How's my (pile) driving?

If you've got some thoughts about any of the diggings up of the roads all over Uptown, the Corps would love to hear them.

Compelling circumstances

Yesterday the media company known clumsily as NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune, having been denied a request for appeal, complied with a judge's order to turn over account information about two frequent commenters on its website.

“Nola.com/The Times-Picayune is committed to the idea that the constitutional rights of Internet users, including the First Amendment right to speak anonymously, should be carefully safeguarded, and that the identity of those who choose to speak anonymously should be revealed only in the most compelling of circumstances,” Lori Mince, the paper’s attorney, said in a prepared statement.

The T-P's position in this matter is laudable in principle. Although it has been pointed out elsewhere that they've been less than consistent on this point.  Right now, it seems, they're committed to objecting to having to rat out their... users? sources? content providers?.. whatever you call a newspaper commenter... to a judge. But they're being forced to do that anyway under "compelling circumstances."

In this case the compelling circumstance is that lawyers representing Stacey Jackson think that one or both of these commenters might have been a federal prosecutor publicly disparaging Ms. Jackson while they were in the process of bringing charges against her.

Many will recall Jackson was head of  the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership agency. 

The NOAH program erupted into scandal in the summer of 2008, when information emerged that many of the homes the quasi-city agency had paid to gut or board up had in fact received no attention. The scandal galvanized citizens frustrated with the city's halting recovery.

Much of their ire was aimed at Nagin, who had championed the NOAH program as a way of propping up overwhelmed nonprofits that had been providing gutting services. Nagin initially reacted defensively, holding a memorable news conference in which he blasted the reporting of Lee Zurik, then with WWL-TV and now with WVUE-TV, and accused him of impeding the city's recovery.

But the real center of the scandal was Stacey Jackson, who was NOAH's executive director and had close ties to several of the program's favored contractors.

Whether or not it ends up becoming the means by which more prosecutorial misconduct is exposed, the NOAH scandal is already a memorable event in the city's political history. Not only was it a major turning point in Nagin's relationship with the media but it also helped launch Karen Gadbois's career in investigative journalism and thus is a major reason we have The Lens today. 

Fewer will recall that Jackson was also part owner of a men's designer underwear shop called "The Him Store" but somehow that fact has become less significant with the passage of time.

Anyway, as we were saying, according to Jackson's lawyers, there is compelling reason to believe that forcing the T-P to turn over information about these anonymous commenters will lead to their being positively identified as federal prosecutors.

Whether they will ever be unmasked, however, is not clear, despite Thursday’s developments.

Keith Marszalek, Nola.com’s director of digital operations, did not respond to an emailed question Thursday about what information the website keeps on its commenters. And whether the identities of “aircheck” and “jammer1954” are even knowable may depend on how hard the two have tried to cover their tracks, experts say.

Or not.  But hey let's err on the side of suppressing free speech and a free press anyway just in case.

Profiles in courage.. or what passes for it

It's fun to think about how much political capital was spent and how many people died on their little hills for our milquetoast insurance-friendly version of health reform.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is resigning after five years in the role and overseeing the launch of the health care law, the New York Times and Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

And it's not over yet. Republicans are in the process of killing one of their own mostly because they don't want to stop fighting the Medicaid expansion.  It would be nice if all this drama happened for something less meh but.. this must be the best we can do.

Bye, Colbert

Yes, of course he can do that job. He'll be good at it. And more people will watch him and he'll make more money and such. So, yay Colbert.

But the job will be of a lesser nature than the one he has now which is probably the best thing currently on TV. That will be replaced with yet another clever guy who interviews celebrities with movies to plug every night.  So.. net loss for the audience.

Oh.. but, apparently, it also means CBS has "declared war on the heartland of America" so that's kind of nice, actually.

Ooh ooh (raises hand)

I think I can answer this one

Jindal and Villere did not responded to requests for comment Thursday as to why neither called on Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter to resign after his D.C. Madame scandal in 2007.

The difference between McAllister's situation today and Vitter's situation back then is McAllister surprised a party insider by running an insurgent campaign which criticized Jindal's refusal to accept Louisiana's share of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

Sure, nobody likes Vitter all that much. But at least he didn't do anything threatening.

Update: Another question to ask is what if, instead of Mrs. Peacock in the office, it had been Miss Scarlet in the Motel 6?  That's kind of the point of TBogg's little McAllister fan-fiction here.

I called Vitter.

He knew the ropes. He’d been here before. He’d know how to patch things up.

“Dave, you gotta help me, man,” I pleaded with him. “You were banging hookers left and right and you not only held onto your job, you got reelected. What’s your secret? I gotta know. I’m desperate.”

“Shee-it. boy, you’re screwed,” he drawled. “First rule ‘o pol-o-tics is you don’t shit where you eat. You can’t be banging administrative  staff in a district office. Do like I did, hire a pro -maybe two or three at a time-  and do it a hotel room. That’s the American way.”

And maybe there's an object lesson there for aspiring cheaters.  Still, the knives Jindal et al have out for McAllister are about politics not morality.  

Monorailed

There's a lot to see in this WWLTV report on the cost overruns with the Loyola streetcar project. Most of us already knew that construction was delayed by a number of unexpected obstacles found underground.

In other words, what they found 14 feet underground often did not match what was marked in the city’s as-built drawings and, even if an item was noted in the plans, it was often falling apart.

Officials from Veolia Transportation, the RTA management company, said contractors stumbled on everything from crumbling water mains to unexpected underground drainage canals; sewer and power lines in the wrong spots; an old icehouse cellar that was leaking ammonia; even a petrified tree stump. Each surprise contributed to delays, which caused contractors’ overhead costs to increase.

One of the neatest things they found was a vestige of the New Basin Canal which once terminated near where the present day Union Passenger Terminal is located.

The continuing problems and work re-orders caused the project to exceed its budget so much that the once hoped for St. Claude extension had to be scrapped entirely. 

As for the final price tag for the Loyola line, RTA records show it was more than $60 million, a third higher than the original budget, which was based on engineers’ estimates in 2010. The RTA had to use $15 million of a $75 million pot of local bond and reserve money that was originally set aside to extend the Loyola spur eastward along Rampart Street and St. Claude Avenue to Press Street.

Instead, that second phase will only extend to Elysian Fields Avenue.

This is unfortunate, of course, but also entirely understandable. RTA attempted to secure additional funding by applying for another federal TIGER III grant in 2011 but were turned down. Maybe someone will find some money eventually but I get the impression the city will have to get used to a tightening of the federal spigot in the years to come.

It's interesting, though, that this worked out in such a way that the leg of the project that ended up being ditched was the most popular with residents and transit activists when proposed.  The St. Claude line was the only one that would have served an actual neighborhood. By contrast, the Loyola line, which moves passengers along a ten block stretch of the CBD, had been dubbed the "streetcar to nowhere."

RTA now boasts that the Loyola streetcar has exceeded its projected ridership numbers. But critics point out that this comes as a result of gaming the system and inconveniencing riders in the process.

But Rachel Heiligman of Ride New Orleans, a nonprofit public transit advocacy group, said that because the RTA cut off the downtown segments of the Freret and Martin Luther King buses at the Union Passenger Terminal, those bus riders now must transfer to the Loyola streetcar if they want to get to Canal Street.

“What we’re doing is really just shifting the ridership from one mode — the bus — to the streetcar,” Heiligman said.

