Wise allocations of public capital

Why does one city need to dedicate public money and tax privileges to two different golf arcades three miles apart from one another? Well, it's kind of an accident. Or a series of accidents. Not well-intentioned accidents, mind you. These are the kind of accidents that happen when all of your policymakers begin with the assumption that the only lever available to anyone in government is the one that gives nice things to the already wealthy. 

Xiao, a Denham Springs-based businessman whose interests include Airborne Extreme trampoline parks in Louisiana, has been working on the Five O Four project since he purchased it from developer Joe Jaeger in late 2022.

Jaeger and his partners bought the site, the former home of The Times-Picayune, in 2016 for $3.5 million. Originally, he had a deal with Topgolf to build an outlet there. In 2017, after Topgolf pulled out, he struck a deal with rival chain Drive Shack to build one of their facilities.

In 2019, a decision by the Convention Center board to quietly propose a Topgolf on the land they controlled prompted an angry response from Jaeger and questions about why the state-sponsored facility would try to compete with a private development nearby.

Then-Gov. John Bel Edwards said it didn't make sense for two such similar outlets so near together and the Topgolf project appeared to be dead. But the pandemic slowed — and eventually scuttled — Jaeger's plans at the Howard Avenue site until Xiao stepped in with Five O Fore.

Xiao has subsidy deals both from reduced local property taxes and from a deal to recoup an additional 2% sales tax to pay for part of its development costs.

The Topgolf project was revived last year by the Convention Center. Topgolf will pay for the development costs itself and will sublet the land from RDNI, which is a long-term tenant of the convention center on that plot.

Topgolf is not seeking any direct taxpayer subsidy, though it is within the River District economic development district, which means it would raise an incremental 2% sales tax that can be used for River District development costs.

The article could have also mentioned the separate $21 million tax break doled out to Shell as part of that same River District scheme.  But try not to think about that right now. 

Anyway one of the golf arcades is suing the other one now over "unfair trade practices." That's pretty rich considering how both of these businesses got here in the first place.

The best bet is nothing will fundamentally change

It's been over a decade.That's a whole lot of holding out hope that our political leadership plans to do something about the exploitative violence of short term rental proliferation as soon as "the data comes in" or "the stakeholders"have their say, or a judge tells them what to do.

It's not clear when Lemelle might rule, or how he might come down. But more changes for the city's rules could be ahead. City Council leaders have threatened to pass an outright ban on residential short-term rentals if the latest law is ruled unconstitutional.

An ordinance to impose a ban was introduced by the council’s at-large members, Helena Moreno and JP Morrell, in September, within a week of Lemelle's restraining order. It has been repeatedly deferred as Lemelle has presided over hearings over the fall and winter.

The council members have said little about the proposal since introducing it. They declined comment for this article.

Blossom and others want more clarity on what comes next.

“They threatened to do this really big thing and haven’t said anything since they threatened to do it — or promised to do it, depending on who you are — and nobody knows what to expect,” said Blossom, who supports the ban. “Are they going to follow through? Are they going to back down?”

The "really big thing" should have happened 15 years ago.  There comes a time when we have to understand these politicians all work for the landlords. If we want something big to happen, we aren't going to have their help getting it done.

CEO

Last summer a judge ruled against the city council in a lawsuit against the mayor's office in pursuit of greater oversight of how the city disperses funds derived from the Wisner Trust.  The already complex matter of the trust has only become more convoluted in recent years after Mayor Cantrell took the controversial step of negotiating a deal with the Wisner heirs and other parties to the, technically, expired trust.

It had been thought that when the original trust expired, its assets would transfer permanently to the city. But the mayor's deal effectively establishes a new, apparently perpetual, arrangement that maintains the terms of the original trust, keeping the Wisner heirs, LSU, Tulane, and the Salvation Army as co-beneficiaries. This sounds like a bad deal for the city. But because it allows the mayor maximum discretion to distribute the city's cut with minimal oversight from the council or the public, it is a very good deal for the mayor. And, really, that's all that matters, isn't it? 

Anyway, here is how that money gets used now. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration improperly paid a city contractor tasked with cleaning up blighted lots and then tried to rush through a renewal of the contract, according to a report by the New Orleans Office of Inspector General that alleged the payments made by City Hall may have violated the state constitution.

The report, issued Thursday by Inspector General Ed Michel and based on interviews with city employees involved in the contracting process, also includes allegations that one employee was forced to resign after trying to slow down the contract renewal.

While it is not clear if the agreement with the Center for Employment Opportunities was eventually renewed, the OIG found that the administration violated its own contract — and possibly the state constitution, which prohibits anything that could be considered giving public money without a public purpose — by paying the group $500,000 without verifying that work it was hired for had been performed.

It feels like a story as old as time in New Orleans.  You've got a seemingly good cause. (We're cleaning up blight! We're helping incarcerated people transition back to work!) But look further and there is no documentation any of that work is done or information about how they go about it. It's a bit reminiscent of the NOAH home remediation scam back during the Nagin Administration. This isn't likely to draw as much attention, though. We're in a different era now. The volume of graft that goes on has magnified several times over and the capacity of the press to keep up is so greatly diminished that it all seems to wash over us like water from a busted main. If a scandal doesn't involve some salacious bit about the mayor's rumored paramour, it barely even registers.

But, alright, fine. Just for laughs, please tell us more about this Center for Employment Opportunities. 

The Center for Employment opportunities, known as CEO, is a New York-based nonprofit that employs recently incarcerated people and aims to help them get back on their feet.

In December, 2021, CEO signed a $1 million contract with the city to clean up abandoned lots, to be paid using money from the Wisner Trust fund. In addition to providing cleanup services to the city, the contract also required CEO to provide support services for the recently incarcerated people it employed. As part of the contract, CEO was to document the work it did and the services it provided to its workers.

But city employees said that documentation for some of that work was never requested nor submitted, according to interview summaries attached to the OIG report. CEO was also told it didn't have to submit invoices, despite contractual provisions requiring them, employees told OIG investigators.

If nothing else, the name of the organization has to be a red flag, right?  Why does the leadership of a supposedly charitable non-profit want its acronym to evoke in our minds the image of ruthless business moguls?  It's amateurish and insulting on its face. 

Or maybe it's just showing off. After all, there's nothing to stop any of this. Not, really. An Inspector General's report can sound like a dressing down, but the accountability is rarely likely to go beyond that. Especially when patronage scams like this are the bread and butter of city politics. And, frankly, that is the reason City Council keeps fighting with the mayor over the Wisner money. They don't necessarily want this sort of thing to stop. It's just that the way the mayor has structured the terms of the trust has frozen them out of the action. For now, anyway.

What does the "government affairs officer" do, exactly?

Blake Corley is quoted at the top of this article expressing his shock and disappointment at the arrest of the grifters for whom he had been laundering money into political contributions. It's hard to imagine he could be that surprised, though.  I mean if anyone should have known what was going on, it would be the person whose specific job it was to handle the operation.  

The complaint alleges the Patels created a fake lender which they used to “make” a $8,540,000 loan to Precision Powered Products, a Houston-based company, allegedly to expand the company in Puerto Rico. That loan was never made.

However, according to the complaint, the Patels allegedly then had 80% of the fake loan secured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in October 2021 — and then sold the loan to Memphis broker-dealer Hanover Securities the next month for a profit — netting them millions of dollars. The FBI alleges they then transferred that money into accounts controlled by Trisha Patel.

