Time to start coasting

As hurricane season kicks into high gear, and the future of emergency response hangs in doubt, let's check in on Jeff Landry's levee board. 

Gov. Jeff Landry has appointed two new board members to the New Orleans area's flood protection authority, which has been in turmoil after four members resigned in protest over changes pushed by Landry earlier this year. 

One of the appointments is raising fresh questions over whether the most-qualified candidates are being chosen -- a key goal of reforms following Hurricane Katrina.

The two new members are Gregory Marsiglia, a New Orleans attorney, and Peter Vicari, a general contractor from Gonzales who owns a classic car auction business, according to his application materials. Vicari is a business associate of Landry’s handpicked board president, Roy Carubba, who described Vicari as a “very good friend.” 

That's nice that they're all good friends.  But this board performs a vital oversight function.  After Katrina, professionalizing the levee boards became a top priority.  20 years later, Landry's efforts to undo those reforms have already come under scrutiny.  And now, in light of recent reports about levee subsidence, one would think that flood control would be a top priority. Hopefully Landry's friends are taking their roles seriously. 

Vicari described himself as a lifelong resident of the West Bank, who had worked in construction projects “big and small” throughout the New Orleans region.

“I'm at a point in life where I can start coasting and I'm willing to give myself to service,” he said. Vicari said he had nearly forgotten that he had even applied for the position when he got an email notifying him that he had been chosen. 

Sounds good.

The wannabees at work

The really insidious thing about the DOGE phenomenon, wherein a team of hooligans under the direction of a hostile plutocrat wreak havoc on the basic physical and social infrastructure that makes life possible for most Americans, is that.. in addition to this... the movement spawns hundreds of immitators in state and local governments accross the country.

Last month we noted that Jeff Landry has formed a DOGEesque committee to attack state services. At last notice, they were writing a report. A week ago, we learned that St. Tammany Parish is getting a DOGE committee of its own. With the New Orleans municipal elections right around the corner, it also looks like Pres Kabacoff is having his own Project 2025 drawn up. (Let's keep an eye on that one, yes?)  In January, we caught this profile of Jeff Landry advisor/patron and Harvey Gulf President Shane Guidry where he explicitly compared himself and his role in the administration to that of Elon Musk. 

Today we find Guidry behind a move by Landry to dismantle South Louisiana's flood protection. After Katrina, a grass roots movement of residents succeeded in taking corrupt and negligent levee boards out of the hands of political cronies, de-emphasizing their police powers, and professionalizing their core flood risk management function. This week, three board members resigned in protest of Landry's attempts to reverse those reforms.  They addressed their resignation letters to Guidry. 

The letter was signed jointly by board members Roy Arrigo, Thomas Fierke, and William Settoon. It is addressed not to Roy Carubba, the president of the board, but to Shane Guidry, Landry’s informal adviser in New Orleans, who is not on the levee authority’s board but has been overseeing reforms at the agency.

It alleges the agency's new leadership had diminished “morale, readiness and focus on flood protection.”

Guidry thanked the departing board members for their service. He also stressed that, under his guidance, the agency was “moving in a better direction to make sure that all flood control assets are maintained properly, which they haven’t been, and working properly, which they haven’t been,” though neither Guidry nor Carubba has provided any evidence that the city’s flood control infrastructure is faulty.

And now we're getting wild unsubstantiated assertions about what does and doesn't work from unofficial administrators of dubious legal authority.  Our wannabe DOGEs are rounding into form.

Or we could just put money directly into coastal restoration

Louisiana has a multi-billion dollar problem involving its sinking coastline.  You might have heard about this. 

As Brig. Gen Duke DeLuca wrapped up his 32-year career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August, he contemplated the key to Louisiana’s massive, 50-year, $50 billion effort to prevent the southeastern portion of the state from being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico.

DeLuca, an expert on the many threats facing the coast, said: “It will take a moon-shot type of investment in the science.”

