That Tricentennial was a long time ago now

I'm so old I remember when Mitch was going to cut the ribbon on a new airport to celebrate. He's moved on to his new career of not running for President now. And the airport is, well, there are problems.

KENNER, La. — Kenner's top building official says he warned contractors about the potential for plumbing problems when construction began on the new, billion-dollar terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.

An email exchange from 2016 shows that the contractor asked to cut back on plumbing hangers to keep costs down. A city inspector would later blame the plumbing problems on a shortage of those same hangers.

Typically when you build anything on top of the South Louisiana Jello soil, you've got to take certain precautions in order to compensate for the inevitable subsidence that is going to occur.  One can easily imagine that this is particularly true when you are building something the size of airport terminal.  Anyway, it's common enough knowledge among the layfolk.  There's no way an engineering firm would just ignore a problem like that out of ignorance. They could only do that as a deliberate cost-cutting measure.  

The audit was based largely on an interview with Mohamad and an email exchange between the contractor, a joint venture called Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro, and 2016 Kenner Code Enforcement Director Stephen Petit.

“Kenner officials insisted subsidence would in fact occur with the soil beneath the terminals, but were told the cost to support the pipelines every two feet would be cost prohibitive, and the national minimum standard of five feet per hanger should be upheld,” writes Adam Campo, Director of Risk, Insurance, Audit and Compliance for the City of Kenner, in his report.

Engineers put a shorter length of pipe in between hangers when they are trying to add extra support.

“It was costing too much to put them at two-foot centers. It was costing a lot of manpower to have those hangers tied into the slab as well,” Mohamad said.

HGBM’s construction manager did not return email seeking comment and a representative for Square Button Consulting, the plumbing subcontractor listed on inspection records, said they simply installed the hangers and pipes to HGBM and the architect’s specs.

Not to get too deep in the muck here (the pipes are doing that well enough on their own) but it's worth remembering that Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro became the contractor after a series of  acrimonious disputes, stops, starts, court challenges, etc. involving allegations of racial discrimination, conflicts of interest, and political side deals among other complaints.  Eventually they hammered something out where everyone could get paid whatever it was they thought they were owed.  Although it now looks like they also took a few shortcuts to get there.

There's no way for us to say what Square Button's role in the shortcutting might have been. But it is interesting to see their name come up given that the firm's specialty wasn't exactly plumbing so much as it was political networking.

Square, however, is not a plumber. He was Mayor Mitch Landrieu's chief information officer until 2014. He holds an MBA from Wharton, an Ivy League business school often regarded as the best in the country. He engineered wireless networks for companies like Verizon and was a corporate consultant for Boston-based Bain & Co.

Square Button Consulting became licensed to work as a plumbing and mechanical contractor in April 2015, just as construction companies began jockeying for a piece of the new Armstrong Airport terminal.

Square's company is getting into plumbing because he was handpicked by the 70-year-old New Orleans firm Gallo Mechanical for a subcontract on the airport project. Gallo describes the deal as a mentorship arrangement that's a win from many sides: Part of the airport's DBE goal is fulfilled, Square gets a mentorship that will show him how to succeed in building trades, and the community, hopefully, gets an African-American-owned business equipped to thrive in a competitive marketplace.

Yes, but do the elevators work?

If so, I hope they don't run on diesel fuel.

In early August, hundreds of gallons of diesel leaked from storage tanks located at the abandoned Naval base in the Bywater neighborhood into nearby waterways, documents from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality show. The fuel spilled from an above ground container onto the soil below, seeped into the drainage system and traveled approximately two miles to the Florida Avenue Canal. After discharging into the canal, the diesel flowed another half mile into the reservoir of a Sewerage and Water Board drainage pump station.

I don't mean to hit you with too many spoilers from this story. But the tl;dr is this. When the Naval base closed, the city took over the property with a plan to redevelop it. Then Cedric Grant diverted all of the FEMA money for that into Sewerage and Water Board. The WWLTV story linked in the article says it went to drainage projects that haven't moved past the design phase. Maybe Cedric just bought a couch with it. Anyway, the diversion of the funds left the city and the developer in limbo over who was responsible for security and hazard mitigation. And so nobody did any of that. And now we have diesel fuel leaking into the surrounding waterways.