After those bus routes were cut off at the UPT, the RTA’s ridership data show both lost riders, suggesting that customers unwilling to transfer to the Loyola streetcar stopped riding altogether.

The Freret Number 12 bus lost 76,000 riders in 2013, a 40 percent decrease from the year before. The MLK Number 28 bus was down by about 5 percent, while overall RTA ridership was up 12 percent.

Ending the St. Claude line at Elysian Fields, as the plan now has things, doesn't really get it too far away from the heavily touristed French Quarter.  So what's left of the St. Claude extension is itself a "streetcar to nowhere" in the sense that it's less a transit line than it is an "economic development" tool.

Pres Kabacoff, a real estate developer from the Bywater neighborhood, said he thinks the streetcar will help spur business. Kabacoff even argued that slowing down vehicle traffic might be a good thing, since having cars whip by "is not conducive for good retail development."

He added, "To the extent that people have a difficult time in traffic getting down the street it may cause them to want to live in the area and use an effective streetcar."

Which brings us back to the Loyola cost overruns. Yes, there were all sorts of construction problems. But that wasn't the only factor which eventually priced us out of St. Claude. There was also this. 

The numerous delays put the project — situated in the center of the city’s sports tourism area — more than a year behind schedule, meaning it wasn’t going to be done in time for the Super Bowl in February 2013. The Landrieu administration made it clear that wouldn’t stand, so the RTA paid premiums to speed up the work and get it done just under the wire, Veolia managers said.

So those bus passengers RTA is forcing to transfer onto its streetcar to nowhere aren't the only transit users who have to take a back seat to the priorities of our dominant tourism industry.

Letters

This is a letter printed in the New Orleans Advocate yesterday from Nick Felton  Walter Powers.  Mr. Felton and Mr. Powers represent the New Orleans Firefighters Association and the Fraternal Order of Police respectively.

On April 3, Mayor (Mitch) Landrieu announced his “reforms” to the civil service system in New Orleans. These “reforms” include the ability to hire and promote who they want. The mayor claims these “reforms” do not impede the civil service director’s ability to set minimum hiring standards, while at the same time, inserting a provision that would require approval of the appointing authority (read: appointee of the mayor) before those minimum hiring standards are put in place. The “reforms” also include raising the minimum wage of about 200 city employees, which was apparently enough to fool some folks into supporting the measure.

The Louisiana Supreme Court said, “In the science of government, experience is always the best teacher. The political drug store is full of panaceas, each with its trade-mark of some school of therapeutics blown in a bottle. In politics there is so often invoked the destructive concept of a practice that to the victor belongs the spoils. It is the “spoil system” that civil service desires to eradicate. If this Court knows what everybody knows, then it has knowledge that political opponents of one administration may be the governing body of the next, and the cranks of the old may become the philosophers of the new; but the value of civil service reform is wholly dependent on whether the law and the evidence, without exception, are fairly and justly applied by the Commissioners, and in the Courts with an even hand freely and fearlessly enforced.” Boucher v. Division of Employment Security, 226 La. 227, 75 So.2d 343 (1954).

The mayor’s plan indicates that test scores for hiring and promotions should not be determining factors, then states that they should be able to eliminate entire pools of certified candidates if those persons are in the bottom half of the test scores. The mayor’s plan repeatedly points to “falsely objective rankings” without providing any support for that contention. Just because you say it over and over doesn’t make it true.

It is not too surprising that some New Orleans city employees are dissatisfied with the Civil Service Department. It is difficult to perform when your department’s budget has been slashed repeatedly and your workforce has been diminished to a shadow of its former strength. There were also comments made by Rabbi Cohn regarding the slow pace of civil service proceedings. To that, we would simply say that Rabbi Cohn’s short tenure on the Civil Service Commission has been hindered recently by counterproductive actions taken by the current administration and its appointees designed only to impede progress.

We will not try to convince anyone that civil service could not be made more efficient or that things couldn’t be done better. We will tell you that these improvements can be made without impacting the foundation of the civil service system that the people of Louisiana felt was so important that civil service was included in the Louisiana Constitution.

The New Orleans Police Department and the New Orleans Fire Department account for nearly half of all classified civil service employees in the city of New Orleans. We stand united in opposition to this “reform.”

Among the most crucial "reforms" Landrieu proposes is removing a significant portion of the employee performance review and  disciplinary process from the purview of the Civil Service Department and placing it in the hands of the Mayor's Chief Administrative Officer.  This alone is cause for concern that the city workforce is being politicized.

But the "reform" further places employees at the subjective mercy of the CAO by altering the process by which their performance is scored and diminishing their standing to appeal capricious disciplinary actions.  

The plan would eliminate service ratings, which now range from “Outstanding” to “Unsatisfactory,” replacing them with a goal-based “performance management system.” Again, Kopplin’s office would be in charge of that system.

In eliminating the ratings, the plan also eliminates an employee’s ability to appeal a poor rating.

That would be unnecessary, according to the proposal, because “written performance feedback under the performance management system is not an adverse action to punish an employee.”

However, it goes on, “once poor work performance has been established” — it doesn’t say how that would be done — that can spur supervisor monitoring and a report to the city’s personnel director. If the personnel director decides that the employee’s work hasn’t improved, then the employee could be disciplined — which he could appeal.

In effect, the new system would push back the point at which an employee can protest a supervisor’s poor view of his work.

Ultimately what this is about is power in the workplace and, by extension, in the city's labor market overall. "Business leaders" around town make it a priority for this reason in particular.

Gregory Rusovich, CEO of Transoceanic Trading and Development Company, rattled off a list of governmental reforms that he said the city has benefited from since the storms — the transformation of the New Orleans Recreation Department into a public-private partnership, the increased transparency in the city contracting processes, the creation of the New Orleans Business Alliance, the proposed civil-service reforms and even the way the city banded together to save the Hornets (now the Pelicans).

Unfortunately, as Felton and Powers state, the Police and Fire are isolated in their opposition to Mayor's scheme. The minimum wage provision they refer to (which is, of course, a nice thing but clearly also a distraction) was apparently enough to bring SEIU on board. I'm less sure about what Civil Service's reason for signing on is but in any case both groups have badly failed to stand up for the people they purport to serve.

Wouldn't this be a bigger waste of taxpayer money?

Going through the trouble of holding elections whose results are invalidated by a turnout threshold seems more expensive than just passing a tax that at least buys the voters whatever thing they might have passed but what do I know?

The most controversial measure comes courtesy of state Sen. Bret Allain, R-Franklin, who wants lawmakers to pass a constitutional amendment that would force local governments and political subdivisions to adhere to new guidelines for tax elections. The coming debate could be a barnburner, pitting the business lobby against school boards, parish councils, police juries, mayors and other local entities.

Allain’s Senate Bill 200 would require a minimum turnout of 20 percent of active voters to validate a local tax election. Under Allain’s measure, even if a tax were to pass with no opposing votes, the ballot wouldn’t count if turnout was one vote less than the proposed threshold. “If we’re going to take people’s hard-earned money, there should be a higher standard,” Allain said.

He contends local governments often schedule tax referenda during off-elections, where there are no high-profile races on the ballot and turnout will be low. “That ends up costing taxpayers more when they do that,” he said. “They pay huge amounts of money to participate in off-elections.”

