Festival Marketport

What if we made a Jax Brewery except it was waay out of everybody's way, and airplanes landed there?  Would that bring in the locals?

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport will join a handful of airports across the country that allow people who do not have airline tickets to access the concourse, where nearly all of the new terminal’s much-discussed concessions are located. Right now, a boarding pass is required to pass through security to eat, drink or shop in the concourses.

The program, called MSY Guest Pass, is slated to begin after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, though a precise date has not been announced.

Aviation Director Kevin Dolliole said the program is aimed at giving the public a different way to access the $1 billion terminal.

I don't know about you but I can't wait to drive (there is no other reliable transit option) all the way out to Kenner, wait in the terrible traffic bottleneck, pay to park, wait in a TSA line to get frisked, and order a $12 beignet or something from a food court.  Is that the idea?

This article says it's kind of a trend in other cities.  It seems like a dumb one on the surface. But there must be some angle to it that isn't obvious.  I wonder what that could be.

No complaints about the plumbing, yet

Even though it feels like a lot longer, we've now lived through an entire weekend of the New Airport Era. And so far the only complaints have been:

1) There's no dedicated flyover exit from I-10

2) You can't get a cab out of there

3) They're probably going to lose your luggage

4) It takes over an hour to get through security

But the toilets work.  At least so far as anyone can tell they do.  Stay tuned, though.

And, yeah, everyone has already excitedly pointed out that the holidays are fast approaching. Should make for some excellent sport.

That Tricentennial was a long time ago now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concrete plans

Huh, well, it's at the bottom of Tyler Bridges's article but I think this is a good place to start with this story.

The terminal was supposed to open in May 2018, in time for Landrieu to inaugurate it just before he left office. The cost initially was $650 million.

Airport officials announced the latest delay in April, pushing back the latest planned opening from May to the fall. It was the fourth announced delay. The terminal and new roadways are projected to cost $1.3 billion. Airline passengers and state and federal funds are paying most of the tab.

Landrieu and the Aviation Board went forward with the new terminal without concrete plans on how people would get there from New Orleans.

Yeah see the airport is still not open. But I don't think the problem with the roadways, or the airport itself, is lack of concrete.  In fact, it might be they're trying to pour too much of it. In a big swamp. Which is an engineering challenge even when you aren't cutting corners to get the thing up and running in time for a photo op. This isn't to say that's what's wrong here. Or at least, it doesn't have to be the only thing wrong.  But when you get stuff like this happening, you have to wonder a little bit.

Spann said rapid sinking of the soil caused a massive sewage main to shift a year ago, leaving it inoperable. That added more than $7 million to the cost of the project, admittedly, a small fraction of the total building cost, but it was the reason officials pushed back the grand opening to last February. It was later delayed again to May and now, to an unspecified date this fall.

In June, the airport released a promotional video on its website highlighting the work that was being done to get the project across the finish line.

“It's really a lot of the finishes, testing. Getting a lot of the systems testing. Getting the fire alarm to go through,” said the project’s Construction Manager Charlie Prewitt in the video. But the promotion didn’t mention the continued problems with the plumbing. The smaller, lateral pipes that connect the toilets, for example, to the newly-repaired sewage main had broken in at least a hundred places.

To try and find the root of the problem, multiple sources working on the construction at the airport said large, exploratory holes have been carved into the concrete foundation of the new terminal building so that crews can access the sewage pipes. The main contractor, a powerhouse joint venture of four large companies, Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro, ran video inspections through the sewage laterals to try and find all of the breaks.

“It's more of an annoyance than it is a serious situation,” Spann said.

They're not saying at the moment that the "annoyance" will cause any new delays.  But then, since there's no opening date set at the moment, how would we even know?

So we built another airport and that sank into the swamp..

And so forth and so on.

Airport officials were first publicly alerted to the sewer line problem at an Aviation Board meeting in May by Spann, who reported that subsidence had lifted up the 2,000-foot long pipe in enough places that officials needed to construct a new line that pumped out the sewage. The original pipe had relied upon gravity.