But despite all of this, some version of the original deal may still be on.  At least that's what the city seems to want.  The developer, who happens to be Joe Jaeger, by the way, is a bit more hesitant.  I will highlight the reason why for you in this quote.

Cantrell’s office is currently working to broker a new agreement with EMDRC, Dyer said. The city will not dedicate funds to the project, he explained, because the developer will be fully responsible for financing construction costs according to the revised contract, which the city plans to execute by the end of the year.  “When we came into office the project was behind about two years. But as of December 31, it will be completely caught up,” he said.

Without going into specifics, Dyer said redevelopment plans have been adjusted to account for current realities. “We now have more information on the condition of the buildings and what can be done, allowing the developer and the city to negotiate a more precise lease.”

Last month, Jaeger told The Lens he was unsure if he will move forward with the deal. “I just work on the construction side of things, and I’m getting to the end of my rope waiting for the city to do its part,” he said.

There is still one way the city could agree to put some money into it, though.  It's a long shot but it appears, at least from this report in September, to have been on the table recently.

Interest in the potential for moving City Hall was kicked off Tuesday morning when Cantrell, answering a question about the future of Municipal Auditorium in Armstrong Park during a breakfast appearance before the Bureau of Governmental Research, suggested the currently vacant building would make for a good site for a new City Hall.

But Montaño said a few hours later that no decisions have been made and the auditorium is just one of several options being considered.

At this point, he said, all city-owned buildings are on the table, including some that would be logistically difficult or are already spoken for.

A brief list of potential sites Montaño went through included Municipal Auditorium but also the former Veterans Affairs building where officials cut the ribbon Tuesday on a "low-barrier" homeless shelter and the former Naval Support Activity property, a long-abandoned site at the edge of the Industrial Canal.

I thought it was odd to see the Naval base mentioned as a City Hall site. It still seems like an extremely remote possibility. But at least now we can see why the thought even came up.  They're just trying to match problem properties with rationales for putting money into them.

Whose street?

 LaSalle Street as it runs into what is now called Champions Square.



Six months later it still isn't officially Tom's street even if he does treat it that way.

Guess what?  There is still no contract between the LSED and the City for the use of the 1400 block of LaSalle.  I just confirmed that through a public records request this week.

I wanted to wait until the first Saints first home game to find out if they were actually going to resolve the issue before 10's of thousands of people poured across the property so I could get a clear picture of how Thornton thinks the 1400 block of LaSalle is "overvalued".  

I, myself, slogged across that public street with thousands of other people that day we got our ass kicked by the Patriots.

Clearly, this street is not "public".  Not even close.  Barriers on both ends with police checking bags....it ain't public.  It is now a permanent part of the Champions Square footprint.

As usual, there's a bunch more to that AZ post including a fun Sewerage and Water Board tie in so go read that. But I'd just like to add that the bag check is even more aggressive this year than it has been in the past.  Used to be they'd let you walk in with your cocktail so you could finish it before you went into the Dome and had to subsist on $9 shitty Dixies for the rest of the day. When we got to the checkpoint last week, they made us stop and throw away our Diet Cokes before passing into the Benson Concession Exclusivity Zone.

This week, you may have noticed several prominent Republican blowhards have taken to being very mad online at Tom Benson's state subsidies.  Before they either get too distracted by the next dumb thing or someone points out that they're actually the party of giving state assets away to their very rich friends like Tom and they drop the subject altogether, maybe we could get them to ask for our street back.

What did the mayor not know and when did he not know it?

An under reported bit of context to the whole drainage saga is Mitch Landrieu and Cedric Grant have been trying to dump Civil Service for quite some time now.

Human Resources Director Sharon Judkins told the board of directors Wednesday (Aug. 16) that the S&WB was short 290 people at the end of July, based on its budget for 1,500 employees. It also has 240 workers eligible to retire, including 121 who are participating in the agency's five-year deferred retirement option program, or DROP.

Those averages have plagued the board for months, if not years. In response, outgoing S&WB Executive Director Cedric Grant earlier this year had tried to eliminate civil service requirements for all future employees. But he failed to sway the state Legislature.

It wasn't just Grant trying to lobby Baton Rouge for these changes. The mayor has a hand in that too. Mitch spent last week implausibly feigning ignorance of some basic information about the status of pumps and turbines.  Here he says he was never notified of a power failure back in March of this year.  But longtime subscribers to regular water service in New Orleans find this dubious given the near constant attention these issues have gotten from one boil order to the next throughout Landrieu's term in office. Even the most casual observers are aware there have been problems.