The complaint further alleges that Trisha Patel gave $2.1 million of that money to an unnamed attorney, bought $500,000 into cryptocurrency, gave $200,000 to her four children’s private schools and spent $81,000 on a new BMW. She spent another $91,000 on rent.

According to the complaint, she used another $1.2 million to pay “various attorneys, lobbyists, and consultants on behalf of Nikesh Patel.” The complaint does not name the attorneys, lobbyists and consultants, but Corley, who denied that he is involved, has worked for the Patels and their businesses, including as the chief government affairs officer and in-house counsel for PPP and American Powered Pumps, a new Florida-based company.

“The majority of the remaining funds went to another business entity associated with the Patels,” the complaint reads, though it does not identify the entity. Trisha Patel is listed in a press release as the owner of American Powered Pumps, which formed last year.

One expects the Government Affairs Officer is the person responsible for the interactions highlighted above. Or at least one expects that he is heavily involved in shepherding them. In any case he took about $100,000 of the fraud money and put it into a couple of PACs from where it was spread to a long list of state political figures. The Gambit article gives a pretty thorough accounting of that.

While it's true that candidates don't always have a lot of control over who contributes to their campaigns and not every contribution automatically implies a quid pro quo and so forth, we can focus on a couple of salient matters in this case. For example, there's the curious case of Corley's fiance's recent campaign for the State House. Despite her status as a complete unknown 27 year old challenger to a well-liked Democratic incumbent, Madison O'Malley immediately attracted immense institutional support from Dem Party insiders. 

At the end of October 2022, Corley and his fiancee O’Malley attended a Diwali event at the White House with Trisha Patel. Also present, according to publicly available information, was Louisiana Democratic Party Chair Katie Bernhardt.

Not long after the White House event, O’Malley set up a campaign committee, launching her bid against Rep. Mandie Landry in New Orleans. Within a month, Trisha Patel, her in-laws Rohini and Ajay Patel, Desai, Caimano and the state Build USA PAC had donated a combined $15,000 to O’Malley.

That race between O’Malley and incumbent Landry, both Democrats, garnered significant attention. The Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee endorsed O’Malley, as did several high-profile Democrats, including Congressman Troy Carter, Gov. John Bel Edwards and former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu.

It was a stunning development at the time. And, thanks to Landry's broad grass roots support in the district, it didn't pay off. (Landry won with an overwhelming 66% of the vote.) But it does indicate just how detached Democratic Party leadership have become from their voters. That they'd spend so much time and energy on public endorsements and campaigning for this one fraudulent candidate in a single house district while doing practically nothing to stem the tide of embarrassment in the statewide races that year illustrates how broken and corrupt an operation they're running now. 

These next few years are going to extremely difficult for Louisiana. The worst people in the state have free rein to max out on their worst impulses. And with the "opposition party" content to sit around collecting checks from criminals and do little else in the way of opposition, we can only expect the worst outcomes.

It's just Dracula's castle now

It's been a while since we did a round-up of our city's most "iconic" doomed redevelopment projects.  In what's now a twenty year race to see who gets "back into commerce" only one of these has made it all the way there... for better or worse. The Trade Mart building is now the Four Seasons hotel.  Boysie Bollinger will sell you his penthouse there for $19.5 million if you are interested.  As for our other favs, well let's take a look.

Plaza Tower: Please enjoy this recent NOLA.com slideshow on the history of the tower. Last month, the city put out an RFP on possible demolition.  That didn't make Joe Jaeger, the building's current owner, very happy. Both Jager and the city have made vague references to possible sale in the works.  But nobody knows who the buyer might be.

Six Flags: As of this past October, Troy Henry has a lease on the property and, apparently, the green light to begin demolition.  He does not, however, have any partners lined up to operate any of the attractions and amenities his pitches for the property have promised.  Nor does he have any financing outside of the potential public subsidy should anything materialize.

Municipal Auditorium: Thankfully this will not become the next City Hall. What it will become remains anyone's guess. There is finally a plan in place to spend the $37 million in FEMA funding to "stabilize" the structure. The years of arguing over what to do with the building almost allowed that to expire. But, even now, there's still no agreed upon vision for the building. An RFP could come soon though.

Charity Hospital: There is news today! Not very encouraging news, of course.  Remember that years-long and very pained public process of getting various entities private and public (LSU, Tulane, the state and city governments, a developer partnership called "1532 Partners") to agree on a development plan? Well that's all scrapped. Instead they're doing this new thing. 

The Domain Companies, a New York firm known in New Orleans for developing the South Market district on Loyola Avenue, has finalized a deal to take over redevelopment of the old Charity Hospital, a project that is more than three years behind schedule and has at least doubled in cost.

What will they build now?  Unclear. But as a placeholder, please enjoy a bunch of gobbledygook.

Domain CEO Matt Schwartz said he isn’t ready to unveil updated plans for the building, but he said the project’s most important component — Tulane’s presence as anchor tenant — will remain the same. Other elements, such as the specific number and configuration of apartments, labs and offices, will be adjusted to make the project more financially feasible.

“Some of it will have to be retooled to make sure the different components are speaking to each other,” Schwartz said in an interview Tuesday. “We are looking at rightsizing the different components for viability, finance ability and making sure we’re targeting the right market and right demographics for what will work.”

The project was originally estimated to cost $250 million, and was later revised to $300 million. After the pandemic, interest rate increases and inflation drove up construction costs. Sources familiar with the project said it could cost as much as $600 million now.

Thumbing back through our notes we are reminded that in 2019 the LSU board gave its final approval to the plan while meeting in Shreveport in order to get as far away as possible from any objections from the New Orleans public. Even at that moment, the emphasis was already moving away from "innovation hubs" and affordable housing and toward condos and STRs. 

Plans for the project also include renting about 150 residential units to Sonder, a short-term rental company that already has significant operations in New Orleans. That would be about 50% more units than would be allowed for the property under short-term rental rules the City Council passed earlier this year, which bar renting more than 25% of the units in commercial buildings to tourists.

And, now, what with all the "right sizing" and "market targeting" Domain is going to do, who knows what they'll end up with. 

Hard Rock fell down. Kailas got up again

 You'll never keep this city's permanent wealth class down. 

The lead developer of the Hard Rock Hotel, which collapsed while under construction in 2019, has begun construction on a major new project in a former downtown office building two blocks from the site of the fatal disaster.

Mohan Kailas and his partners in the new venture are planning to turn the 31-story skyscraper at 1010 Common Street into a mixed-use complex with two hotels, including a 250-room Fairmont Hotel with a rooftop pool.

The project, which will cost more than $90 million, will also include an extended stay Element Hotel and six floors of office space.

It's so obscene you almost have to admire it. 

It’s the first big project for Kailas, a seasoned developer with several successful real estate projects under his belt, since the Hard Rock fell. The collapse killed three construction workers and injured dozens of others. Kailas was never accused of criminal wrongdoing in connection with the disaster. In legal filings and prepared statements, Kailas and his partners have blamed the project’s engineer and steel provider for the structural failure, which remains the subject of more than 100 unresolved lawsuits.

Oh well, no one to blame. Nothing has to change. And now we're right back to building nice things for rich people in a city facing an ever-worsening housing crisis. Yes, there will be a public subsidy. Why even bother asking anymore, really. 