Unfortunately, we don't really do "moon-shot" level investing in any science that isn't primarily about blowing things up. (Recall the actual moon shot was, itself, about building rockets and beating the Soviets.)

Instead, when it comes to funding big projects with no obvious military purpose, we take bank-shots. So, instead of just putting money directly into coastal restoration, we see how much we can coax heavy industry to contribute to the cause.   How do we do that?  By selling them licenses to keep on throwing soot into the air in California.

Carbon credits, derived from the additional absorption of greenhouse gases from the air, can be put up for sale in two markets.

The first market is in California, where industrial facilities are required to make up for the amount of greenhouse gas they release by either finding ways to reduce those emissions or by buying carbon credits for reductions elsewhere. The second market is a voluntary market where companies look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits to offset greenhouse gases they release during the course of business.

The regulatory market usually results in a higher price for the credits, but both could provide a market for Louisiana wetlands building, as imagined over the next 50 years in the state coastal master plan.

See? Everybody wins!  Well, OK, not everybody, really. 

“I don’t see carbon fully funding a coastal restoration project, but I see it could help fund projects,” said Sarah Mack, one of the report’s authors and president and CEO of Tierra Resources. 

You know, it helps a little. But the polluters get to keep on polluting with a slightly clearer conscience. And that's really the point.  If it wasn't we'd just go ahead and force the industries that cause environmental damage to pay for repairs.  But we've already said we don't want to do that.  

#Standing

Some people are obsessed with standing.

A federal judge on Friday (Feb. 13) dismissed a controversial wetlands damage lawsuit filed by the east bank levee authority against more than 80 oil, gas and pipeline companies, ruling that the authority failed to make a valid claim against the energy firms.

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East contended that dredging of navigation canals and other actions by the companies caused wetland damage that reduced or would reduce the effectiveness of the recently-rebuilt levee system protecting most of metro New Orleans.

The suit attempted to get the energy companies to either repair the damage or pay damages to the authority, with the money used to improve the levee system.

But U.S. District Court Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown found that the levee authority's standing as a third party to federal and state permits granted to the energy companies was not strong enough to justify a financial claim against the companies.

As we all know by now, healthy wetlands are an indispensable element of the natural and man-made systems that protect the inhabited parts of South Louisiana from storm surge during hurricanes.   One assumes the Flood Protection Authority would have some interest in making claims against damage to that system. 

So why do they not have "standing" to sue in this case?  Watch this.

Brown also disagreed with the levee authority's attempt to find the energy companies liable under provisions of Louisiana law governing the flow of water over property, which is called "natural servitude of drain". The levee authority contended that the energy companies were responsible for storm surge posing an increased threat to the levees because of the erosion the companies caused.

But the state law is written to protect downstream landowners from problems caused by upstream users, and the levees are on higher ground. Brown said several cases cited by the authority did not adequately support their position turning that provision of the law around.

Because levees are on higher ground the levee board has no jurisdiction where it concerns the marshland that actually makes those levees effective.   Weren't we supposed to have evolved beyond this sort of self-defeating thinking post-K? 

And if the levee board doesn't have standing to sue over damage to the levee system who does?  The State of Louisiana itself might.  But that's not likely to happen. Not under the current administration.

The ruling also was praised by the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal, who opposed the suit.

"We appreciate the judge's ruling and are pleased that this frivolous lawsuit has come to an end," said Shannon Bates, deputy communications director for the governor. "We've maintained that this was not a claim SLPFA had the authority to bring, and we are glad the court agreed."

And not likely under the next one either.  

Links

• John Barry takes on a favorite rhetorical ploy set out by the oil and gas industry in its argument against the SLFPA-E's lawsuit.
  

  It's not the levees.
  
  For years the state has been told that the levees have caused the tremendous land loss across coastal Louisiana, even where land loss was greatest — Terrebone, Lafourche, and western Jefferson Parish. But it ain't so. 
  
