Guess they dodged this bullet

NOLA.com: Auditor warned New Orleans RTA that paratransit issues could lead to federal oversight

An estimated 1,200 residents in New Orleans rely on the RTA’s federally-mandated paratransit service to get to and from work, doctor’s appointments and recreational activities.

The RTA, however, “engaged in patterns and practices” in 2022 and 2023 that limited the availability of that service, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the report from the RTA’s Office of Internal Audit and Compliance.

A “significant number” of trips from Jan. 2022 to June 2023 were excessively long or had “untimely pickups,” RTA Manager of Audit Compliance Malon Thompson wrote.

The RTA also used incomplete data to “inflate” the paratransit service's performance metrics during that time period, Thompson wrote.

Under a heading labeled "exposure," Malon wrote: "Failure to adhere to ADA regulations and [Federal Transit Administration] guidelines can cause the organization to be subject to lawsuits, consent decrees, fines, and/or increased federal oversight."

Joke's on the auditors, though.  Pretty sure "federal oversight" isn't going to exist anymore by the time this would come across anyone's desk.

 

Bus nap

RTA says it has a strategy to improve service and get the busses running on time more often. Apparently this involves reducing the number of busses in the "active fleet" and by adjusting the schedules so that they don't look like they're overpromising. That sure sounds like a service cut to me. The dreaded phrase "more with less" is ringing around in there somewhere.  But RTA insists it will make things better in the long run if they aren't spending as much time dealing with maintenance issues and after the new busses they bought with COVID money get up and running. We'll see. 

Anyway I thought this was funny. 

On Wednesday, Willy Lee, a dishwasher at Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse in the French Quarter, sat on a bench at a stop on the currently out-of-service Rampart streetcar line watching videos on his phone, waiting for his shift to start. He left home two and a half hours before his 4 p.m. shift began. 

“I leave home around 1:30 because the bus be kinda late,” he said. 

Lee lives in the Little Woods neighborhood in New Orleans East and must transfer buses in order to get downtown, adding more possibility for delays. He said sometimes buses don’t arrive at their expected time shown on Le Pass, the RTA’s app.

In a September interview, Hankins blamed the problems, in part, on a lack of qualified mechanics to quickly fix problems, perform routine maintenance and get buses back on the road. 

The plan announced Thursday will address that by reducing the number of buses that the agency’s mechanics have to work on. Of the 18 buses being pulled out of the active fleet, 10 are being “to sleep.” The RTA will hold onto them, but they will be removed from the roads and the maintenance pool. (The agency currently has 14 buses in that category, bringing the total to 24 beginning in January.) The other eight will be permanently retired.

Anyway, wake me up when a trip downtown from Little Woods doesn't take the same amount of time as a flight to Philadelphia. 

Ghost bus

 Clearly this app is haunted.

RTA launched a new app called Le Pass in August 2022. The app uses GPS technology to track buses. While it does include information about route delays, Ride says the updates don’t appear quickly enough, leaving riders waiting at stops with no idea when to expect to get picked up or whether they should change their transportation plans.  

“What we’re frustrated by is that we don’t have real information from the RTA on how the service issues are affecting different parts of the system,” Buckley said. 

Buckley said riders are reporting to Ride that sometimes the Le Pass app will sometimes show a bus’ location where there is no bus and sometimes a bus will be running and won’t show up on the app. 

And when a bus breakdown causes a delay, the app only tells users there are “significant delays,” but it doesn’t offer added information about a vehicle being taken off its line.

That's great. I've literally had RTA workers tell me not to use Le Pass. It can't even tell you whether or not a real bus is coming, let alone begin to figure out why it isn't. 

Hankins said she’s trying to work on getting more accurate information out to the public, but it’s hard to know how long a delay might take. 

“What I have gleaned from my peers across the country is they will say there is an incident on this line [or] police activity on this line, but they can’t describe how long the delay will be. Whereas our app just says there’s a delay. And so how do we … give riders better information?” Hankins asked. “That is something I’m challenging our team to try to figure out.”

To be fair, there are a lot of factors to consider in estimating delays in New Orleans. Maybe a tree has fallen on a bus. That could take an hour or so. A flooded street might mean two or three hours. But what if a sinkhole has swallowed a bus whole?  That might take longer. Perhaps a building has collapsed onto a streetcar line.  Now we are talking about a years' long delay.  All of this may be beyond the app's ability to compute efficiently.

Or maybe the delay is caused by something more mundane. Like, for example, decades of negligence. 

On its worst day the agency had only 78 buses available. At its best, it had 89, one shy of what the agency says is the ideal number — 90 buses — to accommodate. 

In an interview last month, RTA CEO Lona Edwards Hankins acknowledged that the transit agency is facing a number of challenges in providing reliable service to its bus riders. 

The fleet size is down by more than 50 percent from its pre-Katrina number, when it was about 370 strong, according to media reports from the time. Much of that fleet — about 200 buses — was destroyed in the citywide flooding that followed the 2005 storm, The Times-Picayune reported in 2009, and the remaining buses were aging out of usefulness. 

After receiving funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and settling with its insurance company, the RTA purchased 137 new buses between 2008 and 2012, officials told Verite.

But Hankins, who was named CEO in March, said there wasn’t a long-term purchasing plan in place.