“It goes from the terminal to the lift station,” Thornton said in the recent interview. “It’s the main sewer line. It’s good we found it out now.”

Contractors discovered the problem – by running a camera through the pipe – before paving over it. But rather than replace the existing pipe, they are planning to build a new one over it.

“It's about a $7.5 million fix,” Spann told the board in July.

The contracting team hired to build the new terminal, a joint venture called Hunt Gibbs Boh Metro, took great care to try to prevent any subsidence of the notoriously unstable soils around the airport.

Every night for 44 weeks, 500 times a night, a truck would dump a load of sand in the area planned for the new terminal and roadway.

Despite these measures, the ground subsided perceptibly once construction workers began pouring concrete on the terminal apron, where the airplanes would move about.

Nothing new here. Just the regular occurring hazards of building on jello-land.  But, hey, maybe there is an upside. If a few more things sink unexpectedly, they might actually push the airport opening closer to the time when there is actually a road leading to it.

Everybody gets paid along the way

Today the Aviation Board voted to expand the scope of the new terminal at MSY.

The latest estimate for the new North Terminal puts the total cost at $993 million. The price tag includes about $136 million to expand the terminal to 35 gates. That figure that has risen by nearly a quarter since its initial design phase last fall in order to add more space and make it more efficient, including additional ramp space for airplane movement and baggage facilities.

This pushes the completion date into 2019 so they're not gonna make it in time for the big Tricentennial now.  But that's the price of progress, right?


So back in January, we noticed that this expansion became possible after the city announced it had "hit its triggers" in terms of additional airlines and flights over a relatively short period.

"In 2016, the growth of the Louis Armstrong International Airport exceeded our
expectations yet again," Landrieu said. "With increased service via 17 airlines and 59 non-stop destinations, including 7 international destinations, we have hit the triggers
for additional expansion.”

How did they do that, we wondered.  What sorts of things does the city do for the airlines in order to ensure these triggers are met? Nobody was really saying anything about that.  At least not in the local press, anyway.  But if you go look at the cities we were out-competing like Pittsburgh, for example...

It used to be that airports provided a fairly standard waiver of landing fees and marketing help to entice airlines. But now they and their partners are offering much more, as the competition for new routes intensifies.

That’s especially true in mid-sized markets like Pittsburgh, where a nonstop flight to a sought-after destination like London is seen not only as a way to cut travel times but as a driver for economic development.

“The secret’s out. Local airport service is one of the pillars of economic growth. Everybody knows that and everyone out there is trying to improve air service,” said Blair Pomeroy, a longtime aviation strategy consultant who has worked for airlines in the past.

While incentives always have been part of the efforts to attract coveted service, what has changed is the willingness by cities or airports to offer cash subsidies or risk sharing schemes to minimize the carrier’s financial exposure, Mr. Pomeroy said.

“Now it’s part of the game. You want a new flight to a big city, you’re going to have to come up with launch incentives, marketing, and risk sharing,” he said.

In other words it's kind of like fighting over a major league sports franchise. Ownership is going to locate wherever they're sucking down the most public money.  As it turns out in this case, New Orleans was offering British Airways just a little bit more. 

In addition to Wow and Condor, the airport authority has offered cash incentives to British Airways to start coveted nonstop service to London from Pittsburgh International, CEO Christina Cassotis said.

She would not divulge the amount but described it as “substantial.”

The airport lost out last month when British Airways awarded a London nonstop to New Orleans, with the city’s tourism bureau chipping in $1.4 million a year for three years to help with the flight.

Mr. Pomeroy believes New Orleans offered more than the county airport authority to attract the flight. But Ms. Cassotis said money was not the reason Pittsburgh didn’t get the route.

One supposes this means NOTMC coughed up the $1.4 million.  NOTMC is one of those agencies that takes in gobs and gobs of public hotel/motel tax money that could be funding city services and turns it into a bonanza for "tourism leaders" and their friends and benefactors. Count the airlines among that number too. 