Last month, when the Orleans Parish runoffs for sheriff and City Council were on the ballot alongside three tax proposals, turnout was 25 percent. In February, when the mayor’s race topped the ballot with six other tax questions, turnout was 35 percent. The last time Orleans saw a ballot with only propositions on it was in July 2008, when four property tax proposals produced a turnout of roughly 5 percent. 

But, if you are going to do this, you might as well hold to your principle and go the whole nine yards with it.  I might be persuaded, for example, by a law that invalidates ANY election result if the turnout is less than  50% of eligible voters. Make them all keep running until we get some kind of consensus.

We might end up having to cancel some parades and stuff, according to some people.

Low voter turnout in key precincts as well as Williams winning the early voting was too much for her campaign to overcome, Hedge-Morrell said.

"In key areas I did really well in (the primary) we dropped 50 percent in turnout," Hedge-Morrell said referring to the Upper 9th Ward and parts of Gentilly and eastern New Orleans.

She cited the St. Patrick's Day festivities as one reason for the low turnout.

"How do we get people to realize you can go to the St. Patrick's parade but you can vote first," Hedge-Morrell said. "It's hard to engage people with the seriousness of the issues we're dealing with. How do we get these people re-engaged?"

Unvanished

The thing to watch for every time we see another one of these reports about how unvanished the oil is is how much more self-assured BP's rebuttals have become.

In this episode we get, "the dolphins were already suicidal, some other studies we paid for said some other fish are doing fine, and anyway we aren't buying your results until you create a completely separate Gulf Of Mexico as a control group," or something like that anyway.

Don't expect that to improve any time soon.. or ever.

The predatory loan state

Payday lenders are going to get out of this legislative session relatively unscathed. So now you know who to go to if you need to cover your chicken boxing debts. And, I guess, Ray Nagin has another option now.

Turnip blood

Now we know why that Nagin legal defense fund website exists.

Federal prosecutors are trying to seize more than $500,000 from former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin following his February conviction on corruption charges.

Prosecutors filed asset forfeiture papers Tuesday (April 8) in U.S. District Court and requested for a hearing on April 29.

Seems excessive. At this point, we're pretty sure Nagin is already going to have spend at least a little time in prison. And, if not that, Dallas. Maybe just quit while you're ahead, the Feds. 

Newcomb Blvd will eventually be sold.. just not today

Planning Commission just voted to deny the sale. Fence is still up, of course. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to come down.

Compromise

This afternoon the SLFPA-E attorneys finally answered one of the Jindal administration's loudest complaints against their lawsuit. They offered to reduce their so-called "poison pill" fees correction: standard contingency fees in exchange for a negotiated settlement with the oil and gas companies named in the suit.

Spokes-Lucys for Jindal and the industry immediately yanked the football away.

NEW ORLEANS — Lawyers for the levee board suing oil and gas companies over coastal land loss offered to reduce their fees Tuesday if any of the 97 defendants settle, but the Jindal administration called the offer empty rhetoric.

Glad Jones, the lead attorney hired by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority – East, said his law firm would accept mutually agreed upon or arbitrated fees from any defendant who comes to the table and settles the lawsuit within six months.

The industry did not see Jones' offer as a worthy olive branch.

"If these attorneys are truly concerned for the citizens and taxpayers of Louisiana, then they will do what's right for the people and dismiss this suit altogether," said Don Briggs, head of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association.

Neither did Gov. Bobby Jindal's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Their position is no settlement, no lawsuit, nothing.  They are able to take such a hard line because they have nearly all of the elected representatives of the state government backing them up.

If only one major statewide official would speak on behalf of the levee board's case, things might go differently.  Unfortunately...

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said Monday that a more equitable division of offshore oil and gas energy revenue, not legal action, is the key to saving Louisiana’s disappearing coastline.

“Lawsuits will not save the coast of Louisiana,” Landrieu told reporters.

Her comments came during and after an appearance at the Press Club of Baton Rouge.
Landrieu is seeking her fourth term in the Senate this year.

Oh well.

Public-Private streets

Eventually they're going to let the Newcomb Blvd residents buy the street. If we can just convince them to build a little moat around themselves and stay on their side, we might all be better off anyway. 

Meanwhile, Lakeshore Drive, which already is only open to traffic during certain hours, is getting ready to undergo yet another in a seemingly never-ending series of multi-year renovations.

A year after the groundbreaking, crews are close to completing a $6 million project to stop the erosion and give the lakefront a new look.

Between the Lighthouse and Mardi Gras Fountain, a concrete cap is keeping waves from washing the soil away.

"Just the little bit of progress to date, some of these northerners, it's really protected a lot," said (Orleans Levee District spokesman Gerry) Gillen.

But the concrete surface creates a new walking path for lakefront visitors, complete with new benches and wheelchair access.

"Oh, it's gonna look terrific," said Gillen. "We do have some landscaping and decorative security lighting that's going out there. This is the second most visited tourist area other than the French Quarter."

This week pre-construction work is starting on the second phase, the badly scoured area at Franklin Avenue.

I would love to see where Gillen is getting his lakefront tourism statistics.  I know "think of the tourists" is the go-to reason to bolster an argument for any project you can think of these days. But this one seems dubious.

In any case, you have to admire the Lakeview folks a little. They've managed to keep their technically public street mostly private for decades without having to deal without having to go through the ugliness of a public hearing.

The next seasonal Abita

How does 4-methylcyclohexane methanol IPA sound?

A New Orleans company is proposing to drill a 13,000-foot well in search of oil and gas on a tract of land near Mandeville, creating concern among some St. Tammany Parish officials and citizens who fear the operation could harm the aquifer that supplies the region with water. Helis Oil & Gas LLC wants to drill the well just north of Interstate 12 and about a mile east of Louisiana 1088 and use the hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," method to extract oil and gas from the ancient sedimentary rock formation known as the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale.

On the bright side, it can't be any worse than lemon wheat. 

Can they have an iconic structure too?

After having lost out on a scheme to glom taxpayer subsidized hotels and condos onto its piece of the Tricentennial Consortium WTC redevelopment plan, Convention Center execs are just going to ask the legislature directly.

The mammoth convention center in New Orleans looks to embark on another expansion phase that would include a corporate meeting center, hotel, condos and retail space. The House Ways and Means Committee approved HB 788 by Rep. Walt Leger, D-New Orleans, that would authorize the convention center authority to increase its bonding capacity in order to raise up to $142 million to be used to attract $1 billion in private investment, according to the author. The revenue bonds would be paid back from the authority’s share of the local hotel-motel tax and revenue generated from the commercial development.

Remember, the Convention Center receives 3 of the 13 cents that comprise the hotel/motel tax already.  If they get to run their own hotel, that money stays in-house, I guess.  It's their own little ho-zone of sorts.

Kiss of death

McAllister's office sure does know how to treat the ladies.

Melissa Anne Hixon Peacock, who is 33 and married, has been identified as the staffer on the video kissing her boss. On Monday, Monroe's News-Star published a quote from McCallister's chief of staff Adam Terry who said that Peacock had just been fired. But why? For being kissed by the boss?

Again, infidelity isn't really anybody's business.  But sexual harassment in a congressional office is.  Also there's the issue of how the video was acquired and leaked. Probably James O'Keefe wasn't involved but it does raise some questions.

