Getting flushed but remaining flush

A Knights of Chaos float from this year's Carnival depicts Sewerage and Water Board Director Ghassan Korban (along with his salary)

One of several interesting things McBride pointed out today while watching the Sewerage and Water Board meeting was this apparent move to help Ghassan Korban cash out if the state really does manage to take over the utility. 

The Sewerage & Water Board Thursday approved a three percent raise to Executive Director Ghassan Korban’s more than $300,000 salary, even as the Gov. Jeff Landry’s hand-picked task force released a plan to strip much of the local control of the city’s sewer, flooding and water treatment utility.

S&WB watchdog Matthew McBride, who first reported the pay raise vote, noted that “according to the salary published in the 2022 audit, this will increase his salary from $338,365 to $348,515.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2022 the average median household income in New Orleans was $51,116.

They also doubled his available leave time which further indicates a sizeable buyout could be coming soon. The board members are also quoted here making annoying comments in praise of Korban that place him among "the employees of the sewerage and water board" they claim to be very proud of.  But that is a complete distortion. Korban isn't a rank and file employee. He's a highly compensated administrator who, even if he does get canned by Jeff Landry, won't have to worry about where his next meal is coming from for a very long time afterward.  Korban is pretty close to retirement anyway. I'm sure the salary boost will help maximize his pension as well.  

We can't say the same for most of the actual employees of Sewerage and Water Board. Their future is very much up in the air. Stephanie Hilferty has a bill pending that could transfer them all from the city to the state civil service system.  I wonder what that does for their benefits, leave, and retirement plans.  I'm guessing its not the same sort of jackpot their boss just got.

Seems bad

Comedy is finally legal again at the Louisiana Legislature. Every stupid joke of an idea they've had batted away in the past is back. And they're having the greatest time of their lives up there. 

Nearly 10 months after Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed a controversial bill that would create a 25-foot buffer around law enforcement officers, a Louisiana House committee greenlit a similar piece of legislation Tuesday (March 26), effectively reviving the proposal. 

House Bill 173 by Rep. Bryan Fontenot, R-Thibodaux, states that “no person shall knowingly or intentionally approach within twenty-five feet of a peace officer who is lawfully engaged in the execution of his official duties after the peace officer has ordered the person to stop approaching or to retreat.”

Anyone found in violation of the law can be fined up to $500 or imprisoned up to 60 days.

Cops can arrest you for just being around now.  

Put these alongside the anti-labor intolerable acts that started moving through committee today, and you can see the kind of world we're headed for over the next few years. 

Loot and privatize

The Landry "task force" sounds like they want the state to take over the SWB and then turn it over to a private operator. Sort of the same process that moved us from public schools, to RSD, and then to the charterization mess we have now.

The proposed recovery district, to be controlled by a board composed of a majority of state appointees, would govern the agency for two years, according to the panel's recommendations. It could then cede control of the utility, renamed the “New Orleans Sewerage, Water and Drainage Board” to the City Council or the Public Service Commission. A third option would be to constitute the utility into a new municipal corporation modeled after one in Louisville, Kentucky. 

In the meantime, there's plenty opportunity for a state appointed water czar to loot as much as possible.  I wonder who will be our Paul Vallas of water? 

Also of note, this week we had expected to see SWB's own "State of the Utility" report the mayor had decided to take on as a counterpoint to the task force.  Guess she flaked on that.

From today's S&WB board meeting: "State of Utility" from @SWBNewOrleans, suggested by Mayor Cantrell as a rebuttal to Governor's task force on S&WB reform, pushed back to middle of the year.

— Matt McBride (@Matthew67052126) March 27, 2024

Support your local non-profit virtual fishwraps

This is a really nice Poynter article today about Karen Gadbois. The implication is that she's (maybe... possibly.. soon.. eventually) planning to step back from regular involvement at The Lens. 

Gadbois said she’s focused on two things: keeping The Lens going by building a better organization and mastering the skill of weaving. By late January, Gadbois said the vision plan for The Lens was “pretty done.”

But when asked if she will be stepping down from staff, Gadbois said she feels like she can’t.

“I really feel like when the time comes, and I know that that time will come, I’ll know what I should do next,” she said.

It’s difficult for anyone involved in The Lens to imagine a future without Karen Gadbois, because in many ways she and The Lens have been inseparable since the day she fired up her laptop from a chemo chair in 2006.

