Oh no not the brand

This week the governor made the Convention Center available for use as a field hospital as the city continues to overflow with COVID patients. The plan is to ramp up capacity there to as many as 3,000 beds. The supplies necessary to accomplish this are still running short.  Supposedly this is a situation that should be made easier by the President's (rather late) disaster declaration but you never know what might happen if he doesn't feel adequately "appreciated."  Fortunately, he seems to think our governor is a "very good" boy. For now, anyway.

The board members, on the other hand, seem to have concerns.

For the Convention Center board, the idea brought back some bad memories from after Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal levee system, when the building was used as a shelter of last resort.

“We all see the convention center as the last resort,” Rodrigue said. “We know what it meant to try to come back from tragic images and what it meant for the brand of tourism in New Orleans after Katrina.”

How did "the brand" do after Katrina?  Fifteen years later, how was the tourism business doing in New Orleans?  Pretty well, right?  Too well, maybe.  Mardi Gras 2020 may seem centuries in the past right now but it was only a few weeks ago that the main topic in town was figuring out what went wrong with this year's celebration fraught as it was with tragedy and mishap.  Just as the virus panic was about to ramp up in New Orleans, The Lens published this Carnival retrospective by Jules Bentley. It's a shame the plague caused our attention to veer away so quickly because Jules's point, that over-tourism is killing us and our most cherished event, is something we should have had more time to talk about. This excerpt supplies the heart of his argument.

Mardi Gras brought New Orleans 700,000 visitors in 2006. It’s at least doubled since then. Multiple news organizations cite 1.4 million as the number of yearly Mardi Gras tourists these last few years, though it’s not clear to me where (or when) that figure originated. Since AirBnB hollowing out the city has made so many more tourist accommodations available, I’d expect the number has grown significantly past that.

The New Orleans tourism industry is thriving. It’s determined to keep attracting more tourists here; to succeed it must endlessly expand. Unfettered growth is the raison d’être of this powerful and heavily taxpayer-subsidized culture-extraction industry, the cause championed in its glossy promotional publications and schemed on in its secretive boards and colloquies.

Our city’s beautiful old streets are no wider than they ever were — certainly not to any degree commensurate with the growth of the masses filling them for Mardi Gras. As the yearly influx doubles and redoubles, the ancient, creaking infrastructure of New Orleans bows, groans and begins to give way.

Jamming 1.5 million humans into the same party space that struggled to accommodate half a million in 1970 is, put simply, unsafe. Like the workers killed in the Hard Rock Hotel, this year’s Carnival deaths can be viewed as not anomalous or exceptional but natural, built-in byproducts of an insatiable tourism industry that’s rendered our so-called city leaders handmaidens to its greed. The sloppy rush and corner-cutting on the deadly hotel was itself likely driven — though we’ll never know precisely to what proportion — by its profiteering developers’ declared desire to have it open by Carnival season.

Any so-called solutions that promise safer parade routes must admit and address this reality: New Orleans cannot physically accommodate our rate of tourist growth.

Prominent among those "secretive boards and colloquies" referred to above is the Convention Center leadership. While Jules is arguing that it is their brand in particular that is killing us, they are still resistant to helping save lives during the virus crisis because that might hurt the brand.

Board member Stephen Caputo asked it might be better for the Convention Center to put up some sort of incentive for hotels to take on the burden instead.

“This is our community and I think we’re all feeling it and want to help as much as we can,” Caputo said. “And I think we’re trying to temper that with our obligation to the center for its long term financial success, recognizing that if they show images of the Convention Center being turned into a hospital, it would hurt our brand.”

As the situation moves forward, it's important that we remember how this works.  We should be familiar enough having seen it before. The size of the recovery effort will be determined in Washington.  But the shape of our "recovery" is determined by decisions made by people like Rodrigue and Caputo as they carve out the shares. We already know what their priority will be.

We probably shouldn't allow people like that to choose what happens to the rest of us.  But there's little reason to be optimistic. Our track record isn't great, anyway.  On the other hand, maybe some of us have learned a few things from experience. 

The Convention Center has been discussed as a potential shelter during other hurricanes that have threatened New Orleans but Honoré said those discussions never went anywhere because of opposition from its board, a quasi-independent body. In the current crisis he said he believed the governor likely had to forge ahead over the board's opposition.

