Follow the money all the way through

 From The Lens on Thursday. 

The New Orleans City Council on Thursday unanimously approved $4.6 million in education grant funding for three NOLA Public Schools programs designed to work with the city’s most vulnerable students. 

The funding — which was in question over the past year under the previous council — will support the Travis Hill School at the city’s juvenile detention center; the Center for Resilience, which serves students with severe behavioral health needs; and the district’s student support office, which addresses truancy.

The Harrah’s Fund education grants — money paid to the city by the casino as part of a lease agreement — had historically been given directly to the school district. But a new lease signed by the casino in 2020 broadened the council’s ability to award the grants, and last year, the city council expressed an interest in shifting the funding to early childhood education. 

The previous council had approved a plan to involve the Mayor's Office in the process for distributing these grants. The new council has reversed that decision. Really though, it might not have altered its eventual destination too greatly. This WWNO story explains the mayor's interest likely stems from an effort to prioritize early childhood education. Which could have meant the Harrah's grants would be destined for daycare non-profits instead of these other non-profits with incarcerated and special needs clients.  But there are other contingencies in the works that might convince them to share. 

For example, city council has already placed an Early Childhood Education (ECE) millage proposal on the ballot next month that could alleviate some of the need. According to campaign materials produced by millage proponents, the new tax would provide approximately $21 million which they say could fund just over 1000 ECE "seats" which is the term the private service providers in this area use for the number of children enrolled in pre-school.  It turns out, though, that the actual need for "seats" in New Orleans is estimated between 6,000 and 8000 so, really, this millage would only be a starting point.  However one provision of the stalled "Build Back Better" social infrastructure bill that may still make it through in some form is a near $400 billion allocation for early child care that would make a significant difference against the need for "seats" as well. 

All of this is to say that the ECE outlook isn't necessarily so dire that it demands immediate rediriection of the $4.6 million in Harrah's grants from one set of private non-profits to another. Which is one reason current beneficiaries of those grants, like the Center for Resilience, likely still had a good chance to retain their status even if the mayor's office were to get involved. 

Liz Marcell Williams, the CEO of the Center for Resilience, said the vote reflects the “original intent” of the funding, which she described as being aimed at prioritizing truancy and mental health services in the city’s unique all-charter school district. 

“A school district alone isn’t equipped to address these needs and this is the council really reaffirming it understands that,” she said. 

“I think it’s a really clear stance that the council is fully in support of our city’s most vulnerable youth and in our current climate when we’re having so many conversations about crime, juvenile crime, that there are prevention programs aimed at helping these students,” she said.

The Center for Resilience, which Williams runs, served 15 students when it opened under the state-run Recovery School District in 2015. In 2018, it shifted to a non-profit model contracting with the Orleans Parish School Board. Williams said the program now has a capacity of 50 students. 

“This affirms [the council] understand there are existing programs that are designed to minimize kids’ involvement in crime by addressing truancy, making sure kids who may make risky decisions are supported with mental health services and that kids who do become system involved are getting support.”

Or to put it another way

City Council OKs $4.6 Mil for DAs wife and 2 other carceral programs https://t.co/tF9BXwVJQE

— KD♐︎ (@ineedja_kadeeja) February 3, 2022

Weird that neither the Lens story nor the previously published WWNO report mention that part.  Anyway, Jason Williams's wife's non-profit, originally awarded Harrah's grant funds while Williams was a councilmember, will continue to receive funds from the Harrah's grant. Also, probably, the city will be able to help more children receive daycare services through other private non-profits funded by the new millage Jason Williams helped put on the ballot during his last term on the council.  It's one of those win-wins you like to hear about.

The bad vibes Carnival

 Everyone is talking about this today. 

There’s been a great disturbance in The Force, you might say. Since the NOPD can’t muster enough officers to patrol Saturday’s Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade, the route of the sci-fi foot procession has been substantially pruned. A krewe official said they got word of the change on Thursday evening.

Instead of starting at St. Claude Avenue and Homer Plessy Way, the 1800-person procession, named after a "Star Wars" character and the Roman god of wine, will begin at Royal Street and Elysian Fields Avenue, then continue into the French Quarter, organizers said.

This comes after we had already learned KDV's route was forcibly shortened and that most of the Uptown parades would also be required to follow a truncated route. That includes, even, Thoth whose unique "Krewe of Shut-Ins" route is designed to pass by Childrens' Hospital and a number of institutijons for the old and infirm. 

Obviously things are headed in an unsettling direction.  Of course there's much more to say about this. But, since I haven't been terrific about finishing the long posts lately, here is a link back to something I wrote in early March 2020. This was during the brief period between the start of the pandemic shut downs and the end of what was itself an ominous Carnival season of tragedies and bad vibes.  Before COVID interrupted everything, the city was getting started on a political dialog about the future of Carnival.  A lot of things were at stake in that fight. But we never got to have it. And now it looks like the city's ruling class is imposing the worst possible version of what might have come out of that process. 

Anyway, I tried to address a lot of my concerns at the time.  So check that out.  I'll try to build on it soon.

One of life's impenetrable mysteries

 Some day they will tell us what happened here. For now, we can only guess.  

Decades after the Wisner Donation was first established, Port Fourchon — which serves more than 90 percent of deepwater oil production in the Gulf of Mexico — was built on the land, leasing it from the trust. The trust was supposed to terminate in 2014, its 100th anniversary, which would have reverted the land and the millions of dollars in rental income it produces to the city alone. 

But the March 2020 agreement Cantrell signed extended the trust, and its shared control, in perpetuity. It’s not clear why Cantrell approved the extension. She has either declined or failed to respond to repeated requests for comment from The Lens over the past year, including for this story. 

An attorney for the plaintiffs also declined comment for this story.

Some day maybe we will also find out what exploded last week. But not now. 

In the meantime, anyone curious about the Wisner backstory is still free to peruse the AZ archives.  See if you can figure it out.

Oh well that is who we are getting

 Biden's probable pick for the open Supreme Court seat. 

Childs’s experience is worth scrutinizing closely. As a lawyer, Childs served as an associate and then partner at Nexsen Pruet Jacobs & Pollard, from 1992 to 2000. At Nexsen Pruet, Childs worked primarily in labor and employment law, principally working on behalf of employers against allegations of racial discrimination, civil rights violations, and unionization drives.

Bloomberg Law has 25 cases registered in which Childs participated during her time at the firm; 23 of those involve alleged employment discrimination or other employment-related civil rights violations. Race and gender were common factors in such suits; seven such cases entailed race-based job discrimination, and another three involved sex-based job discrimination. In all but two registered instances, Childs was not representing the plaintiff but the defendant, meaning that she overwhelmingly represented employers accused of violating civil rights and gender discrimination laws in the workplace.

Not considered the "front runner" at the moment, but all the elements are there. Clyburn is pushing for her. Apparently, Lindsey Graham is on board so it's "bi-partisan."  Add to that the concept of a figure who checks all the indentitarian boxes while also upholding a conservative ideology and you've pretty much got the flavor of the moment in Democratic Party politics right now. Hard to imagine this isn't the direction they go in.

 

What did John Bel know and when did he know it?

And now the fun begins.

