Arnie's greatest hits

Two years ago, Fielkow conducted a hearing on the very serious problem of contractor wage theft in New Orleans. At the time, we were grateful to see the councilman take an interest in this issue. Unfortunately not much happened after that as Arnie went on to support more important to him priorities.

Among these were giving Sean Cummings whatever he wants, installing red light cameras everywhere, and naming trees and buildings after soft drinks or potato chips. Or maybe it was peanuts... whatever, it's all about the public-private partnering and such. Just don't call it a sell-out, whatever you do.

Of course there was that one time when Arnie... allegedly.. behind closed doors... in a conversation nobody really knows anything about.. told Tom Benson off real good. We'll always remember that fondly.

Oh and then there's this.



Before he leaves town, let's make sure Arnie tells us where he left the Deduct Box.

Bye, Arnie

If it means that now we don't have to sell every public park in town to a naming rights sponsor, I'm all for Fielkow taking his talents to the NBA or whatever.

In a prepared statement, Fielkow said he is accepting the position of chief executive officer of the National Basketball Retired Players Association. The Fielkows will be leaving New Orleans, the statement said.

Not so bad in an age when our unscheduled public office vacancies typically mean someone is going to prison or reality TV or on some dubiously purposed bus tour of America.

Probably the best thing we can say about Arnie's career in local politics is that it briefly relieved the council of Jackie Clarkson which was pretty nice while it lasted.

Turns out we can have nice things provided we name them stupidly

Because this project's advocates have stuck with it through several years of stops and starts, New Orleans is on the verge of getting a new three mile cross-town linear park along the right of way originally established by the old Carondelet Canal.

The City of New Orleans owns most of a 3.1-mile linear right-of-way along a former shipping canal and railway that once connected the historic French Quarter to Bayou St. John. The right-of-way is unique in that it traverses a cross-section of the City that captures its two hundred year settlement pattern, ranging from the colonial-era settlement of the Vieux Carre to the mid-twentieth-century suburban neighborhood of Lakeview. It has long been the objective of the City and community to convert this special right-of-way into a greenway, comprised of publicly accessible open space, recreation areas, and other amenities. The project is now one of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s “Committed Projects.” At the heart of the greenway a bicycle and pedestrian trail is desired that would facilitate travel among diverse, adjacent neighborhoods.

The greenway or something like it has long been on the drawing board or in the imaginations of New Orleans residents and now is closer to becoming a reality than it ever has been. This afternoon begins the first in a series of public meetings designed to collect input regarding the types of amenities and functions the park should offer. The Gambit blog provides us with a schedule of topics.

Meetings begin at 4:30 p.m. at Sojourner Truth Community Center (2200 Lafitte St.)

Monday, Aug. 15: Recreational Activities and Programming AND Corridor Education, Employment and Jobs Opportunities

Tuesday, Aug. 16: Greenway Arts and Interpretive AND Transportation, Stormwater, and Infrastructure

Wednesday, Aug. 17: Land Use and Urban Design AND Housing and Economic Development Strategies

Thursday, Aug. 18: Financing, Operations and Maintenance

Friday, Aug. 19: Health and Environment

A general community meeting on the project will be held at 9:30 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Aug. 20 at Delgado Community College's Student Life Center (615 City Park Avenue).

Two more weeks of workshops scheduled for November 2011 and February 2012 will be announced soon.

If you're attending, please feel free to suggest a few possible naming rights sponsors for Councilman Fielkow's consideration.

The Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday agreed to recommend that the full council consider Fielkow's suggestion that Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration solicit advertising and marketing firms to figure out what city assets might best attract paid sponsorships.

"I believe we have the chance to market and sell everything from advertising on local governmental access (cable TV) channels to potentially some naming rights for some of our city-owned buildings to a whole slew of inventory, " Fielkow said.

Obviously the BP Greenway has a nice ring to it but we should probably endeavor to buy (or in this case be bought) local. Old New Orleans Rumway? Wagner's Meatshaft? Entergy Path Presented by Cox?