Whatever the case, you're probably gonna be waiting a while. Maybe just have the app say that.

Shark alert

It's been a busy couple of days with little time to do much yellow blogging but we would be seriously derelict in our responsibilities if we did not note the Metal Shark ferries (well, one of them anyway) are finally going into service. The early reviews are positive.

After two years of delays, a sleek new passenger ferry began plying the Mississippi River between Algiers Point and Canal Street on Saturday, in journeys that are faster, calmer and better for the environment.

“It was real smooth, very relaxing. It doesn’t rock up and down,” Christina Burrle, 24, said as she exited the ferry near the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas.

Real smooth and relaxing sounds pretty good. I kind of remember one of the problems with getting these boats certified had to do with the safety equipment. So we don't want things getting too rough out there.  On the other hand, since the boats are no longer free to pedestrians, some of us might want our $2 each way to buy us a thrill or two. Maybe that's possible. The deckhands seem to think so, anyway. 

Guiding the ferry straight across the river might seem like a simple task, Burris said. “But it takes a lot of technique, practice and great ship-handling capabilities when you get high river stages and the currents starts moving at five, six, seven, eight knots. You can catch yourself in an eddy, kind of like a blender, and you can flip yourself all the way around.”

Can't wait to try it out.

Not going anywhere for a while?

Wow after all those years of watching the city build streetcars even though we kept trying to tell them they are glorified theme park rides for tourists, the city is cutting back on streetcars because... there aren't any tourists.

Since the pandemic triggered restrictions on businesses in early March, the Regional Transit Authority's iconic streetcars have seen a 90% decline from normal ridership levels. The RTA already has most of its system running on the less-frequent Saturday schedule in response, but the streetcars — which once provided millions of dollars in fares when they were filled with tourists — are now costing the agency much more to run per passenger.

As a fix, the RTA is considering running the streetcars less often. While the schedule now has an eight-minute wait between streetcars on Saturdays, the RTA could increase that to a 15-minute wait or longer.

"It's just time for us to take a hard look at what that service level should be, but still maintaining adequate social distancing," said RTA chief executive Alex Wiggins during a meeting of the RTA board this week. "Right now eight minutes between streetcars is just too much service."

Because fewer streetcars would likely make keeping distance more difficult aboard any one in particular, they probably wouldn't want to cut it back too far.  But do we really think the current bar is 8 minutes?  Because, no. Also we need to talk more about this fee-based system for public services and why we need to move away from that altogether. But that's for another time.

What's really fun about this is many of us have spent the better part of 15 years since Katrina arguing that the city devoted nearly all of its attentions to "rebuilding" a city that serves tourists while neglecting the needs of those of us who actually live here.  The streetcar projects have been a perfect example of this.  In the case of the Rampart cars, the explicitly stated goal was less about transit than it was "economic development."  But whenever the issue was raised in these terms, it was always met with denials. RTA has even been accused of re-configuring bus lines specifically to force more commuters onto the Loyola streetcar line in order to demonstrate its usefulness.  These are your streetcars, we built them for you. What would ever make you think they were just a tourist amusement?

Cut to today and we're cutting streetcar service because there aren't enough tourists anymore.  Oh well. The good news is, all these tourists who aren't here will be less frustrated figuring out how to get down to the pedestrian only French Quarter now that they can't ride or drive there. 

Another option might be for the non-tourists to consider soon will be to not take the boat.  Coming in September. We mean it this time. 

After more than two years of delays, failed inspections and fingerpointing, New Orleans’ public transportation authority has announced that one of its new ferry boats will begin carrying passengers across the river next month.

It’s the first time since 2018 that the Regional Transit Authority has given a hard deadline for a ferry's completion, after contractors and managers have repeatedly blown previous deadlines assigned to the $10 million vessels.

The ferryboat RTA 2 should be repaired and ready by Sept. 18, officials said at a transit board meeting earlier this week. Then, Metal Shark, the Jeanerette company building the boats, is expected to resolve leftover issues with its twin, RTA 1. Though officials said the second job should wrap quickly, the agency did not provide a timeline for completion in that case.

Only one boat is ready.  The good news there is since these boats don't carry cars, and we already know there are no tourists, and nobody has a job to get to downtown anymore anyway, they probably won't need the second boat any time soon.

 

Do do do do do do

I guess because it is almost June now, we are getting a look at RTA just a few months away from when its October 1 divorce from Transdev is finalized. By that point we probably will have seen the last of Transdev for a while, although it's possible we may be welcoming its former parent Veolia back into town when and if we decide to privatize Sewerage and Water Board.  But that's a problem for another time.  For now, let's just take one more look at the subcontractor we're still waiting on results from.

Public furor had also sparked around Transdev's failure to monitor a subcontractor's performance on the construction of two ferries, which that were supposed be ready in 2018 but have yet to enter service. 

The Metal Shark boats were supposed to be ready in time for Mitch Landrieu's Tricentennial celebration.  I think he was planning to end his last day in office by riding off on one like Frodo leaving Middle Earth or something.  My goodness so much has happened since then.

Don't get too used to it

For those of us who have been wondering for a while now what it would take to convince RTA to try going fare-free. We now know the answer is a global pandemic.

Public transit systems in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish are waiving fares for riders beginning Sunday due to continued coronavirus concerns in Louisiana, officials said.