Reading this brought me back a little. I know I don't post here as often as I used to. (Or as often as I'd like to even now.) But I do occasionally click through the old "blogroll" to see if any of those disused sites has happened to pop back to life. Every now and then one of them does and it's a little bit thrilling.  Squandered Heritage used to be on that list but I culled the link a long time ago when it went blank.  Anyway, the Poynter article talks about that a bit. 

On New Year’s Eve in 2005 — four months after Katrina hit — Gadbois returned to Louisiana. Her downstairs had flooded. The upstairs was spared. Other homeowners weren’t as lucky. Demolitions began sprouting all over the city.

“At that point, I felt like I had to do something,” Gadbois said. “It was like wild town — ‘do what you want.’”

She began blogging on Squandered Heritage, cobbling together information on proposed demolitions and attending hearings. “They were crazy. The craziest public hearings ever,” she said. “They’d have like 26 properties on the docket, and the meeting would literally take 10 minutes.”

“I would post daily pretty much,” she said. “And then, occasionally, I would write essays. Sometimes just, ‘Here’s the house. And here’s the proposed demolition.’”

Twenty years later, it can still very much be wild town around here. There's a lot of shitty stuff that goes on that can only be slowed down or stopped (sometimes) if someone happens to get a lot of people to pay attention.  

In some ways, it's actually worse now. New Orleans in 2024 is a more spiritually broken place than it was even then in the wake of the Katrina disaster. Two decades of displacement and gentrification can do that to a place. I'm sure I could articulate this better with time to think it out but there are days when I feel like we've lost a collective sense of what it means to live in a city together.  Karen talks in this article about what drew her here from Mexico City.

She decided on New Orleans. In both cities, she felt, people congregated within their families and celebrated with the larger community. “They were both places that had long-rooted traditions,” she said, “and people weren’t as interested in what you did for a living.”

Insofar as those rooted community traditions even exist today, they aren't nearly as deep as they were before 2005. If there's one theme to the succeeding decades here, it has been the slow squeezing of the humanity out of our home.  Let's put a pin in that for now, though. I'm just trying to say that it's harder to mobilize the fragmented community around civic issues than it was when we had a more natural communion together. 

The state of our media is one symptom (and reflexive cause) of this cultural diminishing. Which brings us to the non-profit newsroom model the Poynter article is attempting to champion. We're meant to get from this article that the non-profits have added more in-depth, textured, "explanatory" news product to the local market than the commercial outlets are willing to provide. In a way, that is true. But it's more true that they're merely filling part of the massive vacuum left by "legacy media" as it dissolves. 

Taken together, I'd say The Lens, Verite, and the Louisiana Illuminator give us about half the reporting capacity one whole newspaper ought to have in South Louisiana. As good a job as they do with what they have, they're still overmatched.  There's enough happening on the New Orleans City Hall beat alone to fill at least two proper daily papers...or whatever the commensurate format is to a daily newspaper today. At least two entities of that size, I mean.  The point is we're not getting nearly enough of what we need. The scrappy little websites get us more than we would have otherwise, but we're not where we need to be.

They've also got their own weaknesses. See, for example, the case of The Lens's "Charter School Reporting Corps" described here.  

Another shining moment came with the launch of the award-winning Charter School Reporting Corps in 2011. Beatty, then The Lens’ publisher and chief executive officer, wrote that the project’s goal was to “provide school news to students, parents and others who are invested and interested in charter schools in New Orleans.” At the time, Beatty wrote, 45 boards ran 65 charter schools — in addition to the Orleans Parish School Board and the Recovery School District, which ran more than 20 schools combined.

“And no one was covering those board meetings, which were public meetings,” said Moseley, who at one point coordinated the corps. “And a lot of times, significant decisions were being made about the direction of the school, or facilities, or other things.”

The Lens hired a corps of stringers and part-time reporters to attend and cover the meetings.

“It’s probably one of the best ideas The Lens has had, in my opinion, and I was privileged to manage it,” said Moseley.

It was! It was a fantastic and quite necessary project. But sufficient resources were never mustered to fully realize its potential. The reason for that is only mildly stated here. 

Gadbois said people loved the project, but it was “a beast to maintain” because of issues with funding and working with freelance reporters, some of whom would skip out on the meetings at the last minute. Gadbois said the corps also came early in the charter schools movement. She recalled some animosity from people who felt what The Lens was doing was anti-charter schools. In 2017, the project was placed on hiatus due to funding.

It turns out that the elite donor classes in New Orleans can have just as much veto power over the content produced by "independent" non-profit newsrooms as they do over the corporate newspaper owned by a billionaire if they really want it.  But, until we figure out a better model, by all means, support the non-profits if you can because they're still the best thing we've got going right now.

