say, ‘Hey, I can do less and make more.’”

One potential solution for smaller systems facing water issues is to merge with other systems. That would create a larger pool of ratepayers to finance repair projects. Harris said whether a system should consolidate depends on its ratebase and system needs.

Woodruff County Judge Michael John Gray, the chief executive of Cotton Plant’s parent county, is in favor of consolidation. He said he sees the benefit to creating a water system that serves the county’s entire population of about 6,000 people.

The problem? Legally, all of the systems have to agree to consolidate. The best that Gray can do is encourage them to consider it.

“The big hurdle for us would be getting all the relevant players to the table,” he said. “It’s a big lift.”

In the meantime, Cotton Plant remains on a boil order, with leaky pipes, potentially unsafe water and no clear route forward. Harston-Brown isn’t interested in consolidating the water system with surrounding areas, saying that would make Cotton Plant less independent.

“(Consolidation) will be a hard pill to swallow,” Harston-Brown said. “We would lose all control of our system … and there would be no Cotton Plant if you did that.”

Ag & Water Desk data reporter Jared Whalen contributed.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.