The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority announced Friday it will no longer charge for bus, streetcar and ferry services. But, it is also reducing the number of routes it will service.

It would be great if someone suggested we try and keep this going permanently but we know that isn't going to happen. What is going to happen when/if things ever return to "normal" is we are going to start hearing from wealthy people in charge of things that many of our nice ideas about public goods and services "just aren't possible anymore" because of the broken economy.  We began 2020 pushing for free college and healthcare but we will end it being told we can't even afford buses anymore.

Hey thank goodness we saved the airlines, though.

The sharing is always fairest for the tourism moguls

The Convention Center has got to love this plan for settling its dispute with RTA.  It's one of those "compromises" where they don't actually have to give anything up.

The single biggest funding source for the RTA, which provides public transportation in Orleans Parish, is a citywide one-cent sales tax that brought in $83 million in 2018, according to the agency’s most recent state audit. But the RTA only kept $7 million out of the roughly $14 million that the tax generated from hotel room sales.

A 20-year old legal settlement has forced the RTA to fork over roughly half of its hotel tax revenue to tourism industry entities — mainly the Convention Center and the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation, or NOTMC, a public body that markets New Orleans to out-of-town tourists.

The Convention Center’s deal would allow the RTA to keep roughly 75 percent of the annual funding instead of 50 percent. The Convention Center’s collections would stay roughly the same. The NOTMC, whose board recently voted to change its makeup and its mission, would stop receiving any of the money.

It’s unclear where Mayor LaToya Cantrell stands on the proposal. Her office did not respond to requests for comment.

Keep in mind this is a proposal created by the Convention Center (which the Lens apparently had to fight to get a copy of) so let's consider it a starting point for negotiation. But this thing where "fair share" actually means the tourism industry gets to keep doing whatever it wants while city agencies collect whatever scraps happen to be laying around (in this case, the carcass of a now defunct NOTMC) seems to be a pattern. So I'm not optimistic.

The Six Million Dollar Men

We now know who picked up the six million dollar contract to operate the ferries.  Linguists will ruminate for decades over the commonalities in corporatespeak nomenclature that produce trash Mcfuture names like "Transdev" (the company RTA just fired from this gig) and "Labmar" the entity who they have just hired.  Labmar is apparently a portmanteau of Laborde Marine. But it also includes these people.

Labmar, which is a joint venture made up of Laborde Marine, Circular Consulting, Royal Engineers & Consultants and MSF Global, beat out HMS Ferries, a firm based in Washington state, for the contract.

The firms' proposals and the scoring sheets from the agency's evaluations of them were not made available Monday.

There are so many Labordes to keep track of in this town. J. Peter Laborde Jr. is one scion of the Ocean Drilling-Tidewater Laborde offshore oil and support services fortune and is pretty much carrying on that Uptown family's traditional business. Royal Engineers are familiar city contractors on several projects including the Canal Street Ferry terminal so now they will be managing the boats that land there. MSF Global is the tech services company who built RTA's app.   

Anyway it looks like one result of the RTA/Metal Shark ferry debacle is a couple of RTA contractors and a classic New Orleans plutocrat get to pick up a bit of a windfall. They say in the article that it also means ferry services could be restored as early as this week.  So everybody wins, really.

I'm guessing Duck Tours?

RTA is supposed to vote this coming Monday on a charter boat operator who will provide temporary ferry service until either the broken down old boats get back up and running or Metal Shark's tin can catamarans ever pass a Coast Guard inspection.

Some of the council members like Kristin Palmer, who district includes the French Quarter and Algiers, displayed signs indicating it's been 67 days with no ferry. "The management system was flawed, deeply flawed," Palmer said. "The operations and maintenance of the ferry system has been deeply flawed. So, we're hear to get some answers."

RTA Board Chairman Flozell Daniels' agreed. "The process was managed poorly," Daniels said. "There was not as much accountability as there should have been The contractor did not do what we thing was the right job to make sure it was managed appropriately."

Daniels promised the RTA is now trying to do better for the public. Two new ferry boats, delivered about 18 months ago have yet to pass Coast Guard inspection. The $10 million vessels were supposed to replace two older boats, neither of which is currently in working condition. People who rely on the ferries to get to work are hurting.

"We've ignored the fact that this is a commuter problem," commuter Fabienne Keenum said. "This is public transportation and I and other service industry and lower income workers rely that ferry to get across."

It's good to see something being done about the "commuter problem," at least. Last week, the city seemed more focused on compensating Algiers Point business owners for our sudden inability to deliver tourists for them to cater to.  There's no doubt those businesses have suffered, of course. But for some reason the city always seems to consider workers as an afterthought. (Did you know, this week, an American city implemented fare-free transit for its riders? Can you even imagine New Orleans RTA currently helmed by a "fare enforcement" specialist considering such a thing?)

Anyway, why won't they name the charter boat operator? Obviously they have somebody in mind.  Please don't tell us we can "Ride The Ducks" across the river anytime soon. You laugh, but thinking about public transit exclusively in terms of amusement rides for tourists is exactly how Mitch Landrieu got us into the Metal Shark problem in the first place.  Here's a public post by Clark Thompson that's been making the rounds on Facebook. I assume it's okay to share here, in a different public part of the internet. He introduces it as a letter to the mayor he wrote in 2016.  Basically, the style of boat that Mitch ordered was never fit to operate on the Mississippi River.