  Don't take my word for it. Ask the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, the trade association for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other major oil companies. True, a U.S. Geological Survey study including industry scientists concluded that across most of the coast oil and gas operations caused "only" 36 percent of the land loss. But the percentage varies from place to place. Mid-Continent studied the area of greatest land-loss — Terrebone and Lafourche — and concluded that there "canal development tended to be the overwhelming cause of wetland losses." 
  
  Mid-Continent did not say what percentage was due to this "overwhelming cause," but in 2006 the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources did. DNR attributed a whopping 76 percent of land loss in the Barataria and Terrebone basins to industry canals and the "altered hydrology associated with oil and gas exploration and drilling." In that part of the state, it's not the levees.

  Last year, the legislature passed a law designed to squash the lawsuit.  Bobby Jindal is defending that law in court. 
  
• Uber but for news.  Disruption has come to journalism in a big way. 
  

  The writing software, called Quill, was developed by Narrative Science, a Chicago company set up in 2010 to commercialize technology developed at Northwestern University that turns numerical data into a written story. It wasn’t long before Quill was being used to report on baseball games for TV and online sports outlets, and company earnings statements for clients such as Forbes.
  
  Quill’s early career success generated headlines of its own, and the software was seen by some as evidence that intelligent software might displace human workers. Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel says that the publicity, even if some of it was negative, was a blessing. “A lot of people felt threatened by what we were doing, and we got a lot of coverage,” he says. “It led to a lot of inquiries from all different industries and to the evolution to a different business.”
  
  Narrative Science is now renting out Quill’s writing skills to financial customers such as T. Rowe Price, Credit Suisse, and USAA to write up more in-depth, lengthy reports on the performance of mutual funds that are then distributed to investors or regulators.
  
  “It goes from the job of a small army of people over weeks to just a few seconds,” says Frankel. “We do 10- to 15-page documents for some financial clients.”

  
  Now that it's putting them out of work too, I wonder if maybe the mainstream of our press corps will finally pick up on how this is not such a terrific trend for people in various other industries also.... before they're all replaced by robots that is.



• Get ready for months and months of Obama legacy talk.  You might think that this NY Mag article has blurbed it to death already, though.  Some of those are ok.  Andrew Bacevich and Mike Davis get in a few pretty good shots.  But a lot of it is pretty dumb too.
  
  Here's a better look at Obama's legacy  (and the useless punditocracy that enabled it) from Tom Frank.
  

  But let this pass. When historians seek to explain the failures of the Obama years, they will likely focus on a glaringly obvious, and indeed still more hard-headed explanation that the apologists for Obama’s enfeeblement now overlook: that perhaps Obama didn’t act forcefully to press a populist economic agenda because he didn’t want to. That maybe he didn’t do certain of the things his liberal supporters wanted him to do because he didn’t believe in them.
  
  Think about Obama’s legacy in this context: The most consequential issue facing Americans these days is the gradual reversion of their economy to a 19th-century pattern. In a matter of 30 years, talking about this transformation has gone from being the kind of thing you hear at union strike meetings to something that wins the National Book Award and that almost everyone recognizes to be true—I mean, even George W. Bush acknowledged the problem of growing inequality back in 2007.
  
  Yet the current leadership of the Democratic Party has been unable either to reverse the trend or to make political capital out of it.

• Survival condos! Perfect marriage of the the victory of the one percent over everything with the  fetish for apocalypse survivalism so pervasive in pop culture.  At first glance, you'd think that there'd be a market for this in New Orleans.  "How much did you pay for your evacuation condo?" But I think the wealthy people buying up all of our housing are already using it as second homes anyway.



• Speaking of people being priced out of cities in favor of nice stuff for rich people, here's Detroit.
  

  Detroit – — A group of shopkeepers who survived 30 years of retail decline on downtown's Woodward Avenue have been given court-ordered eviction notices just as the area booms with new upscale life.
  