Louisiana House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, described a recent Associated Press report which revealed that Gov. John Bel Edwards knew about the violent, fatal arrest of a Black man by Louisiana State Police long before the details of the arrest went public “greatly disturbing.” 

Schexnayder said in a written statement that he had talked to Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, and Attorney General Jeff Landry over the weekend about the report on Edwards, though he didn’t say what the three Republicans might do in response.

Instead, he alluded to a possible legislative investigation or impeachment, saying the Legislature was fully prepared to use its authority to serve as “check and balance to other branches.”

“What happened to Ronald Greene is inexcusable and should never happen to anyone. His family and the citizens of this state deserve to know the truth,” Schexnayder said.

“It’s time to find out who knew what – and when – and hold them accountable,” he said.

Of course, Schexnayder, Cortez and Landry are all pandering hypocrites who have zero interest in preventing police violence or even, I would venture to say, justice for the Greene family.  But the interesting thing about this will be the response from the various Democrats and JBE allies around the state who, in rallying around the Governor, will find themselves on the side of our racist and murderous state police and, by extension, the racist and murderous criminal justice system overall.

Not that most of them will have much of a problem with that.  After all the general consensus among our elite politicos of either party is very much in favor of more unaccountable police violence and a more violent and brutal system of legal punishment overall.  It makes little difference whether that position is arrived at through white supremacy or through an individualist belief that poverty is a personal shame deserving of its consequences, or through fealty to the oligarch class interested in keeping workers disciplined.  It all leads everyone who is anyone in politics and media to just about the same place. 

And so if these Republicans end up going hard after John Bel, the battle lines on either side will be about partisanship rather than anything resembling a moral principle.  Either way, don't expect any of it to alter the regime of state violence most of us are subjected to in Louisiana. 

What did John Bel know and when did he know it?

 It's looking more and more like the Governor deliberately covered up this murder. 

What the governor knew, when he knew it and what he did have become questions in a federal civil rights investigation of the deadly encounter and whether police brass obstructed justice to protect the troopers who arrested Greene.

“The question is: When did he find out the truth?” said Sen. Cleo Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat who is vice-chair of a legislative committee created last year to dig into complaints of excessive force by state police.

The FBI has questioned people in recent months about Edwards’ awareness of various aspects of the case, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the probe. Investigators have focused in part on an influential lawmaker saying the governor downplayed the need for a legislative inquiry.

The governor’s spokesperson said he is not under investigation and neither is any member of his staff.

Edwards kept quiet about the Greene case through his reelection campaign in 2019 and through a summer of protests in 2020 over racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Even after Greene’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit that brought attention to the case in late 2020, Edwards declined to characterize the actions of the troopers and refused calls to release their body-camera video, citing his concern for not interfering with the federal investigation.

You may have noticed also that the city of New Orleans is the throes of yet another mass panic over crime stoked by the media and by political leaders who are thrilled as ever to ride the wave of pubic hysteria but have nothing but the same old counterproductive responses to offer.  This week at city council we saw politicians demand  more cops, tougher cops, cops who will stop and frisk you if your car looks a little dirty, cops who will put you in jail for marijuana possession.  The same politicians have also called for an end to consent decree and its requirements that police at least appear as though they mean to act in accordance with the constitution.  Or, failing that, they have called for more policing by entities not bound by that restriction. One councilmember even suggested calling in the National Guard.  The State Police are already here a lot of the time, of course.  

All of this can only increase the danger to New Orleanians.  But it's clear from the statements of the local leaders, and the actions of the Govenor, that none of them actually care about any of that.

Not a moment too soon

 TP: EPA to start surprise inspections of industrial polluters, add air monitors in Louisiana 

Focusing on environmental justice in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans start unannounced inspections of industrial polluters, install more fenceline monitors at the plants and push state and local officials to step up their own enforcement.

“I asked my team to go further and faster than we’ve ever done before to elevate protection for people who have historically been left behind in underserved communities,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Tuesday. “Those who are suffering disproportionately under the weight of the pandemic, who are on the frontlines of climate change, who suffer more from pollution, have been waiting long enough. And they are counting on us to get this right.”

I hope they bring the explosion detectors too. That's something we need to look out for, especially.  

Westlake, LA (KPLC) - Officials with Westlake Chemical have confirmed that there was an explosion at the Westlake chemical south plant.

Officials said a tank of Ethylene Dichloride exploded.

The plant is located near Pete Manena Road and PPG Drive.

We are currently reaching out to officials for more information.

Y'all we could have ended the pandemic

 When you see (or maybe just hear) a shooting star, that is your moment. You have to seize it. 

Meteor?

Maybe. We're checking with NASA to see if anything was reported. The National Weather Service doesn't track meteors.

"Meteors aren't weather," according to Mike Efferson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Slidell.

Earlier this month, a loud boom was heard in part of Pennsylvania, and NASA said it was caused by a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, according to CNN.

NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office tracks meteors at its office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. 

They run a Facebook page called NASA Meteor Watch that tracks fireballs across the country. It had not been updated as of Wednesday morning. We've reached out for more information.

But I get the feeling too many of y'all might have just wished for a ham sandwich instead. 

Congrats, Walt

I resolved to do more posts in 2022. I haven't done more posts yet.  Will do more posts soon. Seriously. Like I said before, I've got a a big backlog of notes and outlines of things I could have written months ago but never got around to.  I've also got some "draft" posts that are really just bookmarks of single items I read in the news but didn't want to forget. I've always tried to put things like that on the blog so I can find them later. Gonna try to get back in that habit as well soon. Anyway, if I end up posting some stuff that seems like old news this is why. This is going to be a very dark year, I am afraid, for a lot of reasons.  Not sure what to do about it other than just try to keep the notes straight as it happens. 

For example, in December, we learned that Walt Leger is finally getting his "fair share" of the spoils he earned guiding the legislation that the mayor called a Fair Share for the city but which actually just gave the Convention Center more control over its slush fund and made the privately operated but publicly funded New Orleans and Co. tourism promotion corporation even richer and less accountable to the public.  

As a reward, Walt will get to run the unaccountable private tourism promotion corporation. 

Stephen Perry, the outspoken longtime leader of New Orleans' tourism and marketing agency, will step down at the end of next year, he said Thursday.

He will be replaced as CEO of New Orleans & Co., the private, publicly-funded nonprofit, by former state legislator Walter “Walt” Leger III, an attorney and former Speaker Pro Tempore of the Louisiana House of Representatives. Leger is currently executive vice president and general counsel at New Orleans & Co.

"Bolt from the blue"

I know Gill's columns have been even less coherent lately than in years past. But even when he appears to be "on" it has never been easy to know when he is being intentionally ironic.  In any case, I'm only sharing this to say that it's neat how they all never seem to have an "inkling at the time," about stuff like this.  Even in cases like below, when the circumstantial evidence Gill cites having witnessed appears, something inhibits professional political observers from getting the inkling.

It came as a bolt from the blue when Thomas pleaded guilty, and resigned as an at-large member of the council in 2007, because his vast popularity across racial lines had made him a hot favorite to succeed Ray Nagin as mayor in 2010.

Although I had no inkling at the time that he was another crooked politician, I was always mildly surprised, whenever I made a modest wager at the Fair Grounds and looked across at the big plungers of the $50 window, to see Thomas standing there at a time when his council salary was $43,000. He later blamed his downfall on gambling.