But while the national media gawks over the lurid details and focuses on Congressman McAllister’s rank hypocrisy, they’re missing the real scandal here: Who leaked the video, and was this leak purposely timed? After all, this video was recorded nearly four months ago, from inside the Congressman’s own district office.

To borrow a horror movie cliche, the call was coming from inside the house.

Update:  Also it turns out that McAllister inherited Rodney Alexander's staffers who probably were not exactly his friends.

Additionally, most people who have seen the movie Clue will remember that the "Mrs. Peacock" character was a Senator's wife involved in a blackmail scandal. So there's that bit of fun.

It worked out OK for Vitter

Don't see any reason why it can't also work for Vance McAllister.

After being caught on videotape, U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister, who ran as a devoted family man and Christian, asked forgiveness from his family and constituents Monday for kissing an aide a month after being sworn into Congress.

There's, of course, the hypocrisy. But apart from that we're just being icky about people's private lives which are pretty much no one's business but theirs.... and, I guess, the cameras they put everywhere. 

Shit my Mitch says

Somebody go get the historicalness scale so we can measure this thing properly. 

"On behalf of the city of New Orleans, I would like to thank all of the fans who came from around the world to WrestleMania 30," said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. "WrestleMania has taken its rightful place amongst the most historic events ever held in New Orleans."

The circular tourism economy

Rest assured, unlicensed vendors, no wrestlemans are coming to overturn your carts of not-official WWE merchandise.

A federal judge in New Orleans this week delivered a smackdown to World Wrestling Entertainment, rejecting the company’s request to allow its personnel to confiscate alleged bootleg goods sold at events surrounding this weekend’s WrestleMania XXX without having to identify ahead of time who exactly is selling the fraudulent items.

You may think to yourself, "Well of course. There is no conceivable justification for handing the World Wrestling Entertainment company special law enforcement powers in your city simply because they are visiting there."  You would then be surprised to learn that this sort of thing does in fact happen. 

In the past, federal judges across the country have been receptive to WWE’s requests to allow it to directly seize counterfeit goods. Ahead of WrestleMania XXVII in Atlanta in 2011, a judge gave this permission and the company seized 3,000 T-shirts that were being sold for $10 apiece, WWE said.

By now we're used to reading boilerplate uncritical  headlines about the economic "boon" to the city each of these events is supposed to carry with it.  But one has to wonder if the extraordinary measures taken to control the flow of the supposed "economic impact" limits its distribution among the host city's population. 

Similar issues arose just after last year's SuperBowl.

The Super Bowl Host Committee has said it expects the game will have a $434 million impact on the city. That figure, though, isn’t the net revenue that local and state governments will deposit into their treasuries, experts argue, and many local businesses said they had disappointing or slower business than expected.

Pam Doerr runs a small shop on St. Louis Street in the French Quarter that sells small jewelry items and art. She said she made two sales between Thursday and Saturday. Both of those customers were locals, she said.

“The people were nice, the crowds were here, but they just didn’t spend,” she said. “I was very disappointed.”

There is no question the crowds were here. The Quarter looked like the city was celebrating Mardi Gras Day all weekend. And tourism officials said there were no hotel rooms available in the city.

“We are pulling final numbers today, but it’s safe to say hotels were at 100 percent (occupancy) for the Super Bowl weekend,” Kelly Schulz, spokeswoman for the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in an email.

This report jibes with other anecdotal evidence I heard during Superbowl week. Independent shopkeepers and vendors did poorly.  This is probably in part because most visiting fans planned to spend their money on "Officially licensed NFL merchandise" which could be had from various temporary stores set up in rented spaces around the quarter like this.









Bartenders and waiters just did okay.   Some did very well, of course, but mostly the crowd was comparable to any event weekend with transient visitors checking into the typical tourist-ridden haunts.  The NFL high rollers, though, appear to have kept their money with in a tight circle of private parties and closed events. For all the attention paid to the tounge-in-cheek "Do Not Serve" Goodell stuff, it was never likely that Roger or anyone throwing around Roger type money would have come in contact with our local service staff anyway.

Michael Regua, executive chef of Antoine’s for 36 years, said that previous Super Bowls have seen a surge of business at the restaurant during the week leading up to the game. This year things were slow until Friday, he said.

“A lot of people had parties and other functions to go to” before the weekend, said Wendy Chatelain, Antoine’s director of sales and marketing.

“I’m not going to say it was disappointing. But we geared up to do more, and it seems everyone got to the city on Friday,” Regua said. “We hoped to have the whole week.”

Michael Pearson, a sports marketing professor at Loyola University’s Joseph A. Butt College of Business, said he’s always skeptical about the expected economic impact that host cities say they will receive from large sporting events.

Much of the money that flows into the game, some economists argue, flows out of the host city and back to the headquarters of those companies hired to help put on what has become a days-long production.

One such private event took place at Armstrong Park.  

The NFL Honors ceremony, a two-hour prime time awards special event, will be held at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre on the evening prior to Super Bowl XLVII (Saturday, 2/2/13). And although the city’s official press release indicated that Armstrong Park would not be closed to the public in preparation for this event until Wednesday, 1/30/13, the park has, in fact, been locked up tight since Monday, 1/28/13.

Was the city even compensated for the use of this facility? (The max event fee is $1,500)

The hotels, though, were packed. For all practical purposes, hotel occupancy has become equated with whether or not we judge an event successful. But it's deceptive to assert that occupied rooms translate into direct benefit to anyone other than the hoteliers themselves.  Keep in mind, the great majority of revenue generated by the hotel/motel occupancy tax goes to right back into supporting tourism related entities.

Three state entities — the Louisiana Superdome Commission, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and the state general fund — get 9 of those 13 cents per hotel dollar. The Superdome Commission — responsible for the Superdome and the New Orleans Arena — gets the biggest cut: 4 cents per dollar, or about $34 million in 2013, based on city revenue estimates. The next largest beneficiary is the New Orleans Exhibition Hall Authority — which governs the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center — with 3 cents, or about $26 million in 2013.

Two cents go directly to the state general fund. Of that, about $7.3 million is allocated this year to the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau and $2 million to the Morial Convention Center for debt services on outstanding construction bonds.

Of the four cents not going to the state, two-and-a-half cents are divided between the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority and the Orleans Parish School Board.

The remaining penny-and-a-half goes to City Hall — meaning only 11.5 percent of the city's hotel/motel tax take goes to city government. At the Nov. 9 budget hearings, council vice-president Jackie Clarkson gasped when she misheard RTA president Justin Augustine announce the agency's share of hotel/motel revenues of "one and a half." "We only get one and a half," she said.

Add to that, the various mechanisms by which large event organizers like the NFL control how and where their visitors spend money on dining and shopping and a picture arises of a much more self-contained "economic impact" to the city at large than tourism leaders tend to describe in the press.

Of course WWE doesn't do this on the scale the NFL does. (Few do.) But clearly there's a model there which others are trying to emulate.  If Judge Berrigan had granted WWE permission to send its employees around town as quasi-law enforcement officers harassing local merchants at will, it isn't hard to imagine such a practice becoming a standard accompaniment to any major event.

Ashlye Keaton, an adjunct lecturer in the Tulane University Law School who specializes in entertainment and intellectual property law, said granting the motion could have created a ripple effect.