Convention Center officials and board members have declined repeated requests for comment about the possibility of using the facility as a field hospital.

“There’s an attitude with this convention center board that we will not use the convention center to save our own people and they can go to hell,” Honoré said.

Well now we're gonna need a new Senator

You may think it's as simple as going down to the pound and adopting another one but, no, there's all sorts of stuff to put up with.  For example, we now have to put up with a full year of Charles Boustany saying things.

BATON ROUGE — U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany is making it clear he intends to run for the U.S. Senate next year, after Republican David Vitter announced he won't seek re-election.

Boustany released a statement Monday (Nov. 23) saying Louisiana deserves a senator "who can lead in times of challenge, offer conservative, workable solutions to complex problems and bring unity in times of division."

Boustany has to be relieved that he doesn't have to run against David Vitter after spending the gubernatorial campaign working to get him elected. Same goes for John Kennedy and John Fleming.  Those guys might be vulnerable to attacks from Scott Angelle (who is also likely to run) should he decide to tie his opponents to their unpopular friend Vitter. Everyone knows how Angelle feels about Vitter now. 

That's assuming Vitter will even be relevant anymore next year which he may not be. Meanwhile, expect more rumors that Russel Honore might run right up until he decides not to. The same can be said for Mitch Landrieu although, he will probably decide three different ways before not qualifying.  John Georges is probably already polling his own name just in case.  And, as always, there's this.

Did somebody say "Open Senate seat?"

— Biscuit ForLA (@Biscuit4LA) November 22, 2015

Anyway, it's almost time to start politickin' again.  Better gas up the party bus.

Honore out

Russel Honore just sent out a press release announcing he is not running for Governor.  Check your local media outlet in a few minutes for more commentary, I'm sure. The email is unnecessarily long but here's the key bit.

For those who have offered themselves as candidates for governor and the legislature, please keep in mind that public service means serving the public, honoring the public trust and putting the people before donors and special interests We need politicians who stand up and lead, not lay back and cash checks. We need to stop being stuck on stupid, stop believing that slash-and-burn business methods create jobs, stop believing that starvation wages are good for the people of Louisiana. We need to invest in ourselves, not out-of-state political donors. Louisiana belongs to Louisianans. We must take care of our own because it's our own who take care of Louisiana.

I want to continue to serve the people of Louisiana, as an advocate for the government we all deserve. . . but after nearly four decades as a loyal and proud soldier serving our country, after much thought and reflection over the past several weeks, I’ve concluded that I can best continue to serve the state I love by, not by becoming a politician and running for governor, but by working with the good people of Louisiana to reorder our political priorities and hold all of our elected officials accountable to the people they swear to serve. The coming elections represent a golden opportunity for all of us: an opportunity to hold our elected representatives accountable and demand that those seeking our votes propose real solutions to the big problems facing our state and its hard working families. And to hold them to their campaign promises.

Basically Honore is promising to stay out of the campaign but not promising to stay off of your TV talking about stuff.  So with that and Mitch Landrieu's continuing insistence that he's not in either, we might have a full dance card for this fall. 

Honore was a keynote speaker at Rising Tide 8 a few years ago just as speculation that he might become a candidate was beginning to form.  Here's that video. He was pretty entertaining.

Rising Tide 8 - Keynote - Lt. General Russel Honore from Jason Berry on Vimeo.

Having a very long think

Russel Honore is not running for Governor.  But as long as people keep asking, he'll keep thinking about it.

Asked if he has plans to run for political office, Honoré said he is thinking about it. He also said that while many of the potential candidates for governor have had disparaging things to say about environmental regulators, he hasn’t heard any of them talking about environmental concerns.

“I heard one of the candidates say he’s going to put his boot on the neck of EPA,” Honoré said.

Pretty sure nothing will come of that.  But I still wonder why John Georges showed up to introduce him at Rising Tide two years ago.  

Who is running for Governor?

As many of you know, there are two dominant political parties in Louisiana.  They are Oil (O) and Tourism (T).  Sometimes these parties come into conflict but often they operate according to a remarkable spirit of bi-partisanship.  Hell, the Landrieus happen to have one sibling in each.