  The small retailers were based on the ground floor of the Himelhoch building, which is surrounded by hundreds of millions of dollars in investment that has meant the rebirth of historic buildings such as the Broderick Tower and the adjacent David Whitney Building. The M-1 Rail streetcar, slated to open next year, will have its Grand Circus Park stop in front of the Himelhoch's Woodward Avenue entrance.
  
  The seven-story Himelhoch is home to 72 rental apartments available to low-income residents, and for 31 years, most of the ground floor was leased by Larry and Dianne Mongo. The husband and wife ran everything from beauty shops to restaurants in the Himelhoch. With partner John Enot, they were spending thousands of dollars to open two small restaurants in the coming weeks.

  Thanks for staying interested in this neighborhood all the people who matter allowed to crumble for 30 years. They want it back now, though. Bye.  Coming soon to Oretha Castle Haley Blvd, btw.



• Here's a look at the city council's proposed smoking ban.  A key issue to watch is how the new rules will work in... um... concert with the noise ordinance.
  

  But the prospect of having people loitering outside late at night to smoke and perhaps drink worries owners of some bars tucked away in residential neighborhoods.
  
  “It’s the city that’s putting this rule in place, and they’re putting more of these quality-of-life issues on the table without a real good solution to the problems that are going to arise out of them,” said Bill Walker, who has co-owned the Lost Love Lounge in the Marigny since 2010.
  
  Walker is in the awkward position of also serving as the head of One Marigny, a neighborhood association.
  
  Cantrell told The New Orleans Advocate last week that she has a solution for that, too: She plans to revive discussion on New Orleans’ seemingly dormant noise ordinance once work on the smoking ban is finished.
  
  “It’s kind of like having to vet it again with the new members of the council,” she said about the proposed noise ordinance, which drew widespread criticism and prompted a parade of musicians to storm the council chamber a year ago to voice their disapproval. “But I think a lot of work went into that, and that’s why I feel like we’ve got to pick it back up, because of the work, and we’ve got to finish the job on that.”

  All of a sudden you're pushing more quiet neighborhood bars into the dreaded "nuisance bar" category simply as a result of their complying with the law.  A suspicious person would suggest that the neighborhood associations who back the Latoya Cantrells of the world are just interested in shutting down bars by any means necessary anyway.  But since we're all "One City One Voice" nowadays there's really no room for suspicious people anymore.

Oil and Gas Lawsuits

Yesterday, amid all the other news, we learned the details of a settlement between the Southeast Lousiana Flood Protection Authority East and two oil companies named in its much talked about and kicked around lawsuit for coastal damage. Here's more from Clancy DuBos.

Two privately held Texas oil companies that were among nearly 90 defendants named in the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East’s (SLFPA-E) landmark environmental lawsuit have settled with the flood authority for a combined total of $50,000 in damages, according to documents filed in federal court and statements by the attorneys involved.

The terms of the settlement were announced a few hours after attorneys for SLFPA-E, White Oak Operating Co., L.L.C. and Chroma Operating, Inc. filed a “Joint Motion for Order of Dismissal With Prejudice” in federal court on Thursday. Parties typically file joint motions to dismiss when they have reached an out-of-court settlement. Because the SLFPA-E is a public entity, the terms of the settlement had to be made public.

While the dollar amount of the settlement seems small at first glance, the fact that two oil companies have admitted responsibility for increased public exposure to hurricane-related flooding due to their operations in coastal wetlands — and agreed to pay damages — is huge. The settlement marks the first time an admission of this kind, along with payment of damages, has ever been made by energy companies.

Even the small.. call it a moral.. victory won there could never have happened had Bobby Jindal and the man he put in charge of Louisiana's coastal restoration effort, congressional candidate Garret Graves,  gotten their way.

At a minimum, the decision by some energy defendants to settle with SLFPA-E completely undercuts, if not outright disproves, the “frivolous lawsuit” meme that Gov. Bobby Jindal, former coastal “czar” Garret Graves (who is now a candidate for Congress in the 6th District) and legislative foes of the lawsuit have parroted ever since the suit was filed in July 2013. If the suit were truly “frivolous,” as Jindal continues to claim, defendants in the energy industry (who are accustomed to environmental litigation) would not have settled — particularly when a lawsuit breaks new legal and environmental ground, as the SLFPA-E suit clearly does.