I am not a bidder on the RTA ferry project, therefore I am late to the game, but I recently learned some details of the RFP (for some reason the document is not publicly available).

As a long time ferry user, a USCG licensed captain, a Naval Architect, a builder of aluminum boats, and a principal investigator on marine building materials for Army Research Labratory, I have grave concerns regarding this RFP.

This RFP requests a high speed, catamaran hull, fabricated from aluminum. Such a vessel is well suited to the long runs on the Hudson River, and in Sydney Harbor. Such a request flies in the face of hundreds of years of experience of operations on the Mississippi River.

First, this is a short run, and a high speed boat will have no time to get up to speed before it must slow back down. The medium speed diesel engines will not have time to blow themselves clean, and will end up running dirty. This will in turn lead to considerably higher than projected maintainence costs and downtime. Furthermore, in order to obtain the required speed, larger engines must be selected, further driving up total cost of ownership.

Second, catamarans have poor low speed manuverability. The complicated eddies on the east bank ferry landing require a highly manuverable boat. Bow thrusters are a poor substitute for a proper initial design and are another item of maintainence that will further drive up total cost of ownership and downtime.

Third, aluminum is a poor material for impact. While this lightweight material is acceptable for the garbage strewn waterways of the Hudson or Sydney Harbor, it is ill suited to the frequent impacts with whole trees, oil drums and other large debris carried by the Mississippi river. Look along the waterfront and you will find centuries of experience dictate steel as the prefered material for watercraft along the Mississippi. Only small response boats are build in aluminum here. This flawed material specification will result in a high risk of downtime for the ferry, and much higher than projected total cost of ownership.

I address this message to you as a lover of the city and the river. Our city will suffer with the impact of a bad decision on this contract for 30 years or more and it is critically important to get it right.

Please consider delaying this contract award until the RFP has been corrected to properly request a boat suitable for the Mississippi River operating environment.

We've also noted previously and repeatedly, the various concerns with the contractor itself.  I think this post has most of that in one place.  But the overriding factor seems to be that Mitch thought the catamarans were cool. So that's what he bought.  Let's hope the charter contractor is chosen according to more reasonable criteria.

Do do do do do do

Well now there's a lawsuit.  Surprised it took this long.

The suit, filed in Orleans Parish Civil District Court by Algiers resident Skip Gallagher, claims the Regional Transit Authority shirked its duty when it ignored Gallagher's requests for more information on what's been keeping the boats from service on the Mississippi River.

I like that the person suing over the seaworthiness of the boats is named Skip. Anyway, assuming most people reading this already know enough of the Metal Shark background saga now. So let's skip to the end of this story where we see Skip is actually asking about the part that's been missing from that so far.

Gallagher wanted to know more about the whole ordeal, including what RTA and Transdev executives were saying to each other about the boats via email.

He also wanted to know who was responsible for selecting Metal Shark and whether that team had any expertise in boat construction management.

We've learned a lot about why what Metal Shark built can't pass inspection. But what we haven't heard enough about yet is why was that faulty product ordered in the first place? We did note back in May a pair of stories about RTA board member Al Herrara, who was forced to resign over a conflict of interest wherein a company he owned sold parts to Metal Shark.  Herrara went on to allege “questionable bidding and billing practices" at RTA in response.  I don't know if anything else has been learned since then.  Maybe Skip's lawsuit will find some emails about it or something.

Meanwhile, the city says they are looking at ways they might be able to compensate Algiers business owners affected by the ferry outage. No one has any idea what can be done for transit riders who may have once relied on these ferries.

The new head of RTA has a background in transit security

I'm not pointing that out in order to suggest that he could/should have done something to prevent this from happening. But I am a little bit worried about how a former DynCorp mercenary who oversaw the installation of body scanners on the Los Angeles subway might overreact to something like that.   

Some days the shark eats you

Late last week we learned that, once again, the aluminum catamarans built by Metal Shark for RTA had failed an inspection and were not yet ready for duty.  But at some point someone does have to ask why we're building aluminum catamarans to operate on the Mississippi anyway. In other words, maybe this is at least in part the fault of the people writing the orders. That seems to be what RTA has decided, anyway.  Today they fired Transdev from the ferry business.

But in July, Metal Shark’s boats were again rejected by the Coast Guard. That appeared to be the last straw for the RTA board members who agreed Wednesday to seek bids from new ferry operators. 

That move will strip Transdev of at least $6 million a year it had been getting to manage the ferry service, Wiggins said. In all, the firm has been paid more than $80 million annually.

Mitch Landrieu wanted to get a lot of projects approved in a hurry as the clock ticked down toward the Tricentennial celebration and his departure from office. Maybe meeting those deadlines was never really the point in comparison with just shoveling out the money as quickly and with as little scrutiny as possible.  Was Veolia/Transdev really the best choice to oversee RTA's first ferry operation?  Or did they just happen to be the contractor of convenience? 

Mitch also happened to think Veolia would have been a great choice for privatizing Sewerage and Water Board management.  Apparently Mitch was trying to sell the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad off to Veolia at one point too.  That company sure did have a good friend in Mitch.  Wonder what that was all about.

Do do do do do do..