Anyway, I thought it would be helpful to list the candidates for Governor in 2015 according to party affiliation.  Doing this off the top of my head so let me know if I miss somebody.

Senator David Vitter (O) Vitter is obviously the front-runner right now. He led all other major candidates in hypothetical head to head matchups according to the PPP poll released earlier this week. All of this despite the fact that some may still assume Vitter's "serious sins"* might represent some sort of vulnerability.  This is nonsense, of course.  Vitter has already competed in and handily won a statewide election since those stories first surfaced. His conservative base is willing to look past it and vote for him.  And the rest of us should look past it and vote against him.  Lord knows there are plenty of reasons. 

Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne (T) According to that PPP poll, Dardenne is looking second best.  I know that poll isn't particularly good at giving us a read right now. But those head to head numbers are interesting nonetheless. Dardenne's most distinguishing accomplishments as of late are as follows.

1) He's looking more and more like actor Rowan Atkinson (AKA "Mr. Bean") every day.



2) He recently completed construction a model of the Native American ruins at Poverty Point which he made on the floor of his office out of Mounds bars.

Dardenne, Jindal, and Vitter have been engaged in a three way tug of war over leadership of the state Republican Party for years now. Jindal is on his way out so now that's about to become a two-way tug.. or at least it was until this happened.

Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle (O) entered the race this week. Angelle will likely take over whatever's left of Jindal's power and add his own geographic base. Clancy Dubos sums up the situation well here.

His announcement for governor triggered the predictable criticism that he’s too close to Jindal. Some even speculated that he is Jindal’s anointed candidate. He and Jindal use the same chief fundraiser, Allee Bautsch, and earlier this year OnMessage did a poll for him. OnMessage in Louisiana is led by Jindal consigliere Timmy Teepell. Angelle says Baton Rouge consultant Roy Fletcher will run his campaign for governor and that OnMessage will have no role going forward.

In his announcement, Angelle said he will be “more focused on getting us across the goal line rather than grabbing the headline” — a clear swipe at Jindal, who frequently grandstands. He also portrays himself as a political pragmatist, not a Jindal-like ideologue.

That’s a good start, but it doesn’t remove the Jindal Factor from the conversation. You can bet Vitter, who despises Jindal, will spend whatever it takes to hang the wildly unpopular governor around Angelle’s neck. For his part, Angelle will have to separate himself politically and philosophically from Jindal at every turn.

In 2011, Angelle received an award for "environmental stewardship."  It was given to him by some oil lobbyists. Sure, that's confusing. But, as Jindal explained that day, the"stewardship" in this case meant fighting for more drilling.

Aaron Viles, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, questioned whether it is ever appropriate for an association to give an award to someone who oversees the regulation of its members.

"Mid Continent giving an environmental award to Scott Angelle is like GE giving a nuclear safety award to the leadership of Fukushima Prefecture," Viles said.

But Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who handed out the award, said in a statement that "Scott has been a warrior for our people and our coast."

"He has fought tirelessly to help get out people back to work after the federal government implemented a job-killing deepwater drilling moratorium and a de facto moratorium on shall water drilling," the governor said.

State Rep. John Bel Edwards (TL): Edwards doesn't belong to either major party. Instead, he's a Trial Lawyer.. a minor but not entirely inconsequential force in state politics.  Take a minute to review the saga of the BP claims center process for a pretty neat example of what they do.

To his credit, Edwards has opposed Jindal's attempts to politicize flood control boards on behalf of the oil industry. He has attempted in vain to force Louisiana to accept Medicaid expansion funds the Governor has rejected. Recently he's been leading the fight to keep what's left of the state Office of Group Benefits from falling apart.

He's also more or less a non-factor in the race. At least according to the polls he is despite being the only Democrat running.  (But remember the premise of this post is Democrats and Republicans aren't the parties that matter in Louisiana anyway.)  Also that could change. For instance...

Mayor Mitch Landrieu (T): Will Mitch run!!??  I'm still thinking no.  But I feel like my opinion is in the minority so he goes on this list anyway.  I don't think Mitch can win.  He matches up poorly head to head with the major candidates.  And he's already a well known item statewide which means he doesn't have any room to grow. Plus, given the enmity his term as mayor has spawned in certain quarters, I'm not even sure he can muster the kind of numbers he would need out of New Orleans.