Seems bad

I don't really know what else we're supposed to say about the legislative session.  Every week is just gonna be a new load of very bad ideas cruising right on through.  Today, the latest scheme for de-funding public education passed out of committee without objection. 

Elected school board members also are starting to speak out against ESAs. On Thursday, just hours after the pro-ESA rally in Baton Rouge, the Livingston Parish school board discussed the bills at a special meeting.

One board member warned that a reduction in state funding could force the district to close schools and lay off teachers. Superintendent Joe Murphy said that an ESA program open to all families could guzzle up tax dollars, leaving less money for the “minimum foundation program,” or MFP, the state’s public school funding formula.

“I think this absolutely has the potential to devastate our schools from an MFP standpoint,” Murphy told the board. After all, money for the ESA program “has got to come from somewhere.”

The money coming out of the public schools' MFP will be at least half a billion dollars a year, in fact. But that's far from the only way in which our "fiscally conservative" legislature has determined to bankrupt the state this year.  Keeping in mind the already much talked about half billion dollar "fiscal cliff" that approaches in 2025, lawmakers spent the special session on "crime" adding tens (growing perhaps to hundreds) of millions of dollars to the budget for throwing people in prison and keeping them there. And the current session may expand that further. Bills are advancing that would jail people for panhandling on the streets or perhaps attending professional conferences. Maybe those are the same thing. Or at least one leads to the other. I haven't quite worked it out. 

Anyway, the legislature has the big checkbook out. But we know how much these fiscal hawks like to talk about prudent budgeting. So they must have some pretty great expectations of future revenues. Wonder where that's going to come from.  One things for sure, it won't come from the oil companies. 

The state House on Monday passed a bill that would cut the oil severance tax rate by 4 percentage points, a measure that aims to revitalize Louisiana’s oil industry but could leave an $80 million gap in state tax revenue.

House Bill 259, sponsored by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, faced virtually no pushback on the House floor, passing the chamber 86-13. It now heads to the state Senate.

With a vote of 96-6, the House also overwhelmingly passed a second Beaullieu bill, House Bill 418, which would halve the tax currently levied on oil and gas produced by wells that have been orphaned and inactive.

The Louisiana Budget Project.. or whatever the hell they call themselves now.. these NGOs "re-brand" themselves all the time for no reason..  estimates the severance tax cut could end up costing the state $80 million year.  Seems bad. 

The intolerable acts

The Landry steamroller is just getting warmed up. There's so much coming so fast that it is a struggle to get a bead on what specific historical period of horror our reactionary Governor and Legislature are trying to revive. Is it Jim Crow voting rights and incarceration policy? Or is it Gilded Age spoils politics and industrial scale corruption?   Whatever it is, they do exhibit a special fondness for the post-Reconstruction era. At the moment, they seem particularly focused on union busting. 

Emboldened by Louisiana’s election last fall of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature will try over the next few months to weaken public-sector unions and slash worker benefits.

A cluster of at least 15 proposed laws takes aim at public-sector unions’ ability to bargain with employers, the system for compensating workers sidelined by injury and a requirement that child laborers must receive lunch breaks. Others would cut unemployment benefits and limit how much doctors can make when treating people for workers' compensation claims.

That's a lot at one time. Last year I heard some low key talk among political watchers that maybe Jeff Landry as Governor wouldn't be quite so bad compared to someone like former LABI head, Stephen Waguespack. The thinking there was that, although, Landry is a fire breathing reactionary, he's also kind of stupid compared to a dead-eyed operator like Wags so maybe he wouldn't get quite as much done. Well, it turns out that was all cope. When there are Republican super-majorities in the Legislature, they could put Neuty the Nutria in the Governor's chair to sign off on everything and the agenda would sail on through undisturbed. 

The other thing they've got going for them is their decision to go for a maximalist agenda right off the bat.  The first year of a new Governor and legislature is always the best time to do this. There hasn't been enough time yet for the inevitable power conflicts among lawmakers and between the legislature and the Governor to develop.  That stuff usually starts to set in after the first round of budgetary decisions have to be made. Money has a way of breaking party solidarity even within a large majority. The policy decisions made now are likely to cause a fiscal reckoning down the road. But right now, it all just feels like patronage payola so it glides right through.

Anyway, as we've already said about the crime session, each measure passed this year represents a rollback of decades worth of organizing and agitating undone.  Every single thing they break will be its own eternity of hard work to put back together.  It's exactly the same with these anti-labor bills.  And just like the crime package, they're all coming, as Clancy Dubos says here, through a big "firehose."