In fact, in his 2012 pitch for a rate increase, the mayor wanted to "be very clear" about the danger we were in. 

"I want to be very clear about this, the city is in a position of danger right now. The power plant at the Sewerage and Water Board has broken five times since Katrina," Mayor Landrieu said in an address back in 2012.

And this was after a 2010 post-boil order examination where new emergency protocols were supposedly put in place. 

But at a news conference a few days later, Sneed said that message didn't arrive for several hours and that it didn't include an official copy of the advisory, which Sneed insisted was needed in order to issue the alert.

"In the middle of the night, e-mail is good, but it needs to be followed up by phone calls to ensure that we got those messages," he said. "All those problems have been corrected, and we feel confident that the issues won't happen again."

St. Martin and Sneed said on Friday that they have changed their emergency protocols as a result. In the future, they said, they will call senior city officials at their home and cell phones -- or dispatch police to rouse them, if necessary -- when major problems occur at night.

So somewhere along the line we went from, "we will send a cop to knock on the mayor's door at 2 am if necessary," to, "nobody told the mayor for months that the turbines were on fire."  It's possible this happened after Cedric Grant took over. I guess Mitch really really trusted him for some reason.

Until he didn't.

Sewerage & Water Board Executive Director Cedric Grant will leave much sooner than he indicated, possibly starting his retirement as early as next week, sources told WWL-TV Friday.

His departure would clear the way for a soon-to-be-named management team which apparently will be made up of at least five state and national experts from various fields.

Grant will be fine, as we are all well aware by now. He's got a big pension waiting for him. That's more than we can say for most of the S&WB line employees, though. And as city leaders move ahead with plans to "reform" municipal pensions or contract more and more work out, that's only going to get worse.

It's still highly likely that the incoming team of "experts in various fields" will favor more privatization, regardless of the "vehement denials" we read about here.

The state senator now plans to introduce a bill to put City Council members back on the utility's board of directors, which would undo changes in state law that he had helped Landrieu and the council make four years ago.

Morrell said Thursday (Aug. 17) that his proposal is a direct response to accusations that the Landrieu administration is attempting to privatize the 119-year-old public utility. The mayor and his spokespeople have vehemently denied any plans to privatize, saying they are hiring outside companies under temporary contracts to figure out what went wrong during the Aug. 5 flood and to help right the S&WB ship.

The final straw for Morrell came from an opinion piece by Jacques Morial, which was posted on The Lens website Wednesday. In it, Morial blasted Morrell and state Rep. Walt Leger, D-New Orleans, for carrying legislation in 2013 to remove council members from the S&WB. Morial equated that action to a first step toward privatization.

J.P. might be taking this a bit personally. But at least he's pushing in the right direction now. He has to because Morial's argument is correct.  The recent reforms are fundamentally undemocratic and S&WB needs better public oversight than that. Morial actually proposed doing away with the board altogether. But if we can't have that, at least let's have more accountability to the citiznery and less to the freaking university presidents.

The move to push Grant out the door sooner in favor of yet to be named consultants, doesn't bode well, though. At the end of the day, it's still more or less impossible for the Mitch Landrieus of the world to imagine any solution that isn't heavily flavored with public-private partnerships.  When in doubt, contract it out.  And there's never more doubt to work with than in the middle of a crisis.  So far we're only vaguely aware of how this crisis impacts upper management at S&WB. They're "retiring" with upper management pensions.   The consequences for the employees there are likely to be far worse.

The climate change era

Mitch does a pretty good job here covering for/clarifying some dumb stuff Cedric Grant said over the weekend. I'm not sure he's right, though.  Sounded to me like Grant meant what he said.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Monday that he disagrees with Sewerage and Water Board Executive Director Cedric Grant's assertion that climate change is the culprit for the recent flooding in the city.

He called Grant's comments a bit "out of context" and "tone deaf."

Grant said Saturday's rains, as well as similar flooding that happened July 22, are part of the "climate change era" the rest of the country is experiencing, and any upgrade to the city's drainage systems would cost billions of dollars it doesn't have.

"I think that was just kind of said in the spirit of the moment," Landrieu said, addressing a question about Grant's comments. "[Climate change] may have a little to do with it. But, generally speaking when you have a major event like that ... we're going to have a water event in the city of New Orleans."