Landrieu would save himself some headaches by staying put as mayor, continuing on the Aspen-corporate-neoliberalism celebrity mayor speaking circuit, and just biding his time to spend his retirement sitting on the NOTMC or some other tourism oriented quasi-public board.

But people still think he's gonna run for Governor. No idea why he'd want that.


Ret. Lt. Gen. Russell Honore (G): The G stand for Green Army which is the environmental activist organization Honore heads up.   In other words, he is utterly irrelevant in state politics. For this reason alone he shouldn't even think about running. Also he's been told no.

When Honore began taking questions from the audience, the topic quickly turned to whether he would run for governor himself. Although Honore reportedly told a crowd at the University of Louisiana at Monroe last week that these issues “tempt” him to run, he downplayed the chances of a gubernatorial bid on Monday.

“I’m not running because my wife said, ‘No,’” Honore said. “I think about it, I take a good nap and I’m over it.”

@Biscuit4LA (D): It's always possible.  The premise of any Biscuit for Gov campaign is that he is as strong a candidate as any other Democrat involved. This was actually his last public statement on the matter back in March.

People keep asking if I will run for Governor again. Haven't decided yet. I typically run when I'm as strong as any Democrat running.
— Biscuit ForLA (@Biscuit4LA) March 19, 2014

And since he appears here as the only nominal Democrat listed, we can expect that he isn't ruling out another run. But there's plenty of time left for to round out the field so we'll have to wait and see.

*That's actually a pretty crappy Bob Mann column. It asserts several nonsense ideas about the "dignity of office" and.. as Mann often does.. greatly inflates the seriousness of Edwin Edwards's supposed crimes. But I don't have time to go into all of that right now. 

QOTD

Russel Honore:

After a BP executive lambasted “opportunistic” environmentalists and journalistic “sensationalism” from a podium in front of hundreds of environmental journalists in a New Orleans ballroom Wednesday evening, Russel Honore could not hide his disgust. Taking the podium some time after, Honore, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General, had harsh words for the oil and gas industry. In the four years that has passed since the BP oil spill, Honore has run out of patience with energy companies that he says have “hijacked” his state.

“They have hijacked our damn democracy. They lobby, they write the laws.”

"Don't expect much other than bad times"

Russel Honore speaks to a St. Tammany community meeting about the Helis Oil fracking proposal Sunday. Yesterday the Parish, for all practical purposes, gave Helis the green light to begin work.



Adding: To be clear, the state and not the Parish has to approve Helis's drilling permit although that is likely a fait accompli particularly now that the local officials have approved Helis's "compromise". There is also the issue of a wetlands permit from the Army Corps of Engineers although one imagines that won't be a problem either.

Where did all the money go?

Russel Honore asks,

Anti-fracking forces in St. Tammany Parish had a long wait this week for retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who missed a scheduled meeting at the Abita Springs Trailhead on Thursday afternoon. But when the general-turned-environmental-activist did show up at Abita Springs Town Hall that evening during an informational meeting about planned fracking in Mandeville, he was greeted like a hero.

The audience clapped and cheered as Honoré entered, and they occasionally started clamoring to hear from him instead of the panelists or audience members who were holding forth.

Organizers insisted on sticking to the program and said Honoré would speak last.

When he did so, the crowded hall seemed to transform into a tent revival. Honoré exhorted his audience, which eagerly participated in a call-and-response that lambasted fracking for failing to bring better roads, schools or prosperity to the places where it is prevalent.

“Where the hell is the money going?” he asked to roars of approval.

Keep on frackin'

Nothing to see here.

Last week, Baton Rouge-based minerals consultant Dan Collins said truck traffic on rural roads is the top environmental concern at the moment. “The Florida Parishes have little industry and aren’t suitable for crops or grazing livestock,” he said. “It’s mostly pine trees and roads without traffic lights.” Groundwater isn’t a major concern for now, Collins said. “Oil deposits in the TMS are deep and well below the water table, making groundwater less susceptible to contamination than in shallower plays,” he said.

But retired Lt. General Russel Honore in Baton Rouge said waste water from fracking is often injected underground in nearby wells and can contaminate drinking water and the food chain. “It might seem safely stored away but could affect water supplies of future generations,” he warned. Leaching and seismic activity are among the potential threats to stored waste water. Honore is the leader of the Green Army, formed in Louisiana in September to raise environmental awareness.

