Nobody asked about a rollback?

Good news! Sewerage and Water Board is about to fix your billing problems. You know, the problem everyone is having where there bill is too small every month.

The vast majority of customers should expect to see cost increases of about 10%, while a handful could see their bills go up as much as 25%, S&WB Project Manager Rebecca Johnsey told a City Council committee Monday. That's because the manual readers being replaced don’t actually capture the entirety of a customer's water usage. 

“Our meters in the ground are mechanical meters, and that means they have pieces on the inside that physically move. So over time, they get gunked up and they slow down, and it actually takes more and more water on the front end to start the movement,” Johnsey said.

About 10,000 "smart meters" have already been installed under a $67 million contract with California-based Aqua-Metric signed in December 2022, and the first bills will begin going out next week, S&WB executive director Ghassan Korban said Tuesday.

The initial round of bills will be no more than 120% of a customer's annual average, he said. After that, bills will reflect the precise reading of the smart meters.

Pretty neat the way they get super interested in the "precise" amount of water used once it gets past the point in the line where you have to pay for it.  How much gets dumped out into the ground before it arrives there, is anybody's guess. Sunk cost, right? 

Anyway, this article doesn't tell us how Aqua-Metric's "smart" meters work.  But, one assumes, they also have "pieces on the inside" that must do something.  Hopefully it isn't what any of the various smart meter vendors who ran roughshod over the state of Mississippi have been doing. 

From 2009 to 2017, at least 10 Mississippi cities signed contracts with the companies to install smart meters or other new technology. All but one have reported problems, and at least four have sued to recoup money they paid to Siemens, McNeil Rhoads or Mueller. Three of those suits are still pending.

Siemens and McNeil Rhoads, competitors that pitched the projects and acted as project managers, hired contractors who installed many meters improperly, according to officials in Jackson, McComb and Moss Point. In some cities, the two companies also struggled to link meters to the home office or to merge a new billing system with an old one.

Officials in at least eight Mississippi cities said they had problems with Mueller’s smart meters, which sometimes didn’t measure accurately because of faulty parts or batteries that died sooner than promised. Water departments in other states, including California and Missouri, have reported similar problems with Mueller meters over the past decade.

McComb, a city of 12,000 people south of Jackson, signed the first Siemens water meter contract in Mississippi. Mayor Quordiniah N. Lockley, city manager at the time, said McComb agreed to pay the company $10 million to install 6,000 smart Master Meters.

But contract workers hired by Siemens put them in backward and missed deadlines to install the antennas that the meters needed to communicate with a central office, Mr. Lockley said. Then some customers saw their water bills hit as much as $1,000 per month, with no obvious explanation.

At least S&WB is trying to get out in front with an "obvious explanation" before the bills start to go up. Or at least that's what City Council is urging them to do. 

Council members urged water board officials to “overdo” a campaign to inform the public about how the new meters will impact bills. Council member Eugene Green also asked the agency to hold community meetings in every council district.

“On the one hand, we can't not have people pay for service they're receiving, but on the other hand there will be sticker shock,” said Council member Joe Giarrusso.

Notice that none of your elected representatives has anything to say about the possibility that your bill is already too damn high.  They're not here to help with that so much as they are here to manage your expectations.  When property tax assessments threaten homeowners with "sticker shock" we at least get some effort at rolling back the millage rates in order to keep things under control.  But here we aren't so motivated. Did no one ask about rolling back the water rates? It's different when the revenue windfall comes off the back of a regressive user fee, I guess.  Poor people always pay their "fair share" first.

Speaking of Draculas...

The other day I saw this sign on the Napoleon Ave neutral ground advertising an upcoming production of the New Orleans Ballet. For a second, though, I thought Dracula (who we have already established lives at Charity Hospital) was running for office.

I am pretty sure the Charity Dracula Castle is in Alonzo Knox's house district. In which case, I'm not sure this wouldn't be an improvement. 

Anyway, there's something about people in the local political scene who just keep coming back from the dead. Take Charles Rice for example. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell wants the City Council to approve a contract with the firm of former Entergy New Orleans (ENO) CEO Charles Rice, who in 2018 stepped down after it was discovered the company had used paid actors to appear at city council hearings in support of a proposed new power plant.