Kailas and his partners in the project, which include Atlanta-based investment group Monarch Private Capital, will use federal historic building tax credits to help finance the building’s conversion. The tax credit program enables developers to recoup 20% of what they spend rehabilitating a building.

The boil order century

I guess we should have known the increasing frequency of system failures and boil orders would inevitably lead to S&WB just giving up even trying to know if the water is safe.  

NEW ORLEANS — The Louisiana Department of Health has sent three notices of violations to the Sewerage and Water Board based on the findings of a joint investigation by the Illuminator and WVUE-TV Fox 8. The series “Tapped Out” found — and state officials confirmed — utility employees regularly fabricated drinking water testing results based on a review of several months of data.

One of the employees involved in falsifying samples has been fired, the Sewerage and Water Board has confirmed.

By skipping sampling sites or conducting the test improperly, the Sewerage and Water Board could have potentially missed the presence of contamination or when levels of chlorine in the water were inadequate to ensure it was safe.

This probably also raises the question as to whether or not it's ever really been safe. Likely there's a range of acceptable amoeba levels we're always adjusting to keep up with what's in there.

Meet the new year. Same as the old year

We're back. We're still doing the things.

Large fire visible in Algiers coming over the Woodland Bridge. Looks to be an Entergy Substation with nearly 10,000 people out of power. pic.twitter.com/p8oh3uYF2E

— Zack Fradella (@ZackFradellaWx) January 5, 2024

Update: If you have any information about the bird and/or small furry animals responsible, please contact the authorities. 

A spokesperson for Entergy New Orleans told WWL Louisiana, “This morning, NOFD responded to a fire at an Entergy substation in Algiers. This created an outage currently impacting approximately 9400 customers. Entergy crews are working as quickly and safely as possible to restore service.”

The cause is under investigation, according to Entergy and officials say no known environmental concerns at this time.

Upperdate: Ah yes, of course there is more

The outage has affected the Wastewater Treatment Plant and Sewer Pumping Stations on the West Bank. According to the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, flow to the plant has stopped because the sewer pumping stations are offline. 

The S&WB claims the stations do not have backup power onsite working to mobile generators and pumps to the stations. The S&WB is asking West Bank customers to be mindful of their water and wastewater usage, and to conserve as much as possible.

I suppose we can kick off 2024 with a quick told-you-so

The building we've come to know in recent years as "DXC Tower" has been sold. 

Two Monroe businessmen and real estate investors, the brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, have purchased one of New Orleans' most visible office buildings: the green granite high-rise at 1615 Poydras St. currently named for its anchor tenant, DXC.

The Hakims bought the 23-story building from its longtime owner, businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart, late Friday. The price was not disclosed.

It's the second Poydras Street high-rise for the Hakims. In 2013, they bought the 20-story Orleans Tower, formerly the Amoco Building, for $16 million and breathed new life into the aging tower, located across from City Hall. They renovated it and raised its occupancy from about 45% to more than 80% today.

The article does its best to suggest that somehow this sale indicates the market for New Orleans downtown office real estate is bucking trends.  It says the sale is a "bright spot" in a local office market where occupancy rates are still below pre-COVID levels but "better than in many larger cities." 

Anyway it's all nonsense. Read further and we see the real reason this building is being sold now is because Frank Stewart is dumping properties, possibly at a financial loss.  

Now 89, Stewart has been trying to downsize his real estate portfolio in recent months and has spent much of 2023 quietly marketing 1615 Poydras for sale. Those efforts got a boost in late September, when Stone’s firm listed the building publicly.

No asking price was specified, but an online flier said the building was less than 52% occupied and being marketed “in cooperation with the lender ... at debt amount.” In real estate terms, that meant Stewart and his partners in Stewart Capital were working with their lender to sell it, even if at a loss, in hopes of avoiding a default on the mortgage.

It is unclear how much Stewart and his partners still owed on the building at the time of the sale.

Read even further than that and we get an update on the status of the building's current titular tenant. 

Since 2017, the building has been named for DXC Technology Co., the Ashburn, Virginia-based firm that opened a regional office in the high-rise amid great fanfare and a promise of up to 2,000 jobs. The company hired only a fraction of its promised workforce and has since downsized its footprint in the building.

DXC continues to honor its lease on the building, which runs through 2031, but is currently trying to sublease four of its six floors, according to online real estate listings. Lahasky said the family has not had any conversations with the company but that meeting with DXC to discuss the lease will be a priority.

Of course, DXC didn't merely "open a regional office" there.  The "great fanfare" referenced in that passage also included a hefty public subsidy from the state and the city. The deal looked incredibly shady to us, especially given the company's outsourcing and downsizing strategy at the time. We did say so. 

Anyway, nobody remembers any of that. On to the next boondoggle, I'm sure. 

The bribes have been negotiated and they are surprisingly small

I think I said this around this time last year, but I really have got to get back to posting here (or writing longer form in some other way) more often. It's the only way I'm going to be able to keep track of the things that happen and hold them in my mind for any longer than it takes to flush them down Elon's Twitter toilet. 

For example, yesterday when I read this story about the deal Elevance and Blue Cross are offering Jeff Landry and Tim Temple so that they will bless the non-profit insurer's sale to the for-profit company, I thought, oh look, all it took was a just a couple of little bribes. They really bought them off cheap.

Many of the major elements of the proposed acquisition are largely unchanged from the original proposal announced in January. The sale price remains the same, as does the percentage of the sale's proceeds that will go to Blue Cross' 92,000 official policyholders.

But the new deal includes changes to the nonprofit foundation that will be formed as part of the transaction and is set to receive 91% of the sale's proceeds. The Accelerate Louisiana Initiative will now have an expanded board of directors that includes an appointee of Gov.-elect Jeff Landry. It will also include a nonvoting "observer" appointed by newly elected Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple.

But it took me a while to be reminded that I'd already flagged this in September when the writing was on the wall about Landry and Temple's intentions prior to the election.  This happens to me all the time now. If I don't deliberately stop and write about something, I'm liable to lose it. I try to keep little notes in draft but it's not the same. There's something about completing the thought here that makes it stick. There's just been less time lately to finish thoughts. That can't be good.

Anyway, this isn't supposed to be a post about me. Elevance is about to take over the state's largest insurer in a deal that will make some very wealthy administrators even wealthier. Meanwhile, Blue Cross policyholders are facing a precarious future. But hey, I'm sure that $3,000 will make up for it. 

Blue Cross first announced the deal with Elevance nearly a year ago. But as the deal came under closer scrutiny before its approval by regulators, critics expressed concerns about the effect of the sale on customers and questioned the structure of the foundation.

Two reports by independent consultants prepared for state regulators raised questions about some of the deal assumptions. More recently, a Metairie attorney has filed a suit in federal court seeking class action status on behalf of the 92,000 policyholders, arguing that as members of the mutual indemnity company who have paid into it over the years, they, not the foundation, are entitled to the sale proceeds.

Under the terms of the current deal, policyholders will split some $276 million, receiving approximately $3,000 each.

Plaza tower, Plaza Duncan

This is a bit from a recent Richard Campanella article about the history of Duncan Plaza. Supposedly everything is in line to build the new City Hall there. I'm still not clear on how much, if any, of the public green space will be preserved in the process.  An acute hostility toward the homeless has local leadership exhibiting a nasty tendency to close off as much public space as possible these days. But we'll see.