Instead, Landry has embarked on a fast-paced, hard-right push that includes more culture wars, less government help for those struggling at the bottom, expanding the state’s already-generous corporate welfare programs, further privatization of public education and removing layers of consumer protection.

He also wants to rewrite Louisiana’s “bloated, outdated, antiquated, and much-abused” constitution. To that end, he’s pushing lawmakers behind the scenes to adjourn their annual session early so that they can convene for a third special session to hurriedly adopt an agenda set by the governor.

The current “regular” session began only last week, and many lawmakers are already tired of having to drink, metaphorically, from Landry’s firehose of proposals — little to none of which he talked about as a candidate last autumn.

Maybe he didn't talk very much about it as a candidate (there was barely a campaign anyway)  but it isn't like nobody could have predicted this was going to be the agenda. Landry's proposals are all drawn from longstanding LABI wishlists as well as model legislation being enacted by GOP controlled governments in many other states right now.

In fact all of this (including the constitutional re-write) was "on the ballot," so to speak in 2019. That year saw what was left of the State Democratic Party by that point band together in an all-hands-on-deck effort to re-elect John Bel Edwards and stave off Eddie Rispone. That campaign made it clear to voters that what we're seeing now as the Landry agenda was on the table then. In 2023, they barely said or did anything at all. 

Which brings us to the question, whose fault is all of this, really? It's one thing to step back and shake our heads at how bad it is when the bad people get to run the government. But if we're going to do anything about it, we have to ask why didn't anyone try to stop the bad people from running the government in the first place? That's what today's party leadership elections are all about. 

Once the results roll in from the Louisiana elections Saturday, March 23, we’ll know who voters have chosen to be on the Democratic State Central Committee, which should vote for party chair and other leadership positions next month.

There’s a total of 210 seats on the committee, two for each state House district. About half of those seats had only one candidate qualify to run, so they’re automatically on the committee. Another 24 had nobody qualify, meaning the next chair will appoint people to these seats after the April leadership election.

In other words, 84 seats are up for grabs on Saturday.

Vying for many of these seats are members of Blue Reboot, a group of both incumbent and new candidates committed to electing a new party chair. More than 40 Blue Reboot candidates also ran unopposed. In some of the New Orleans races, U.S. Congressman Troy Carter, a Democrat, has backed opponents of Blue Reboot candidates.

Some in the party blame current chair Katie Bernhardt for Democrats’ disastrous showing in the fall elections, often citing ads she made early last year in which she appeared to be considering a run for governor. There have also been many cases of infighting.

So far former state representative Randal Gaines, a Democrat from LaPlace, has officially thrown his name in the hat. Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis is considering a run, and some have mentioned two-time statewide candidate Caroline Fayard’s name as well.

After Saturday, we’ll have a better idea of how strong momentum is for the Blue Reboot reform candidates from seeing how well they fare against longtime party players, some of which have more name recognition, and others in the state’s most liberal and conservative districts.

Perhaps you can tease out from those few paragraphs that even if "Blue Reboot" scores a win today, it's highly likely the Democratic "infighting" will continue. Clearly, Louisiana deserves a more forceful and organized opposition to Landryism than what they're getting from the Democrats as currently constituted. Merely firing the Chair is one very small step in what promises to be a long struggle for that.  Some of the Blue Reboot candidates appear committed to the longer project.  I'm not sure all of them are. 

Anyway you can see a list of Blue Rebooters here.  But there's more to the story than just their slate.  Antigravity has undertaken the immense task of telling as much of that story as can be uncovered. Their voter guide features blurbs on every DSCC and DPEC candidate on the ballot. (Insofar as there is enough information available on them.)  Meanwhile, DSA has its own take which includes a more narrowly focused slate of endorsements and recommendations.  These races can feel like bewildering inside baseball to most voters. All of those links should help. 

But electing more and better Democrats to party positions isn't going to stop Landry's anti-labor intolerable acts.  That's going to require more immediate and direct action.  Not sure what form that takes just yet.

Rats gotta eat

First of all we'd like to thank NOPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick for choosing to drop this Weed Rats meme on us just after Mardi Gras.  It means that everyone who might have had to scramble for ideas a few weeks ago will now have a full year to really sit with the image and decide whether or not it is truly the costume for them. 

Heavy mold and deteriorating elevators, HVAC units and plumbing are some of the issues that have been plaguing New Orleans Police Department headquarters.

But those aren't the only problems at aging police facilities around the criminal justice complex near Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street. Don't forget the vermin, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee on Monday.