I like that phrase, the "spirit of the moment."  Currently our spirit in bit of transitional moment with regard to climate politics.  We're moving from a spirit of denial (It's all a hoax so making difficult or expensive changes is unnecessary) to a spirit of condescending acceptance (Yes, it's real but it's too late/expensive to make any difficult changes so just get used to it.)   One thing's for sure, though. Nobody is going to make any difficult or expensive changes. Remarkable constancy of spirit to fit any moment. 

Delicious but deadly

The lead is in your pipes.

If you are living in New Orleans, you may be – or may have been – exposed to elevated lead levels in your drinking water without even realizing it, a risk that could spike as the city of New Orleans embarks on a $2.4 billion infrastructure overhaul.

That is the finding of a new report released Wednesday (July 19) by the New Orleans Inspector General’s Office. It calls on the city and the Sewerage & Water Board to be more targeted and proactive in warning residents of the risk of higher lead levels in the water. It also recommends the city take specific steps to help residents protect themselves, like handing out water filters and developing incentive programs to help low-income families remove lead service pipes on their property.

“Other cities are making great efforts in communicating with their citizens about this problem,” Inspector General Ed Quatreveaux said. “We need to take the small level of energy we have here around this issue and intensify it, because this is a serious problem.”

Serious as the problem may be, Cedric Grant says it might be more your problem than it is his.

Lead, once valued for its malleability and durability, was widely used for city service lines and home plumbing up until the mid-20th Century when we started to learn more about its toxicity. A ban on the installation of lead pipes came into effect in 1986.

Homes built before the late 1980s, which includes much of New Orleans’ housing stock, may still have lead service pipes, which can release the toxic metal into the water.

Grant with S&WB has long emphasized the agency is only responsible for replacing lines on public property. “There are public and private responsibilities here,” he said.

There may also be public lead service lines still in service under our roads. Grant said the agency replaces any lead lines it encounters during regular work, though, because lead was once an industry standard, it does not have a catalog of where those lines are. (The city started taking inventory of the city’s 140,000 service lines last fall. So far, 3,000 service lines have been recorded, 800 of which were lead.)   

Can't afford to protect your family from the poison that enters your home thanks to an old building code that has nothing to with you?  Too bad. You probably should have been more "responsible." What are you thinking trying to live in this city if you can't meet the cost of paying for your own resilience anyway?

Doesn't anybody want this grift?

The city says it is a step nearer to shaking some money out of FEMA to restore the Municipal Auditorium. After that the task will be identifying which developer will be handed the public money in order to put the building "back into commerce" as, probably, some sort of for profit operation. We expect this is what will happen, anyway. Mostly becasue of how defensively insistent they are that it will not.

As a result, Grant said the city will hire a consultant to perform a market analysis that can be used to form a redevelopment plan. The plan is to then hold a competitive bid process with a developer who could use the FEMA money to restore the venue in a way that would make it a viable venue for events.

Asked whether it's possible that a developer could use the building for a non-public use, Grant said the city would do anything it could to avoid a situation like that.

"We'd have to be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the building couldn't be put to public use again, Grant said. He added that people who used the building in the past "are absolutely adamant that it be for the public use."

Ok well we'll check back on this once they have the money. Let's just hope the auditor who wants to take our street repair funding back doesn't get involved.

Movie pitch

Prologue: You think you know a story...

For eight years, Kenneth Landrieu wore the six-pointed brass star of the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office and carried a laminated “reserve” deputy card signed by Sheriff Marlin Gusman.

Whether the honorary designation gave Landrieu the power to chase down a driver, whip out a gun and threaten a man with arrest will be for an Orleans Parish jury to decide in a trial slated to start Tuesday before Criminal District Court Judge Laurie White.

Landrieu’s attorney claims his client was well within the law when he pursued the driver and announced he was a law enforcement officer following a near-collision on Magazine Street last September.

According to police, Landrieu pulled in front of the other vehicle in the Lower Garden District, hopped out of his baby blue 2004 Cadillac DeVille and pointed his gun at the driver, cursing and threatening to arrest him.

Okay so here's the scene. Times are tough in the city of New Orleans. The camera pans over monuments cracked and crumbling under the shame of their own hypocrisy. Smoke from a nearby marsh fire wafts into view. A sinkhole of dread lurks beneath every street. Resilience is running thin.   