This morning Graves finds himself in a runoff with former Governor Edwin Edwards. Edwards has crawfished a little on the lawsuit himself; at times appearing to support it and at others speaking more vaguely about "finding the parties responsible" for coastal erosion and holding them accountable.  But it's Graves who has stayed in lock step with Bobby Jindal as a critic of the "frivolous" lawsuit.  I don't think either has been asked to comment on this settlement just yet.

Meanwhile, speaking of "frivolous" Oil and Gas lawsuits, check this one out.

FORT WORTH, Texas — A North Texas city that sits atop a natural gas reserve is preparing for an extended court battle after voters made it the first in the state to ban further hydraulic fracturing — a fight that cities nationwide considering similar laws will likely be watching closely.

An industry group and the state's little-known but powerful General Land Office responded quickly to the measure Denton approved Tuesday night, seeking an injunction in District Court to stop it from being enforced.

See, it's frivolous when we (meaning our public bodies) sue them. But they, apparently can sue the hell out of us whenever we sneeze on them.. or spit up blood or whatever it is you do after drinking frack-tainted water.   That's what this guy thinks, anyway.

Battling the fracking ban will be Texas Land Commissioner-elect George P. Bush's first fight. The founding manager of an energy and infrastructure consultancy, Bush promoted the economic benefits of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, throughout his campaign.

Oh yee-haw the Daddy party really is back.  

More than zero

$50K won't pay for a whole lot. 

The east bank levee authority and White Oak Operating, LLC and Chroma Operating, Inc., released a copy Monday of a settlement agreement in which the two companies will pay the authority $50,000 in exchange for being dismissed from a wetlands damage lawsuit.

The agreement was signed Oct. 30 by representatives of the companies and Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East President Stephen Estopinal, but the document had not been made public.
On Tuesday, Estopinal said the settlement money would be directed to coastal restoration.

Maybe it will buy one pump.. if they get the kind with the hand crank.

"The attorneys will not be taking a cut from the $50k settlement," he said in an email response when asked if attorneys representing the authority would receive a portion of the settlement. "Every penny is going to be spent on coastal restoration."

Ooh in that case, maybe they can buy two pumps.  In any case, it's more than Bobby Jindal.. or District 6 Congressional candidate Garret Graves wanted. 

Those seem like two separate questions

Buddy Caldwell won't submit an opinion on the constitutionality of the "kill the lawsuit" act because a court already says it doesn't kill the lawsuit.

The court had asked the parties to file briefs about the constitutionality of the law being applied retroactively to the lawsuit filed by the authority last year, but Caldwell's office, through contract attorney E. Wade Shows, says the constitutional issues are a moot point now that the judge determined the law does not apply to the levee authority.

Still the retro-activity question seems relevant.  Because the Legislature passed a bill while stating it was intended as an ex post facto measure, it might be a good idea to have a court establish that they can't actually do that.. in case they happen to write a bill that actually works next time.

Also, if this law, which is now on the books, doesn't apply to the levee authority then, who does it apply to?  And is it a good idea to continue to have such a law?

Monday Must-Read

If you haven't seen it already, here is Nathaniel Rich's New York Times Magazine article on the SLFPA-E lawsuit.

Rich is also the author of this New Republic article about Plaquemines Parish we mentioned last week.

Update: In a related matter,  a judge ruled today that the infamous "kill-the-lawsuit act" passed during the recent legislative session does not actually kill the lawsuit.

And 19th Judicial District Court Judge Janice Clark said from the bench that she's also likely to rule that the law, Act 544, violates the state Constitution's "separation of powers" clause by usurping's the court's power in determining whether or not the levee authority can sue. She said she thinks the law may be unconstitutional for a second reason, but did not name it during the brief court hearing.