Triggers

The city has been aggressively adding airline service over the past year or so. So many, in fact, that it turns out they've met their quota.

"In 2016, the growth of the Louis Armstrong International Airport exceeded our
expectations yet again," Landrieu said. "With increased service via 17 airlines and 59 non-stop destinations, including 7 international destinations, we have hit the triggers
for additional expansion.”

That's interesting. It's good news.  But I'd like to know more about how that worked out. 

Do we do the do-over over?

Yet another challenge to a decision on the airport construction.

NOLA Airport Builders argues in its protest that the Aviation Board improperly jettisoned that competition because it did not show "just cause" as required by Louisiana law.

The protest also says that the Aviation Board's Review Committee, which judged the most recent competition, gave "erroneous and arbitrary" scores, dolling out too few points to NOLA Airport Builders and too many to Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro. It also calls out the board for putting Kenneth Schwartz on the Review Committee, saying his inclusion presented a conflict of interest.

Robert Boh, chairman of Boh Bros. Construction, is an emeritus member of the board at Tulane University, where Schwartz is dean of the School of Architecture. The Boh family are noted Tulane donors, according to the protest.

Recall that "NOLA Airport Builders" (then known as Odebrecht-Parsons)  had their "win" in the first round of this process thrown out, at least in part, because of... conflict of interest issues.

Adding another twist to the already tangled awarding of a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars — and potentially giving ammunition to a challenge by the losing bidder — it was reported this week that New Orleans Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant previously worked for one of the companies he recommended should oversee construction of a new terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.

Grant worked for Parsons Corp., one of the firms involved in the Parsons Odebrecht joint venture that he and other members of an evaluation committee last week scored as the best choice to manage construction of the $546 million terminal.

Maybe, if we keep trying, someone will submit a bid involving nobody who knows anybody. It might take a while to do that.. especially in this town.   Good thing we're not trying to get this thing done on some sort of timeline.

The $828 million construction project should create 13,000 jobs, according to materials handed out by the mayor’s office, and is scheduled to be completed in May 2018 — not so coincidentally the date of New Orleans’ tricentennial celebration.

Maybe make it two out of three?

The losing side in the airport bidding do-over is considering its options. 

The team lost a competition for the contract last week when a selection committee of the Aviation Board opted to recommend rivals Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro. However, NOLA Airport Builders has until Aug. 17 to protest the committee's decision.

Asked whether the joint venture intended to file such a protest, a spokeswoman for the team said in a statement that its member firms "respect the selection committee's decision," but "we are evaluating our options moving forward."

Not sure what those options are now.  Was someone on the selection committee taking Ambien and using NOLA.com in a strange fashion?  That's a popular ground for appeal.

Revisions to the do-over

The revised rosters of competing airport patronage arrangements are available now.

Of the two, the proposal by NOLA Airport Builders has the most changes from the plans put forward in the previous round, including a shake-up in the leadership of the joint venture, which went by the name Parsons-Odebrecht in the first round. Those two companies, one based in California and the other in Brazil, brought in Royal Engineers, one of the state’s largest minority-owned engineering firms, as a full partner after the first round of the process and severed ties with the local company Woodward Design+Build.

The Woodward tie became controversial in the last round when a lawsuit called attention to racially insensitive behavior on the part of some of the company's supervisors.  One interesting way the NOLA Airport Builders group is attempting to compensate for that now is by paying off some influential people hiring a consultant.

In addition to those changes, NOLA Airport Builders announced Wednesday that the Urban League of Greater New Orleans would be working with it to improve outreach to so-called “disadvantaged businesses,” firms that are owned by women or minorities.

Erika McConduit-Diggs, president and CEO of the organization, said this will build on work the Urban League already is doing and on previous successful efforts to improve participation by disadvantaged businesses in other projects.

“We want to be able to commit ourselves to make a difference and help make those opportunities available,” she said.

The Urban League is listed as a contractor on the project and is being paid for its services, but McConduit-Diggs would not say how much the nonprofit will receive.