Campanella's article focuses on Duncan Plaza but it is really about the surrounding neighborhood too. The "backatown" area of interest in this case extends, roughly,  from S Rampart to Claiborne and from Tulane Ave to where the Superdome is now. Prior to the 20th Century, this was barely a neighborhood at all. It was only after the development of the modern drainage system that it began to take shape. Campanella tells a little bit of that story here.

Yet as the city grew, the area became densely populated, mostly on account of its proximity to the urban core, and also because mechanized drainage had partially drawn down swampwaters, allowing development to extend further inland.

By the mid-to-late 1800s, the area became part of the 3rd Ward, though locals continued to call it the back-of-town, among them Louis Armstrong, who grew up here. Later in life, Armstrong recollected how “the neighborhood was consisted of Negroes, Jewish people and lots of Chinese, (who) moved into a little section of their own and called it China Town,” now 1100 Tulane Avenue. Others dubbed the area “the Battleground,” though it would later become appreciated for its key role in the development of jazz and other cultural contributions.

Wary of the neighborhood, the city in the early 1890s selected the block adjacent to today’s Duncan Plaza for a new criminal courthouse, police station, parish prison and morgue. In 1893, workers completed construction of the fortresslike compound on South Saratoga Street, marking an early attempt to use this area to centralize governmental functions.

Throughout the early 1900s, this area ranked among the most diverse and spirited parts of the city, with such landmarks as the Knights of Pythias Temple, said to be the largest Black-owned building in the nation, and the South Rampart corridor, known as “the Harlem of New Orleans” for its rich cultural life.

Anyway as many people know, the historical character of the neighborhood is greatly diminished now. Its few remaining exemplars, the jazz  history landmarks on Rampart are falling apart. Much of it is surface parking. Some of that was turned into the "South Market" condos where nobody lives. And, of course, the Plaza Tower is there. Nobody lives there either. Or if they do, they'd better look out. 

The city is currently in litigation with the building's owner. Earlier this month, Jaeger's company sued the city after an administrative law judge agreed to assess $180,000 in allegedly lost parking revenue due to street closures near the skyscraper. Anthony Davis, who recently became the city's new director of Code Enforcement, said the city is moving ahead with securing a demolition contract now, "so we’re not waiting around to see what the result of the litigation is going to be — we’re ready to go."

Jaeger has received the heftiest fine levied by code enforcement so far since its new crackdown began — $220,000 for 11 violations, on top of the fine for lost parking revenue. In September, Jaeger attorney Mike Sherman said that the building had been under contract to an undisclosed investor since early August.

In an email, Jaeger said that the city's comments about demolition create an additional challenge for the sale of the property and "send the wrong message."

Jaeger said the buyer is still hoping to move forward with the purchase but is facing financing challenges.   

"If demolished, I believe the sites will become a surface parking lot and it is highly unlikely that those sites will ever be developed," he wrote, referring to Plaza Tower and another property he owns on the dirty dozen list, the Canal Street Hotel. He said that the Plaza Tower has been secured with netting at a cost of $1.5 million.

Anyway, as we've noted many times now, the Twentieth Century is over.  And there's a feeling that the little world we made out of the swamps is returning there soon.

Why does Tim Temple hate Metaire?

Louisiana's next Insurance Commissioner is preparing to ascend to that office next year without having had to campaign for it.  No one ran against him for the open seat (Jim Donelon decided he didn't want it anymore) and so voters haven't really had to think about him much yet.  Would you like to meet him now? His name is Tim. 

Hailing from DeRidder, Tim Temple has been working in the insurance industry for 20 years, with the last 13 years of that as an insurance executive, like his father did before him. There is really little to remark upon about his resume – he was presumably very successful in these ventures, donating nearly $2 million to his two campaigns (about $900,000 in 2019 and $950,000 this year). But otherwise, he seems to be a case of an insurance man interested in becoming The Insurance Man.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to know about Temple is that he also served as the chairman and president of the Committee of 100. While that may sound like a secretive organ of the Chinese Communist Party, it is in fact just another “good government” business and industry nonprofit group that advocates for “economic development.” But it is a useful context; Temple is not some wealthy political outsider who has elbowed his way into power over the wishes of the usual interests. He is firmly enmeshed in that crowd, and has simply ascended from “interested party” to decision maker.

And he has begun to lay out the sort of agenda you might expect from someone running in those circles. Temple’s main solution to Louisiana’s insurance market woes? A special session early next year, to push more deregulation, more tort reform, and more incentives for competition.

Our state is one of several right now that exist on the front lines of an acute insurance crisis. Fewer insurers are willing to write affordable policies in the places seen as most obviously vulnerable to climate change. There's an air of inevitability to that. But the shape of the crisis, though, and the shoulders that bear the worst of its costs are all entirely the result of policy choices. Political leaders at the state, local, national and international levels consistently move to outsource climate to private finance.

 

The least powerful individual victims of the system are purposefully left to absorb the consequences. 

Energy bills in New Orleans are rising at the fastest rate in almost two decades, and outpacing increases in the rest of the country.

Despite living in one of America’s most climate-vulnerable and poorest cities, it is still almost impossible for low-income residents such as Jones to reduce their “carbon footprint”. It’s not easy making green choices when public transit options are limited, and where tax incentives for solar panels and electric vehicles have largely excluded low-income households.

“I would love to get my house weatherized. I’d consider an EV if it was affordable – or even giving up my car. But the public transit here is draconian,” said Jones, a volunteer community activist. “Tax rebates don’t help me, because I don’t file taxes. They make it so hard to do the right thing.”

Climate scientists are clear that the world must transition away from fossil fuels immediately if it has any chance of avoiding the most catastrophic climate effects.

In recent years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have pushed the notion that personal choices are to blame for the climate crisis, while at the same time lobbying for policies to ensure their products – and profits – continue to expand.

Americans in every income category have bigger carbon footprints than their counterparts in almost all other G20 nations, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) data shared with the Guardian. But carbon inequality in the US is a complex situation which for many people – particularly those on a low income – has little to do with personal choice.

Tim Temple is fine with all this.  In this interview with Stephanie Grace, he says his main goal is to deregulate the insurers. Maybe then, they will be nicer.  Actually he didn't even promise that. Here he basically says that if you expect affordable insurance rates in Metairie you are shit out of luck and it's your fault for living there

Grace: So I guess the flip side of being able to charge the rates they need is very high prices for customers — perhaps unaffordable.

Temple: It certainly can be. There seems to be an underlying current of well, it's got to be fair: If I, as a consumer, want to go and build a home in the middle of a forest that's 26 miles away from the nearest fire hydrant, or if I want to build my home on the Gulf Coast 10 feet from the ocean, that I should have some type of affordable insurance.

I mean, we don't want it to be a government-funded, socialized type of product. What it needs to be is if you want to exercise your right to build where you are legally allowed to build, then you have to know upfront it may cost you more to build that house on the Gulf Coast than it does to build it in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Grace: When you're talking about the Gulf Coast, are you talking about down in the marsh, or in, say, Metairie?

Temple: Metairie, you can argue, is dang near the Gulf Coast. If you've ever flown into the New Orleans airport, you know that. Again, the concept is to create an environment where companies can come in and be treated at least not any worse than Texas or Florida treats their companies.