At least not, "at the time."  It's only after the fact that these inklings appear in print. Wonder why that is. Is it that difficult for the professional local politics observers to conclude that a local politician might be corrupt?  Maybe if it weren't such an off -the-wall concept it would take less time to figure out.

Louisiana's dominant political party maintains its grift

The state Republican Party re-elected Louis Gurvich as its chair after yet another year of squabbling between his faction and a group more closely in the orbit of Eddie Rispone. This time the opposition is accusing Gurvich of verbally abusing a staffer, which is probably true, but also not the real reason they're opposed to his chairmanship. 

Gurvich denied the allegations against him. In a speech Saturday, he said the party’s financial problems preceded his election as chairman in 2018 and that Republicans had robust fundraising over the past two months.

He did not directly address the allegations that he had mistreated a former party employee, though in his remarks Saturday, he compared himself with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who was outraged when he found himself being accused of sexual assault after being nominated to the country’s top court.

Several top Republicans in the state have been upset with Gurvich’s leadership. Eddie Rispone, a former gubernatorial candidate and a Republican mega-donor, has openly criticized the party’s leadership on several occasions.

“No one wants to contribute to the party because it’s not run properly,” Rispone said Saturday.

Is the party being "run properly?" Well that depends on a lot of subjective criteria. They do hold both houses of the legislature, both US Senate seats, all but one of Louisiana's US House seats, and every statewide elected office other than Governor.  On the other hand, they haven't yet figured out how to divvy up the spoils of all that plunder without being jerks about it. 

And that's what these chair elections are all about.  See a few years ago, these same factions had it out over whether or not Republican candidates should hire former chairman Roger Villere's consulting firm and how much they should pay him.  This year they are at it again, likely over the same sort of territorial grudge, regardless of how they want to explain it. 

Taking a stab at Rispone, Gurvich said he wouldn't let a "wealthy businessman wrest control" of the state party and downplayed Bayham's GOP bona fides, saying he consulted for Jay Dardenne, a Republican who serves as Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards' chief budget architect.

Oh yeah you really wouldn't a "wealthy businessman" getting control of the party.  That's definitely why you need Louis Gurvich around.  

Gurvich’s desire to be the LAGOP’s top leader might seem an unusual move from his weekday responsibilities as president of the Uptown-based New Orleans Private Patrol, but the private security business is in Gurvich’s blood. A third- generation entrepreneur, Gurvich’s family came to Louisiana in the late 1920’s when J. Edgar Hoover, the young director of the Bureau of Intelligence — later known as the FBI — personally transferred Gurvich’s paternal grandfather to the city. Gurvich received multiple degrees in business and law from UNO, Tulane University and Loyola Law School and entered the 87-year-old family business in 1991.

Anyway, now that Gurvich is back, what's next for the state GOP power brokers besides trying to hide all the money from each other? 

Acknowledging his narrow victory, Gurvich, who will lead the party through the next election for governor, said the stakes are too great to let to party devolve into infighting. 

"We are here to save a country, nothing less, make no mistake. Our enemies are powerful, they are a driven by a Marxists ideology," Gurvich said. "My promise is that I'm here for every one of you."

LOL, your "enemies" are almost entirely out of power in this state and they are driven by a neoliberal ideology of privatization and patronage not too different from your own. But keep that grift up. It's going well for you.

Mild

 No, the virus is not getting "milder."

Before omicron came along, SARS-CoV-2 was actually evolving to be more severe, says Bhattacharyya, of Harvard Medical School. "We're looking at a virus that's gotten progressively more severe over time," he says.

A study from the U.K. found that alpha was about 40% more likely to kill a person than the original virus. And delta was about two times more likely to put you in the hospital than the alpha variant.

"Omicron may be a small step back in severity. But it's probably more severe on its own than the original version of the virus," Bhattacharyya says. Becoming "more mild" hasn't been the trend or evolutionary trajectory, he says.

In addition, omicron didn't evolve directly from delta. It evolved from an earlier version of the virus circulating in 2020. And so omicron could actually be more severe than its ancestral virus, and it could be progressing toward higher severity, Bhattacharyya says.

And thus, there's no guarantee that the next variant to emerge will be milder. It could be the most severe yet.

"I think we don't really know what direction this virus is taking," says evolutionary biologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah. "We've learned that trying to predict the evolutionary trajectory of this virus is very, very difficult. If not impossible."

How did the "mildness" of Omicron evolve?  Well, America's bosses decided it was time to force people back to work regardless of the health hazard. America's political leaders, by and large, agreed with that. And America's news editors, by and large being of the same socio-economic class as America's bosses and political leaders decided they, too, were tired of being inconvenienced by worker safety concerns and that it was time to stop worrying so much about COVID.  So they started putting the word "mild" in headlines and the thing just mutated from there into conventional wisdom.

Can't go back now. Even if the next variant really is more severe, they've all figured out whose lives do and do not matter by this point.

Let's hope it's a good one

We begin 2022 in the middle of a great experiment. Policymaking deciders at all levels of government are attempting to find out what would happen if they just caved completely to the demands of the hooting death cult coalition of capitalist bosses and anti-vaxers who have been yelling at them this whole time to just let the virus do what it wants.

And, well, we're finding out.

"Omicron is truly everywhere," Dr. Megan Ranney, a professor of emergency medicine at Brown University's School of Public Health, told CNN on Friday night. "What I am so worried about over the next month or so is that our economy is going to shut down, not because of policies from the federal government or from the state governments, but rather because so many of us are ill."

The political calculus is obvious. Turns out there is a high tolerance for economic disruption, overloaded hospitals, and even people dying, as long as the politicians can say it isn't because of a thing they tried to do. In fact, every policy choice up to this point can be described as elected leaders desperately trying to get this bullshit off of their desk where it is someone else's problem. This stage of total inaction is only the latest, um, variant of that pathology to emerge. 

Schools are about to open next week. In New Orleans, where the response thus far has been to misreport case counts, and blame students and teachers who get sick for their individual "irresponsible" behavior, the plan now is apparently just to see how much more they can take.  

With the virus spreading, some staff and experts are expressing concern about what school reopenings could mean.

"There will be pediatric hospitalizations," Hotez said. "And what's going to be the other tough piece in the next weeks, keeping the schools open, because of this high transmissibility -- especially if you start seeing absences of school teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria staff."

Whatever happens, rest assured it will never be the fault of anyone in  charge. Their only real job has been to keep the workers from getting too uppity in their demands that their safety and well being be protected. And so far they've done that job perfectly. 

What year are we even in now?

Earlier today, @NOPDChief & @mayorcantrell unveiled 40 brand new Harley-Davidson police motorcycles leased by the department to replace the outgoing fleet. This near $1 million investment provides #NOPD Traffic Division officers top-of-the-line vehicles for use in the field. pic.twitter.com/PSlinl1eJS

— NOPD (@NOPDNews) December 30, 2021

Really great to see we're focusing on what matters. See we spend all this money on police when... wait a second... Computer, enhance.

 

 

   Okay enhance again.