"The rats are eating our marijuana," Kirkpatrick said. "They're all high."

The great thing about the weed rats is everybody immediately loves them. But also nobody actually believes they are a thing. I mean, sure, there are rats at police headquarters. That's easy enough to believe. But, if anything is being stolen from the evidence room there, it's far more likely the culprits are in uniform.*  Even more dubious is Kirkpatrick's claim that the rats are "high." Rats can and do get high. We learn that from this study where rats were observed with increased appetite and laziness after exposure to cannabis vapor.  The key bit, however, is the vapor. Could the rats get high from just eating the raw plants?  I don't think it works like that. 

Anyway, why is this colorful fantasy being brought to our attention now?  Well, you see, NOPD wants a new headquarters. Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  They aren't necessarily asking for a new building. We just know they want to move out of the one they have. 

A plan to relocate New Orleans Police Department headquarters into two floors of a downtown office tower is a large piece of a wider vision to leave behind the city’s crumbling justice complex in Mid-City, said chief administrative officer Gilbert Montaño on Wednesday.

About 400 police department staffers are slated to relocate with the pending move to the 17th and 18th floors of 1615 Poydras Street, called the DXC building, he said. The draft 10-year lease, which awaits City Council approval, calls for a May 1 move-in date.

The plan is to abandon the current HQ located in the (geographic) center of the city with its proximity to the criminal courthouse and central lockup and move, instead, into an office tower downtown with limited public access and practically no parking. Oh and also now the city doesn't control the building and is paying rent to a private landlord for at least 10 years. This is short sighted, minor league city type stuff. The police aren't even "allowed" to do police business in the police office. 

Lahasky said the lease will not allow NOPD to conduct interrogations or make arrests within the office building.

“Our agreement with NOPD is that the offices will be utilized as administrative offices, and that certain uses such as interrogations and lineups and things that outsiders perceive as maybe not the kind of uses you’d like to see in an office building” won't be allowed, he said. “Those particular uses are to be held off-site.”

Nothing about this makes any sense in terms of public service.  It does make sense if you come at it from the point of view that the city government exists solely to facilitate real estate deals that benefit the succession plans of fading oligarchs like Frank Stewart.  Which is precisely the sort of thing you might think if you are Gilbert Montaño. 

Negotiations began in earnest about six months ago, Montaño said, when the building was still owned by businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart. The Monroe businessmen who bought it at the end of last year, brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, also own Orleans Tower, the former Amoco Building a few blocks away. The city leases space in that building for the Department of Safety and Permits, Civil District Court clerk and Civil Service Commission, among others. 

Frank Stewart, for those who need a refresher, is a billionaire investor whose fortune derives from his family's funeral home business.  The "philanthropist" descriptor he gets in articles like the one above is an inevitable result of owning lots of things (downtown office towers, for example) and making use of as many tax write-offs as possible.  In recent years, his "charity" work garnering the most attention was his leadership of the Monumental Task Force's attempts to maintain the city's Confederate statues. In 2017, he took out a full page ad in the newspaper denouncing Mitch Landrieu's efforts to have them removed.  Mitch was on his way out of office and working on his national profile at the time.  Because of this, he could afford to ignore Stewart's provincial concerns.  The same could not be said for Stewart's ambitious local ally in the monumental "lost cause," Councilwoman and soon to be Mayor LaToya Cantrell.

On Dec. 17, 2015, the day the City Council voted to remove the monuments, Cantrell, then a council member, gave a speech that must have been music to the ears of the pro-monument crowd, chastising then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu for bringing the issue to light. Amazingly, within the same hour she joined the majority of the council in voting for removal.

In early 2018, within a few months of being elected mayor, Cantrell empowered a secretive working group of Confederate monument supporters to decide the future location of the warehoused monuments. One of her spokesmen stated, “She believes that the future of the former monuments belongs in the hands of those who care about them.”

It’s highly likely that the only reason the mayor didn’t go through with the group’s relocation plan, moving them to another prominent location, was the exposure she received in an article by Kevin Litten published in The Times-Picayune. The article exposed Cantrell’s willingness to placate the side of the argument endorsed by some of the most moneyed and powerful people in the city — the side she voted against as a City Council member.

None of that was surprising. Both mayors (and a number of other state and local politicians) have done plenty of favors for Stewart over the years. In 2017, the same year the monuments controversy came to a head, they all helped swing the deal that gave Stewart's building its "DXC" moniker. That $120 million deal committed the city and the state to a package of subsidies and incentives including an agreement to rebate the payroll of software company DXC in exchange for its promise to occupy ten floors of Stewart's tower. The company and the politicians promised as many as 2,000 new "tech" jobs.