In a desperate attempt to restore hope... not to mention his own relevance.. Ceremonial Sheriff Marlin Gusman laminates some badges in order to commission a elite force of freedom fighters. The fake credentials issued by the fake sheriff combine to equal actual legitimacy due to the power of the double negative.  They are called the Faux-Po Five.

Recent Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office records list Landrieu among 49 people granted “honorary special reserves” status by Gusman, though it’s unclear just what, if any, special powers it confers.

Among others on the list are former New Orleans City Councilman Jay Batt, singer Irma Thomas, jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield and frequent political candidate Gary Landrieu, who is Kenneth Landrieu’s brother.

Irma, Batt, Mayfield and the lesser Landrieus set about the work bringing scofflaws throughout the city to justice. Sewerage and Water Board Director Cedric Grant builds and furnishes a secret headquarters for them atop the Broad Street Whole Foods where they use his magic white board to spot petty municipal violations wherever they may occur. (Jeff Landry shows up to help drive them around sometimes too.)

Dramatic scenes from the trailer show Ken brandishing his pistol at a motorist with an expired break tag. Drums sound in the background as Gary files to run for five different municipal offices simultaneously. Irvin bludgeons noise violators in the street with his golden trumpet. Jay drinks lots of martinis and tells people to start calling him "Battman."

Not sure how we're going to afford the effects in the scene where they all have to cross streams and fight the 200 foot tall Savory Simon, though.  That Hollywood South money ain't what it used to be.

Nobody likes Kip

That is, at least, according to Kip.

To Holden it appears that many people are jockeying to assert themselves as the leader of the crowds who are demonstrating on Sterling’s behalf, and perhaps the people demonstrating in Baton Rouge should rally behind one voice, but Holden does not believe he is the person for the job. He said he doesn’t believe the demonstrators like him or will follow him.

It isn't mentioned in this article but Holden is running a quixotic campaign for Cedric Richmond's Congressional seat this year. Richmond has been much more vocal on the Sterling shooting than Holden who may trying to position himself as more "moderate" if that's really the word for craven refusal to immediately and unequivocally condemn police violence these days.

Fenced out

Last week when we brought up this mess at The Fly, I was certain there wouldn't be anything anybody could do to interfere with Ron Forman and Tom Benson and their various friends in the Uptown clubs doing whatever they want with the open space along the riverfront.  I might have been wrong about that.

Adrienne Petrosini, representing the Save the Fly movement, requested Thursday (March 3) that the City Council consider creating an interim zoning district for The Fly, which would require any development on the property to earn City Planning Commission and council approval.

The council voted to receive the request and forward it to its Community Development Committee, which can consider the creation of an interim zoning district.    

The Boosters want to fence off a large space currently open to the public and build a new soccer field which, unlike the open soccer fields that already exist there, they can collect rent and concession sales from operating. Open public shared space shouldn't be fenced in for private profit like that.  It's good to see the City Council at least take this principle into consideration.

On the other hand, maybe they don't really care.

The city’s new fence, which will enclose the parking lots that extend along Calliope Street from St. Charles Avenue to South Rampart Street in the Central Business District, will force out dozens of homeless people, some of whom were camped there on Wednesday. The city plans on having it up by mid-April.

Reopening the parking lots, which have been chained off since 2012, also is designed to provide relief in a neighborhood where parking spaces are in high demand. And turning them into managed, paid parking facilities, as the city plans, also is expected to bring new revenue for the city.

Before the city closed the area to parking in 2012 to combat homeless encampments, the lots were under the state’s jurisdiction, and parking was free.

The New Orleans Building Corp. plans to ask for bids from would-be lot managers this spring. Officials said revenue estimates won’t be available until after an operator is chosen.

“Because of the limited number of on-street parking spaces available, returning this area to commerce will decrease traffic congestion and increase accessibility, which will ultimately improve commerce,” said Cedric Grant, the Building Corp.’s acting chief executive officer and the Sewerage & Water Board’s executive director.

"Returning" previously free parking "to commerce," says Grant. Good lord.  He's not wrong, though. Parking is a booming business in New Orleans these days.   Maybe the Carrollton Boosters can be persuaded to trade their current racket for this one.  It's worked out well for the Landrieus, after all.
 