 

 

My God we're right back at the beginning. It is still 2005 or 2008 or whatever and the mayor is still a cop. 

We're never getting out of this loop. Happy New Year.

Here we go around again

Looking forward to 2022 in New Orleans when we will be turning more public investment into private profit despite our chronic housing crisis as has been done over and over in exactly this fashion.  

The property is zoned CBD-1, which calls for high-density and mixed-use developments downtown. The buildings, constructed in the mid-1800s, are eligible for Federal and State Historic Tax Credits and located in a qualified Opportunity Zone, a flyer for the listing said.

The purchase price was not disclosed. The listed price was $4.7 million. Siegel, along with William Sadler and Jeff Cohn, represented the sellers, listed as New Orleans residents Rosemonde Kuntz Capomazza, Carlo Capomazza, and Stefano Capomazza, in the transaction.

Whatever will they do with that property in that downtown neighborhood? 

Asked about plans for the Baronne and Union streets buildings, Phil Winton, a spokesman for GBX Group, said in an emailed statement that “We don’t comment on future plans until we have them buttoned up. Rest assured, the historic building will be preserved.”

Mixed-use, multifamily, short-term rentals and hotel redevelopment projects are abundant in the area. Developers have used tax incentives and creative funding measures to overhaul vacant properties, many of which were used as office space in their past lives.

Don't worry. The building will be fine. That's really the point of all this, right?

One other note from this story. GBX Group is also in possession of the deteriorating jazz landmark buildings that face S. Rampart Street. According to the Times-Picayune, the plans are to redevelop the whole block into an "entertainment district" anchored by a "'jazz-themed' hotel/convention venue along Loyola Avenue."  One assumes that means the river side of Loyola Avenue which is currently occupied by surface level parking lots. So it's not clear that City Hall which is currently located across the street would have to move out of the way for that but they are trying.   Here is their latest idea for that. 

The 23-story office tower at 1615 Poydras St., originally known as the Freeport McMoRan Building, is currently the headquarters for DXC Technology. It sits across the street from Caesars Superdome and is two blocks from the current City Hall.

The building is owned by Stewart Capitol, which is controlled by New Orleans investor Frank Stewart, according to the company’s website. According the Orleans Parish Assessor's Office website, it last sold for $30 million in 2000, according to assessor's records. Mohammad Motahari with Stewart Enterprises told WDSU Friday the city reached out about potentially selling. He added that the company will listen to all officers, but no offer has yet been made. The memo says the prospective timeline would depend in part on the financing process.

Just as an incidental note, Frank Stewart, we may recall, spent much of 2017 throwing a public fit over the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces in the city.  Thankfully, the city didn't bow to Stewart's faction. Well, not entirely, anyway. LaToya Cantrell certainly gave them a lot of consideration. After all, it wouldn't make sense not to listen to your business partners, no matter how filthy racist they are, right? 

New heights

 Records are made to be broken. 

Louisiana reported the highest single-day increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

There were 6,199 confirmed COVID cases and an additional 3,179 probable COVID cases reported in the Department of Health's noon update.

The 6,199 confirmed cases mark the largest single day increase ever in Louisiana.

Interestingly this is happening within a context of  under-reported data be it from increased use of at home tests or just flat out lying by local medical examiners. 

In Lafayette Parish, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death in 134 fatalities in 2020, even though there were 419 “excess deaths” – the number of deaths that exceed a normal, pre-pandemic year. The gap between these two numbers means hundreds more people probably died of COVID-19, researchers said. 

Deaths attributed to diseases that are often tied to COVID-19 increased. Deaths at home from hypertensive heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s all increased 30% or more in 2020. Those deaths, especially those that weren’t properly investigated, make up at least some of Lafayette’s missing COVID-19 deaths, according to experts.

Especially concerning are deaths in the community attributed to nonspecific causes, known as “garbage codes.” For example, 40 people in the parish who died at home since 2020 were certified as dead of “heart failure, unspecified.”

Meanwhile it looks like we're back to just waiting to see if it all blows over as a policy response. I saw some city agencies are reimposing mask mandates and the councilmembers are back on Zoom.  Everyone else is basically at the mercy of their boss for direction going forward.  Hope you don't work for the schools....

 

Just spoke with a nurse on the Children's Hospital covid testing hotline and she said they are not doing return-to-school tests as they are currently overwhelmed, so don't waste your time trying to get an appt.

— Molly Rouxdolph 🦌 (@hashtagmolly) December 29, 2021

Gotta get NHIF back on the ballot

Will have more to say about this if I ever get that elections post done. But this shouldn't have been allowed to happen. 

For decades, tax proceeds went to the city’s Neighborhood Housing Improvement Fund, or NHIF, which has been used in recent years for emergency rental assistance, repairing storm damage, assisting first time home buyers and incentivizing new housing developments.

It was a narrow defeat. With 50.8 percent of voters casting “no” ballots, the margin was fewer than 1,000 votes. And already, some are calling for another vote to restart the tax.

Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center, argued that support for the NHIF remains high in New Orleans, and that the renewal’s defeat could be largely blamed on the extremely low profile nature of the race, and the near total lack of institutional support from government officials. 

“No one put any resources into educating the public on the fund and what it’s accomplished,” Hill said. “The NHIF has always had broad support whenever it’s been polled. But it’s also clear that many people had no idea that the NHIF was on the ballot, even in the weeks before the election. So it suggests that this very disappointing result was about a lack of education.”

The only PR effort that made any impact at all was BGR's absurdly conservative opposition which got broadcast all over town more or less unchallenged. That argument is what Andreanecia Morris is referring to at the end of this article. 

But Morris also argued that the focus on accountability was partially due to a deeply ingrained bias that makes people particularly suspicious of government spending on affordable housing.

She argued that similar issues can be found throughout city government, but that some people’s deep-seated association of affordable housing with corruption and crime put much greater scrutiny on housing programs. 

“Why does housing get this fake purity test?” she said. “Please name for me a pot of money that’s perfectly managed.”

The failure to renew this millage will result in a reduction in revenue for the housing fund from $12.9 million to $3.1 million in 2022 according to the city budget projection.  The Lens notes that source of that $3.1 isn't clearly indicated. However, we do know that it relies now on fees collected from short term rental licensing which, in addition to being a difficult figure to get a handle on, is also builds in a perverse incentive for funding affordable housing by allowing STRs to proliferate.  

So it's imperative that we figure out a way to get an affordable housing millage back on the ballot. It is not at all clear that the incoming city council will be interested in doing something like that, though. But maybe that's something else to save for an election recap.

The boss will decide if you are too sick to work

They will say they are citing CDC guidance, of course. But one thing that has become abundantly clear over the course of the pandemic is who the CDC actually works for. 

A union for flight attendants is accusing the CDC of loosening rules for quarantine after Covid-19 exposure at the behest of the airline industry, as the Omicron variant continues to rage across the globe.

"We said we wanted to hear from medical professionals on the best guidance for quarantine, not from corporate America advocating for a shortened period due to staffing shortages,” said Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International President Sara Nelson following the CDC announcement shortening the recommended quarantine duration from 10 days to five days.

“The CDC gave a medical explanation about why the agency has decided to reduce the quarantine requirements from 10 to five days, but the fact that it aligns with the number of days pushed by corporate America is less than reassuring,” Nelson said.