Of course, there were those of us who, just days after the announcement, observed that DXC appeared to be taking advantage of the state's generous corporate welfare offerings in order to facilitate its own global downsizing and outsourcing scheme to cut jobs and wages. But nobody ever listens to those of us who say such things. Anyway as time went on, it became clear that DXC was never committed to hiring locally. Over the following years, they would repeatedly miss the goals set forth in the original agreement. As of 2022, they had nearly scuttled the entire thing and were looking to sub-lease much of their office space in the tower.

In the meantime, The Cantrell Administration has spent plenty of time and energy trying to figure out ways to plug the hole in Stewart's revenue stream.  At one point they even considered moving City Hall into the building.  Which brings us up to last year when we find an aging Stewart trying to liquidate his asset portfolio in a slow market for downtown office space. At the time of the sale, the building was roughly 50 percent vacant. But its buyers, Eddie and Joseph Hakim were strangely bullish on its prospects. Likely the, by then, well underway negotiations over a guaranteed NOPD tenant had something to do with that.

All of this is typical New Orleans cronyism. But it also reflects the conservative ideology at the heart of the Cantrell administration. Gilbert Montano said recently that "the future" of city government should rely more on regressive user fee-based budgeting rather than a reliable tax base for dependable services. Under that kind of regime, there can be no real investment in social or physical infrastructure. City services will exist under continual threat of cuts. City departments won't own their own buildings.  Not even the police.  The only dependable revenue streams created go the other direction. Out of the public coffers and into the hands of corporate landlords.

For his part, (potential mayoral candidate) Oliver Thomas wants to put a pause on the NOPD lease because he doesn't feel adequately communicated toward.

“Not only was there a lack of communication about this viable move, but it seems like there was not a lot of thought put into multiple locations that would provide the best access to the men and women that utilize the headquarters, as well as the citizens to whom access is extremely important,” Councilmember Thomas said in his letter to Montano and Chief Kirkpatrick.

Thomas wants to “take a step back” to review other possible locations for the new NOPD headquarters.

He says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that is more “community-oriented” with easier parking and that could become a more permanent spot that would add “value to the community.” He also says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that would add overall access to residents in the city.

The kids are already joking that maybe Thomas will suggest putting the new HQ at the Six Flags site his friend Troy Henry is supposed to be redeveloping. But it occurs to us that this would put us a step closer to the New Orleans Cop City we've already speculated that Mayor OT might build one day. So maybe it's not that funny. In any case, it wouldn't represent a change in governing philosophy so much as a slight adjustment in the direction of the spoils.  It's never really a question of whether the rats are going to get a piece of the stash so much as it is which rats in particular.

 *That link references an evidence room scandal from 15 years ago.  When I started writing this post, I hadn't yet seen the latest one out just today.  Interesting that after the weed rats got their fifteen minutes of fame, NOPD has moved right along to blaming the conveniently deceased for what is clearly a systemic issue.

Nobody actually lives here

It's pretty amazing that we're going to live with a persistent narrative of post-Katrina New Orleans (the 2010s especially) as some kind of a boom period. In reality it was a straightforward process of gentrification and ethnic cleansing. The population took a big hit with in 2005 and never recovered. The next 20 years were a time of wealth consolidation. What were once neighborhoods were scooped up by asset speculators. Schools and family services were sold off. It wasn't just raw population numbers that got smaller, the scope of community, the social sphere itself shrunk. It was a truly awful time. But for some reason, it was accompanied by a media driven fantasy about a "new New Orleans" attracting scores of young hip people.

Anyway, it's all still happening. Only now we get to read about it minus the pretense. 

And the New Orleans-Metairie metro area saw the steepest loss among large metros nationwide, with its population declining by 4.3%. The metro area had traditionally been able to count on fast-growing St. Tammany Parish to improve its standing, but that ended in 2020 when the suburban parish was made into its own metro area.

Even if the population growth St. Tammany saw since 2020 were added into the New Orleans-Metairie total, the metro area would still have seen the third steepest loss across U.S. metros.

Speedily warped

As the regular session of the legislature begins, I just wanted to flag this particularly good Gambit summary of where we are so far in Jeff Landry times.  The "crime" special session alone should be considered a human rights violation.

During his campaign for governor, Landry painted New Orleans as a lawless city that only he could fix, vowing to “bend the city” to his “will.”

While the city has struggled with gun violence and high rates of poverty and trauma, the rate of violent crime dropped significantly in 2023.