According to a draft of the contract, the administration wants to hire the Rice Group LLC to help in ongoing litigation between the city and the Municipal Police Employees Retirement System, which handles the NOPD’s pension.

Of course, Rice didn't actually step all the way down from Entergy after the "actors" scandal. Remember, the paid actors gambit basically worked.  The plant the actors were hired to advocate for got built. The fact that the ploy got exposed resulted in a moment of bad press and nominal fine but that's all well worth it. And Rice was happy to take the fall anyway. No big loss to him.  He just got kicked down from CEO to legal consultant. Also his wife continued to work for and with the company. (She also continues to serve on public boards.)  Like Dracula, people operating at this level of privilege basically go on forever. They really aren't allowed to fail the way most of us mere mortals might be. I mean the Rices were doing kickbacks to their brothers-in-law over public contracts way back before a lot of you kids were even born. These are ancient powers we are dealing with here.  

Meanwhile, at Dracula's castle

Nothing is happening and no one is getting paid. 

More than six months after a new development team was brought in to help jumpstart the stalled redevelopment of the former Charity Hospital building in downtown New Orleans, the project remains in limbo with unpaid bills to its architect, contractor and other vendors that total at least $5.7 million.

Public documents show three liens and a lawsuit have been filed against 1532 Tulane Partners, a consortium led by local apartment developer Joseph Stebbins and Israeli financier Yoel Shargian that was awarded the rights to the Tulane Avenue building in 2018. 

The article goes on to itemize the liens but can't get any comments from the firms filing them. The paper did manage to get in touch with ex-NOPD Marlon Defillo who is suing over $190,000 he says the project owes him for "security consulting." He offers up some famous last words here. 

“Each time we would ask for payment, they would say, it’s coming,” said Defillo, a former assistant chief with the New Orleans Police Department. “Believing this is a state-owned building, I thought, how could things go wrong?” 

Anyway, on the last episode of Dracula's Castle back in January, we learned that Tulane had brought in The Domain Companies as a partner. Presumably the object there was to re-jigger the "state-owned building" in a way that placed even more emphasis on private profits from luxury condos and short term rentals than had already crept in. Which is weird since a few blocks away on Poydras, they're moving public entities like the police department into a privately owned building over there. Whatever you gotta do to shake the money out, I guess.

We've got all the star stuff at home

Probably you devoted at least a little bit of your time on Monday to experiencing the solar eclipse. Maybe you scored a pair of free glasses before the stampeding hordes got them all. In New Orleans, it didn't matter anyway. Most of us here just tried to get a brief frustrated glimpse through the cloud cover. At least, that's what I did. I kind of saw it a little. Here, I got a picture. Would you like to see?

 

Maybe you managed to get a better view than this. Maybe you made elaborate  plans in advance to take a trip into the "path of totality" so that it could "touch your soul."

On April 8, the Stones will host a dozen-plus visitors from as far away as Sweden to experience this year’s event.

“It’s such an emotional event,” Stone said. “It touches your soul, it really does. Any time you realize there’s something bigger than you, it gives you perspective. Surely that power has a purpose.”

In Buffalo, Horowitz said the eclipse, an obvious reminder of nature’s beauty, offers a chance to reflect on nature’s fragility and to find hope amid worldly chaos and personal challenges.

“You can sometimes be clouded by all that darkness,” he said. “The natural world is trying to tell us that beyond the darkness, there is light.”

If this is you, then, that's great. The human mind's capacity to perceive its surroundings and color it in feeling is infinite in its variation.  Contemplation of the heavens is a popular vector for this.  So I get it. But it's just not where I get my good vibes.  The universe may be unfathomably vast. But most of it is also distant from and indifferent to us.  The way I see it, if we really are made of star stuff, then we've got all of it we need down here. And besides, we're the ones doing all the interesting shit with it. 

The music of the spheres is great and all but what really touches my soul is "truck stuck in flooded underpass appears to have Sewerage and Water Board logos." There is where we find the true face of God.

