The drainage blank slate

Our new S&WB Director Ghassan Korban is a man who, much like our new CFO and our new CAO, is brand new to New Orleans and yet finds himself in a position to make very big decisions with far reaching consequences for the city where he probably will not actually spend more than 5 to 10 years at maximum.

When you are in such a position. When you aren't from here, don't have any personal ties, don't give a shit who was here before you or who can live here after you're gone it becomes very easy to just treat the whole thing like a "blank slate" that can be written over on a whim. For example, it becomes very easy to just commit everyone to a massive overhaul of the drainage system.

Three weeks into his job, the new S&WB executive director is laying the groundwork for a bold plan that would go beyond the short-term fixes and emergency repairs that have dominated the agency since well before last summer’s floods in New Orleans.

His eye is on a multiple-decade master plan that would see brand-new systems for drainage, water and sewerage — a process that would mean at least tens of millions of dollars a year in new money from residents.

“We’re at the point where replacement is the only option,” he said.

Mitch Landrieu, on his own way out the door and on to horizons well beyond the city, made the same recommendation.  He reckoned such an endeavor would run about $60 billion.   He also was not exactly shy about saying that $60 billion would come largely from regular old New Orleanians with little or no help from state or federal sources. It's lunacy to believe such a cost is bearable by the local population. The state boasts the nation's 2nd highest poverty rate and its 4th lowest median income.  The City of New Orleans is among the worst in the entire world in terms of income inequality and  is already looking at a potential $37 million budget shortfall for next year.

Simply put, there isn't enough money available to support and maintain $60 billion worth of new infrastructure.  Not unless we're willing to make a drastic shift in where our tax burden falls.  We could do a bit more if we decided to actually tax rather than subsidize the hoteliers, real estate moguls, non-profit scammers, and oil and gas polluters who draw off and hoard whatever wealth the desperate toil of Louisiana workers produces for them.  But the Mitch Landrieus and LaToya Cantrells of the world will do no such thing.  All they know how to do is squeeze the "bad actors" among the proles for every last dime they are worth only to blame their "culture of permissiveness" when the turnip fails to produce enough blood.

None of this is to say Korban and Mitch are wrong in the abstract.  A top to bottom overhaul of the city's water management system is a fine idea. In an ideal world where we don't penalize people for being poor, it would be just the thing to set to work on right about now.  But in the absence of fair and adequate funding for infrastructure, we're probably better served to keep muddling through for the time being.  Otherwise, we're stuck trying to raise the money on the Trump Administration's terms. And, as we've tried to point out previously, that is a direct path to privatization.  Maybe Korban is fine with that.  Cantrell hasn't really taken a position on it in a while.  Someone should probably ask, though. It's going to come up sooner or later.