Metaire. People shouldn't live there.

You are required to vote again for some reason

Here is your AG guide in case that helps.

I can't say much about what's on the ballot today other than this. 

1) The Republican candidates are all going to win the remaining statewide offices. Murrill winning Attorney General is particularly troubling because that will green light a lot of the coming monkey business that Jeff Landry is about to throw at us. Republicans holding the Sec of State office would be a problem in the Presidential election if Louisiana were at all in play. It could still be an issue as struggles over voter registration and access in New Orleans become more of an issue.  It often doesn't matter who the Treasurer is. But John Fleming will figure out how to be a bad one. For example, if Landry wants to keep attacking the city via the bond commission, Fleming won't stand in his way. Anyway, there's nothing anyone can do about any of that at this point. Go vote against the bad guys. But they are going to win today.

2) There are some runoffs in legislative races still pending. Locally the new District 23 in Mid-City is on some of your ballots. Like a lot of things this cycle, the field attracted by that brand new open seat was disappointing. All of the candidates were either empty retreads from among the usual suspects or clueless novelties. The remaining two are one of each of those. Pick your poison. 

3) All four of the constitutional amendments are basically bad. At least if number 2 passes, it doesn't actively harm anything. But I'd vote against it anyway. There are also some of those private security districts up for renewal in a few neighborhoods. None of those should exist. 

In any case, the news is bad. It's all bad. But here we are. The 2020s have not been a fun time for anyone anywhere. In Louisiana, they're about to become more difficult. We'll start working on what to do about all that next year. 

But for now, just be careful out there. 

Groundhog Mitch

Will he see his shadow this time?

All of this has the chattering class wondering if another Democrat should pick up the mantle. A half-dozen recently published lists of possible candidates — should Biden withdraw — all include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 41, who retains support among younger voters; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, 52, who won a state that backed Trump; California Gov. Gavin Newsom, 56, who has money, popularity and a growing national profile; and Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, who is the first woman in history to hold that office and is arguably the default choice.

So: What about Landrieu?

He has spent the last two years traveling tens of thousands of miles around the country. It's a role that has involved helping state and local officials, of both parties, quickly navigate the bureaucracy to get the federal money to start often long hoped-for infrastructure projects — not a bad launching pad for a campaign.

Of all the speculative lists of possible Biden replacements, Landrieu, 63, was mentioned in only one, in what amounted to a footnote.

While Landrieu has given no indication he's interested — and there's no way he could do so right now, without sabotaging Biden — five years ago he was openly flirting with a run.

 Back then, Landrieu said he would never challenge Biden, and presumably that rule still applies.

Okay, well, consider the appearance of this article an "indication he's interested."  That's how this sort of thing works. Mitch was extremely close to doing it last time around.  Like, really close. A media whisper campaign had been dropping his name into the rumor mill as early as 2017. By mid-2018 the whisperers were clearing their throats and speaking more loudly.  It came so close, in fact, that Mitch's  friends at the Bayou Brief  even coordinated an announcement day campaign puff feature that got posted prematurely and then quickly taken down.  I happened to see it come across the RSS and read it in the meantime. I hope everyone involved is still embarrassed. 

Anyway today's article doesn't mention this but we read a few weeks ago that Mitch's former deputy mayor and longtime political operative Ryan Berni has taken a job working for Biden 2024.   In 2020 Berni was one of several familiar soulless Louisiana Democratic Party professional assholes who ended up collecting a few checks from the money bomb set off by former New York City Mayor/billionaire Michael Bloomberg's spectacular failure of a campaign flame out. One assumes they were all available to jump on board with Bloomberg because their schedules were cleared for Mitch.

Four years later there's an incumbent Democratic President on the slate. That's where all the dirty money is. And so that's where characters where Berni are going to be. For now, anyway. But that Democratic President is looking shakier every day.  And maybe some of that money is looking for other places to go. The appearance of fresh rumors in the press would indicate someone is at least hedging bets on it.

Fun years ahead

It appears Gov-elect Landry will abandon @LouisianaGov current plan/path to be carbon neutral by 2050. Says everything he’s read shows carbon neutral policies ‘extremely destructive’ to economy’ #lagov #lalege

— Greg Hilburn (@GregHilburn1) November 15, 2023

 

And, as we've pointed out many times and in many ways,  the state's carbon goals, such as they are, are not sufficient to the problem. Remarkably, all Jeff has to do is run with the same program JBE is leaving behind, and there will be plenty money to be made poisoning the environment and sinking the coast.  In fact, it's likely we're going to see very little substantive change. But the hooting and braying about it will be turned up several levels. Maybe that's better than John Bel's lying pretense that we can keep burning gas all over the place and still care about the climate if we pretend the carbon capture boondoggles actually work. Or maybe it doesn't matter.

Looks like maybe the "making amends" step?

Or maybe something else is going on. Anyway, here is Karen Carter Peterson, still serving a prison sentence for defrauding the state Democratic Party, asking the state to take back one of the last public-private partnership schemes she signed off on before the downfall.  

In early 2022, shortly before she resigned her post amid a federal investigation into her embezzlement of Democratic Party and campaign funds, state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson helped earmark $7 million in state funds for the Odyssey House in New Orleans to create southeast Louisiana’s first residential gambling treatment center.

More recently, less than seven months into her 22-month prison sentence, Peterson was moved from a minimum-security camp in Dallas to a re-entry facility in New Orleans, and she quickly became a central figure in the project. She is now pushing to get the state money moved from Odyssey House, a nonprofit, to the Metropolitan Human Services District, a state-run entity.

Peterson, who is working as an advisor to the Davillier Law Group, says she believes the Human Services District, which gets state money annually for gambling treatment services, is better equipped to stand up the facility.

Peterson goes on to say she "has no financial role in the project."  And we have to assume that is true... now. At the time she approved the earmark? Who knows. Since that time, a lot has changed. Peterson is where she is and the real estate deal Odyssey House had in mind isn't looking viable anymore for some reason not quite given. 

For its part, Odyssey House, which runs treatment centers around the state, raised concerns about the proposal last week, with its CEO saying he wasn't given a rationale for transferring the money. Peterson and the Louisiana Department of Health have asked Odyssey House to sign off on transferring the funds through a mid-year transfer process that requires buy-in from area lawmakers and all parties involved in the transaction. 

But on Monday, Ed Carlson, CEO of Odyssey House, said his board has decided to go along with the request and sign off on the deal. (Note: The deal signed off on here is Odyssey House giving the money back)

Carlson said Peterson approached him about the project ahead of the 2022 legislative session. She put the nonprofit in touch with a real-estate agent to look at a building, but it wasn’t suitable for the project, he said. With most of the money still not available, Odyssey House has so far been unable to move forward, he said.

Carlson said he found out only a few days ago that Peterson and the LDH wanted to see the money transferred to the Human Services District — a division of the LDH. He said no one had discussed it with him beforehand. 

"At this point, we just want to get as far away from this as possible," Carlson said Monday.

Anyway whatever the original plan was is in the trash now.  We'll never know who was kicking what back to whom.  One footnote that didn't get mentioned in the article is Ed Carlson was the third candidate in this year's bizarre and acrimonious District 91 race for State Rep.  For some reason, he still thought he needed friends in Baton Rouge as late as this fall.  Interesting.