There is a white truck with what appears to be a Sewerage & Water Board logo stuck in a flooded Franklin Ave underpass.@WWLTV pic.twitter.com/WIvNQGUXx9

— Rachel Handley (@RachelHandleyTV) April 10, 2024

Not everyone is as impressed, of course. 

But as life in many parts of the city returned to normal, business owners there were still knee-deep in clean-up work — again. Krivjanick's business has been flooded during storms in December, January, February and again on Wednesday, she said.

She's had enough. 

"I love the city of New Orleans," said Krivjanick. "I love the culture. I love everything that we have. But I don't feel like I'm being respected as a property owner, as a taxpayer. I don't feel like I'm being heard."

Look I don't want to be here rooting for crumbling infrastructure and corrupt government. Not every time, anyway. But, "won't somebody respect the property owners for a change," isn't engendering a tremendous amount of sympathy.  On the other hand, neither is this, "help us find the real killers," bit. 

But in an update on Thursday, S&WB spokesperson Grace Birch said that the power supply was further hobbled while the rain pounded down. All three of the S&WB's available backup generators tripped offline, she said, and officials suspect vandalism to an electrical feeder was the cause. The New Orleans Police Department has been asked to investigate. Two other backup generators were already out of service because of mechanical issues.

The S&WB said more details would be forthcoming in an after-action report on its pumping, power and staffing levels during the storm, which is required by state law within 48 hours of National Weather Service advisories.

I don't think there's an update on the "investigation" but we do know there were multiple power supply issues in play that day and that they can't all have been the work of imaginary terrorists.  

The utility confronted a second major issue at about the same time, when it attempted to send power from another of its turbines — Turbine 6 — to Pump Station 6 as well as a series of stations along Broad Street.

Because that turbine is relatively new, installed after Hurricane Katrina, the power it produces needs to be converted by a frequency changer for use by the older pumps. 

But the frequency changer tripped offline, rendering that power source useless, too.

The utility finally began using Entergy power to bring the frequency changers back online, allowing the pumping stations to begin using power from the changers between 10:15 a.m. and 11:25 a.m.

Without all of the necessary power, the Sewerage & Water Board was forced to leave some pumps off during the storm.

So to bring this back to the original point, there are more engrossing mysteries in the affairs of humanity on Earth than there are, even in the unfathomable expanse of outer space. And anyway, space is boring. For example, we already know exactly when the next total solar eclipse will be visible over US territory. In 2045, you can drive right over to Pensacola and see it. Hang around until 2078 and you can take a boat out to where New Orleans used to be and see it there too. It's all very predictable. Like a clock, I think someone once said. 

But try and figure out when Turbine 4 is coming back online... well now there is a genuine challenge to demand every power of philosophy ever dreamed of. 

The S&WB says it needs 44 megawatts of 25-hz power to run the pumps during the heaviest storms, but has been forced to operate with a little more than 40 megawatts since T-4 went down.

That turbine is not expected to return until next month.

We can peg the exact position of the moon for the next.. well for millennia into the future. Turbines, though, are unknowable. All we can say right now is check back sometime in May.  Really puts things in perspective, doesn't it.

Fitting way for all of this to end

Over a decade of struggle to protect what's left of New Orleans's neighborhoods from having the life sucked out of them by Airbnb; all of the research, the planning commission studies, the overheated social media debate, the marathon city council meetings, the good times, the bad times, the shit times; is about to be brought to an abrupt end on Monday in the state legislature. 

Just as cities and parishes across Louisiana such as New Orleans, Lafayette, and St. Tammany Parish have been ramping up their enforcement of short-term rentals, HB 591 would make AirBnB immune to important oversight. Rep. Lyon’s bill, which will be heard in House Commerce Committee Monday morning, would destroy local government’s abilities to enforce city regulations, which are critical to ensure bad actors cannot continue to illegally operate short-term rentals in our neighborhoods.

Jeff Landry says he wants the city to "operate like Charleston." Charleston is one of the fastest gentrifying cities in America, thanks, in large part, to the conversion of neighborhoods into clusters of vacation rentals. 