It really isn't even a big secret. When pressed on the matter, CDC leadership openly admits they are considering factors besides the public health question. They are, instead, prioritizing an agenda pushed corporate lobbyists which insists that sick leave time is a threat to"societal function." 

The decision to cut the recommended isolation time in half, which was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts, reflects the increasingly tough decisions health officials navigate as they seek to strike the right balance between vigilance and normalcy as the nation heads into the pandemic’s third year. Even with a surging variant, President Biden has said he is not looking at lockdowns and stressed that people who are vaccinated and boosted do not need to fundamentally change their lives as they did at the start of the pandemic.

The guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was based on the anticipation of a large number of cases might impact societal function,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Post. “There were starting to be limitations in society, not just in our health-care workforce but in other parts of society. We were seeing infections in many places that we realized this could be a harbinger of many other essential workers we needed.”

"There were starting to be limitations in society." In other words, workers were demanding to be treated as though their lives actually meant something and we just can't have that.  

Starbucks' union drive comes amid much a broader national labor movement spanning multiple industries across the country. Last month, in a strike wave known as "Striketober," tens of thousands of workers at companies like John Deere, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg, and McDonald's organized work stoppages over unethical working conditions and low pay. 

According to Cornell's Labor Action Tracker, the share of workers on strike last month jumped to 25,000 – a marked departure from the three months prior, which saw an average of 10,000. Many experts and labor advocates told Salon that strikes are being driven largely by a growing sense of dissatisfaction amongst essential workers as the pandemic wanes.  

Corrina A. Christensen, Director of Public Relations & Communications of the BCTGM International Union, which represents workers at Frito-Lay, Kellogg, and Nabisco, said that the strikes have "everything to do with workers being fed up with employers bent on disrespecting their work and demanding take-aways in wages, benefits, forcing overtime…after they were upheld as 'essential.'"

That is the line the CDC is trying to hold. The bosses who have the ears of policymakers have succeeded in defining 5 days of additional sick leave as a "societal threat" so large that it actually outweighs the threat of pandemic COVID. The article quoted above is primarily about the organizing effort at Starbucks in Buffalo. In this article, the workers involved in that campaign refer to the "fear culture" brought to bear against them by management. 

“Most of the workers I talk to are almost immediately on board,” Murray says. He joined the organizing effort two months ago, and has been talking to his coworkers ever since. He says that not only do organizers have to educate everyone on what a union is all about, they also face a latent level of fear among employees that they could be targeted for retaliation, particularly now that the union drive has gone public. 

“[Coworkers] were saying, ​‘I’m scared, can Starbucks do something to us?’ That broke my heart, because that fear culture has already been cultivated,” says Gianna Reeve, a shift supervisor who has been helping with the organizing effort. ​“It really hurts. This is an opportunity that we can be stronger.”

Fear of retaliation is the greatest weapon the bosses have against workers. And it permeates the atmosphere of most service industry jobs like Starbucks where the boss can demand not only compliance in deed but also in attitude. Standards in service jobs are subjective. Workers can be made accountable not only for the amount of work they produce but for arbitrarily defined perceptions of that work. Here is what that looks like in practice.

In case you would like to know what it’s like working at Starbucks https://t.co/ke1BhXegX2 pic.twitter.com/3lZ0qHSMg9

— Cory Doctorow MOSTLY AFK (@doctorow) December 24, 2021

Did you show up for that twelve hour shift on a holiday? Were you on your feet the whole time mixing hundreds of pumpkin spice lattes during the fall rush? Ahhh but see you weren't quite "WARM AND WELCOMING" enough as you went about that so we are going to have to punish you again. 

Service industry bosses are absolute tyrants. Workers organizing against that kind of intense intimidation need all the help and encouragement they can get. Which is why having a strong labor influence in the halls of power is so important. When a government agency has a chance to step in and put its thumb on the scale, it can make a big difference.  Joe Biden's CDC has chosen to intervene on behalf of the bosses. It even seems like they are rubbing it in the workers' faces by amplifying the bosses' intimidating rhetoric.  

'The government and your boss put you in harms way. We took away paid sick days and unemployment supplements. Better get vaccinated so you don't starve.'

I'm not a health comms person so I can't evaluate how effective this message is. pic.twitter.com/rHtsD4McYP

— Justin Feldman (@jfeldman_epi) December 29, 2021

 According to this CDC ad, workers have a clear choice. Their health or their job. If you are one of the good ones, the poster implies you will choose to work your shifts. If you are one of the good ones, in fact, you may not even "tolerate being at home."  At least that's what CDC says.

“Our guidance was conservative before. It had said 10 days of isolation,” Walensky told CNN. “But in the context of the fact that we were going to have so many more cases — many of those would be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic — people would feel well enough to be at work, they would not necessarily tolerate being home, and that they may not comply with being home, this was the moment that we needed to make that decision and those changes.”

Clearly these people care about your well being. 

Do more posts

Not to go too far into the realm of self-actualized blogging but I am aware that I haven't posted as much here during the back half of 2021 as I would have liked to. There are reasons for that. Being "busy" is relative to a bunch of stuff and I don't need to explain it in too much detail. But lately I've been specifically busy in ways that take me away from typing out paragraphs on the yellow web page. Either that or I've been lazy. In any case it's been easier these past months to just tweet out whatever is the thing that comes up than it has been to write it all down before the next distraction occurs. 

Sometimes that's fine, but also it is a problem.  While it's loads of fun to argue with people on Twitter, the actual constructive reason for posting things on the internet is to share information and to take notes. Twitter is good for sharing immediately. It's less good for taking notes for future reference.  Too often I find myself half-remembering something I read and tweeted out a week or a month or even a year ago but not being able to dig it back up easily.  I can only find the real deep cuts if I've blogged them, tagged them, and hopefully synthesized a few ideas about them here.  Let too much of that slip away into the ether and you start to feel like you're losing your grip a little bit.  It's not healthy. 

So I'm gonna try to get back to doing posts in 2022.  I don't want to lose as much of it as I lost this year. In the meantime, I do, in fact, still have some 2021 notes I will try to salvage. Another consequence of not getting the little posts out day by day is those notes get stored away in unfinished draft posts that get bigger and bigger and more difficult to finish as time goes by.  Presently this blog has 788 "drafts" where I've shoved at least a few links and sentences that I must have thought at the time would be good to pull out at some point.  I'll probably never go back through all of that. But  there are at least four that have the skeletons of long-ish posts about big topics from this year I probably ought to finish if I can.  One is about the pandemic, one is about infrastructure, one is about tourism, and one is about this year's elections.  I'll try to get those done just for my own peace of mind, if not by the end of this week, then at least within the next month.  That might tie a bow on the year so we can move on. 

Also more blurting out of random things. Let's get back to that if we can.

Bill Cassidy's victory tour

Much like Troy Carter, Bill now gets to go on a tour of the state doing a bunch of ceremonial groundbreakings and/or aspirational ribbon cuttings for stuff in the infrastructure bill that *might* build infrastructure but will definitely line the pockets of some important <strike>donors</strike> "private partners while at least seeming to try to build things.  For Troy, it just means a fun year of being a new Congressman-for-life.  But for Bill, it could very well be the opening round of his campaign for Governor. 