Bus nap

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

Anyway I thought this was funny. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot streak

 Always nice to be thought of as a global leader. 

The last 12 months were the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and New Orleans had the second-longest streak of days with extreme heat across the world, a new study found. 

Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate change and energy issues, released the study to the public on Thursday and looked at major cities across the globe that had long streaks of extreme heat.

Houston had the longest streak with 22 days, and the extreme temperatures lasted in New Orleans for 17 days. The Crescent City tied with Jakarta and Tangerang in Indonesia, according to the study.

Can't say we haven't earned it.  Everyone knows well the amount of Louisiana's public capital and natural resources are sacrificed each year to make the demon live. Today The Lens highlights only one recent example. 

Now, a new industrial operation is taking shape in the unincorporated community of Port Sulphur, which remains a working-class, rural area. The silhouette of Venture Global’s colossal LNG gas-export terminal looms over the surrounding marsh, visible from miles away to cars driving downriver from New Orleans on Louisiana Highway 23.

When the plant is finished, natural-gas-fired turbines will supercool gas down to -260 degrees Fahrenheit to turn it into a liquid 1/600th its original volume that can be shipped overseas. But at this point, it’s still in progress, a 630-acre construction site, with tower cranes and 130-foot storage tanks peeking over its walls. 

Venture Global did not respond to questions about its terminal under construction in Plaquemines Parish. Once complete, it’s expected to employ 300 operational workers, according to Board of Commerce and Industry meeting notes. 

Those 300 jobs are subsidized to unbelievable levels, thanks to the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP), a state tax-incentive program for manufacturers, created with the goal of luring jobs to Louisiana. 

For its local payroll of a few hundred workers, Venture Global’s ITEP abatement over a 10-year period totals $834 million, said Erin Hansen of Together Louisiana, which monitors ITEP incentives and jobs created. 

That works out to $2.8 million in tax breaks per Venture Global job, Hansen said.

During the campaign, Jeff Landry (sort of) led the public to believe that he would let John Bel's rather moderate limits on ITEP remain in place.  We'll see how that plays out.  I do have my doubts.

3-D Spidermans

Amusing bit from this past weekend's T-P politics round up.  The issue at hand here is the ongoing legal dispute between the mayor and the city council over who gets to pass around Wisner trust money to whose patrons. The council's position is that the mayor is "wrongfully handing over city money to private parties." And that is, of course, true. But the only reason the councilmembers are so hot to challenge her on this is because, in their estimation, wrongfully handing over city money to private parties is supposed to be their job. 

Really, both sides are kind of right. Ordinarily they all work together to figure out all the spoils. But lately nobody at City Hall is getting along with anyone else. When that happens the little understandings that normally obtain start to break down and the system can no longer function. For instance...

Below the surface, the case involves a more fundamental question: Can the council sue the mayor, as an independent component of city government?

No, it cannot, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled in June, a decision that is now before the Louisiana Supreme Court. Before that is settled, however, the council is trying a new tactic, one that will test its power in a different way.

The council on Thursday voted to order the City Attorney’s Office to make the city a plaintiff in the lawsuit, even though city lawyers have already made arguments on Cantrell’s behalf. The strategy is to pre-empt any dismissal based on the council’s lack of authority to independently sue the mayor. And the result, if it works, will be a spectacle: a mayoral administration suing a mayor. Might New Orleanians have the privilege of witnessing one city lawyer arguing against another in open court? Seems highly unlikely, but one can dream.

The headline for this column makes reference to the Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman meme but doesn't explain the joke in the text of the article. On the one hand, it's refreshing to see the T-P assume even a minimal degree of sophistication in its readers. On the other hand, maybe some clarification is in order. We're pretty sure they mean the two Spidermen here are the hypothetical dueling city lawyers. But they could also be every councilmember and the mayor pointing at each other in every direction as well. Maybe it's all of that.

Imagine if everyone could do this

During the record heat wave of summer 2023, Entergy and Sewerage and Water Board denied City Council requests to suspend utility shut-offs for New Orleanians behind on their exorbitant (and often inaccurate) bills. 

Advocates for utility customers say the number of households vulnerable to losing electricity and water has grown in recent years as heat waves, gas prices, hurricanes and rate hikes have made it harder for New Orleans residents to keep up with their utility bills.

“Folks are absolutely struggling,” said Jesse George, policy director at the Alliance for Affordable Energy. “We were getting calls on a weekly basis from people struggling with outrageous bills.”

Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, said that energy bills have been a major part of the city’s housing affordability crisis, and that high utility bills are starting to impact more people.

“I’m hearing from people who don’t normally struggle with their bills, which is never a good sign,” Morris said.

According to that article, during the summer there were something like 24,000 accounts considered "delinquent" by S&WB 1,100 of which were facing disconnection. Meanwhile, Entergy is a little more shifty with its numbers. But one out of five accounts behind on bills seems like a lot.

It is harder to pin down how many Entergy New Orleans customers are vulnerable to shutoffs. Customers owe $6.2 million in electric bill debt and $639,000 in gas bill debt, according to numbers the company provided to the council in late August. But neither the council nor Entergy provided any estimate on the number of customers in debt to the company.

Entergy executives did tell the council in Dec. 2022 that 36,000 customers — roughly one in five New Orleans accounts — had entered deferred payment plans to keep up with bills they couldn’t afford in 2022 alone.

This week we also learned that Entergy bills are higher than they've ever been for most New Orleanians. Perhaps not coincidentally, so are Entergy profits. 

At the same time as bills have reached historic highs, so have dividend payments to Entergy shareholders. Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corp., has paid out $3.2 billion in shareholder dividends since 2020. 

Burke and other advocates have long warned that the company has effectively shifted most of the risk of the business onto the shoulders of customers, who have to deal with erratic bills while shareholders enjoy steady, rising profits.

In any case, it's a lot of people who Entergy just figures it can ignore repeatedly. 

And then there's this story.  

The lights are back on at Saint John and the French Quarter restaurant is planning to reopen, marking a swift turnaround from just a day before.

Thursday afternoon chef/owner Eric Cook announced that Saint John was closed "indefinitely" amid a dispute over an Entergy bill for $40,000 that resulted in the restaurant's power being disconnected.

In a statement released Thursday, and in a subsequent interview, Cook described the decision to close as a culmination of frustrations with doing business in New Orleans, and the Entergy billing dispute as the last straw.

However, Cook said Friday that after a morning meeting with representatives from City Councilmember Helena Moreno's office, he heard from Entergy that power to the restaurant at 1117 Decatur St. would be restored while he and the utility work through the billing issue. Moreno sits on the City Council's Utilities, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology Committee, which oversees the council's responsibilities as regulator of Entergy New Orleans.

And so there you have it.  If you want to be heard fairly by Entergy, you should simply own your own restaurant and have enough reach to get enough people mad on the news.  Why doesn't everybody do that?

Ghost meter

 While we're on the subject of Entergy today. 

Chef Eric Cook opened his French Quarter restaurant Saint John two years ago with an aim to showcase traditional New Orleans cooking. Today he announced he’s closed the restaurant “indefinitely” in exasperation over the city’s leadership and its utility providers.

In a statement, Cook said Entergy New Orleans cut power to Saint John, at 1117 Decatur St., over a bill for $40,000. Cook claims this bill is for “a ghost meter that they cannot even determine its location on the property.”