Another inspection, another chance for the the boats to be found "lacking on multiple fronts" 

Two trouble-plagued ferries that were supposed to go into service a year ago for the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority still don't meet federal standards, and it’s unclear when they will start carrying passengers across the Mississippi River.

U.S. Coast Guard officials said Friday they inspected the boats in July and found them lacking on multiple fronts. To remedy the problems, the RTA said it will hire a project manager.

The new RTA head wants you to know it's not as bad as it sounds.  To be clear, they didn't fail the inspection. They withdrew from it before that could happen. 

In an interview, new RTA CEO Alex Wiggins disputed the idea that the boats had failed inspection, saying the process was paused at his request after the Coast Guard found issues on the boats on the first day of inspections. But Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Rachel Ault said it's standard practice for the Coast Guard to stop an inspection midway when it's clear that a vessel isn't ready for service. The Coast Guard did just that on July 25, she said.

This is, of course, after the boats weren't ready in June, which is after they weren't ready for Jazzfest.  And, of course, all of that was well after they weren't ready for the Tricentennial celebrations.

Three years later, the agency entered into a contract with Metal Shark for two new high-speed, catamaran-style vessels to handle the Canal Street-to-Algiers Point run. Transdev, the RTA's private contractor, managed that process.

The boats were supposed to arrive by May 2018. That deadline was later advanced to March to align with some tricentennial celebrations and former Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s tenure at City Hall. But neither deadline was met, after inspections revealed numerous problems.

So, much like the airport, the ferries are something else that aren't ready at least in part because Mitch wanted them rushed in time for his big party. Not that we can say for certain this is why Metal Shark was hired. But we are pretty sure that was a less than great idea.   

Transdev isn't in charge anymore so here are some Transdev people to be in charge of things

Reshuffling at RTA under the new "hybrid" management system.

But under a new contract that will be inked by Sept. 1, Transdev will handle maintenance and operations of the agency’s buses, ferries and streetcars, but not the agency’s administrative and leadership functions. That will fall to Wiggins and former interim Executive Director Jared Munster, now the agency’s chief administrative officer.

Also part of the cabinet is Mark Major, a veteran transit official who will serve as the RTA’s chief financial officer, the role most recently held by Ronald Baptiste of Transdev. Major was a finalist for Wiggins’ job and a former chief investment officer for Transdev. Baptiste, another transit veteran, will move into a separate role on Transdev’s smaller New Orleans team, which will be led by Darryll Simpson.

Wiggins also aims to hire a chief operating officer in the coming weeks.

Good to see Major landed on his feet.  As for the rest of the new management scheme, I've never seen the point of a slightly less privatized structure if the operation is still by and large privatized.

Wiggins says he hopes to expand service but isn't ready to talk about how just yet. There's
"low hanging fruit," he says but looks like he's still asking where.

“Being new to the organization, I know that there is some low-hanging fruit, and we will talk about things we will address in very short order,” Wiggins said to the RTA’s board.

“How do we provide better services to the New Orleans East? To Algiers? How do we really put the ‘R’ back in regionalization when it comes to the RTA?”

This month, RTA has been paying a consultant to run a series of meetings designed to provide the appearance of public input.  I'd ask what they hope to learn if I thought they really wanted to learn anything.  We need more routes, greater frequency, and later hours with fares as close to zero as possible. How hard is that to figure out?

Anyway, a couple of the meetings got postponed by Barry but there are a few still planned for this week.  Here is the schedule in case you feel like shouting into the void.

The right to move around

Here's a report from the uptown RTA charrette. This might be triggering for those of us who went through the post-Katrina public input planning process.

The series of planning events are open-house style; people can drop in to participate throughout the event. The activities and information session are meant to take about 20-30 minutes to complete.

At the meeting, attendees were each given a packet of materials with a set of stickers for them to use in interactive displays about changing the transit system. Using the stickers, participants can vote on what they want to see most in the redesign, such as more frequent streetcar and bus stops versus more express lines, where they travel to most within the city, and which options are most important to them: more reliable service, more frequent service, faster service, more weekend service, more late-night service or better regional connections.

According to Jennifer Brady, who conducts outreach for the RTA, the RTA is surveying people at bus stops, including Elk Place and Canal Street, the largest transfer point in the city, so that people who cannot attend the meetings are able to provide feedback for the redesign.

The survey asks about how frequently people ride the bus and streetcar, what other transit options they use, as well as what they would most like to see change within the current transit system.

Well at least it only takes 20 or 30 minutes to go play the game with the stickers. I have no idea if it's worth participating.  The purpose of these events is to have some sort of "outreach" on the record in order to insulate decision makers from criticism when the actual policies are made.  That doesn't necessarily mean they'll do a bad job. But it does mean they are definitely going to be condescending about it one way or the other.

Anyway the goal is to create a transit system people can use to navigate the city with as much convenience as a car owner might.  That means allowing for actual freedom of movement at all hours and in all directions. But for the most part, the pros and consultants are focused on getting grunts to work and back "efficiently." That isn't good enough. And they're going to use your pile of stickers to justify whatever they want to do either way.

But if you want to play the game, here is the schedule. There is one tonight in Mid-City.

Do do do do do do

And the latest bit in the Metal Shark saga is......

No, the boats aren't ready yet.