This act is wearing thin

Russell Honore has been talking up some great ideas in the series of appearances he's made over the past several months.

Nearing the end of the meeting, Honore gave a brief overview of ideas for possible legislation next session, which begins in March. Three preliminary ideas presented by the former Joint Task Force Katrina commander and retired army lieutenant general included:

• Barring former industry officials from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ
• Increasing transparency in the Legislature by forcing lawmakers to recuse themselves from votes when they've received industry campaign contributions.
• Reducing subsidies to the oil, gas and pipeline industries.

There comes a point, though, where we have to wonder about this schtick. 

He said his "Green Army" -- the loosely affiliated environmental activist groups and concerned citizens with which he's been meeting -- will fight "through blood, sweat and tears. We're going to do this."

Really? I mean we all know about the negative effects of oil and gas on our state's politics and environment.  And, sure, we know Honore was an army guy type. (Ray Nagin famously called him a "John Wayne dude.") But do we really have to go around playing like we're in a "Green Army" bleeding and sweating over everything and whatnot?  Can't we just say we're supporting a reform agenda during the coming legislative session since that's actually what we're doing?

The hyperbolic self-aggrandizing pretend language is the sort of thing Jim Letten or Ed Blakely would lay on us.  It's condescending at best and, at worst, indicative of a person who is not sincere in his words. 

Transference

This column is about Russel Honore's continued effort to organize Louisianians of various stripes whose lives, livelihoods, and futures have been adversely affected by the oil and gas industry's activities over the years.  But the interesting thought is offered by Louisiana Oil and Gas Association President Don Briggs via this Harper's article Moseley cites.

During our conversation he [Briggs] vented about topics ranging from the fracking rules the EPA was scheduled to release later in the year, which he warned could shut down the domestic oil-and-gas industry, to what he saw as a shameless scramble by residents along the Gulf of Mexico to get a piece of the $20 billion compensation fund created following the Deepwater Horizon spill. “BP is getting raped and pillaged by anyone who had any sort of business on the Gulf Coast,” he said with a snort."

OK, then. 

Keep on fracking, I guess

The "reindustrialization" of South Louisiana continues. 

Royal Dutch Shell said today it plans to build a $12.5 billion natural gas plant in Ascension Parish, bringing some 740 new permanent jobs to the area.

Gov. Bobby Jindal joined Shell this morning to announce the company has selected a site near Sorrento for the planned natural gas-to-liquids (GTL) facility, though a final decision on whether the project will move forward has not been made.

Shell intends to make that call after site evaluation and preliminary engineering studies. The company did not provide a timeline for the evaluation phase.

Shell is one in a string of companies looking to expand its domestic manufacturing operations amid historically low U.S. natural gas prices. Rumors surfaced earlier this year that Shell was looking at sites in Louisiana for a GTL plant that could produce at least 70,000 barrels of liquids per day.

Sooner or later the frack boom will have to do... something.. to move the jobs number in Louisiana, right?  At the moment, we're still waiting. This is from a recent report from the Louisiana Budget Project titled The State Of Working Louisiana 2013.

Louisiana had nearly 2 million jobs as of July 2013, an increase of 7,500, or 0.4 percent, since the start of the recession in December 2007. But the state’s population has grown by 6 percent in that time, meaning the number of jobs is not keeping up with the working-age population. With the state’s population expected to grow by another 2 percent over the next three years, this means that Louisiana must create roughly 150,000 new jobs by 2016 to bring the unemployment rate to pre-recession levels. That’s equivalent to creating 4,000 jobs each month for the next three years, more than twice the rate of job growth experienced over the past year. The state created an average of 1,950 jobs per month between July 2012 and July 2013.

A large portion of the state’s job growth since the start of the recession has occurred in low-wage industries like leisure and hospitality, which added 15,900 new jobs since December 2007 (an 8 percent increase), while high-paying industries cut jobs. Louisiana manufacturers,for instance, have eliminated 14,600 net jobs since December 2007 (a 9.6 percent reduction).

Mark Moseley wrote about the disconnect between the promised reindustrialization and the slide in jobs numbers last month.