That's a shame. I do sort of expect maintaining a meter that tells you how many ghosts are in the restaurant would be kind of expensive. At the same time, though, I thought that's what the big Varg piece on the wall of the dining room was for.

You are the resilience plan

This is a comprehensive study of Entergy rates going back 20 years by Verite's Michael Isaac Stein. If you've been thinking your bills are higher than they've ever been, then, yes, you are correct. In the last year, alone, the average annual bill in New Orleans is up by 60 percent. The article also points out the City Council is poised to approve an additional 20 percent hike for "resilience upgrades." 

We've been on this horse for a while now. See here and here for some relatively recent posts about this. But, long story short, the main thrust of Entergy's "resilience" strategy is to shift the growing costs of climate change down to its captive ratepayers while investors and executives continue to reap extraordinary profits. You pay more for everything; that's the resilience strategy in a nutshell.  The Verite article shares comments from several parties who also make this point well. 

Some Entergy critics argue that there is also a broader and more simple reason bills are rising so fast — Entergy is favoring its shareholders over its customers. 

“Entergy’s mission is to enrich shareholders, so it’s a contributing factor for certain,” Harden said. “It’s about trapping New Orleans residents to ensure we’re always paying high bills, a cycle of billing we have no control over.”

At the same time as bills have reached historic highs, so have dividend payments to Entergy shareholders. Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corp., has paid out $3.2 billion in shareholder dividends since 2020. 

Burke and other advocates have long warned that the company has effectively shifted most of the risk of the business onto the shoulders of customers, who have to deal with erratic bills while shareholders enjoy steady, rising profits.

“Why should only residents be the ones who suffer as a result of climate change and international markets?” Burke said. “Why should people, especially in cities like New Orleans where a vast percentage of our population is in poverty, be holding up these Fortune 500 companies and their shareholders who are insulated from every risk at every turn? I don’t think there’s any world in which that is just or equitable.”

Why should the poorest and least powerful shoulder the burdens of maintaining capital through a global disaster? The short answer is, because that's always been how it's done.  Shifting the inevitable risks of climate change onto the most vulnerable is at the heart of US industrial policy now. You are the resilience plan. Your blood and your bones. It's not going to stop, either. Verite pulls a quote from Monique Harden for its headline that is apt enough here. There's simply "no end in sight" for the costs we're going to endure.

Holiday spirits are up

 It's right around the corner. Have you sent your emails to Santa yet? I think this guy got the wrong address.

Schofield, 76, was charged late Monday in a bill of information, typically a sign that a defendant has signed a plea deal and will cooperate with the government. Schofield's lawyer, Steve London, declined to comment.

Federal authorities in April secured a guilty plea from the restaurateur, Fouad Zeton, and assuming Schofield pleads guilty, prosecutors are expected to take aim at their next target, New Orleans police officer Christian Claus. Claus, a seven-year veteran of the NOPD and a former lawyer who also hails from Nevada, has been on desk duty since at least December, when news broke that he was the subject of the investigation.

Claus is described clearly but not named in the documents, instead referred to as "Individual A," in keeping with Justice Department policies that frown on defaming people in court documents who have yet to be accused of crimes. Schofield is accused of sending Claus an email that "misrepresented [his] honest assessment of the appraised art's value."

Somebody's already made a list of naughties, anyway. I wonder who this is. 

Court documents in Zeton's case say that Claus was to receive a kickback from the proceeds resulting from the false insurance claim. In addition, prosecutors alleged that Zeton had promised to use his influence with “a high-ranking NOPD official” to get Claus better posts and promotions. It’s unclear who that official is, or whether Zeton or his friend ever attempted to help Claus.

Ghouls and goblins

Governor-elect Landry's transition team is populated with all of the infamous figures you might expect to see. You've got your Grigsbys and your Bollingers and whatnot. There are other things you might expect.  An oil company lawyer will chair the Coast & Environment committee, a charter school guy will chair a K-12 education group.  I also see there's a committee chaired by Gray Stream. That's an interesting character we highlighted last month as well. 

Lane Grigsby will be in charge of something called a "Constitutional Reform" committee which is itself a whole 'nother can of worms we've been trying not to have to open for quite some time, primarily because of some issues we brought up on election night. 

Anyway, I'm linking back to old posts here because we're about to get swallowed up by some monsters that I, like a lot of people, have been warning about for a long time. You might say we're practically haunted. Not sure what anyone can do about it now. After all, the exorcist was two governors ago.

Louisiana's Privatized Utility King

We flagged this a few years ago. Jim Bernhard is slowly building himself a little public utilities empire through his new-ish private equity firm. Today we learn he's about to add a pretty big piece to that. 

Entergy Corp. is selling its natural gas distribution business to Baton Rouge-based Bernhard Capital Partners, part of a broader strategy shift that if approved by regulators will mean a new gas provider for tens of thousands of Louisiana homeowners.

Entergy officials announced the $484 million deal on Monday and said they hope to finalize the sale in mid-2025.

In an email to customers, Entergy executives said there would be no immediate changes to gas service or bills for their roughly 200,000 customers in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

“We will work with our customers, regulators and Bernhard Capital to ensure a smooth transition and minimize any inconvenience,” read the message, which was signed by Entergy Louisiana CEO Phillip May and Entergy New Orleans CEO Deanna Rodriguez. They promised to provide additional information “in the months ahead.”

"Hot commodity"

 Your District Attorney is doing a little forcible real estate flipping. 

The structure is one of three surviving buildings from the Storyville district, according to a 2022 City Planning Commission report. It once housed seminal jazz clubs Frank Early Saloon and My Place Saloon.

In 2019, the location at 1210-1216 Bienville Street was cited for demolition by neglect by the Historic District Landmarks Commission. The case remains open and the $3,075 fine unpaid, according to public records.

Williams described the historic property as a "hot commodity," though its future is murky. Williams said he'd like to see it house fresh produce for sale to the neighborhood. David Abbenante, president of HRI Management, developer of the abutting, mixed-income Bienville Basin Community apartments, said the impact of the market's closure is just beginning.

Civil asset forfeiture is a controversial practice that has been banned in four states. Louisiana's laws are among the ripest for abuse in the nation, according to the libertarian Institute for Justice, which gave the state a D+ grade.

Williams, throughout his career in politics, has been rolling in contributions from developers.  Here's a brief taste from the 2020 Antigravity voter guide, for example. 

Williams has received money from charter school supporter Leslie Jacobs, a point of concern if ending the school-to-prison pipeline truly is a goal, as Williams states. (For a more thorough look at how and why charter schools directly serve the school-to-prison pipeline, revisit our introduction to the school board races in our previous guide.) Williams has also received money from notorious real estate developers Pres Kabacoff and the Motwanis. “Development” and policing go hand in hand, and New Orleans is no stranger to the trend.

Spooky Season Reading

The older I get, the more I find myself becoming a creature of ritual. I don't know why, exactly. I think it has to do with wanting to mark the accelerating passage of the year. At my age, it can slip by almost completely unnoticed if you don't make a special effort to feel it happen. This requires us to participate in the seasons; make the gumbo when the weather turns cold, eat the king cake on Jan 6... wait, are these all gonna be food?  