Assembled QsOTD

Krugman:

Look, it might have been slightly better if Obama had acknowledged the economy’s problems more forthrightly, rather than continuing to insist that the ARRA was doing just fine. But that’s not about focus — and not at all opposed to doing health reform too.

What’s crucial to remember here is that economic policy is about actually doing things, not about saying “Message: I care.” A bigger stimulus — and, importantly, one that wouldn’t fade out just in time for the midterms — would have mattered. “Focus”, not so much.

First Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin at the City budget hearings (as paraphrased by The Lens):

Kopplin says government efficiency consultant could help government identify needless consulting contracts.

Also via The Lens Twitter feed from the budget hearing:

"I'm not sure who's in charge of things, but we just lost several lights here," (Councilman Arnie) Fielkow said. Lights blown out in the chamber.

Former Mayor Ray Nagin on former Technology Officer Greg Meffert's decision to reach a plea deal with federal prosecutors.

“The reality is this was an independent act by Meffert,” Nagin said. “I’m not the target, have never been a target of any of these investigations. In fact, during the civil trial, I wasn’t even called as a witness. I don’t see it. I haven’t done anything wrong, so I hope he tells it all.”

Just for kicks, Dambala digs up a famous radio interview in which Meffert aggressively denied any and all wrongdoing.

Drew Brees on Saints' offensive tackle Zach Streif to whom Brees almost completed a touchdown pass Sunday night while running a play some of have been waiting years to see.

"I remember throwing about three balls in practice right at about his face mask, and he'd just snatch 'em," Brees said. "He's a really good athlete. You should see him play basketball."

Who's missing the money now?

Surely I'm not the only one who gets the impression that this is really an argument over whose friends get to lose the money next.

The issue arose as part of a larger debate over spending on an executive-branch office of economic development and the Nola Business Alliance, a nonprofit organization funded by a mix of public and private funds and operated independent of City Hall. Fielkow believes that the public-private partnership should take over the job of the city office. While the UDAG money won’t be spent to hire new employees for either organization, the fund is relevant to the debate because its mismanagement has been used to bolster arguments that economic development funds should be managed by business professionals rather than City Hall officials.

In short, Arnie is proposing that we address the problem of publicly accountable public officials mismanaging funds by removing the "publicly accountable" part of that altogether and just allowing a private club of businesspeople to pass the money back and forth amongst themselves. What could go wrong with that?

This must mean that Arnie's in, then?

Mitch Landrieu Says He Won't Run For Mayor

Bucking the paid labor trend

Over the past few years, headline writers at City Business and The Times-Picayune have promoted a pet myth of a recession-proof New Orleans "recovery" economy "bucking the trend" of national hard times. The loosely implied thesis is based on two ideas. The first part of the theory holds that since the local job market is heavy on T-shirt & booze pedaling and light on manufacturing or technology or finance it isn't as vulnerable to the kinds of shocks that have affected other parts of the country. Or, since there aren't many real jobs around here in the first place, there aren't that many to lose either. And while that may be kind of true, it seems an inappropriate cause for cheering in the business pages.

The second major tenet of trendbuckery asserts that because the Federal Flood left us with so much shit to either knock down or rebuild (but mostly knock down) we're in the midst of an unparalleled construction boom. This is also partially true but, again, less than cheering when one takes into account the degree to which it relies on a system of slave labor.

About 80 percent of wage laborers in New Orleans, mostly Hispanic, report they have been stiffed. New Orleans has the highest incidence of wage theft by far in the South, according to a survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"This isn't a few bad apples," Gonzalez said. "It's systematic."

Neither does it affect only the 30 or so members of the Congress of Day Laborers, affiliated with the Center for Racial Justice, who showed up to the council meeting in work clothes and boots, wearing Spanish and English "Stop wage theft!" stickers over their hearts.

Darnell Parker, a black U.S.-born day laborer, said one contractor waited until a grueling job was finished to tell him he was being paid less than expected. The only explanation offered by the contractor was that he changed his mind.