SLFPAE lawsuit is still just mostly dead

Pro lawsuit board member Paul Kemp was nominated to stay on.  Jindal could still try and block him.

Dirty job but somebody has to...

There are two seats up for reappointment on the SLFPA-E and nominations are due next week.  Depending on how the nominating committee decides to package things, the process could result in opponents of the board's lawsuit against oil and gas companies gaining a majority.  The guy who is supposed to tip that balance sounds really enthusiastic.

Morgan said Wednesday that while he “didn’t really want” to serve on the board because of the time and work involved, he felt compelled to submit his name after being asked to do so by officials including Jindal’s former coastal protection chief Garret Graves, who is now running for Congress in the 6th District. While serving in state government, Graves was one of the leading opponents of the suit.

Jay Lapeyre, the chairman of the nominating committee, said Wednesday that he was among the people who encouraged Morgan to put his name in for the position, and he said he has encouraged anyone qualified to do so. Finding qualified candidates for the authority has been difficult in the past.

“I encouraged, as I always do, everyone with ability and competence to run,” Lapeyre said.

If he is appointed, Morgan is expected to be a fifth vote against the lawsuit.

Graves and Lapeyre must have appealed to his noble sense of civic duty.. or something like that. 

Trying to kill the kill the lawsuit bill

As expected, the SLFPA-E has challenged Louisiana's so-called "kill the lawsuit" bill in court.

The filing isn’t a surprise. In July, lead plaintiffs attorney Gladstone Jones said he expected the legal fight over the constitutionality of the law to take at least three months. Whoever loses, he said, probably will appeal.

Lawmakers behind the bill have said they carefully crafted the bill to meet the expected legal challenges.

That "carefully crafted" part is pretty funny.  If they meant to carefully craft a law that will shield BP and any future responsible parties in similar disasters from incurring damages, they might be on to something.  

But during the last minute debate over whether the Governor should veto the bill over these supposedly unintended consequences, it appeared as though even the bill's sponsors weren't sure what it did.

But it sure does seem to be working.

Again, what was the point, exactly?

Law passed ostensibly to kill the SLFPA-E lawsuit probably doesn't actually kill the lawsuit.

John Barry, whom the governor removed from the levee authority board for leading the lawsuit effort, now heads the nonprofit Restore Louisiana Now. In a letter to his organization, he recently outlined some of the tactics that lawyers for the Flood Protection Authority may use to keep the suit alive.

Barry described two points of contention: that legislators broke their rules on public notice while moving the bill between committees, and that the language of the law actually exempts the levee authority from the intended oversight.

During the session, lawmakers supporting one bill to stop the suit failed to gain approval in one committee. But they were able to have it amended into another bill that was before a more receptive committee, where it eventually passed.

“So not only was proper notice not given, but [the new bill] as it was heard was entirely different from how it was filed,” Barry wrote. “And it gets even more egregious: forget the lack of notice — even if you were physically in the room when the committee heard [the bill] you could not get a copy of the bill. This violates all sorts of notice and open meetings standards.”

  So what was the point of that law?

SB 469 appears to have been written and deliberately designed by lawyers who represent the oil and gas industry in order to shield, reduce, or eliminate their clients’ exposure to civil damages on a wide range of pending and future claims, including, most notably, BP’s liability for billions of dollars in outstanding claims related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Indeed, according to people intimately involved in the legislative process, no one lobbied harder for the passage of SB 469 than those associated with BP.

What, then, was the point?

The "Kill the Lawsuit" bill does not appear to have actually killed the lawsuit.

The attorneys will definitely challenge this bill on several grounds. Let me name just two:

First, Act 544 does prohibit “local government entities” — except for parishes — from suing over any oil-related damages in the coastal zone. However, a local government entity has a very precise legal definition, and that definition does not fit the flood authority. So the bill actually does not prohibit the flood authority from suing. That is a very strong argument that the attorneys will make.