“There are all kinds of conventions that come into town. We are a tourism-breeding ground, and you know, if they were successful in that motion, just imagine the size of the can of worms that would open for anyone else coming down here,” Keaton said. “Everybody would be filing their motions in advance.”

For this weekend, though, the most WWE's agents can do to suspected bootleggers is call the NOPD.  And while that's theoretically more constitutionally valid than, say, sicking some pro wrestlers on them, we all know that in practice, it may actually be worse.

The after-grift

Ray Nagin, apparently, has a legal defense fund.

NaginLegalDefenseFund.com claims that Nagin “lacks the resources for a more robust defense,” and seeks “tax-free” donations to an independently administered trust set up on Feb. 27. That was about two weeks after the former mayor was convicted on 20 of 21 federal corruption counts.

The site says gifts will support, among other things, “living and travel expenses related to clearing the Nagin family name.” It also rails about prosecutorial misconduct in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and suggests that unsettled questions about other online postings could be grounds for Nagin to get his conviction overturned.

WWL-TV has not been able to determine if this is a real independent trust or even if Nagin is aware of it. But we did verify that at least one New Orleanian is already donating to it.

Though no one has verified it, if I had to guess, I'd say this is legitimately a fund for Ray Nagin's defense and not just some scam.  This isn't to say that there isn't an element of scam to it, but that's another issue.

In any case I'm kind of disinterestedly rooting for Nagin at this point. Jim Letten's stint as US Attorney was every bit as much an exercise in egotism and hypocrisy as Ray Nagin's terms as mayor were.  Nagin's legacy has already been justifiably blown to hell.  We're really just getting started with Letten.

Hogs without a cause

A state under siege. A lawmaker responds.

Desoto Parish State Rep. Richard "Richie" Burford, R-Stonewall (motto: "A great place to live"), introduced House Bill 353, which declares open season on wild hogs — the pigs, not the Tim Allen dad-buddy masterpiece. Under the bill, hunters can go after wild hogs, day or night, on private property. Under present law, hunting wild hogs is restricted to daylight hours from February through August. The bill passed the House 85-10 on Wednesday and was introduced in the Senate Thursday.

Go see that Gambit post for recent video of rampaging hogs out on Almonaster Boulevard. (They are very difficult to count!)

Also, if any of your newly empowered local militia happen to provide you with feral hog meat in the near future, know that it is pretty good eatin'.  We got a hold of two wild roasts a few years ago.

It's a little gamey and a bit more lean than farm raised pork but there are some things you can do to mitigate that. It helps to brine the meat for a few hours ahead of time.  Another thing we did was layer on some bacon in order to add in some fat as it roasted.

Here is the first preparation where we braised it in red wine with some potatoes and vegetables while we watched a Saints game in 2009. It was good. It didn't photograph so well but, trust me, it was good.



In any case,  I prefer this version we did later on during Mardi Gras 2010.



It's dressed with cumin, paprika, oregano, thyme, onions, garlic, potatoes, some lemons, yucca root, and obviously, the bacon again.  Added some lime juice, orange juice, and beer then roasted it for about 8 hours.  Very pretty results.

Troublemaker

On this day in 1968 Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting striking city sanitation workers.  In today's environment, how would that go over?

If he were still alive, King would surely join the growing campaigns to unionize and improve pay and working conditions for janitors, security guards, hotel workers, hospital employees, farmworkers, grocery employees, and others who earn poverty-level wages. He might disrupt Walmart stockholder meetings to demand that the company pay employees a living wage, join fast-food workers in their quest for decent pay, and urge consumers to boycott the Gap, Walmart and other companies until they stop manufacturing their products in overseas sweatshops. He'd also be working with unions, community groups, and fellow clergy to pressure Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, which was one of the demands of the March on Washington.

Today we view King as something of a saint, his birthday a national holiday, and his name adorning schools and street signs. But in his day, the establishment considered King a dangerous troublemaker.

Probably today, too.

All of Uptown is under contruction

Best to avoid trying to drive there in any particular direction for the next few years.



Those blue pipes are water lines getting ready to go underground on Napoleon Avenue this week. It's part of the now decades long SELA drainage project currently slated to wrap up some time in 2018. Here is a recent presentation on the work begin done (PDF).

Once the utility work is finished, they're going to dig into the neutral ground and create a new underground drainage canal.



Similar work is currently going on on Jefferson Avenue and is schedule to begin on Louisiana this month.



Combine this with the ongoing streetcar tie replacement project happening up and down St. Charles and you're better off just avoiding the roads altogether for a while.

Predictably, the work will probably cause some disruption of access to next year's Carnival parades although it's not clear exactly how that will work yet.  Anyway don't tell these felled lamp posts about it. They're already roping off their spot.

Rent is too damn high

There goes the neighborhood

Being a real estate junkie, I’m constantly looking at properties around the city, renovating them in my mind. Last week, I noticed a small house just around the corner from us was on the market for $419,000. Now, it’s only 1700 square feet, it’s a nice renovation, and it’s in Central City.

Priced over $400K?? My jaw dropped.

Obviously from a property owner’s standpoint, having nearby property blow up in a sales price sounds pretty good: that  means that our property is theoretically going to be worth more. But does that now mean that Central City is eventually going to become the next Bywater—with prices so expensive no one but rich people can live there?

Mostly it's about being able to bully people

Had a brief Twitter conversation about this yesterday.  In my working life I've had to deal with all sorts of personalities. I've worked with and for some great people. And I've worked with and for some terrible people.  I've supervised good employees and troublesome employees.

I've always considered it a given that people are going to have their quirks and their strengths and their weaknesses. And since we're not robots, those qualities are not going to be constants.  The secret to working with people, though, is tolerating the fact that they are people and figuring out how you're all going to get something done in spite of whatever is bugging you.

You do this best by being flexible and being respectful.  Most importantly you do this by resisting the bullies and the hypercompetitive Type-As and the atmosphere of suspicion and intimidation they tend to foster.  Simply put, in a majority of workplaces, unless an employee is behaving criminally or dangerously, there's no reason to fire or threaten to fire them.  Firing people is a serious and traumatizing action from which most people do not easily recover.

But the bullies do tend to run things and that's how you get stuff like this.

According to Landrieu, the plan would not touch employee protections in disciplinary matters. However, one provision appears to do just that.

The plan would eliminate service ratings, which now range from “Outstanding” to “Unsatisfactory,” replacing them with a goal-based “performance management system.” Again, Kopplin’s office would be in charge of that system.

In eliminating the ratings, the plan also eliminates an employee’s ability to appeal a poor rating.

That would be unnecessary, according to the proposal, because “written performance feedback under the performance management system is not an adverse action to punish an employee.”

However, it goes on, “once poor work performance has been established” — it doesn’t say how that would be done — that can spur supervisor monitoring and a report to the city’s personnel director. If the personnel director decides that the employee’s work hasn’t improved, then the employee could be disciplined — which he could appeal.

In effect, the new system would push back the point at which an employee can protest a supervisor’s poor view of his work.

What are you trying to say?

Found this on my windshield yesterday. Not going into that good night just yet.

Everybody hates Badon's bill

State Rep. Austin Badon had to pull his bill to lessen penalties for marijuana possession from consideration today.  The bill was opposed by speakers from the ACLU as well as from the libertarian leaning conservative Pelican Institute on the grounds that it did not go far enough in the direction of full decriminalization.

This afternoon in a chat with the The Lens, Sen. JP Morrell also characterized Badon's bill as being a bit lukewarm for his liking. 