Cassidy may have an easier time winning the governor’s mansion in 2023 than reelection to the Senate in 2026. Gubernatorial elections are more often about candidate qualities and local issues, while U.S. Senate races tend to track national partisan fights. This could lessen Trump’s influence in a contest for governor.

If Cassidy runs for governor and makes a runoff against a Republican, he could win the faceoff with support from Democrats, independents and his remaining personal base among Republicans.

Conversely — if he makes the runoff against a Democrat, he could win with votes from Republicans, independents and conservative Democrats. Even most Trump die-hards would hold their noses and cast ballots for Cassidy, a Republican with an 83% conservative voting record, rather than vote for a left-leaning Democrat.

That Ron Faucheux column doesn't really even mention Bill's support for (and significant role in crafting) the "bipartisan" infrastructure package. But he sure does get a ton of credit for it from the Advocate's ostensibly liberal  opinion writer. So much, in fact, one would think she has some sort of quota to fill.  All of which is to say that should Cassidy run for governor, he will be a very well positioned candidate on paper... or in the paper, as it were. 

But that doesn't always mean everything. Faucheux does point out also Bill isn't the most popular guy among so-called "Trump Republicans." And given that the term Trump Republicans pretty much just means Republicans then that could be a problem. Also, as has been famously noted, the "dude is weird."

Rep. Cedric Richmond, a dapper politician from New Orleans and key Landrieu supporter, was more blunt. “He’s weird. Dude is weird,” Richmond said. “He’s not what Louisiana is. He’s not personable, he’s not charismatic.” 

Of course that is far from the only issue with Bill. He's not just a "weird dude." He's a weird dude who protects the chemical industry from consequences when they poison our air and water. 

Under federal law, Louisiana must develop a “state implementation plan” outlining actions that plants must take to reduce emissions below that standard. As part of that process, the Department of Environmental Quality in 2017 and 2018 ordered Rain to adopt a plan to change its manufacturing processes to keep sulfur dioxide levels in check.

Rain balked, however, saying it was having trouble figuring out how to monitor the heat and flow of gases and other materials at its plant because conventional meters kept melting. In 2019, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., intervened on behalf of the company and joined the state agency in successfully lobbying the EPA to delay implementation of the plan.

Still, if he does run, he's going to be the favorite candidate of the Advocate editorial page.  But that also isn't surprising given the company line over there with regard to protecting the environment.

Troy Carter's victory tour

It may be true that Congress is so wracked with corruption and indifference that it can't protect voting rights, or labor rights or get us our health care and child care bills we desperately need. It is nonetheless a great time to be an incumbent congressman.  This is especially true if you happen to be a freshman incumbent congressman like Troy Carter. 

Troy doesn't really figure in to the high level back room negotiations over anything in the deadlocked megabills that comprise the work of the modern congress.  Because of this doesn't own any of the failures. But, because the last two years of perpetual crisis have forced through little bit more non-military federal spending than would otherwise have been possible,  he still gets to go around the state cutting ribbons for the next two years. 

Carter said the bridge is his first stop on his tour that will see him announce various infrastructure investments across the 2nd Congressional District, which covers almost all of New Orleans and stretches north and west along the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge. 

His next stop is Thursday in Grammercy, where he will announce tens of millions of dollars in repairs for the Veterans Memorial Bridge, he said. 

It's a fantastic time to get the job.

Police pipleline

Thinking back to the beginning of this year and all of the problems facing this city with an election season looming.  A pandemic, a budget crisis, a housing crisis, poverty, general corruption... rascalism, etc. And here we are at the end of democratic process, through which we are supposed to resolve these issues and all our prospective representatives can talk about is how much they want to lock people up and hire more cops.  

Okay that's not all they can talk about. Sometimes they can argue about casserole recipes. But mainly the District B candidates are arguing about who can be the biggest cop. 

Much of the city's crime problem can be traced to repeat offenders who receive what amounts to a slap on the wrist by the district attorney before they are let back out on the street, Banks said. Instead of boosting the New Orleans Police Department's budget to fight crime, as Harris advocates, he would work to create criteria that every lawbreaker must meet before they are released from jail, he said.   

However, Harris, 46, said she wouldn't pull from other departments to better fund the cops. Instead, she'd push NOPD to apply for federal grants that could help employ more officers.

The department could also boost recruitment by partnering with universities to offer free or low-cost tuition for new officers, and by providing tax credits to first responders who live in the city, she said. She'd also tap a task force to identify crime prevention strategies.  

None of that is especially coherent.  Banks should and probably does know that a city councilman doesn't have a whole lot to say about sentencing. A councilperson does have something to say about the police budget, though, which makes Harris's threat to give the more money at least credible.  But.. "tax credits" for cops too?  We may have reached a new level of neoliberal brain poisoning. 

Meanwhile in District E, Oliver Thomas has dispensed with the complexities of tax incentives or dubious notions about deterrence and taken a more direct approach to producing more cops.  OT is going to build a "pipeline" directly from the schools.

To prevent crime, Thomas wants to create a "youth-to-law-enforcement pipeline" that would see NOPD partner with local schools to recruit new officers. The department could also rely on the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office and other entities to issue misdemeanors for low-level offenses, so that more of the force's time is freed to focus on violent offenses.  

Dream big, kids.  Just like your inspiring political leaders do.

"If any"

Page Cortez sure sounds fired up about taking steps to deal with our out of control State Police force next spring.  That is, "if any" need to be taken.  They might just wait and see what the Superintendent can find out about that first.

Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, named the committee of four Republicans and three Democrats with a goal of delivering a report by Oct. 31. Foil said he hopes to get a report ready prior to the Legislature returning in March of its regular legislative session.

“The creation of this oversight committee came about at the request of Senate members in order to find out what the agency has learned over the last few years, what they have done to change their policies and what, if any, bills that may need to be filed in the upcoming session in order to improve our agency,” Cortez said.

Davis said he started with a top-to-bottom review conducted internally. He discontinued that review and went to find outside analysts to oversee the report. He hopes to sign the contract early next year and have a definitive report before the end of 2022.

Yeah that report might take a while. I mean.. there's a lot to review. 

An AP review of internal investigative records and newly obtained videos identified at least a dozen cases over the past decade in which Louisiana State Police troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct.

AP's review — coming amid a widening federal investigation into state police misconduct — found troopers have made a habit of turning off or muting body cameras during pursuits. When footage is recorded, the agency routinely refuses to release it. And a recently retired supervisor who oversaw a particularly violent clique of troopers told internal investigators this year that it was his "common practice" to rubber-stamp officers' use-of-force reports without reviewing body-camera video.

In some cases, troopers omitted uses of force such as blows to the head from official reports, and in others troopers sought to justify their actions by claiming suspects were violent, resisting or escaping, all of which were contradicted by video footage.

"Hyper-aggressiveness is winked upon and nodded and allowed to go on," said Andrew Scott, a former Boca Raton, Florida, police chief and use-of-force expert who reviewed videos obtained by AP. "It's very clear that the agency accepts that type of behavior."

So okay we'll wait until all that gets sorted to see "if any bills need to be filed."   OR Davis also floated this idea instead. 