Two new ferries built for the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority have again failed inspections, yet another setback for a project that has been delayed for over a year.

The inspections, outlined in a June 3 report by an RTA consultant, have kept the boats out of service well after one RTA official's prediction a few months ago that the boats would be in operation by the time of the 2019 Jazz Fest at the end of April.

Oh well. Maybe they'll be ready in time for Gretna Fest instead.  Better make sure the gator-proofing is up to standard, though.

GRETNA, La. — The City of Gretna has a warning about large gators. The warning comes after several gators were spotted along the riverfront.

Mayor Belinda Constant ordered the posting of signs that say "Caution! Alligators have been sighted in the river in this area."

Constant is nervous that a child or pet could be snatched up.

"We received another picture of the alligator actually sunning himself on the concrete part of the levee," Constant said. "The most important thing for us is just having people aware that there is an alligator close by."

 Anyway it's good to see there's another looking at the boats now.  That should.. help?

Shipbuilder Metal Shark did fix some issues with the boats within 45 days of receiving roughly $959,000 from the RTA, as was agreed to in a March deal between the two parties, RTA attorney Sundiata Haley said.

But Greenwood Marine Management of Morgan City found the company still had not addressed other problems, including issues with the boats’ rescue equipment and fuel tanks.

I don't know who Greenwood Marine Management is. But it looks like they are different from The Shearer Group who RTA had hired to review the Metal Shark work just back in December.  No idea if this is getting the boats on the water any faster but, hey, it's a living.

Maybe someone can explain all of this better at one of these public input meetings.

Public meetings to redesign the public transportation network across Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard Parishes kick off Monday evening in New Orleans. Where people live and work in the New Orleans area changes over time, so the public transit authorities need to periodically update their transit systems in order to efficiently move people around the region.

Under a yearlong program called New Links, transportation planners are studying existing transit lines and holding public meetings to get input from riders. Information gleaned from that process will be used to propose an entirely redesigned transportation network for Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Bernard Parishes, according to information on the New Links website.

Or maybe they can't. Either way, it means more consultants get paid which I am beginning to think might be the actual point. Still, if you think it's worth your time, most of these meetings are in July. Here is the schedule.

Do do do do do do

Hey what do you know, the Metal Shark boats still aren't ready.

NEW ORLEANS — Two brand new ferry boats arrived in New Orleans about a year ago to replace the 60-year-old, oft-broken down ferry boats that traverse the waters between Algiers and New Orleans CBD.

 They have yet to transport ferry patrons and no one seems to know when that will change.

 “RTA and Metal Shark owe an explanation and a clear timeline of when we can expect the vessels, which have been delayed for more than a year, to go into service,” said Council member Kristin Gisleson Palmer.

This is a bit of an oddball TV story in that it treats the matter as though it were a sudden discovery.  There's actually been a lot of local reporting on the ferry saga. I compiled much of it here a few weeks ago.

Anyway it's been pointed out to me that the problem could be as much RTA's lack of experience determining and enforcing the terms of its contract as it is the shipbuilder's ability to fill it. Which is to say it could be a Transdev issue. Is Transdev going to be in charge of that part of the business under the restructuring?

Updated: Transdev must does have pretty good odds

RTA is in the process of deciding on whether or not it wants to renew its relationship with Transdev this year or contract out operations to a different management company.  It's tempting to think, then, that the fact that 2 of the 4 candidates being considered for CEO have Transdev ties is a pretty big tell as to where that's headed.

Regardless of whether Transdev wins the contract this year, its role is expected to be diminished somewhat.   RTA will still outsource most of its operations management. But the executive level leadership will be directly hired by and accountable to the publicly appointed board.  Maybe that's a distinction without much of a difference. It would certainly seem that way if the new CEO is hired straight out of Transdev.

One of the four candidates is former longtime RTA executive Mark Major. Major, technically, is a former Transdev employee. But it's worth noting that he tried not to be.

Major, 58, a Loyola University graduate, spent more than 30 years at the RTA in various roles, including general manager from 2006 to 2008. In that role, he sought to keep the RTA's operations under local employees' control, but lost out to Transdev, which hired Justin Augustine III to run the agency.

Major was actually pushed out of RTA just last year in the midst of a controversy over the new Canal Street ferryboats. 

Under a resolution the RTA approved in January 2016, the agency was supposed to spend no more than $10 million on the catamaran-style boats, which will carry up to 149 passengers each across the river between Canal Street and Algiers Point.

The firm chosen to build them, Metal Shark of Jeanerette, originally had until late May 2018 to complete them. But Transdev later negotiated a revised $10.7 million contract with Metal Shark with a March 21 delivery date.

Apparently the extra money was a rush order to get the boats up in running in time for Mitch Landrieu to have a big celebratory ribbon cutting before leaving office. That didn't work out so well. As of the beginning of May this year the new ferries still weren't ready.

So what went wrong?  A lot of things. This September 2018 article summarizes a series of delays incurred last year due to failed inspections.

Though the ferries were complete enough by May to warrant inspection by the U.S. Coast Guard, the inspectors said the ferries’ stairways were too steep and the access plates for their fuel tanks were on the wrong side of the tanks. Metal Shark had to remove the stairways and the fuel tanks and start over.