New Orleans, as we all know, has already been bled nearly to death by the phenomenon. And, yet, every turn in the long saga has left us with some hope that we'd finally get our local electeds to listen to us even a little bit. The most recent twist found a judge (after an extended delay) finally upholding the current version of our not quite restrictive enough ordinances. But since then, nothing has happened because 1) the administration has neither the capacity nor the inclination to enforce the rules and 2) the landlords are appealing the ruling anyway. In the meantime, it's back to business as usual.  Nobody actually lives here. The rent is too damn high. And homes continue to become hotels while city leadership looks the other way.  

And now comes Marrero Democrat Rodney Lyons with the Deus Ex Machina, a bill that finally takes the entire question off of the desk of anyone in local government.  You can bet that they're all hoping Lyons's bill passes for that reason alone. It makes their lives a lot easier if all they have to do is say they feel bad that you got evicted and no one expects them to do anything about it anymore.

The Boil Order Decade

It felt like we measured out the 2010s in the time spent between the several boil orders.  So much so, that by the end of the decade, it stopped feeling like anything out of the ordinary. And, of course, in the 20s, the global pandemic made our little home grown perpetual public health crisis seem practically pedestrian by comparison. It's just expected now the every so often, the water pressure will drop and people will have to take precautions.  That's resilience!  We even figured out a way to limit the boil orders to specific neighborhoods now so they seem like even less of a big deal. That's innovation!  As we all know, resilience and innovation are synonymous with the global brand of New Orleans. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration has fumbled a $141 million grant for green infrastructure projects, according to a report from a federal watchdog, with poor planning, misallocation of funds and a lack of workers undercutting the city's efforts to keep stormwater at bay.

In one case, a grant-funded program to add porous pavement and other upgrades to New Orleans homes — which the city has previously touted as a success — was so poorly handled that it actually made some properties more vulnerable to flooding, according to an audit released this week by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General.

The audit, conducted over nine months ending in July 2023, said construction had not started on any of the eight grant-funded infrastructure projects comprising the “Gentilly Resilience District,” which is supposed to hold stormwater in redesigned green spaces that would otherwise flow directly to the often-overwhelmed city drainage system.

 Okay well nevermind that right now. It's a global brand, trust me.

Following her participation in an international climate change conference in Dubai last December, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced she had signed a major new deal with a private company to significantly reduce the city’s carbon emissions and boost its drinking water and energy efficiencies.

The announcement was a public relations win for Cantrell after more than a year of being criticized for maintaining a busy travel schedule without any major results to show for them.

The Dec. 8 press release outlined the ambitious project the city would undertake with Zoetic Inc., an Ohio-based HV/AC coolant manufacturer. Described in the release as “a leading U.S.-based climate impact company with a portfolio of carbon reduction solutions,” Zoetic would be tasked with “increasing sustainability, including significant carbon reduction and water and energy resiliency.”

But more than three months later, the only thing Cantrell has to show for the trip remains the press release. In fact, internal administration documents indicate that after an initial flurry of behind-the-scenes activity, the project has completely halted.

Those documents also show Cantrell appears to have made the deal unilaterally within hours of meeting Zoetic’s founder. According to these records, Cantrell never consulted staff experts back in New Orleans before signing it, and the press release caught even her top climate-related aides off guard.

With city staffers scrambling to figure out what the agreement actually meant for the city, several people involved raised questions about the Zoetic deal, including one city employee who called the company “sketchy.”

Alright well put a pin in that one too. The point is, we're resilient now.  The streets flood every time it rains for a few hours and the water gets all amoebaed up every time a main breaks and we are not fazed one bit by it.  

That doesn't mean we can't be a little curious, though. I mean, maybe once or twice over the course of the Boil Order Decade, you may have wondered where does all the clean water our bills say we've been paying for go anyway? Well, now we know. 

NEW ORLEANS — The office of the Inspector General released a report outlining failures within the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans.

The report says that infrastructure weaknesses, plus metering and billing errors created significant water loss.