The Parsons-Odebrect/NOLA Airport Builders group was also criticized for Parsons' ties to former Deputy Mayor and now Sewerage and Water Board President Cedric Grant. They appear to have compensated for that unseemliness by taking the word Parsons out of their group's name.

"Community RFP"

The Airport bidding process just keeps getting more and more complicated.

Stand with Dignity, a local labor group, announced on Thursday that it is launching a "community request for proposals," which will, among other things, ask the joint ventures to demonstrate their commitment to hiring locals, paying them a living wage and offering them opportunities to improve their careers.

The city's selection process for the contract includes requirements for the participation of disadvantaged business enterprises -- companies usually owned by minorities, women or veterans -- but it doesn't have much in the way of guarantees for workers, particularly those from poor communities, said Collette Tippy, lead organizer for Stand.

Stand's request for proposals mirrors that of the city. However, rather than asking them to demonstrate their experience and expertise, the labor group's request asks the joint ventures to detail how they will achieve Stand's employment and wage goals.

Stand has no official authority or legal standing to select a contractor for the airport project. Participation in the group's request for proposals is completely voluntary.

Just to clarify one point.  This "local labor group" doesn't appear to be affiliated with any of the building trades unions whose members would actually do the bulk of the work associated with these construction contracts.  Instead, they're kind of a weird mix of neighborhood groups, faith-based orgs, and.. the Cowan Institute.. for whatever reason. Oh and SEIU who only get things right about a third of the time.

Doesn't mean they're wrong to insert themselves or that their concerns won't be valid.  But they're different from simply "a labor group" and they certainly aren't the only "labor group" with a stake here. 

Not exactly a do-over after all

Figured there had to be some sort of re-shuffle in the works.  Otherwise, what would have been the point?

A shake-up in the organization of one of the ventures vying to build Louis Armstrong International Airport’s new terminal has bumped one of the state’s largest minority-owned engineering firms up to a full partner in the project, while dropping a firm that had been a source of controversy.

When the team that had been organized as Parsons Odebrecht submits a proposal for the $546.5 million terminal next month, it will do so as NOLA Airport Builders, a new joint venture that now includes a seat for Royal Engineers and Consultants at the head of the table and leaves out Woodward Design+Build.

That reorganization seems aimed at shoring up the company’s weak points even as it doubles down on the themes that received a positive reception the first time it faced off against Hunt Gibbs Boh Metro, a competing joint venture that includes several local firms.

The do-overs are starting to pile up

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe they're just worried about being sued.

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously the thing to do now is build two new airports

I see no other way to resolve this.

The selection process to choose a firm to oversee construction of the city's new airport terminal ended in a tie today, and it's not yet clear how the tie will be broken. 

The city's proposal Review Committee was tasked with selecting between two joint ventures hoping to manage the $546 million construction project to build the new North Terminal.

Just build another one. Say you need it to handle the increased banana volume or something.  Put it on the Jazzland site and solve two problems at once.  

Noted for future reference

Not accusing anyone of anything. Just saying that statements like this have a way of becoming hilariously ironic as time goes on.

"We have had an unprecedented level of cooperation between the executive branch and the legislative branch in the last three years," Landrieu said. New Orleans City Council vice president Jackie Clarkson added, with a laugh, "We pushed this through faster legally than anything we've ever done. A fine line there, but we did it."

Nagin tweets we didn't see

Nagin's actually in Atlanta today hawking his goofy book. (Yes, I have it checked out right now but haven't quite yet summoned the strength to dive in.) But mostly I'm disappointed that he wasn't around today to give us one more "sell that sucker"* for the record.

Kopplin and the mayor's economic development chief, Aimee Quirk, cast an imminent and significant airport overhaul as critical for the New Orleans region to remain an economic player. Investors want an airport that offers competitive fares and that aesthetically reflects its home town, something travelers for years have complained Louis Armstrong does not, they said.

After three decades of public debate over the airport's fate, including proposals to turn over the facility to a private operator and to relocate it more centrally between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, officials can't wait any longer, Kopplin said.