(LA Economic Development Secretary Stephen) Moret would have us believe it’s a new day. Investments are in place, huge new plants are being built. The unemployment uptick is just statistical noise before the industrial boom kicks in. Don’t you worry, fracking good times lie ahead!

He has a point. In April I made a partial list of encouraging business news items about new headquarters, plants and facilities in Louisiana. It’s an impressive array of projects, and it would be highly disturbing if, as they came online, statewide employment numbers continued to worsen.

Keep watch to see if next week’s statewide unemployment numbers rise again. If they do, it could signal more political problems for the Jindal administration. The public would want to know what is happening to the Louisiana economy right now. They wouldn’t want to hear Moret’s repeated assurances about the industrial paradise that lies over the rainbow.

The unemployment numbers are not better. And so what the public might want to know now is why their money is being appropriated for millions of dollars worth of "incentives" paid out to Shell.

Corporate welfare is at an all time peak nationally.  It's estimated that the various subsidies paid out to big businesses cost the average American household something like $6,000 per year. Louisiana is among the very worst offenders. A 2011 "report card" study by the watchdog Good Jobs First rated Louisiana's subsidy programs "D+" The introductory test on the GJF website offers this brief history.

Louisiana has a long history of enormous corporate giveaways. A decade ago, the Louisiana Coalition for Tax Justice compiled the state’s property tax exemption records for the 1980s and found that they added up to $2.5 billion, with the largest tax breaks going to giant petrochemical companies and utilities. Almost three-quarters of the exemptions created no new permanent jobs. Many of the companies also received enterprise zone tax rebates and credits. One of these, Shell Oil, collected credits for hiring new workers to replace seven employees killed in a 1988 plant explosion.

The chief economist in the Legislative Fiscal Office recently criticized these kinds of payouts like what was recently awarded to Sasol for building another gas plant.

Sasol, for example, will get $115 million in cash in 2018 and 2019 to build their liquids-to-gas facility in southwest Louisiana. In these years, state tax revenues in excess of cost will actually be negative, according to LED's own projections, but officials still state the "cumulative" tax revenues will be positive.

Albrecht disagrees with this characterization.

"They're trying to imply that it's still free even though their annual benefit is negative in that year," he said in an interview Thursday. "I think a little of disingenuous."

This cash incentive throws a wrench into the budgeting plan for those outlying years, because lawmakers will have to find the money from the state general fund, construction budget or elsewhere. When asked where he thinks the administration will say the money is coming from, Albrecht said he didn't know.

"They don't say," he said. "When (the costs from the Sasol project) starts, they're going to be gone and they've obligated future legislators to come up with $115 million in cash."

A few weeks ago Lt. Gen. Russel Honore spoke to the Rising Tide conference about economic justice and Louisiana's chemical industry. It's a remarkable talk for someone who is frequently the subject of rumors about a run for statewide office. Such rumors are certainly far-fetched. It's difficult to imagine any Louisiana politician exhibiting this much open hostility toward oil and gas.

"What we have going on off our coastline is equal to what we have going on in Nigeria as far as environmental injustice," he says at one point.

Later he directly attacks the influence of oil money on state politics, on the public universities and on commercial media.  "If I had my way we would put a proposition in that would say, if you're running for office you cannot take money from the oil and gas industry. It distorts a democracy."

Rising Tide 8 - Keynote - Lt. General Russel Honore from Jason Berry on Vimeo.

It's maybe not the most polished speech you'll ever watch but it is remarkable to hear a public figure of Honore's stature talk like this even as the state continues to open its purse to companies like Sasol and Shell without anything like an expectation that they will offer anything other than more destruction in return.

Russel Honore to oil companies: "Put our coast back back like you found it"

Levees.org and the Natural Resources Defense Council have taken out a full page ad in today's Advocate presenting a letter from retired Lieutenant General Russel Honore. In the letter, Honore endorses the SLFPA-E's lawsuit against 97 oil and gas companies for damage done to the Louisiana wetlands in the course of their activity there. 

I wish we could count on our government officials to hold the oil companies resposible. But after more than 100 years of oil operations in our state, our governors and legislators have failed to hold the oil companies accountable. As citizens, the only recourse, you and I have left is the courts. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East has filed suit against 97 oil companies. The law suit is just asking them to do what our mothers told us growing up: "If you make a mess, you clean it up."