I think Rep. Badon's bill is well intended but it doesn't go far enough. The problem it poses, during this legislative session, is that it is a "compromise" that, if successful could lead people who are considering my bill to reconsider their support 

Morrell is supporting a Senate version that would reduce possession charges to misdemeanors. Under Badon's bill, marijuana possession would remain a felony.

But what really got to Badon was the opposition of the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association whose support he had counted on. One supposes, in fact, the bill was as moderate as it was specifically to court the Sheriffs.  They said no anyway. 

But, Badon deferred discussion on his bill Thursday -- and said he doubted he would bring it back up for discussion -- after Sheriffs' Association head Mike Ranatza testified against the bill in front of committee.

Badon said the LSA had indicated to him that they would remain neutral on the bill, as the Louisiana District Attorneys Association did Thursday; Ranatza would not comment on the blow up, but was overheard telling state Rep. Steve Pylant, R-Winnsboro, "I never spoke to him since last year" on the bill.

It's kind of weird that Badon would have been caught this flat-footed by the Sheriffs, even stranger that he would not have been in contact with them, even.  In any case, he made a point of  demonstrating frustration afterwards.

When asked to comment on Ranatza's statement that there had been no discussion, Badon told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, "B---s---...His leadership has to be called into question...You don't do that in this body."

Badon was seen avoiding Ranatza after the vote was taken, slipping out the back as he called, "Austin! Austin!" behind him. Badon said, "I'm not in a good frame of mind, Mike."

If only there were a safe, legal way available to help him calm down....

Oh well.  Morrell's Senate bill is still forthcoming. And the House will undoubtedly take this up again.  Part of me wonders if Badon might have decided to stall his own bill on purpose just to see if the Senate version offers some room to hammer out something better.  He clearly wasn't happy with this version.

Badon agreed with Esman and said he wished the bill went further, but he was forced to compromise: "It's a good bill. I wish it would do more but it is a consensus bill."

Badon was reluctant to postpone debate on his bill to lessen these penalties, however, and noted afterward he hadn't decided to bring it back up for another vote later: "I'm pretty livid. I don't want to make any rash decisions right now."

In other words, pulling it in the first place might not have been a "rash decision" either? Just speculating.

Incentives

Yesterday the legislature passed a bill that (theoretically) could put a stop to the SLFPAE's lawsuit against the oil and gas industry over damage it has done to the Louisiana coast.

State Sen. Robert Adley, R-Benton, is sponsoring the bill, as well as a few more that seek to derail the lawsuit filed last summer by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East, or SLFPA-E against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies. The east bank levee board is seeking damages from industry for decades of environmental harm that dredging and other pipeline activities imposed on Louisiana's coastline.

But Gov. Bobby Jindal is fiercely opposed to the lawsuit. After ensuring its strongest proponents were removed from the levee board, Jindal turned his eye to killing the suit legislatively. Adley agrees with the governor that the board illegally entered into a contingency fee contract with legal firm Swanson Jones, without seeking the proper approval or making the terms of the terms of the contract public.

Jindal and Adley and others have argued that the lawsuit interferes with the state's own supposedly good faith negotiations with oil and gas over coastal restoration funds.

Which brings up the question, what are the industry's incentives with regard to coastal loss?  What do they get, for example, if nothing is done about it?

A set of laws unique to Louisiana allows the state to claim the minerals found under any navigable body of water. That has troubling implications for landowners in Vermilion Parish and every other coastal region of the state. The laws mean that as more land becomes submerged under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico each year, more and more money that once flowed from oil and gas drilling companies to the bank accounts of landowners now flows directly into the coffers of the state.

Landowners here say the law not only hurts their pocketbooks, but also creates a disincentive for Louisiana’s government to care about coastal areas and repair and maintain wetlands. The theory goes that if the cash-strapped state can make money off gaining increased mineral rights, then it has no reason to help keep privately owned bayou property from going underwater.

"Collectivists"

The Kochs have some weird fantasies about stuff. They also have all the money, though, so we have to listen them.

Troll plan

Career bureaucrat Bobby Jindal proposes a health care "plan" that he says will protect you from "Washington bureaucrats"

I won’t endorse a plan that sees millions of other Americans forced out of the insurance they like, simply because it doesn’t meet some Washington bureaucrat’s standards. And I won’t endorse a plan that sees Americans extended the promise of insurance, only to find out that the “coverage” provided doesn’t guarantee they’ll receive the care they need.

He purports to accomplish this through block grants to the states so that they can "come up with insurance reforms and other solutions" which would probably be done in consultation with some industry bureaucrats.

Mostly, though, it's the same menu of crap policies conservatives have been pushing for decades; limits on malpractice suits, replacing Medicare with a voucher system, health savings accounts, etc.

In other words, it's a political ploy by an increasingly desperate Jindal sensing that he's being ignored by the media and the circle of Repbublican donors making decisions about who they're going to back for President.

Beyond developing a health-care plan, Jindal has been meeting with dozens of Republicans who served as influential bundlers for the campaign of Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. Prominent donors also know Jindal from his time as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. Nevertheless, few have said they would back him.

 Oh and, just for fun, these proposals are a complete waste of time too.

Jindal's proposal would be lucky to get much Republican -- let alone Democratic -- support. First, as conservative health policy experts James Capretta and Tom Miller estimate, high-risk pools aimed at covering up to 4 million people would cost between $150 to $200 billion over 10 years. So Jindal's figure is already low (although his policy director surmised that states could come up with the rest of the money). Second, the Republican-led House hasn't shown any willingness to fund high-risk pools. In fact, last year GOP lawmakers scuttled a bill pushed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) to spend just $3.6 billion on high risk pools for under a year, fully paid for with cuts to Obamacare.

Conservative policy analysts don't even take it seriously and Republican lawmakers are unlikely to support it anyway.  Jindal probably got the little attention bump he was looking for this week, but it may not be the kind of attention he was looking for.

"It is too disruptive to existing employer-provided insurance, and it does not help enough people get coverage," wrote Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at the conservative National Review. "Replacing Obamacare with this plan would probably result in millions of people losing their coverage, and I think that would doom it."

Or maybe there's no such thing as bad attention.  

They will eventually be allowed to build the Holy Cross high rise

Mostly because it will now be up to the city council to decide. And because this is precisely what our councilpersons want.

The plan’s backers say it represents a rare chance at economic revitalization for the neighborhood. Its opponents say it would destroy the fabric of Holy Cross, and might represent the first step toward changing the traditionally low-rise New Orleans waterfront into something very different: the kind of high-rise, high-rent district you see in Miami or Houston.

Pretty sure Jackie gets to vote for this before she leaves. 

Eventually they will be allowed to buy the street

On one side of the argument, we've got some lofty rhetoric about the city's master plan and the integrity of the urban street grid and such.

While it noted that city departments did not see a need to maintain the street as a public property, the Commission staff report found no compelling reason it should be private, either. The staff identified several drawbacks to the sale.

“The street forms an integral part of the city’s network of interconnected streets, which is supported by the goals and policies provided in the Transportation and Land Use elements of the Master Plan. As a result, the staff believes the proposal is inconsistent with the Plan for the 21st Century,” the staff report says.

On the other side we've got some very wealthy people who can pretty much do whatever they want. What will happen? Let's watch!