Sewerage and Economic Development

Can't have any "Old" New Orleans office furniture in the New New Orleans. Not if we're gonna "lean forward."

But in a recent interview, Grant defended the spending as a part of a broader effort to bring a new sense of purpose to a shabby public agency and remake it as a world-class organization, even if he spends only half of his work week there.

“This is an old, tired place,” he said. “We want it to be really leaning forward and managed well, top down.”

The Mayor’s Office refused a request to let The New Orleans Advocate photograph the renovated offices.

Grant’s office makeover, detailed in receipts and purchase orders obtained through a public-records request, represents a negligible amount of the S&WB’s nearly $300 million annual budget.

But records show that taxpayers plunked down $10,000 to paint the rooms and another $30,000 for an interactive “white board” and computer monitor that Grant said is a more efficient way to manage infrastructure projects. Furniture and other equipment brought the grand total even higher.

Pretty typical with these people.  Proper management is really all about projecting an "image."

“Yeah, it cost a little money, but I think it was a very wise investment in relation to our ability to manage better and bring ourselves into the modern age in relation to how we need to manage and communicate with people,” Grant said.

What’s more, he said, with the agency undertaking a major building program to replace aging pipes and other infrastructure, and New Orleans aiming to become a world leader in water management, the agency needs to look the part of a sophisticated operation. He couldn’t, for instance, host foreign leaders in an office with peeling, yellow wallpaper and a “nasty” vinyl couch, he said.

“What’s the image that we need to put forth?” Grant said. “The image of the organization needed to be one of a professional, public organization.”

Although the S&WB is a government agency, Grant said he plans to manage it more like an economic development organization, meaning it will both look and function in a more progressive way.

The water department isn't an "economic development organization."  Its job is to maintain critical city infrastructure while trying to deliver service to residents at reasonable value. But all of that is really considered a secondary priority for the leadership elites and their planner-entrepreneur friends they do business with.   They're really more about trying to impress one another, network, and make money together.

Cedric Grant seems like he is especially good at this stuff.

Busy man

Cedric Grant could have his hands on a lot of money spigots over the next year or so.

Should it pass, Grant will be in charge of not only major improvements to the city's sewerage and water systems, but also an estimated $9 billion in repairs to its notoriously pockmarked streets.

That means for the first time in recent memory, the persistent problems that most often rankle New Orleanians -- from broken streetlights and potholes to flooded roads and poor water pressure -- could fall to one man.

It was the only way he would take the job, Grant said Tuesday in a wide-ranging interview from his office at the water board's St. Joseph Street headquarters.

Optimistically, this might be like having a more competent Ed Blakely around.

On the other hand, it's still kind of like having Ed Blakely around.

"I was coming over here to do this. If they didn't want this done, I'm not the one (for the job)," he said. "I've been in infrastructure my entire career and I've seen it all, and this is what needs to be done to make this city work."

See what I mean?

The do-overs are starting to pile up

Let's see, that's now the WTC site, Six Flags, the St. Roch Market, and, the airport are all back out for bid.

The New Orleans Aviation Board Monday voted to cancel the request for proposals related to the construction of a new terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.

That means that the entire selection process will have to start again from the beginning, including an advertising period to solicit new proposals.

The board encouraged joint ventures Parsons-Odebrecht and Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro to submit new proposals. 

That's a lot of blockage. Maybe the city's unsuccessful bid for the 2018 Super Bowl has them convinced that "no" is the only respectable answer.  Or maybe they're wondering why nobody is sending them superfluous iPads. 

Or maybe they're just worried about being sued.

By starting from scratch, the board may have avoided a potentially lengthy court battle over the contract, because either joint venture would have been able to sue if the board had picked the other bidder.

Airport officials anticipate the request for proposals will be released again in the next few weeks, with the deadline for responses several weeks after that.

That would set back the project, which initially was expected to be completed by the end of April 2018, but could still leave enough time for the new terminal to be opened during the city’s tricentennial year.

It's not clear whether they're more worried about litigation arising from allegations of racial insensitivity on the part of one contractor or from former Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant's possible ethical conflict. Anyway they're starting over.

The good news there is, since there's no Super Bowl, nobody has to worry about flying too many people in during Tricentennial January.  Maybe it will be ready in time to receive bidders in town to present the next round of proposals for doing whatever is supposed to happen to Charity Hospital now.