I can't find an online copy of the ad anywhere just yet. Here's a photo.




Lt. Gen. Honore will address the Rising Tide Conference this coming Saturday on the campus of Xavier University.  Click here for more information.

Footprint

Stephanie Grace seems ambivalent about it here but she also gives Ray Nagin too much credit for a decision he didn't make.

2) Mayor Ray Nagin rejected the idea of shrinking the footprint.

After surveying the angry reaction to the green-dot map, the mayor declared that no area would be deemed unprotectable or unserviceable, and as few homes as possible labeled beyond repair — though, in his inimitable way, he said there were certain areas he’d advise against resettling. (He didn’t identify them.) The result is exactly what the advocates of aggressive land use policies had predicted: Some flooded neighborhoods have bounced back, while others are contending a pattern of spotty habitation known as the “jack-o-lantern effect.”

Another result of Nagin’s decision: over time, the conversation has shifted. There’s no real point debating the wisdom or fairness of piecemeal, property-by-property redevelopment, because it’s a done deal. Now, the city’s challenge is to manage the consequences, to properly target recovery resources and figure out how to pay for a sprawling infrastructure that supports a smaller population on a reduced tax base.

I don't like the way Grace characterizes the "done deal" as a choice between shrinking the footprint and "Jack-o-Lantern" effect. The choice that was never taken seriously or implemented was honestly rebuilding all affected neighborhoods at once. Instead, (some but not all) flooded areas of the city were asked to pick their poison from among demolition via bulldozer or demolition via neglect.

Keep in mind that Nagin was actually for shrinking the footprint before he was against it so we really have the green dot reaction to thank for at least rhetorically winning that argument. In truth, Nagin only deserves credit for caving to public pressure. But that's as far as it went. While nothing as brash as bulldozing entire neighborhoods ever became official public policy (although there was some talk at the time that it should) we ended up with a kind of shrinking by neglect of many of the green-dotted areas.

It's taken five years to even begin resolving the glaring health services problem in New Orleans East, for example. The East and the Ninth Ward have also suffered from lack of attention in infrastructure restoration as well as transportation services. All of which was occasionally justified with the shrug-shouldered argument that residents weren't returning to those area as quickly as they were to others. There's a sort of obvious chicken-or-egg question begged by this argument but even that isn't difficult to answer. The city was forcibly and totally depopulated by one external event beyond the control of its residents. Those residents deserve to return to the same services to which they were entitled prior to the event. Arguing that they suddenly don't deserve or need those services because they have been temporarily removed is patently unfair and hostile policy. I live in a house. My house is hit by a meteor. I need a house again. The fact that I'm not currently living in one does not refute that point. But this was the Nagin policy. As an alternative to actively shutting your neighborhood down, we will wait until you either prove yourself worthy of our help or blow away on your own. Jack-O-Lantern is a mark of laissez-faire policy, not the result of over-ambitious rebuilding.

Meanwhile, as we've seen this week, Road Home's inefficiency and overtly discriminatory practices have also restricted growth in the East and in the Lower Nine and prevented poorer citizens from rebuilding in all parts of the city. In this context, the Nagin laissez-faire approach to recovery essentially penalized homeowners and neighborhoods for having already been victimized by flooding and by Road Home. In fact, it was during this time that the city's most noticeably aggressive recovery project involved knocking down as many troubled properties as possible while shoveling the federal funds for this to friendly non-profits and contractors. It was sort of a big scandal at the time. Made all sorts of news.

But I kept wondering how it would have been any different from just bulldozing the green dots in the first place. Much of the consequences of that action we were most concerned about have, in fact, been realized. Five years later, New Orleans is a smaller economy more reliant than ever before on tourism and entertainment as its sole lifeblood. Its historic neighborhoods already gentrifying before the storm are becoming more so while the parts of town where the majority of the city's middle and working class people lived have had to struggle for the progress they've made. And so when we read that the city's population is "richer" but smaller this isn't exactly a cause for celebration.

And so now five years later we're starting the process over again. Mayor Landrieu recently released a list of recovery projects which, if implemented proplerly, could represent a first step in the right direction.