"Privatization has been rejected. A new airport at another location has been rejected. The time to seize the moment is now - for this airport on this property," he said.

*We refer you to this 2008 WCBF post for some background.

Chestnuts glowing on an open screen

Just in time for holiday travel.

Over the next few days, the federal Transportation Safety Administration will start using four whole-body imaging machines at security checkpoints at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

The new scanning equipment, which has already been deployed in 59 airports around the U.S., has created a mild stir because of concerns about invasion of privacy.

While a TSA official informed them about the federal government's plans to roll out the technology in New Orleans, aviation board members were greeted Thursday with a poster board display showing ghost-like, but revealing black-and-white images of a man, his face blurred but his genitals clearly defined.

I distinctly remember reading about a widely celebrated survey which suggested that the genitals of New Orleanians were quite well-defined already without the aid of high tech image enhancement, thank you very much. Of course, one could argue that these images are needed for the purposes of verifying the survey... or conducting new surveys of a similar nature. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and, frankly, TSA won't be using much of that anymore anyway.

Naturally, the typical set of privacy advocates are putting out the typical range of concerns for the right to privacy of their privates. TSA assures us they've got that covered... for lack of a better word.

But TSA regional director Ray White, who oversees airport security in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, assured the aviation board that several steps are being taken to protect privacy and ensure images of bodies are not retained.

He said only one TSA employee will be able to see the images, in a separate room where they will have no contact with any travelers. He also said the images will be erased immediately after the screener determines that there is no threat, and only written data will be retained.

One guy alone in a dark room will look at the nekkid pictures, spend a few minutes assessing their level of threat, and then immediately erase them from his hard drive. No American will have any real trouble understanding this procedure. This is how porn works in any number of households across the country. But if that makes anyone uncomfortable they can always opt for the less invasive full body pat-down alternative.

In addition, all travelers will have the option to decline a full-body image scan. They will be able to opt out and be screened using traditional metal-detectors, White said, but they will be subject to pat-downs and other secondary screenings that they should be able to avoid if they go through the body imaging.

Can't see anything going wrong with that policy at all.

Might just give up flying altogether

You people are just gonna have to come to me. Unless you don't like being strip searched either, I guess.

This is why you have to read all the news

A seemingly... um... infinite number of threads can end up relating back to one another eventually.

Oh alright... what was your favorite part?

Celcus liked the part where the Mayor said (about getting the crime cameras working) "Don't clap. We haven't done it yet"

BSJD liked the part where "Mayor Bozo was bragging about the number of vacant buildings"

Oyster liked all the "optimism"

For me, it's hard to say. Nagin's clowning last night was aimed mostly at selling three dubious projects. One of those projects is the "Reinventing the Crescent" riverfront development scheme that has sometime Nagin crony and New Orleans Building Corp. head Sean Cummings under so much scrutiny. The second is the transfer of the airport to state control in exchange for expedited state funding of... Cummings's riverfront development scheme, mostly. The third is a little-remarked-upon transfer of LRA money originally designated to restore rental properties to a mortgage program for first time home buyers. While the home lending program isn't a bad way to invest money, the transfer represents only the latest hostile act by the city toward those of us not quite ready to make the "lifestyle choice" (Stacy Head's words) toward home ownership.

So there's a lot of bullshit to pick from here. But I guess my favorite part had to be the introductions. The paranoid Nagin administration not only declined to provide the press with an advance copy of the Mayor's speech but also did not publish a program for the ceremony. Thus WWL radio was forced to broadcast much of the inane reciprocal backslapping of VIPs and Councilpersons introducing and congratulating one another that preceded the actual address.

I had tuned out for a few minutes during Irvin Mayfield's interminable elaborated performance of Amazing Grace so I didn't quite catch the name of the woman who actually introduced the Mayor. But when she... after another unnecessarily long speech... got around to making the introduction, she did so with the words, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Children of all ages...." as though the circus were coming. And come it did. I think that was my favorite part.

Update: More favorite moments from WCBF