In July, one of the boats began test runs on the Mississippi, and Transdev’s crews began to learn how to operate both vessels. But training stopped after only a week as the RTA and Transdev found still more problems. The boats didn't drain correctly and there were issues with how some of the equipment was mounted. A door seal failed, and there weren't enough safety signs, according to the RTA.

What was worse, though, was this wasn't the company's first such complaint. That Advocate article also notes that the previous year Metal Shark ferries delivered for use in New York City had to be taken out of commission when the boats, "began leaking and corroding after only a few months in the water."

That was interesting to me so I looked up a few more details. Turns out the New York City deal with Metal Shark involved a strange kind of competition with an Alabama based firm called Horizon.  Here is how that went.

Two years ago Metal Shark and Horizon were selected to build — on an aggressive schedule — 19 aluminum catamaran Incat Crowther-designed 85’4″x26’3″ ferries for New York City. Both yards were given contracts for a certain number of ferries by ferry operator HNY Ferry Fleet LLC, the Hornblower subsidiary that is running the system for the city. By November 2016, 16 contracts had been let and there was what amounted to a competition, based on what Hornblower saw during each yard’s construction process, to see who would build the additional boats.

In 2017, Horizon made the first delivery to New York’s NYC Ferry Service, with Metal Shark making its first delivery right behind it. But the aggressive schedule proved too much for Horizon, logging far more labor hours than it had anticipated, helping plunge the shipyard into a financial quagmire that eventually led to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in October 2017. Meanwhile, the ferry service was an almost immediate success and Metal Shark was given additional contracts to build more boats for the service. 

So after driving Horizon into bankruptcy by undercutting it and delivering a faulty product in the process, Metal Shark went on to buy Horizon out in 2018. Really living up the "shark" part of the name, I guess.

But there is more. In October, RTA board member Al Herrara was forced to resign after it came out that a business he owns entered into a deal to sell parts to Metal Shark. 

Herrera billed Metal Shark of Jeanerette $8,500 for pipe fittings, pipe flanges and other materials his Kenner company, Best Bolt & Nut Corp., provided for the new ferries in November and December 2017, invoices obtained by The Advocate on Wednesday show.

The Bolt and Nut deal is a clear ethics violation. As a parting shot, though, Herrara went on to claim "whistleblower" status accusing RTA leadership of "questionable bidding and billing practices" although it isn't clear what he was referring to specifically.  Whether any of this contributed to the construction delay is anybody's guess.

After that the relationship between RTA and Metal Shark experienced some strain. RTA began charging the contractor $1,000 per day in late fees.  In November we learned that the boats would be delayed again due to "corrosion problems."  Metal Shark then began to push back against RTA with somewhat non-specific complaints about the terminals these ferries are supposed to be serving.  A month later, the Advocate found that a consultant hired by RTA had reported Metal Shark's work appeared "rushed" and "not very organized."

"Metal Shark appears to lack direction in coordinating final outfitting and finish work of the vessel," Barry Geraci of the Shearer Group said in a June report about the first catamaran the RTA's contractor designed and built.

By March of this year, however, everything seemed like it was back on track pending a few contractual details and.. something about a "rescue net."  

The dispute between the RTA and Metal Shark centered on whether the new ferries should include an attachable rescue boat or use a rescue net to retrieve passengers who fall overboard.

That story says the parties eventually agreed on "a crane-like device coupled with a rescue harness" to fish people out of the Mississippi so, if you are planning to ride the new ferries, maybe stay away from the railings. Anyway, we were told at this point that the new boats might be ready in time for Jazzfest. They weren't. But, no doubt they'll be along soon.

And now that the Metal Shark saga appears to be ending, what better person to run RTA than the sort of but not really Transdev guy who paid them $750,000 to "rush" the job in the first place? I don't like to bet on these things because I am shit at predictions. But if Transdev has better than even odds at re-upping with RTA in September then it's probably also fair to say Mark Major has better than even odds of getting the CEO nod tomorrow as well.

Update:  They went with this guy.

Next BIG announcement is hiring a new CEO—The Executive Committee recommends and the Board Approves Alex Wiggins from Los Angeles #RTABoardMtg A little more background on Mr Wiggins and the other candidates https://t.co/NmIczGP6Ig

— Ride New Orleans (@RideNewOrleans) May 28, 2019

  

 The Advocate has a paragraph of his CV here.

Wiggins, 52, joined the Los Angeles transit system as executive director of security in 2015, after more than 20 years in transportation jobs. He has worked for transit systems in Denver, Chicago and Oceanside, California, serving as chief administrative officer and deputy executive director, among other roles.

Let's spend a few seconds googling and see what we come up with real quick.


Wiggins's title in L.A. is Chief of Security and Law Enforcement.  The position was created in 2015.

In the newly established position, Wiggins manages the agency's internal security operations, along with its $100 million contract with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Part of his job involves maintaining Metro’s security standards. But he also focuses on ensuring that the agency’s surveillance systems, fare enforcement technology and communications systems work together efficiently.

In addition, Wiggins aims to increase L.A. Metro’s law enforcement visibility throughout its entire network.

"Fare enforcement" sounds super friendly.  So does the prospect of passing through a body scanner every day just to get to work.

In addition to the Thruvision scanners, the agency is also planning to purchase other body scanners – which resemble white television cameras on tripods – that have the ability to move around and hone in on specific people and angles, Wiggins said.

