"None of the items includes an explanation or a price tag"

The above is a line from today's T-P description of the "partial list of citywide capital projects" not quite enumerated in Ed Blakely's recovery plan. In fact the entirety of Blakely's plan.. despite yesterday's publicity event, remains a mysterious entity. So far we've learned that the city plans to "incentivize" (to borrow Donald Powell's non-word) investment in targeted zones through "$300 million going toward loans, grants and other incentives" but Blakely's plan for specifically how these funds are to be dispersed is either not publicly available.. or not made clear by this article.

It's not even entirely clear that the funding is in order.

Easily the biggest question mark hangs over the $324 million that the city suggests will come via a federal waiver of the requirement that local and state government provide a 10 percent match for federal rebuilding grants.

The source of that sum is $775 million that the Louisiana Recovery Authority has set aside to cover local matching funds for such projects. The hope among New Orleans officials is that most of that money will be filtered down to the various storm-damaged parishes, if and when the federal government approves the waiver.

Andy Kopplin, director of the LRA, said the authority's board is amenable to shifting the bulk of the $775 million toward parish recovery plans in the event of a waiver. But he said the board won't act on that until the federal government approves it.

'Not done yet'

Nagin on Thursday called the federal waiver "something that Congress is working on" that "we feel pretty good about. But it's not done yet."

While both chambers of Congress have approved a waiver as part of emergency supplemental spending bills, President Bush has all but promised a veto, in part because both bills contain language regarding withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Donald Powell, who leads the federal Office of Gulf Coast Rebuilding, reiterated Thursday that "there are no current plans to waive the 10 percent match." Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for Powell's office, added that Louisiana officials could cover the cost of the 10 percent match by tapping an $875 million state budget surplus.

"The administration seems pretty dug in on this, no matter how many good arguments are brought to them and no matter how many times Congress makes clear this is Congress' intent," said Adam Sharp, an aide to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. "I'm not optimistic."

My heavens! Read the rest of that article so I don't have to post the whole thing here. Needless to say.. it gets worse.

I think the "zones" themselves are encouraging in that they imply an effort not to leave the badly flooded areas to rot. But without specifics about who gets what money to do what with, the publication of the target zones is just not very informative.

I call it Ed Blakely's plan despite his insistence that it is a "people's plan" because if it were indeed a "people's plan" then one would expect the "czar" to be more amenable to sharing details of the plan with the people. Instead we get this

Pressed by two reporters for further details about what the areas might look like, however, the recovery chief took offense.

"I have a very clear idea" of how the zones will develop, he said. "Developers make a lot of money by getting those clear ideas early and getting the jump in the game. And that shouldn't happen in the newspaper. You're a newspaper reporter, not a developer."

Nagin, meanwhile, demurred in the face of reporters' requests for a rough timeline and a rundown of the kinds of projects that might sprout in the zones.

"I don't want to get into specific dates and specific projects with you guys because I know what you do with that: You come back later and you talk about the things that we haven't done," the mayor said.

You know, newspaper reporters may or may not be in cahoots with "developers" but there is strong evidence to suggest that the short-on-specifics mayor is. But now, with his own credibility stretched to its extremity, the mayor gets to hide behind the bizarre cult of personality developing around the ever temperamental and condescending Blakely. Shouldn't we know better than to trust bristling secretive public officials by now? Apparently not.