Obviously there's more to Barry's post there but the highlighted part is what's interesting to me.  It suggests the bill's authors may not have had the levee board lawsuit in mind specifically even if that was the ostensible reasoning behind the bill. 

BP shield law

The important thing to keep in mind about the "Kill-The-Lawsuit-Bill" Bobby Jindal signed last week is that it may not even actually kill the lawsuit.

Here's what we know for sure it does.

SB 469 appears to have been written and deliberately designed by lawyers who represent the oil and gas industry in order to shield, reduce, or eliminate their clients’ exposure to civil damages on a wide range of pending and future claims, including, most notably, BP’s liability for billions of dollars in outstanding claims related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Indeed, according to people intimately involved in the legislative process, no one lobbied harder for the passage of SB 469 than those associated with BP.

It might also kill the SLFPAE lawsuit but that hasn't been determined just yet.  Which is why Jindal is still punishing board members who supported the suit in the first place.

Anyway, renowned idiot Don Briggs is happy.

Oil and gas industry lobbyists had pushed hard for the bill during the 2014 legislative session, which passed both the state House and Senate by relatively healthy margins. They lauded the governor's decision Friday.

"The signing of SB 469 is a huge victory for the oil and gas industry as well as the economy for the state of Louisiana," said Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association. "While there is still much work to be done, this piece of legislation is a big step in the right direction."

Recall that Briggs' deposition was taken in advance of a frivolous LOGA suit brought in hopes of slowing down the SLFPAE suit.  You can think of SB 469 as a similar obstruction with regard to the SLFPAE suit. It means we have to make time for one more round in the courts.

Backers of the lawsuit filed by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East are expected to challenge in court the new law Jindal signed. The authority's lawsuit that generated so much attention is already in federal court.

Which means at least one more round of legal wrangling stands between now and the time we take any meaningful steps toward saving the Louisiana coastline. But hey, take your time there, right?



But as far as the oil industry is concerned, that lawsuit is really just one claim.  If it stands up in court, SB 469 shields them from many many more claims.  It looks like they're aware of this.

Wisner Donation says BP has stopped beach property remediation, cancelled property access agreement. https://t.co/7Abho5B7Ju
— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) June 9, 2014

Everything you need to know about the lawsuit bill

Lamar has you covered.

That is a comprehensive article by Lamar. It doesn't miss a beat. But perhaps its most crucial observation comes here.

Oil and gas industry attorneys weren’t merely “involved;” they wrote the bill. According to those who were there, lobbyists and lawyers for BP seemed to play an outsized role.

Earlier tonight, John Barry, the former chairman of the SLFPA-E and the internationally acclaimed author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, told me, “A lot of people mentioned to me how omnipresent BP lobbyists were, more than the other major oil companies were (though all of them showed plenty of interest), so much more that it got a lot of people wondering, ‘What’s in the bill for them?’ It certainly got us wondering.”

I also spoke with State Representative John Bel Edwards, who echoed Mr. Barry’s concerns. Oil and gas lobbyists already knew Representative Edwards was opposed to the legislation, he said. They didn’t even waste their time trying to convince him otherwise. But lobbyists, particularly lobbyists associated with BP, spent a lot of time with some of his colleagues.

When the Attorney General expressed his doubts about the bill earlier this week, the reaction of Jindal's legislative allies who pushed it through appeared to indicate that they had only a vague conception what was in the bill in the first place. Robert Adley and Bret Allain's comments basically boil down to, "Well why didn't you tell us any of this stuff before?" Now we know why that is.  Most of our legislators don't seem to really know or care what they're doing beyond just following orders.

Might as well make the money now

If we were to play devil's advocate for a minute with regard to gentrification, it's worth pointing out that the State of Louisiana isn't very well invested in the city even being here for much longer.

The Louisiana Legislature finally approved a bill Friday morning saying it opposes and wants to kill the levee board lawsuit seeking recompense from 97 oil and gas companies for environmental damage to the wetlands.

