Errick Simmons

Errick Simmons did not come to water the way most guests on this show do. He is not a founder and he is not an engineer. He is a trial lawyer who co-runs a Greenville law firm, Simmons & Simmons, with his twin brother, and who has been the Mayor of Greenville, Mississippi since a landslide win in 2015. So when he talks about water, he is talking about the thing a mayor of a small Delta city actually wrestles with: pipes that are decades past their prime, a workforce heading into retirement, and a federal funding system that, in his telling, was not built for towns like his.

Errick Simmons co-chairs the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, a coalition of 101 mayors running the length of the main-stem river, and that is the seat from which he sees the real scale of the problem. As he put it on the show, the corridor has sustained over $210 billion in actual losses since 2005, and the most expensive lines in that bill are bridges and water systems, all the way from Memphis down to Greenville to New Orleans and back up to Bemidji, Minnesota. So this is not abstract climate talk for him. It is the repair invoice landing on a hundred mayors' desks at once.

What makes Simmons worth listening to is how a lawyer-mayor actually moves money and people when the big federal vehicles do not reach. In Greenville he brought in private operators to take over the wastewater plant, specifically so the city could keep the retiring operators and their decades of hard-won experience instead of losing all of it at once. He leans on the State Revolving Fund (the low-interest loan pot states use for water projects) because, as he says plainly, cities with Black and brown communities have struggled to benefit from the big-ticket programs like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. And when neighboring Jackson collapsed into its 2022 water crisis, Greenville sent 18 truckloads of water, partnering with Dollar Tree and Family Dollar to do it, which is mutual aid between cities turned into an operating model.

Errick Simmons also thinks the sector has a recruitment problem, and that is where the episode gets its title. His pitch is that water has to become as attractive to young people as the Apple and Samsungs of this world, because right now everyone bright is drifting into consumer tech while the people who keep water running are aging out. His fix is concrete rather than slogan: STEM scholarships, mayor's youth councils, water in the K-12 curriculum, and a push to digitize water so a city can see a force main or a pipe failing before it bursts and hands the taxpayer the emergency bill. He has carried that argument to COP26 and COP27 as one of a small group of self-described climate mayors.

And there is a quieter, longer-game side to it. Errick Simmons is most proud of a partnership with Ducks Unlimited to deploy roughly 66,000 acres of nature-based infrastructure around Greenville, the kind of restored floodplain that reconnects the river, sequesters carbon, and softens the high-water events that wreck the buried pipes in the first place. It is a telling choice for a mayor: the cheapest water infrastructure is often the marsh you decide not to pave over. Simmons frames the whole agenda in one line that doubles as his thesis, which is that when you rethink water, you are rethinking the world.

“When you rethink water, you're rethinking the world. And given that it's a global issue, it must have a global solution.”

Simmons is still in office in 2026, still co-chairing the river coalition, and his case has only gotten louder as more towns hit the same wall. The full conversation, from the $210 billion repair bill to the Apple-and-Samsung pitch, is worth an hour of your time.