Maybe not all of them. I'm also in the habit of trying to find the best spooky books to read during this time every year. That's easier said than done. So much horror in books and movies turns out to be trash. It's easy enough to be grossed out by cheap schlock. (And hey sometimes that's exactly what we're in the mood for!) But, like I said, I'm doing these rituals for the sake of.. I dunno... spiritual communion with the season, or something like that. The good Halloween books are more atmospheric than shocking. In the best ones you might even find something profoundly moving.

This October I read six spooky books covering a wide variety here of style, of form and of audience.  There are picture books for children, a graphic collection for teens, as well as some fiction for adults. Anyway, here's list. 

The Skull by Jon Klassen (2023)

Klassen might be my favorite children's author and illustrator.  A girl runs away into the woods. We aren't told why, exactly. She comes to an abandoned house where she befriends a disembodied skull. The skull can talk. It can move a little bit. It can even taste the food and drink the girl feeds it. Or at least it politely says that it can. Like the girl, though, the skull is also hiding from something it will need her help to escape. Klassen's re-telling of this folk tale is, I think, about processing trauma and what it means to choose your own family. The illustrations are lovely and the text is imbued with his trademark existential wit.

How To Sell A Haunted House by  Grady Hendrix (2023)

There's a lot to like in this novel it but it was maybe a little too much TV melodrama for me. The title says, haunted house, but really this is a haunted doll story. A single mother is a tech engineer in Silicon Valley when she learns that her parents way back home in Charleston have suddenly died. This requires her to fly across the county and settle the estate with her estranged fuck-up of a brother. What ensues then is a plot where unfinished family issues must be confronted and secrets... um... unearthed. Drama tropes and horror tropes abound.  Still, it's clever and even a little funny in spots and there are some interesting ideas in it about art and performance and memory.

In The Dark by Kate Hoefler (2023)

This is a picture book about community and acceptance of outsiders. Pages depict alternating points of view between villagers witnessing a mysterious group of newcomers (witches?) to the nearby woods and a competing narrative told by the newcomers themselves. The brief text and gorgeous pictures make this a great read aloud. 

A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories Edited by Richard Z. Santos (2023) 

Mostly a collection of sketches, many of them quite short. Some compelling ideas, though. Does a hurricane leave ghosts in its wake? Is an aging couple stalked by El Chupacabra or the idea of death? Is the noise next door La Llorona or an even more terrifying reality? Little evocative ideas are often better than drawn out novels in this genre.

Through The Woods by Emily Carroll (2014)

This graphic collection was recommended to me on Bluesky after I began a thread of these. The stories here have moody elements of folk tales and Victorian gothic. Much like the short story sketches in "Night of Screams" these vignettes are evocative pieces to read at night. Both of those books were great for Halloween mood setting. 

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan (2023)

A not-too-distant future Toronto is falling apart. Its physical and social infrastructure are neglected and rotting away amid the forces of capitalism and climate change. Gig workers and civil servants struggle to keep heads above water (often literally as street floods and sinkholes proliferate.) At the top of the precarious social order, a territorial battle is taking place between a corporation in charge of a "smart cities" style privatized district and an old line set of real estate developers trying to maintain family legacies. 

The titular "Marigold" tower is one such legacy. Permitted, we learn, through a ritualistic boardroom gathering of oligarchs somewhat reminiscent of a Comus ball and built, in accordance with custom, on top of a literal human sacrifice, the building is a manifestation of the city's longstanding way of doing business. One of Sullivan's characters describes it this way.

"They would say they aren't monsters. The system works out, so their hands are clean. In the past, people were walled into these places alive. Now when they do it, they'll say it's humane. These people don't care, and they want you to not care either. Everything you own comes from bodies and blood, one way or another. Your phone. Your clothes. The good things you have are primarily drawn from the misfortune of others. Blood, sweat, tears. All of it literal."

In the face of the economic and climate crisis, though, the condo development, like the entire city, is failing. Meanwhile, a mysterious mold is growing out of the ground where all this blood and exploitation was sewn and is beginning to threaten everyone. 

The Marigold is set in Toronto but I kept thinking about New Orleans.  You could probably insert any city into this narrative. For example, it was hard not to read this novel without thinking of the conglomeration of private real estate developers, university boards, and tax exempt non-profits in control properties like Charity Hospital. 

Nearly five years after a team of developers was selected to bring Charity Hospital back to life, the landmark building's renovation is at least two years behind schedule and in need of more money to get the project back on track.

Officials involved with the project have recently brought in a new developer to help jump start the renovations, which have seen delays due to the pandemic and soaring construction costs.

According to one person familiar with the project's financing, the costs have risen to well north of $500 million from around $300 million two years ago.

The image of a city's social elite literally building their wealth on top of the bodies and bones of the poor comes further into focus with this macabre bit I remembered from having read Kathryn Olivarius's Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom last year.

If we were to travel back in time to October 1833, when John Wyeth was digging mass graves, and sat in the Cabildo's public gallery to listen to the deliberations of New Orleans's city council, we might not realize that the city was in the grips of its worst yellow fever epidemic in a generation. We would hear detailed discussions concerning the oyster shells being used to pave a new road out to Lake Pontchartrain; debates about city attorney salaries; estimates for the amount of wood needed for a flying bridge; and fights about the cost of lantern oil for the cotton exchange. Across the road in the mayor's office, the conversation might center on city finances or the schedule of the city guard. There would be little to no discussion about the horrific situation at the Charity Hospital less than a mile away, where unclaimed corpses baking under the sun outside had recently exploded. Nothing either about the roughly 300 immigrants around the corner in Marigny who had just died from yellow fever. 

The elite culture of apathetic fatalism ran deeper than silence. New Orleans's city fathers actively avoided discussing yellow fever, even at the height of epidemics, instead preoccupying themselves with finances, zoning, and parochial matters like bread weights. Aldermen considered it a poor use of political capital to seek out means to resolve or ameliorate disease. Some believed the fatal status quo was intractable and that there was nothing to be gained by raising controversial topics like quarantine, which did little but produce shouting matches and inflame the ire of businessmen. Others were weary of discussing disease which inevitably morphed into conversations about other sensitive issues like taxes, regulation or immigration

There's much in Olivarius's book about Yellow Fever that foreshadows the political response to COVID, no doubt. But the larger point, I think, is illustrated in Sullivan's novel, where the fundamental issue, as always, comes down to who decides who gets what, no matter the circumstances, and the futility of thinking that those fundamentals could ever change. As one of his protagonists concludes, "It didn't matter what you knew. The future was owned by someone else, someone bigger than you, someone or something that didn't even pay taxes." 

Anyway, Happy Halloween.  I suppose it was the spirit of this real estate horror novel that inspired this year's Jack-O-Lantern.  I give you, Joe Jaeger's Crumbling Plaza Tower of Terror.

 

And one more passage from Sullivan describing what's going on with one of his characters whose family has parlayed its wealth from slumlording into luxury condo development.

Another revenue stream, another way to maximize return on tragedy. A building wouldn't do anymore. The very act of holding onto a property was immoral. He reconciled himself to that years ago, welcomed his role as the villain. To be an owner, to be a landlord, meant someone had to be subjugated. The other developers who talked around those facts were kidding themselves, doing their best put some polish on an ancient profession. Humans couldn't survive without a roof over their head. A building gave you more time, sometimes decades. To deny anyone that, well, you'd need to be a monster, wouldn't you?