The state Senate voted 25 to 11 to concur with House amendments. Senate Bill 469 now goes to Gov. Bobby Jindal for his signature.

The legislation would reach back and change the conditions under which the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, called SLFPA-E, could sue.

So long as the coast is falling into the sea anyway, our legislators figure they might as well allow the extractive industries who dominate the state's economy pull all the money they can out of it in the meantime, right?

I suppose we could say the same for the high priced playground for tourists and adventurers we're building in New Orleans.  It'll all be gone in less than a century anyway.  Might as well let the dominant players make their money now.  What are the rest of us even doing here?

If you didn't want to flood you wouldn't have so many dang levees

Here is the majority consensus among the Louisiana Legislature.

If oil and gas production is going to cost us  the entire southeast portion of the state it's pretty much worth it. Also if we really cared about flood protection, then we probably shouldn't have built all that flood protection.

“This bill is a 110 percent get out of jail free card,” said Gladstone N. Jones, a New Orleans lawyer representing SLFPA-E, said of the bill’s impact on the oil and gas industry’s failure to cleanup after itself.

Dove questioned Jones on why SLFPA-E sued only the oil companies and not the lumber interests, federal government and others who might have contributed to coastal erosion.

“It’s a good question,” Dove said.

“Not really,” Jones replied.

Oil and gas industry activity is responsible for 36.7 percent of the coastal loss, according to studies, Jones said.

Dove responded: “Did the oil companies build the levees on the Mississippi River?”

Much of the coastal damage also was caused by levees channeling the soil carried in the Mississippi River off the continental shelf rather than replenishing the wetlands.

So long. Thanks for all the oil. 

There have been a lot of terrible people being terrible in the legislature this session

Hard to say any individual has been more terrible than Katrina Jackson.

Jackson, a Democrat from Monroe, described the measure as “one of the pieces of legislation that will be most impactful to this state regarding the pro-life movement.”

Abortion-rights groups say doctors who provide the procedure have difficulty getting hospital privileges, not because of their credentials, but because hospitals are leery of the attention those privileges could draw.

Proponents say the measure will ensure women have access to proper care if they have complications from an abortion, describing possible medical problems like hemorrhages, cervical injuries and infections.

Opponents say the restrictions are medically unnecessary and designed to limit abortion access. They say the legislation will shut down all abortion clinics south of Shreveport, creating the need for a five-hour drive each way for women who live in the southeastern end of the state.

Meanwhile, the legislature managed to pull off one last abortion for the road.

A Louisiana House committee Wednesday voted to specifically kill the lawsuit filed by a New Orleans-area levee board.

The House Committee on Natural Resources amended Senate Bill 469 to say that the Louisiana Legislature wants this measure to apply retroactively and that lawmakers oppose the lawsuits filed last year by Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority — East against 97 oil and gas companies claiming environmental damage to the marshes.

Expiration date

One thing that's come out of this is we can now assume the shelf life of your typical "good government reform" effort is about 8 years.

The political independence of these two regional flood protection authorities relies hugely on their status as political subdivisions. They are units of local (not state) government. They serve our metropolitan area flood protection needs and are no longer controlled by the governor, as metro-area levee boards were pre-Katrina.

These repeated legislative assaults on the political independence of the flood protection authorities would move them away from the protections of local government, weakening them by treating them as state agencies subject to the governor’s control.

That’s not what Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans fought for in 2006. That’s not what Louisiana voters approved when they passed the 2006 constitutional amendment.

But that is what SB 553 is now trying to accomplish, by chipping away at the authorities’ powers and treating them differently from other levee districts and political subdivisions in Louisiana.

Political scientists will thank us for this measurement tool.  We should give them a name for this unit that honors its discoverer.  We could call it a Jindal but that's already the amount of time a sitting governor spends out of state campaigning for President.  "Adley" has a nice ring to it, though.  One Adley = about 8 years.