Licensed union contractors also lose out: They are at a disadvantage if they have to compete against freelance contractors who can underpay laborers without facing penalties from a union or the police, experts said.

Wage thieves drive "honest businesses out of business," said Ted Quant, director of Loyola's Twomey Center for Peace through Justice. Homeowners lose out at that point because the pool of contractors available for jobs thins, Fielkow said.

Thanks should go to Councilman Fielkow for hosting that hearing, by the way.

Meanwhile, also not magically insulated from the national recession is the local financial sector.

NEW YORK — Continued problems with repayment of mortgage loans in Whitney Holding Corp.’s Florida markets has led Fitch Ratings Service to downgrade the company's ratings, and its forecast is that the situation is not likely to improve in the near future.

Investors refer to Fitch ratings to gauge the perceived health of the company.

Fitch lowered Whitney’s long-term Issuer Default Rating to BBB from BBB+ to reflect the bank’s increased level of nonperforming assets.

Whitney Bank is a subsidiary of Whitney Holding Corp. It's unclear to me just how insulated Whitney is from its parent's investments but suffice to say there's almost no such thing as a local bank anymore. If you're a lending institution, chances are you've been affected by "troubled assets" in one way or another.

Now if Whitney happened to have a friendly Senator or two lying around someplace, things might be a bit different.

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm's losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn't meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye's office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

Now there's how you go about bucking a trend.

Fielkow the anti-Stormy

Check out Adrastos's airing out the new Arnie Fielkow for Senate rumor. Apart from the amusing thought of watching these two men attempt to out-lisp one another in debate, I think this is a horrible idea for two specific reasons.

1) Even if he had anything approaching Vitter's money (which he doesn't and won't), Fielkow has no chance ever ever ever to win a statewide race against David Vitter. Vitty sits comfortably on the sweet spot of the Louisiana political pulse while Fielkow's position is something like a blood-starved necrotic wart. Vitter is an incumbent Senator with strong wingnut flag-waving cred, and a growing reputation in the anti-whatever-the-Obama-Administration-wants-at-the-moment teabag movement. Arnie is a stilted and soft-spoken moderate (which will play as EXTREMELY LIBERAL in a statewide race) midwesterner with a political base confined to the whiter precincts of Orleans parish who was recently in the news speaking against a recently passed anti-gay adoption law.

2) It's boring. Fielkow is boring. How am I supposed to get interested in watching David Vitter beat the crap out of somebody if I can't at least draw some reassurance from the expectation that it will be funny? Last week, Greg Peters excoriated the LA Democratic Party for its pathetic display of substituting a proxy stunt candidacy of a porn star for an actual strategy. Greg writes

This is what the Louisiana Democratic party as come to: freelance operatives running joke candidates because the party itself can’t come up with a credible opponent. This will get lot of press, and some jokes on Letterman, and everyone will have a good laugh, and the hugely conservative voting base of Louisiana will be turned off by the mockery and the constant exhortations of “hypocrisy” coming from a party that can’t field a candidate or organize a campaign, and the voters will rally around the values flag for a massive FUCK YOU vote and Vitter will crush you in the jungle primary. And there we’ll all be, stuck with that obstructionist, outdated asshole for another six years. But hey, we ran a porn star! SNUK SNERT!

And I largely agree with that. But throwing Arnie out there looks very much like the opposite side of the same coin. Instead of working on finding viable candidates, or making a reality-based argument to the voters, LA Dems are desperately trying to find a way to use Vitter's well-publicized prostitution problems against him. Having second thoughts about the efficacy of using Stormy Daniels to draw a "pointed contrast" of Vitter's "serious sin" with his "family values" platform, the squirrels are hunting after the same nut only this time using a squeaky clean anti-Stormy to remind voters of Vitter's faults. You can see them sitting around trying to brainstorm this. "I know! We'll run a porn star!" A few minutes of chuckling... and then, "Or wait what if we run Mr. Rogers?" It's a fool's gambit and a guaranteed failure.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have to suffer from a profound lack of entertainment. Oh well... maybe Nagin will run.

