Pick your monster

Louisiana politics is full of  Godzilla vs Mothra moments where it's best to just root for both sides to fall into a pit of lava or at least the nearest sinkhole or something. But even while we're waiting for that to happen, we can't help but find small moments of catharsis when one of the creatures lands a particularly satisfying blow on the other.

Take the Governor and the Mayor, for example. Jindal and Mitch are obviously both monsters.  There are subtle distinctions between the exact sorts of monsters they are which come into play in interesting ways from time to time.  Such as when they're arguing over whose friends will best benefit from a misappropriated trough of money.

"House Bill No. 516 by Representative Walt Leger grants additional powers to the Ernest N. Morial-New Orleans Exhibition Hall Authority," Jindal wrote. "The bill also would allow for the first time the Authority to use non-traditional tax free bonds that would benefit any properties being developed by commercial, private entities and the bonded debt could count against the state debt limit. In addition, this project could be funded through the capital outlay bill. For these reasons, I have vetoed House Bill No. 516 and hereby return it to the House of Representatives."

Of course, since the Governor has put so much work into privatizing the state's education and health care apparatuses, we have to chuckle a bit at his concern over this misdirection of public money into private hands.  But hey at least someone with some power has chosen to articulate this for once so why complain?

To be fair, it isn't clear that the convention center debt actually counts against "the state debt limit" as Jindal claims.

Bill sponsor House Speaker Pro tem Walt Leger III reacted angrily. “I’m livid. I’m upset. The convention center thing is out of left field. I cannot be more shocked. It’s a real setback for the hospitality and tourism industry.”

Leger said the Convention Center is a political subdivision of the state and has its own revenue stream. “It does not impact the debt limit of the state,” he said.

Regardless, Leger's bill still authorized a public entity to issue bonds in order to finance private hotel and condo development. Where the debt is incurred specifically is a distinction irrelevant to the principle in question. A recent Lens op-ed by Roberta Brandes Gratz explains this pretty well. 

The Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Superdome and the Tourism and Marketing Corporation have no business being developers. This is always the problem in creating legally independent organizations or authorities that, once authorized, function outside the normal scope of democratic review. If, as it seems, these entities have an excess of earned income burning a hole in their pockets, they should help the city pay for other urgent needs — such as either or both of the two federal consent decrees, one with police, one with the city jail, that the Landrieu administration keeps saying it can’t afford.

I should add, though, I'm not endorsing Gratz's column as a whole.  She seems hung up on opposing any redevelopment of the WTC site regardless of how it is funded. Along the way she makes several questionable statements including this overreach:

Every attempt by an American city to “remake” itself has failed, leading to repeated efforts to redesign the redesigned city.

Every attempt! That's pretty serious. Although I guess it depends on what one means by an attempt by a city to "remake itself" if such at thing has ever actually even occurred.

Gratz appears to be following a popular vein in preservationist scholarship where one ceaselessly pursues any and every opportunity to  flog the ghost of Robert Moses. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But, as is often the case in this line of argument, Gratz has confused a legitimate complaint against unchecked and unaccountable power with the idea that any and every "big project" is an inherent evil. She lists a few of the favorite whipping boys in her article including the long ago defeated riverfront expressway and the new LSU/VA hospital. She concludes:

But while advocates of big projects focus on outsized, misguided visions, New Orleans is rebounding incrementally through innovative efforts all over town, proving once again that small and modest projects always exceed expectations while the big ones never fulfill theirs.

Again Gratz exhibits remarkable certainty in that final "always" and "never" statement.  It's a particularly alarming one too for anyone holding out hope that the very big expensive projects now protecting New Orleans from catastrophic flooding or the even bigger expensive projects proposed to save the Louisiana coast will come closet to fulfilling expectations in at least some minimal fashion.

It also displays a curious ignorance of the forces currently driving what we'll charitably agree to call the New Orleans "rebound."  I don't know what Gratz means by "innovative efforts all over town" exactly. I suppose she could mean anything given her apparent grasp on what goes on around here.  For example here's an article of hers published in The Nation where she states that Bayou St. John is located Uptown and that the grassroots driven effort to create a linear park along the Lafitte corridor was all preservationist and political insider David Waggoner's idea.

But I digress.  Whatever activity Gratz might be alluding to by "innovative efforts all over town" the odds are those efforts can be traced back to the massive influx of federal aid into New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans-based demographer and consultant with GCR Inc., calls the data good news but says New Orleans still has a way to go before hitting its pre-Katrina population.

The population of New Orleans in July 2005, a month before Katrina hit, was 454,000, he said.
Rigamer said the city could be back to pre-Katrina levels by 2020.

“What’s going on in New Orleans is you started out with decreased base from Katrina and you are also seeing a lot of federal money pumped into the city,” Rigamer said. “There is a lot of recovery spending occurring right now. A lot of FEMA projects under way.”

This includes, by the way, the major revitalization underway in Mid City evidenced in several concurrent retail and residential construction projects along Carrollton Avenue, Tulane Avenue, and Broad Street  which benefit directly from rebuilding funds and are catalyzed by the hospital project Gratz takes a shot at in her article.  So big projects are having impacts all over town, even if we choose to see them as something else.

The WTC redevelopment, though, is undoubtedly going to be a "big project" no matter how it ends up happening. The bill Jindal just vetoed would have allowed it to happen while private developers profit off of the bonded indebtedness of a public entity. So, for the moment, we can enjoy that particular swipe of one monster's tail.  This doesn't mean, though, that something "big" shouldn't happen at the site eventually.

I can't say for certain whether this means the trade mart building absolutely has to be demolished. But I do know that no private developer has been willing to invest in it for decades and that this reluctance only vanished the moment the tourism cabal proposed funneling free Convention Center money to bidders as an incentive.  Suddenly two of the three proposals involve "saving" the now "beloved" "iconic" building.

One of the bidders, Gatehouse Capital, has even slapped together an impressively funded "Save The WTC" campaign. You may have noticed their ubiquitous signage popping up in your Facebook feed or in various vacant lots and neutral grounds around town.



Normally you might expect to find an urban policy analyst like Gratz ... or anyone covering this issue in the New Orleans media for that matter... to be quick to note the obvious astroturfing at work here.  But then, I guess, everyone has to pick a monster to root for sometimes.