$peech

Let the freedom flow over everything.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court took another step Wednesday toward giving wealthy donors more freedom to influence federal elections.

The justices ruled 5-4, in a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that limits on the total amount of money donors can give to all candidates, committees and political parties are unconstitutional. The decision frees the nation's wealthiest donors to have greater influence in federal elections.

In a related matter

The next time U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu gets down over all those television ads attacking her for supporting President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, at least she can take comfort in the fact that she’s not Kay Hagan.

Hagan is Landrieu’s North Carolina counterpart, a Democrat who backed the Affordable Care Act who’s now facing the fight of her life to win another six-year term. And like Landrieu, Hagan has landed in the crosshairs of Americans For Prosperity, the Koch brothers-backed advocacy group that’s spending this election season pummeling ACA backers on the air.

But that $2.9 million AFP’s spent so far on anti-Landrieu ads? That’s relatively small potatoes compared to the whopping $7 million the group has invested in its effort to unseat Hagan, or 44 percent of the $16 million AFP has spent so far to knock out ACA supporters in the Senate, according to the Washington Post.

In other words, not only can it get worse for people on the wrong side of the oligarchy, thanks to this decision, it most likely will.  

The rent is too damn high

We've discovered the source of the gentrification problem and it is Marlin Gusman.

Not only did the sheriff’s office overspend, Quatrevaux said, but it also reported indirect costs for the program that couldn’t be verified or that were grossly miscalculated — including paying $140,000 a year in rent.

And it was Gusman, the landlord, charging an eye-popping rate to Gusman, the tenant, and the city paying the tab. That’s because the monitoring program rents space in Gusman’s Intake Processing Center.

Evaluators consulted a real estate quarterly report to determine that the Sheriff’s Office was overcharging the program for rent.

Instead of calculating the per-square-foot rent by the year, as is the industry standard, Gusman’s office was calculating it by month. So it charged 12 times as much as it should have, Quatrevaux’s office reported.

It charged $15 per square foot every month for the 782-square-foot office used by employees of the monitoring program. That’s $11,730 per month.

“At $179 per square foot, OPSO’s Intake Processing Center would be listed in the real estate quarterly report as ‘the highest priced office space in the New Orleans metropolitan area,’ according to the author of the quarterly report,” the Inspector General’s report reads.

Update: See also, this Lens op-ed by constitutional law professor Michael Avery Gusman's expensive operations are in no danger of resulting in constitutional treatment of his inmates any time soon.

The judge, on the other hand, is seriously constrained by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and its provision that a federal court can respond to specific violations of inmate rights only with measures that are “narrowly drawn” and the “ least intrusive.”

The act specifically provides that a court may not order the release of prisoners unless overcrowding is the cause of constitutional violations and, even then, not until less severe remedies have been tried and have failed.

The evidence objectively supports the conclusion that the jail should be closed, but though it is seriously understaffed, the one problem it does not have is overcrowding. Gusman’s predecessor, ex-Sheriff  Charles Foti, expanded the physical plant to house as many as 7,000 prisoners; it now has approximately 2,000, but even after extensive damage due to Hurricane Katrina, there’s room for another several hundred. Absent overcrowding, federal courts do not have the power to order prisoners released.

Unfortunately, the evidence at the hearing proved that the prison cannot be made constitutional within any reasonable period of time using the tools available to the court under the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

Chicken boxing

Can't get through a legislative session in this state without one of these numbers showing up somewhere.

State lawmakers spent a portion of Tuesday morning discussing the finer points of a “sport” known as chicken boxing. And no, it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.

It started when state Sen. Jean-Paul Morrell, a New Orleans Democrat, introduced Senate Bill 523, a measure that would expand the state’s current ban on cockfighting to include all types of chickens. The bill also would make it a felony to possess paraphernalia such as spurs, leather training spur covers and other items commonly used in the illegal sport.

SB523 ran into a little trouble when state Sen. Elbert Guillory, an Opelousas Republican, said the bill is too broad. He said the bill would make it illegal for people that raise “15th and 20th generation fighting birds that are exported legitimately and legally to other nations”

That’s when Morrell interrupted, telling his colleague that raising chickens for fighting is illegal.

“No, no. Not for fighting,” Guillory said. “They just raise them.”

“So, they’re raising chickens who are 15th generation fighting chickens, and they’re exporting them just to export them,” Morrell asked. “That sounds like someone who buys a lot of pseudoephedrine and ships it to a trailer in the middle of Texas for the fact that someone might have a big cold.”

“I don’t know what ephedrine is,” Guillory responded.

In his defense, we already know that Guillory's constituents  raise chickens for purposes other than fighting.  Sometimes they just need their bones for reading the portents and whatnot.

A bill to repeal the law was recently killed for the third straight year by Louisiana’s Senate Education Committee. In this post on Slate, Zach Kopplin writes about Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory, who explained at a May hearing that he doesn’t think the law should be repealed because he wouldn’t want to dismiss faith healing as a “pseudoscience.” Guillory even describes his encounter with the faith healer, who was “half naked” and used bones in a ceremony.

As to his familiarity with ephedrine and its derivatives, the jury is still out. 

Come back when you have a Noah's Monorail

This morning I likened one of the two Six Flags redevelopment proposals to an April Fool's joke.  (Not too keen on the other one either, for what it's worth.)  Turns out the committee wasn't very impressed either.

Alan Philipson, Industrial Development Board chairman who led the committee meeting, said the companies behind the proposals can return, if more firm finances are assembled to back their project.

"This committee has an obligation to the city, to the Industrial Development Board, to all of the citizens in this community, that we are not going to let ourselves sit down at a table and ink a deal that wet not comfortable the financial where with all is there," Philipson said. "Both of these proposals have come in here with absolutely no cash commitment."

A whole lot of inside lawyerball

Dambala continues to pursue the likely rigging of the BP claims process. Just go back and read his previous stuff there for more context.  The takeaway for me, though, is it's just further illustration of the fact that the entire legal community is one massive blob of conflicted interests. Just knowing that much explains a lot of what happens around here day to day.

So Katrina Jackson seems nice

Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a bill designed to mimic (and in some ways be worse than) Texas anti-abortion legislation passed last year under a firestorm of controversy and protest.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Kathy Kliebert and several anti-abortion advocates have said the proposal is about protecting women's health. But abortion rights advocates said the legislation has little to do with keeping women safe and that it's only purpose is to further restrict access to abortion.

Sponsored by Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, the legislation would require physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facility where the procedures take place. It also imposes the same restrictions -- such as a requirement for a 24-hour waiting period -- on abortion-inducing medication as surgical abortions.

Early last month, Lamar challenged Rep. Jackson on some of the more egregious aspects of her bill.  She was kind of a jerk about it.

Tax amnesty

Louisiana's revenue estimating process is a less than reliable endeavor as it is.  During a forum for three Louisiana ex-governors on the campus of Loyola last week, Edwin Edwards talked about how oil price volatility makes it difficult for any Governor and Legislature to get a handle on what the coming year's budget is going to be.

Last year lawmakers introduced a controversial three year "tax amnesty" program as a stop-gap measure to fill holes in the badly blown-apart budget.

The new plan projects raising $200 million a year – of the $526 million it would bring in overall per year – by launching a tax amnesty program that would last for nearly three years.

Budget experts question the plan.