"We really want to be effective and we need the ability to have a fixed field of view, but we also need to be able to move that field of view as necessary," Wiggins said. "Deploying these technologies together gives us that accuracy and minimizes any delays."

Now we're not saying this means Wiggins is going to go full-on police state managing the buses and what not.  But we should note he does have some experience in that area.

A veteran of the U.S. Army Military Police, he joined Metro's executive team after more than two decades of security-related experience, including a stint training a new police force in Iraq through DynCorp International.

DynCorp is an internationally notorious mercenary paramilitary security force. Famous the world over for operating in such human rights quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, and post-Katrina New Orleans.  On the plus side, this means our new RTA head could very well have experience getting people to work on time.

While labor trafficking is clearly a human rights issue, McCahon is quick to point out that recruitment fees are also procurement fraud. Under the current contract, Dyncorp and Fluor pay Ecolog to bring them a specified number of workers. The contractors assume responsibility for transporting and housing their workers and are reimbursed by the government for the associated costs. “So if a subcontractor brings over 8,000 workers, and each worker comes with a $2,500 recruitment fee, that’s a $20 million black money kickback,” explained McCahon. “This is the largest contract fraud in the history of reconstruction.” The Army reimburses Dyncorp and Fluor for all of their allowable costs, plus 3 to 6 percent of their costs as profit—so the higher the costs, the higher the profit.

Upperdate: Looks like Transdev is back in. 

The RTA’s board of commissioners unanimously awarded the contract to Transdev at a meeting Tuesday, following recommendations from a separate selection committee and an outside consultant’s study that urged a structural overhaul of the agency’s leadership. Having also handled financial and policy planning decisions since 2008, Transdev going forward will only oversee operational aspects of the RTA.

I thought they might wait to announce that until after the reorganization was a done deal. But here we are.

Uppestdate:  I forgot to mention one more Metal Shark fact. Yes, Bobby Jindal's LED helped them get state subsidies. Why wouldn't they?

In May 2012, Gov. Jindal dedicated a previous expansion of Metal Shark's facilities in Jeanerette, after the company won a $192 million U.S. Coast Guard contract in November 2011 to build the Response Boat-Small, a watercraft adopted by the Coast Guard to broaden its homeland security mission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The company is also building other boat classes for the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, local law enforcement agencies and foreign agencies.

The state began working with Metal Shark Boats on the current expansion project in November 2012 and will provide the company with a $750,000 Economic Development Loan Program award, along with the services of LED FastStart®, the nation's top-rated state workforce development program. Metal Shark also is expected to utilize the state's Industrial Tax Exemption and Quality Jobs programs. Construction will begin later this year and hiring for Metal Shark's new jobs is under way.

Just take the moneeys back

A lot of what the mayor wants to do in order to claw back from the tourism cabal has to go through Baton Rouge first. That's going to be difficult. The Governor has already signaled some opposition to her plans and most lawmakers from other parts of the state are more likely to respond to requests from tourism lobbyists and less likely to care about funding drainage in New Orleans. Also everybody up there is just used to the money piling up in the direction it currently does and, well, there's a lot of inertia to overcome.

But that doesn't mean there aren't some options available outside of all that if you know where the pressure points are. Flozell Daniels has an idea about that.

The RTA sent a letter to New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. CEO Mark Romig this month demanding the return of more than $31 million to the transit agency. The RTA's current chairman, Flozell Daniels, said the agency now believes the 2001 agreement that diverted the funding was unconstitutional.

Daniels added that the agency isn't planning to give up any more money under that agreement.

"For two decades our service has been impacted by limitations on financial resources, while the resources available to the tourism and hospitality marketing agencies have steadily increased," Daniels wrote. "New Orleans cannot be a 21st century city without 21st century transit."

The legal stuff here is tricky. By the terms of a 2001 settlement, RTA gets to collect sales tax on hotel rooms but it has to kick back some of that to NOTMC.  What Daniels is saying, now, though, is that NOTMC doesn't use the money for the purposes specified in the ballot referendum authorizing the sales tax.  So, I guess, as a steward of these public funds, he is stopping the payments. 

This is a fun argument to present because it forces Romig to justify his organization's use of the funds in terms of whether or not they "specifically benefit public transit," as Daniels puts it.  I don't think he succeeds at this.

But Romig said the Marketing Corp. often promotes the RTA's streetcars in the ads it aims at tourists, and that it has used the roughly $2.9 million a year it gets from the tax to support local festivals and other events for which public transit is used.

Ha ha, yeah, making ads that tell more tourists to get on the streetcar isn't doing much to benefit public transit.  It does crowd the streetcar lines a bit and reinforce the notion that public transit is an amusement ride. It might also get some tourists to dinner at Commander's, although not necessarily on time. I suppose this provides some benefit to that wing of the Brennan family. 

As for the festivals, that's really more a case of creating a challenge for RTA, isn't it?   Romig's phrasing suggests they should be happy to have been brought more "customers." But public transit doesn't exist just to collect more fares. It is the transit agency's job to move people to and from these events without disrupting too badly the commutes of their regular riders in the process. If anything it's RTA who needs extra support from tourism agencies to meet the demand these events create.

And if they can't do that then maybe RTA is better off just taking its money back.