According to the report, "SWBNO water losses were found to be consistently above the highest range of industry averages of 45.5 percent, with a ten-year average of non-revenue water of approximately 73 percent between 2008 and 2017. OIG evaluators found the SWBNO continued to experience similar rates in 2021 and 2022, with 75 percent water loss in 2021 and 64 percent water loss in 2022."

The OIG says the water board did not follow industry standards, resulting in a combined loss of over $19 million over two years.

They've been pouring it straight into the ground.  Now, from what we understand, several of the stalled "Resilience District" projects had to do with creating stormwater retention facilities. This, we were told, had a dual benefit. They would supposedly lessen the stress on the drainage system by lowering the volume of water that had to be pumped out immediately. They also were supposed to be good for maintaining the soils beneath the city famously vulnerable to subsidence caused by over-efficient drainage.  But here we see that, even though, the retention projects weren't being build, S&WB was more than making up for it by dumping the water back into the soil anyway.  Score another one for innovation.

Seems bad

 Everything they do seems bad. Throw this on the pile as well. 

Cloud’s Senate Bill 482 goes the furthest of those bills by gutting from the list of records eligible for public access all documents that detail “deliberations” in government work. It would exempt documents containing "advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations” that feed into any government decision or policy-making choices.

Watchdog groups and attorneys dealing with public information issues decried the bill Wednesday. Melia Cerrato, a Sunshine Legal Fellow at Tulane University’s First Amendment Law Clinic, called it “extremely alarming” and said it risked violating the state’s constitution.

“This will create government secrecy on a level that should alarm people regardless of where they are on the political spectrum,” Cerrato said. “This is bad government.”

Anyway, I don't know what else to say. It's all bad.  

The Louisiana governor is already thought to be all-powerful, but a handful of legislative proposals would give Jeff Landry more control over the state government than any of his recent predecessors. 

Two proposed constitutional amendments would allow Landry to pick most members of the Louisiana Supreme Court and state Civil Service Commission, which oversees hiring and firing guidelines for state workers.

Another bill gives Landry control over the Louisiana Board of Ethics, after it dinged him for taking a private flight from a campaign donor last fall. 

There’s also legislation to empower Landry to pick the chairpersons and other officers of hundreds of other state boards and commissions.  

Most lawmakers who drafted the bills said Landry is not pushing the proposals, though the sponsors include some of the governor’s biggest supporters in the Legislature.

But we did know it would be this bad. Everyone knew and they knew for a long time.  But what happens when the Democrats and the press remain inert for the whole two years of the statewide election cycle leading up to this?  Well, it gets bad. This must be what they wanted on some level. So here we are.

Carbon Capture Capers

The state is rushing headlong into carbon capture despite many remaining questions as to the efficacy and safety of the process. It definitely feels like we're going to learn about the consequences the hard way.  Anyway, it doesn't inspire confidence that companies are limiting public scrutiny by doing everything in their power to keep the site locations secret for as long as possible.

Without information about where CO2 injection wells will be located, Eustis said it’s not possible to notify local landowners of the potential risks to their drinking water or assess if there are pathways for leaks, such as underground faults. In areas with underground salt domes, like Vermilion Parish, CO2 leakage and pressure can extend up to 12 miles away from the injection site, according to research by the University of Texas at Austin. A new report commissioned by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project warns of the risks of proposing carbon disposal wells in areas dense with abandoned oil and gas wells.

“Class VI applicants cannot keep the locations of the underground plume secret, and also have a comment period,” Eustis said. He questioned how his organization could warn the public about the potential safety hazards of pollution in such a short time frame. Most projects in the state only require a 30-day commenting period. “The risks extend far from the injection site, and can affect hundreds to thousands of landowners, although we hope that will be unlikely,” he said.

Also in the above story, Exxon seems keen to place injection wells on state-owned land in order to limit liability. Also it looks like they're taking advantage of the state's "orphaned well" clean up fund in order to do their prep work for them.  Other shenanigans afoot.  Anyway, for now all we can do is hope it doesn't end in too many sinkholes or poisoned aquifers. But we won't know that until it's too late either.