Violent crime increased nationally during the pandemic, from 2020 to 2022, especially in New Orleans. But, by last October, the city’s murder rate had fallen by 24%, with similar declines in nonfatal shootings, armed robberies and aggravated batteries. The national rate of violent crimes also dropped, but the rate in New Orleans declined twice as much.

Still, Landry kept his promise to call a special legislative session on crime, which ran from Feb. 19 to Feb. 29. During it, lawmakers speedily passed traditional failed “tough on crime” measures that certainly will put — and keep — more people behind bars in a state that already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.

The previous legislature seemed to understand that in 2017 when lawmakers passed a bipartisan set of reforms to the criminal legal system. The changes reduced penalties for nonviolent crimes and expanded opportunities for parole by allowing a state board to release certain nonviolent offenders from prison early.

The current legislature, fueled by Landry’s support, undid much of those reforms last month — in some cases making the system harsher than it was before 2017. He’s already signed most of them into law and is expected to soon sign the rest. Once signed, they’ll start taking effect over the next six months.

I've already said this but those 2017 reforms were the result of decades of hard work and struggle while people waiting on relief from the cruel punishment state suffered.  All that's been wiped out in an instant. It will take generations of more suffering to fix that. 

Much more damage to come this spring.

The backlash is swift and devastating

The 2017 criminal justice reforms were the culmination of decades worth of struggle and effort. They were an imperfect but long overdue compromise born out of years of experience as Louisiana learned the hard way that excessive cruelty and mass incarceration does not make our communities "safe" from violent crime.  And, for a brief moment, even those mild and imperfect compromise measures were beginning to show some small benefit. Here is a recent Washington Post summary of all that.

Embarrassed by his state’s incarceration rate and racial disparities, Edwards set out to reimagine the state’s prison system after he was elected in 2016.

Edwards worked with GOP legislators and national nonprofit groups to figure out how to make Louisiana a national model in criminal justice reform. At the time, the state was sending nonviolent offenders to prison at 1.5 to 3 times the rate of other Southern states, according to state data. Louisiana’s inmate population was so high the American Civil Liberties Union called the state the “prison capital of the world.”

In 2017, with bipartisan support, Edwards signed into law 10 bills collectively known as the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI). The legislation recalculated prison terms for nonviolent offenders, gave judges more discretion to offer probation, and made it easier for some prisoners to receive parole, including juveniles sentenced to life in prison.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped develop the legislation, estimated the new laws would slash the state’s prison population by 10 percent over the next decade. The measures were also expected to save the state $262 million, money that would be diverted to community-based groups that work to lower crime and recidivism.

Separately, Edwards signed a law in 2017 that stated juvenile offenders under the age of 18 couldn’t be tried in the adult criminal justice system, although prosecutors could still make exceptions for minors suspected of carrying out heinous violent crimes.

Six years later, state data indicates the reforms have achieved the goal of reducing the number of nonviolent offenders in the state’s prison system.

A December report by the Louisiana Department of Corrections found the state’s prison population has fallen from about 35,000 inmates in 2016 to about 29,000 by the end of 2023 — a reduction driven by a 50 percent decline in prisoners being held on nonviolent offenses. Recidivism due to new criminal offenses or parole or probation violations also dropped sharply. All that has added up to $153 million in taxpayer savings, the report noted.

Yes, well, goodbye to all that. We're boomeranging back the other direction now, and then some.

Louisiana death row prisoners could soon be executed with nitrogen gas and the electric chair under legislation given final approval by state lawmakers Thursday — part of a push by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to toughen penalties for criminals and limit their opportunities for second chances.

The legislation, House Bill 6, headlined a whirlwind 10-day special session convened by Landry in a bid to fight crime. Lawmakers sent 19 other pieces of legislation to Landry’s desk Wednesday and Thursday, marking a victory in the governor’s effort to lurch the state’s policies to the political right by dismantling bipartisan justice system changes enacted in 2017.

Lifetimes of arduous organizing effort erased in an instant. No more parole for any adult (which we will define as 17 yrs and up now.) Extreme limits on conviction appeals. And, on top of that, now also, death by torture. All of this will take another generation or longer of suffering before a new mild, hard-won compromise might hope to undo any of it. 

"Major entertainment district"

This is kind of a story about the mayor's objections to a recently passed concealed carry law.  But the part that draws our interest is where we learn that Alonzo Knox might have a solution. 

City leaders said they hope that after  Gov. Landry signs the bill, legislators will at least agree to exempt the entertainment district of New Orleans. 