Campaign 2010

Mayoral candidate makes a big deal out of re-wording an already unenforceable City Council resolution, not to make it enforceable, but rather just to say that he really really wishes it could be. While it would be sort of fun to watch the same candidate subsequently ignore the unenforceable resolution as Mayor, it's also probably a good thing that he won't get that chance.

Stumped

I really don't know where to begin dealing with this. The latest fantasy of those leading the local "recovery" (whatever that may mean at this point) involves a proposal to transfer management of the New Orleans International Airport and its associated patronage over to the Governor's office in return for State-backed financing of the "Reinventing the Crescent" scheme plus a spastic belching of every half-baked development proposal floated locally over the past three years.

Under the plan, bond dollars would be invested in five areas in New Orleans: a "sports and entertainment" district on the perimeter of the Superdome and New Orleans Arena; the government complex that is home to City Hall, Civil District Court and the shuttered State Building bordering Duncan Plaza that is slated for demolition; the medical district where a new Veterans Administration Hospital is planned; the theatre district surrounding the intersection of Canal Street and Loyola Avenue; and a six-mile stretch of downtown riverfront that city leaders hope to transform into park and new commercial space.

It's as though they resolved to just keep naming projects until the mark the customer finally assents to the deal. Oh wait. That's not all.

Seeking to address concerns that only a small part of the city would benefit from the infusion of state money, business leaders recently agreed to consider including funding for a major development -- possibly a distribution center -- for eastern New Orleans.

I thought Eastern New Orleans was already getting a monorail. I wonder if we keep waiting around, they'll throw in another one.

Okay now... What? Oh goddammit they're still talking.

While much of the work envisioned in the proposal would involve improvements to streets and sidewalks and amenities such as parks, fountains and public art work, advocates say some of the bond money could be used as the local match for big-tickets projects, including a new streetcar line along Loyola Avenue and an extension of the Riverfront line upriver to Jackson Avenue and downriver to the Industrial Canal.

Another component would revive a dormant proposal offered two years ago by Nagin that called for tearing down City Hall and offering the site for sale to developers.

The plan would relocate city government offices across Poydras Street to the privately owned Dominion Tower, a 36-story, 490,000-square-foot office building that sustained extensive wind damage during Hurricane Katrina.

That has got to be the most massive and improbable collection of projects that ever ran interference for what looks like a funneling of state backed bond money to the New Orleans Building Corp in return for control of the aviation board... so that Sean Cummings can build condos in the Marigny. But I never said we were lacking for grandeur around here.

But none of that is what has me stumped. The part of this article that has truly rendered me speechless is the part where Arnie Fielkow says it will be a great way to "restore confidence among displaced residents unsure about returning to New Orleans." Yeah that and a few well-placed billboards.

Seriously, though. Suppose you are a displaced resident who depends on a federal housing subsidy. You and your family have lived in New Orleans for generations. The failure of the Federal Floodwalls has forced you out of your home to Houston or Atlanta or.. god forbid someplace worse. You're desperate to come home. You've even been offered your old job back at the same hotel. But due to a catch in the HUD rules, you find yourself trapped until the rents in New Orleans fall back to a level comparable to that of the market you want to move out of. You were hoping the rents would stabilize as more affordable housing became available but then Stacy Head blew you a kiss as the city council signed off on the demolition of the "big four" public housing complexes. Meanwhile the city seems determined to demolish whatever remaining usable private housing stock remains as the Mayor shrugs his shoulders and tells you we're still waiting on our "market-driven recovery" to fix everything. And now Arnie (Fielgood) Fielkow is telling you that a proposed theater district/new City Hall/riverfront ampitheater/monorail-streetcar-extension-thingy is supposed to "restore" your "confidence"?

Again... I'm stumped. It's so stupid, it's not even funny.