With 924 troopers on staff, Davis said he needs 200 more to decrease the amount of work individuals have to do. “We are expecting them to do more with less,” he said.

Because sure maybe what we've got right now is a 1000 strong armed death squad acting with what appears to be complete impunity. But, hear me out, what if we had 200 more of them?

Why not say what they actually do?

I don't mean to pick too much of nit with this article about Cantrell's City Council endorsements. I will say that I appreciate the headline doesn't blast the phrase "MAYOR LATOYA CANTRELL..." at us for SEO purposes the way almost every bit of news that even tangentially mentions her tends to do. And there's nothing really wrong with the story.  It's just that, I think sometimes when we describe these candidates in one or two sentences it would be helpful if we mentioned the very relevant fact that some of them are realtors and landlords. 

So here we have Freddie King described as " a lawyer, youth mentor and former constituent services director in the district." 

In District C, Cantrell said King -- a lawyer, youth mentor and former constituent services director in the district -- “works in the trenches and understands the issues that matter.”

"Freddie knows constituent services and knows that you have to be responsive to the people you serve," Cantrell said. 

That's three whole things! You can shove a lot of information in between those dashes when you know what you're doing.  So maybe let's find a way to also say that he is a realtor. The notoriously verbose DSA voter guide got it in there. It only took a couple of sentences. 

It’s unclear how King vows to “Fight the Red Tape of City Hall and Review the Permitting Process,” or what that even means. However it is clear in his duties of City Council that he will be one of the arbiters of land use and zoning, and pass regulation on matters around short term rentals. He formerly worked for then-Councilmember Nadine Ramsey as a coordinator of constituent services. Ramsey was notoriously awful when it came to affordable housing, and worked to remove minimum affordability requirements for big developers. That’s a big red flag for renters and housing advocates hoping to advance a rental registry.

King is a lawyer who lives in Algiers with his wife, Casandra. Together they own and operate LeBeouf Street Properties, a Gretna-based real estate company with a handful of properties in Algiers.

Anyway, we just mentioned Monday that King, who says, "I believe in a capatalistic society" is all in on shoving more Airbnbs into the French Quarter.  So this little bit about how he makes his money seems relevant.

There's another one of those in here whose real estate money might be even more relevant.  But it's hard to know that. The article only says he's a "veteran" of the politics wars. 

The first of Cantrell’s endorsements came Monday, when she threw her support behind the 31-year-old Glover, who also claims support from several former primary rivals and other community leaders. Glover, a former St. Roch neighborhood association leader and current nonprofit director, is taking on Eugene Green, a veteran of local politics and government who is twice Glover’s age.

Again, I don't really want to pick on this article, the T-P or any reporters in particular. They actually often do mention that Eugene Green is a real estate broker. They just did it yesterday, in fact.  

The other candidate in that race, real estate broker Eugene Green, said he would allocate city funds to support programs that turn blighted properties into affordable housing.

Green's assertion about wanting to create "affordable housing" demands interrogation, though.  Especially given the nature of his business interests.  Green isn't just a realtor. He's a landlord. Again, one sentence from the DSA guide. 

He is the president and owner of the generic-branded Nationwide Real Estate Corporation, making him a massive property manager throughout the city.

Have the properties Green owns and operates been a safe and healthy answer to the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans?  Might want to ask his tenants about that.

Nobody actually lives here

 Happy Holidays

Erath took over the business from the previous owners after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with a pledge to keep the shop open. And he kept that promise, keeping the store open for the last 16 years. However, as time progressed, Erath says that less people are walking the French Quarter.

"We're totally dependent on tourists. Over the years, fewer and fewer locals because fewer and fewer residents in the French Quarter," Erath said.

Erath's fondest memories are seeing people reminiscence when they enter the shop for a visit.

"Most gratifying thing is year after year, people coming in with their kids. We have adults in here saying they come with their grandparents," Erath said.

Erath is encouraging people if they would like a Santa's Quarters ornament to do so before Christmas before inventory runs out.   

The other night there was a forum featuring the two candidates competing in the city council runoff for  District C. This district includes Algiers, Bywater, and the French Quarter so naturally the short term rental plague is an issue.

Speaking to a crowded room at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel on St. Louis Street, the two District C candidates agreed that Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration has not adequately enforced city laws aimed at curbing the rentals and keeping noise at bearable levels in the district. 

Bridges said she would use the council's power over the city's budget to compel Cantrell to do so. Neighbors also need to bring their complaints to City Hall, she added.

"I can hold public hearings from here to Timbuktu, but unless I have the community behind me, nothing will be changed," she said.

King said he would require the city's code enforcement department to regularly update the council on its operations. He would also allocate money for more code enforcement officers. "Every month, they need to give us an update on what they are doing," he said. 

But the pair disagreed on what changes to existing laws were needed.

"I believe in a capitalistic society, and I think you should have short-term rentals in commercial areas," said King. Specifically, the retail and entertainment strip that faces the Mississippi River in the quarter would be ideal for AirBnB listings, he said. 

Even at this late stage in the process, where the damage done and the need for action are plainly evident, our politicians are capable only of maintaining the status quo or backsliding.  Neither of those answers is acceptable.

The problem now is not, as Bridges asserts, that the law is being poorly enforced. The problem is with the law itself.  We went into greater detail about this at the time the regulations were passed, but to summarize, the types of STR licenses it creates and the way those licenses are tied to zoning, actually allows..  a lot of high density short term rentals in a lot of  places a layperson might assume are "residential neighborhoods."  Also, the real heads will recall that because the City Council decided not to freeze permits for the few months time between the passage of the law and the date it went into effect, the gold rush on irrevocable permits during that time have left us with a large number of STRs that are now grandfathered in.  So any current councilmember or candidate who won't commit now to a new and stricter STR ordinance, is not serious about limiting STRs. 

That, of course, means none of them is serious about it.  Instead we have self-described believers in "a capitalistic society" like King who not only doesn't seem to know the current law already allows STRs in commercial zones but also doesn't seem to know how capitalism works.  Real estate speculators haven't been turning the Seventh Ward and Treme into blocks and blocks of de-facto hotels because they've been barred from the French Quarter. They're doing it because that's where they can get the highest return on their initial investment. That isn't going to stop unless we stop it.  But from the looks of things the next District C councilperson won't be in much of a hurry to do that. 

Update: I typed up this little blurb about District C candidates before I saw that this week's Gambit has a long feature story on the state of STR enforcement.  There are comments from current and future councilmembers as well as some people in the mayor's administration. The article looks at how other cities in the US and around the world are dealing with the problem and hints at the reasons some of those solutions might or might not apply here. Also, there is this. 

Only a few months after the new regulations went into effect, the pandemic struck New Orleans. With travel restricted amid stay-at-home orders, the bottom fell out of the STR industry around the world, making it difficult to fully understand the impact the city’s new regulations have had. Housing groups, like JPNSI, have been focused more on fighting evictions during the pandemic, but they certainly are keeping an eye on the STR issue, particularly as tourism builds back up in New Orleans.

“Through 2020, we saw a decrease in license registrations for new short-term rentals, and that’s been creeping back up through 2021,” says Russell Moran, JPNSI’s program and operations manager. “But I think one of the things that we did see is as cities were in lockdown, folks who operate short-term rentals were actually then renting those apartments to tenants and converting them to long-term tenants.”