While not everything on the list is something worth getting excited about, one does find a number of public service, police and fire department buildings scheduled to be rebuilt. Which is interesting since, according to General Russell Honore, all that stuff has been done already.

But there is good news. Post-Katrina tax incentives have had a dramatic impact. The region has more hotels and restaurants than it had before the hurricane, and its major infrastructure -- sewer, water, public service buildings, police and fire departments, National Guard -- has new or rebuilt buildings. Federal money has transformed the schools in New Orleans, reorganizing them into charter schools, which are a far cry from pre-Katrina's dysfunctional schools operating in dilapidated buildings.

One thing that could hurt the rebuilding program this time around is the promotion of false "We Are OK enough" narratives favored by clueless boosters like Honore or, always the problem, marketing professionals worried about the city's image in the eyes of potential tourists. We've already seen the effects of this uncomfortable tension on efforts to ensure the safety of our seafood in the wake of the oil disaster. And the Landrieu people do appear susceptible to this sort of thing themselves quite often. But, if we are looking for reasons for optimism, we can at least be grateful that the fight to maintain the "footprint" is, in fact, a "done deal" conceptually. Time will tell whether or not it can be made so in reality.

Update: I started writing this post when I read Stephanie Grace's column on Sunday. But today's Grace column is just as relevant to it.

Former Mayor Ray Nagin may have cast himself as the face of the city’s post-K period. But due to circumstances beyond the new mayor’s control, plus a few directly under his control, Landrieu could wind up going down in history as New Orleans’ recovery mayor.
That’s partly because Nagin himself left so much undone, so many decisions either unmade or in desperate need of rethinking.

BayouBuzz

At least they're consistent

Quote of the Day

Josh Marshall writing about retired Gen. Russell Honore's possible entry into the GOP primary for LA Senate in 2010:

Honore is a very interesting possibility in terms of potentially shaking up the race. Unlike most others associated with Katrina, Honore came out of it with a very good reputation. And while some national observers did not realize it (because of his very very light complexion), Honore is African-American. ('Is' is a fraught word in this context. Honore identifies himself as an "African-American Creole", which is to say a person of mixed race descended from the French-Spanish-African population of Louisiana from the pre-United States period.) I know enough about Louisiana politics not to be stupid enough to try to understand it. But some Republican GOPers in Louisiana and nationally might see his entry as not totally unwelcome, even an opportunity to unload the thoroughly damaged Vitter.

The T-P this morning gives us a taste as to why this may be so. (Can't find the link yet. Blame the freaking impenetrable NOLA.com)

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said Honore is popular and charismatic, and he wouldn't be surprised if Honore got into politics.

Asked whether he'd support him, Nagin said, "Oh man, I'll support that guy any way he goes"

This could make for yet another election defined by its unusual alliances and confused racial politics. But I'll have to see more of Honore on the stump before I decide that I'm stupid enough to try to understand it.

Two LSU/VA points

1) I would have just posted this on Greg's blog but I don't feel like going through the rigamaroll of registering. His post is about the revelation that the expected synergistic sharing of facilities resources between the two hospitals, which was a major selling point of the project, has been scrapped due to the now out-of-sync timing and funding for each hospital. I've noticed that opponents of the new hospital, who have worked diligently to delay or obstruct the project, are now claiming that the success of their efforts proves the dishonesty of the plan in the first place. I find this less than persuasive.

2) This is an interesting turnaround about which I was previously unaware.

Meanwhile, Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore added his voice to those calling for the federal government to help pay for a new hospital to replace Charity, a shift in position for the man who commanded Joint Task Force-Katrina in the wake of the 2005 storm. In May, Honore told The Times-Picayune that Charity should have been reopened after the storm and that "the state of Louisiana needs to pay for its own damn medical center."

"Contrary to what I may have said in the past, the federal government needs to step up and provide a decent grant (to replace Charity) because the storm did destroy the hospital, " Honore said last week.

"I think a medical center or teaching hospital is something the city needs and I don't think it can fit in Old Charity, " Honore said. "I do think it's time for FEMA and Health and Human Services to step up and help the city replace what was Charity with what could be the beginning of a world-class medical center."

"We need one in New Orleans and it needs to be able to withstand a flood, " he said. "This time the first floor needs to be a parking lot."