Councilwoman Helena Moreno said she believes a proposed house bill might offer some pushback against permit-less concealed carry. According to Moreno, State Rep. Alonzo Knox, whose district includes The French Quarter, plans to author a bill to limit the crime session law's application to his district. 

"It's a carveout of what we are calling a major entertainment district, these are the areas which have the largest crowds," Moreno said. "What the legislation does, is it puts it under a firearm-free zone, so in public places there would not be firearms allowed."

Moreno said she has spoken to Republican legislators privately, who said they would support the bill. 

Something tells me an "entertainment district" bill by Alonzo Knox is likely to be more about heightening surveillance, cracking down on street vendors and removing homeless people from sight during the Superbowl next year and that the guns bit is just a coincidental add on.  Anyway, watch this space, I guess.

Actually, instead of being lazy, I looked up the bill. On its face, it just defines a new term, "major entertainment district" in order to create a zone where firearms are prohibited.

A major entertainment district" means the public spaces within an area that traditionally hosts more than fifteen million people annually, contains a venue for sports and entertainment with a capacity for more than seventy-five thousand people, a convention center with more than one million square feet of exhibition space, and has one land-based casino. 

This shall include the area of the city of New Orleans containing the boundaries of the French Quarter as provided in R.S. 25:799(B), the Downtown Development District as provided in R.S. 33:2740.3(A), and the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as provided in R.S 33:130.862(A).

Conveniently, of course, this creates a new stop-and-frisk zone for Jeff Landry's "Troop NOLA."  There are other issues as well with designating a larger part of downtown under a term that implies its primary function is to entertain tourists.

The Year of Cloying and Sniveling

Here's a story on reaction from local political leaders on their deliberate exclusion from the Governor's Sewerage and Water Board "task force." The councilmembers all correctly perceive that they and their constituents are being ignored in favor of interests from either out of town altogether, or at least from the very top rung of the class pecking order. Landry's appointments, for example, include a Trump administration hand-me-down,  Darryl Berger's nepo baby, the owner of a fracking company charged with hazardous waste violations, and a former Rex. Also Paul Rainwater is here because his name dictates it.

Landry announced his four picks on Wednesday. Chairing the task force will be Paul Rainwater, who once briefly ran the S&WB under former Mayor Mitch Landrieu and currently works as a lobbyist for Cornerstone Government Affairs. That firm represents the S&WB and the city. 

Landry also appointed Lynes "Poco" Sloss, who currently holds a seat on the S&WB, as well as real estate developer Ryan Berger and William Vanderbrook, a Metairie accountant who served as a campaign treasurer for former U.S. Sen. David Vitter.

Three other task force members hold important state jobs under Landry: Joe Donahue leads the Department of Transportation of Development; Gordon Dove chairs of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority; and Aurelia Giacometto is secretary of the Department of Environmental Quality.

Paul Flower, chair of the New Orleans Business Council, said he will be that organization’s representative. The other six members have not been announced.

And, as we mentioned the other day, the remaining seats are appointed by organizations with no democratic accountability to the city and little to no interest in representing poor or working class people in any way.  The City Council is at least somewhat expected to do some of that, at least in theory. Which is one reason they've been cut out. They aren't happy about that. There are other more cynical reasons they've been excluded and there are other more cynical reasons they are complaining, but let's not focus on that right now. 

Instead, take a look at their comments, which are quite strong. In particular, see JP Morrell's thread here referencing the Council's ongoing efforts to exercise some oversight of its own. 

Council Vice President JP Morrell said in a series of social media posts that many of the organizations represented on the task force “hid” during the council’s sometimes-tense debates with the S&WB over recent reforms.

“The fact that SWB had a press release lauding this creation means the likelihood the task force will actually suggest fundamental changes in favor of ratepayers or legitimate critical review of S&WB’s performance is 0.0%,” Morrell said.

He's probably onto something there. Otherwise, why would the SWB leadership be so welcoming of the Governor's initiative? 

Some City Council members also lambasted the water board's lackluster response to Landry’s order Tuesday creating the task force, which skewered the utility for corruption, incompetence and dishonesty. The S&WB simply said it “welcomes the attention to our utility and our city’s critical needs.”

Council member Joe Giarrusso called that response “cloying and sniveling.”

“I was candidly surprised by the fact that the executive order is so over the top... and the Sewerage and Water Board seemed to say thank you, we'll take another lashing,” he said.

This isn't the first case of the city's administrative wing falling over itself to announce that it is "in alignment" with the new Governor's reactionary policies.  Expect the cloying and sniveling to continue apace.