But that trend is already reversing as Covid restrictions have eased, Moran says. 

"Sadly, now we’ve started to see in eviction court, landlords evicting tenants so they can return to short-term rentals,” Moran says. “[Landlords] aren’t outright coming to say that — we have tenants who have called us and said specifically that my landlord is putting me through the eviction process for whatever reasons but has made it clear that they’re going back to short-term rentals.”

The first of the month is coming again next week...

Be sure and vote real hard

Supposedly, it matters

Made this a few months ago and never posted but feel like it deserves to see the light of day

Anyways tomorrow is #ElectionDay NOLA. Vote accordingly. pic.twitter.com/q47Aol5lrF

— Monet from Algiers (@jazzcatmama) November 13, 2021

Election malaise

It's been a long hard slog here in post-Ida (and pre-post-COVID.. maybe?... but not really) New Orleans.  October was basically our second "Lost Month" in two years. But worse because I've barely been posting anything. It's not been a great time, okay?  We're just trying to hang on but maybe we are getting somewhere. Halloween was kind of encouraging.. almost normal, even.  You can see here where I tried to render the Superdome on fire (remember that? it was a thing that happened this year!) in the traditional lighted gourd medium. 

 

 

Only moderate success with that, I am afraid. We'll try and do better, though. 

Anyway, if you're anything like me, you're probably still too immersed in the "malaise" to get super psyched up for this weekend's elections.  In which case, it is a good idea to check in with our friends at Antigravity to see if they can pep us up. Let's see... who is running for, oh I dunno.. Assessor? 

Beyond the two name changes, (Anthony "(Low Tax)") Gressett has fairly frequently used the court system to address grievances, including at least two slip-and-fall injuries, multiple altercations with police, an argument with a Southwest flight attendant he alleges threw bagged peanuts at him, and at least three disputes arising from work by contractors or movers at his own home.

According to court records, Gressett hired a Metairie-based painting and renovation company to do work on his home last year. He alleged the company’s workers violated the contract by showing up early, smoking on his property, playing music, using spray paint where the contract called for hand painting, and not properly cleaning up. That included using his “family’s personal residential garbage cans” for disposing of job waste and going into a storage area they weren’t supposed to access, where they took the family’s “private residential broom and dust pan” to clean up. After multiple disagreements with the workers, he alleged they “sprayed graffiti” on his house, applying “unauthorized writings,” and deliberately delayed the job. The situation made it “almost impossible” to have the house ready for Christmas card photos and even caused Gressett concern he wouldn’t be able to raise his tenants’ rent, according to his court filings. The case appears to still be pending in Jefferson Parish court.

In another incident, Gressett and his wife Bam sued a moving company they hired in 2016. When the movers arrived, Gressett alleged in court, they repeatedly claimed services he thought were covered by the contract weren’t, “and these episodes went on from almost beginning to end of the contracted work shift until the defendants finally wrecked the moving truck into the plaintiffs’ home…” The case was ultimately settled, according to court records.

It goes on from there so enjoy that little pick-me-up.  Makes you feel a little bit better about the world for a minute.

Now let's see what our friendly neighborhood comrades at the DSA can do to keep us on that high. 

Take a look around New Orleans in late 2021 and you will find it much worse for all the wear. The pandemic has left our service workers more precarious even as the ownership class of the tourism industry is better funded through public dollars. Housing costs are higher than ever while the real estate interests who fund our politics have even more wealth. There are surveillance cameras everywhere but the traffic signals don’t work. The streets still flood. The intelligentsia speculates about an indefinable sense of “malaise.” If one were to travel the gauntlet of malfunctioning lights along Loyola Avenue from the collapsed Hard Rock site to the collapsing Plaza Tower, one would inevitably pass City Hall along the way. The mayor who goes to work there every day recently said to anyone who might find a reason amid all of this to complain that “maybe New Orleans is not for you.”

But is LaToya Cantrell for New Orleans? There is the question that this election should have addressed. But given the field of challengers, it very likely will not.

Oh man.  Well okay back to bed for now, I guess. 

Surveillance state

In what is probably the final bit of fallout from Leon Cannizzaro's "fake subpoena" scandal, Jason Williams's office has entered into a settlement with plaintiffs in the civil rights lawsuit that came out of the scandal.  We don't need to re-hash the details of all of that here too much.  The Lens article runs us through the paces of summarizing it anyway. But anybody reading this already knows about Cannizzaro's use of fraudulent subpoenas and abuse of material witness warrants to compel testimony from crime victims.  The upshot here is Williams, who was elected DA based in large part on his promise not to do that stuff anymore, has agreed to 42 months of "monitoring" to ensure that he doesn't.  The joke is this now means we've hit a golden trifecta of criminal justice consent decree type arrangements in Orleans Parish now. 

The New Orleans Police Department and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office are also under court-appointed monitorships, and have been since federal consent decrees were first approved for the agencies in 2013.

The agreement with the DA’s office is different from those other agreements, however. For instance, the U.S. Department of Justice is a party to both the police and Sheriff’s Office consent decrees, as a plaintiff. Williams’ agreement is only between his office, the individual plaintiffs and their attorneys. 

In addition, the monitoring periods for both the police and the Sheriff’s Office are indefinite. Both keep monitors in place until, and for a period after, the agencies reach substantial compliance with their consent decrees.

The DA’s office, however, will only be under a monitor’s supervision for 42 months. And since both sides have agreed on Schwartzmann, there will not be a lengthy, politically fraught search for a monitor in this case.

The Schwartzmann referenced in that quote is civil rights attorney Katie Schwartzmann who has been named to head the "monitoring" effort.  This article doesn't go into the details of her position, though. We don't know from this how much she is paid or what the total cost of the monitoring will be. One assumes whatever it is comes out of the DA's budget and that it is in addition to the amounts paid out here according to the terms of the settlement. 

In consideration of the remaining plaintiffs, Williams’ office will pay $120,000 to the ACLU Foundation, in two $60,000 installments over the next year. The allocation of that money will be determined by the plaintiffs and their attorneys. And the office must create a new procedure for victims and witnesses to file grievances over their treatment by DA’s office employees.

Anyway maybe they will tell us more about who gets paid and for what.  Recent experience tells us that's at least as important as whether or not the monitoring program actually accomplishes its stated purpose. 

Re-opening soon

Much like the ol' wash and fold here, I figure it's about time to take the boards back down off the windows of the blog. Didn't mean to be away from it all month but, well, many things happened.  I think the last thing I promised here was a synthesis of the post-Ida notes. So we'll get to that in a few days. And then it's on to the very dismal election season, I guess. 

But for now, all of this is superseded by yet another emergency that certainly no one could possibly have predicted. 

Today @wdsu at 4/5/6PM hear from upset #Saints fans who left the @CaesarsDome Sunday in a packed stairwell, no ramps or escalators open, they say.
Some took 45-50 minutes just to leave the property.
We are waiting on a response from Superdome leaders.
DM any videos or pics.

— Travers Mackel (@TraversWDSU) October 4, 2021

Unfortunate. But there was just no way to know...