“It’s a very risky way of balancing the budget,” said Jim Richardson, a Louisiana State University economist who sits on the four-member Revenue Estimating Conference that is about to meet to determine how much of the higher-than-projected revenue collected by the state Treasury can be spent. “I don’t see any way our conference can buy into that figure without more information.”

“Any way you cut it, it’s one-time money,” said C.B. Forgotston, an attorney and longtime budget expert whom the Fiscal Hawks have regularly consulted. “It goes against what the Hawks have been preaching. It’s also highly speculative. It’s a best guess of who will choose to pay.”

Under the amnesty program, people with outstanding tax bills could pay without incurring penalties or interest they’d normally face, at least for the first year.

And, as it turns out, they've already mis-speculated. 

Shifting the dynamics of the budget debate, lawmakers will soon learn that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s spending plan for 2014-2015 is short by $47 million due to an error in calculating last year’s tax amnesty program.

Administration officials are already working with lawmakers to address the unexpected shortfall, but there are expectations already that budget reductions will represent the only solution.

“We can’t count on any new revenues materializing, unless it comes out the Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) in May,” said a source.

Right now, an estimated $260 million from the amnesty program, a figure that includes the miscalculation, is dedicated to the Department of Health and Hospitals.

On the other hand, an ark might not be a bad idea

Here's a report on Louisiana's vanishing coast put together for The Weather Channel by Katy Reckdahl.

Over the past 80 years alone, experts estimate that about 1,900 square miles of Louisiana coastal land have washed away. The state loses a football field-sized area of land every 45 minutes. Flooding has increased markedly, causing residents to raise their homes again and again. Many homes are now set on stilts more than 13 feet in the air.

But elevated houses only postpone what now seems inevitable: the complete disappearance of south Louisiana’s small coastal fishing communities, most of them populated by families who have spent their lives pulling shrimp, crabs and oysters from the water that now threatens to submerge them.

We've found our Iconic structure and it is an ark

Saw @NoahMovie the other night at Cinepolis. Opens 3/28. Very intense! #thefloodiscoming pic.twitter.com/unqxZmzDku
— Drew Brees (@drewbrees) March 24, 2014

What better way to match the intensity Brees speaks of than by plopping Noah's Ark down on our defunct amusement park.

Transformation Village LLC submitted a wide-ranging, seven-phase plan that starts with building a Jazzland park, although the plan has no clear source of funding or cost estimate. Future phases of the development would include a water park called "Atlantis," a dome-shaped shopping center arranged by global continents, a 450-foot replica of Noah's Ark that houses an orchestra studio, a movie production lot, a resort-hotel complex and a facility for students studying hospitality.

The only reason  I even sort of think this might not be an April Fools joke is that they went to the trouble of putting together a 49 page proposal. Although, it's pretty ridiculous itself.  Still, if it's intentional humor, it's of an exceptionally deadpan variety.

Thinking about it

We're at the stage of the little game where Bobby Jindal pretends to now be "thinking and praying" about running for President.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal confirmed he is considering running for president in 2016, during an interview with the Heritage Foundation during its annual Resource Bank meeting in New Orleans.

"It's something we're thinking about. It's something we'll pray about. But...we have to win the war of ideas first," Jindal told Genevieve Wood of Heritage's The Foundry, a right-leaning news service, during the meeting this past week. "We've got to win the elections in 2014. And after we do that, we're certainly giving it some thought."

We all know Jindal has been thinking about being President ever since before most of us even knew him.  So this is really more like a coming out party than anything else.

Still, it's an important moment in Jindal's career. Now that he's acknowledged publicly that he's thinking about running, he's pretty much committed to keep thinking about it. Probably for the rest of his life.  Or until he's elected, you know, whatever comes first.  Taking this long view of things, Moseley concludes there's plenty time left for it to be the former.

First off, presidential candidates require some amount of delusion. It’s essential for any human who believes he or she should lead the most powerful nation in world history. And long-shot candidates who intend to hop from state-level politics to the top of the heap — in only one election cycle, yet! — well, they need a double serving of delusion.

But that’s not such a bad thing. (Clancy) DuBos himself observed that sometimes candidates who ignore the odds can actually improve their chances. It’s true. Over time, “delusion” can start to look like perseverance. If a talented candidate adheres to an ambitious strategy, at some point he or she might find that opening. (Then it becomes a matter of sticking a  paddle deep in the political rapids and attempting to jet through the sluice.)

Jindal is still only 42 years old.  There's plenty time left for him to come up with all sorts of delusions now that he's officially commenced with the thinking.  

Morning agit-prop

Not bad. A little goofy, maybe.

Pinkertons

All working for the banks

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

Once you've managed to define a bunch of annoying kids sitting around stinking up a park with their drums and other nonsense as "terrorism" you've entered a whole new and weird area.

There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people's income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent.

Remember that only 10% of the money donated to WikiLeaks can be processed – because of financial sector and DHS-sponsored targeting of PayPal data. With this merger, that crushing of one's personal or business financial freedom can happen to any of us. How messy, criminalizing and prosecuting dissent. How simple, by contrast, just to label an entity a "terrorist organization" and choke off, disrupt or indict its sources of financing

"Open secret"

It sure seems like it's taken a while to crack the open secret all the way open but better late than never.

As a defense attorney, Gibbens served on the team representing Fred Heebe, co-owner of landfill company River Birch Inc., as federal officials began to probe allegations that Heebe had bribed officials for preferential treatment.

By then, the fact that at least one federal prosecutor was using Nola.com comments to weigh in on cases had been an open secret in New Orleans’ clubby legal community for years. It was a secret that Gibbens and co-counsel Kyle Schonekas would use to explosive effect in a defamation suit when they — with the help of a former FBI profiler — identified Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone as the author of 595 comments posted on Nola.com under the handle “Henry L. Mencken1951.”

The moment Heebe trotted out his forensic divination charlatan guy two years ago, many readers immediately suspected Perricone was more likely to have been outed by the grapevine.  All of these people know each other. Heebe, himself, was almost nominated to be US Attorney once. The whole thing is one big "clubby" inside game.

And remember we still don't know all of the identities of the prosecutors who took part in what increasingly looks like a coordinated public propaganda campaign.  We don't know how high up it went. Some have suggested that one of the remaining suspicious comments handles belonged to Jim Letten himself.  It's also possible that one or more participants in or people with knowledge of the scheme are still on staff at the US Attorney's office.  At a recent appearance, the new boss Ken Polite said that "he spends an inexcusably inordinate amount of time dealing with internal personnel issues."

As for this Gibbens character, it's difficult not to admire him a little bit.  Sure some crooks may get off the hook thanks to his efforts.  But not all crooks are created equal.  Justice in the Danziger case would be worth twenty Ray Nagins walking free, for example.  All of that notwithstanding, it seems appropriate that someone stand up to the haughty bullying, public grandstanding, and sockpuppet propagandizing Jim Letten and his deputies disgraced his office with.

The issues all of this raises for the press are serious, though.  And I don't mean to give the principles at issue short shrift.  But, in practice,  it's not entirely clear that they don't deserve a bit of comeuppance themselves for the role they've played at times. But that's pretty much an open secret too.

Late breaking Entrepreneur Week suggestion

Shouldn't somebody go out in the Gulf and try to harvest, culture, and patent the oil-eating "magic microbes"?  Seems like there might be lots of customers out there if you could sell those.