Crown jewels

City Council is adding staff to its in-house utilities regulatory office (CUNO). The idea is to give the council more directly accountable agency in its oversight of Entergy instead of outsourcing that function entirely to consulting firms. The consultants aren't being replaced. This is more about CUNO having more of a policy voice. Currently it has practically none.

“What’s unprecedented about New Orleans … is that they outsource everything,” utility industry attorney Scott Hempling told The Lens in March. “I’m not aware of any place that has any resemblance to that paucity of internal expertise and the near total dependence on outside expertise. No place.”

Instead of having zero input, the council is now aiming to have some. 


But, while more direct regulatory engagement from the democratically accountable council is a welcome shift in the right direction, that's not all that's going on here. The consulting contracts, at a combined $7 million, are some of the biggest that city councilmembers can award to anybody. And this article suggests that these moves now could mean the next time the contracts come up for bid they won't automatically default to the same two firms who have held them contracts for almost 40 years. The contracts are up for bid in 2021. As it happens, that is also when the councilmembers are up for reelection.

Sooo, well you can see where this is going.

Moreno is not the first council member to push for change. Notable predecessors include Shelley Midura, Stacy Head and Susan Guidry. Those former council members told The Lens earlier this year that the consultants were able to keep their positions in part due to political connections and contributions.

“Certainly, politics come into play,” Head said. “And these advisers have been skilled at making sure they have alliances that will benefit them in keeping relationships with council members and getting their contracts renewed.”

Another former council member, Oliver Thomas, told The Lens that because the utility committee was responsible for assigning the bulk of the council contracts’ value, it was traditionally seen as politically powerful.

“When you talk about a crown jewel committee, that’s probably the most influential council committee,” said Thomas, who was chair of the utility committee from 2006 to 2007. “That’s where you can raise money. And more importantly than being able to raise money, that’s where you place your relationships and where you can help people who are trying to get involved in that particular industry. So that’s a plum jewel.”

Anyway if you're interested in following the next citywide election cycle, you'll want to pay attention to Dentons' and Legend's campaign contributions as well as those of their potential competitors.

Every emergency is an opportunity

No, we're not talking about Sewerage and Water Board just yet. But we'll get to it. There's a lot of emergencies to keep track of. Meanwhile, back at the Hard Rock site, the developers charged with demolishing the mess they've made there want to also knock down three more buildings in the process. Is it absolutely necessary for them to do this?  They haven't explained that yet. But it does look like it would be beneficial to them either way.

There’s also a worry that the developers might benefit from knocking down the buildings, since it would leave a large vacant parcel that could be sold or redeveloped to recoup the mounting costs of the collapse.

“All of that is a matter of speculation, but it certainly would result in a larger parcel for redevelopment and no assurance on what would be put back there,” Lott said.

There is a review process that goes through HDLC and then through other bodies including the City Council with probable input from the mayor.  But often these sorts of things get expedited during an "emergency." 

Actually it adds zing to the barbecue sauce

They say he had no use for it but I don't think they know.

Horn, a Saints standout and fan favorite who retired from the NFL after the 2007 season, admitting paying off co-defendants Vanover and Caldwell and others who helped him submit the false claims, according to court records.

Among those claims was reimbursement for a $52,000 cryosauna, a machine that uses nitrogen vapor to create freezing temperatures for body therapies. But Horn didn’t need the machine and never received it, prosecutors said.

It's the quick-freeze that really locks the flavor in.



Joe Horn Barbecue Sauce. Try some on your Beefy Mac 

If you live long enough, all of your heroes become Uncle Rico, I guess.

Anyway it's a shame this happened.  NFL retirees have had to fight pretty hard to get the league to do anything at all to help with the health care costs incurred after a career in pro football destroys their bodies. Ripping that fund off, in particular, is, as they say, not a very good look.

Of course, under a nationalized single payer health care system, none of this would even matter. But that's another conversation. 

There's always more to the story

Headline says, "OMG the driver was denied a permit!"  And, admittedly, that is a problem. But it's a very large and convoluted citywide problem involving the charter school system, the legal environment under which bus companies operate in Louisiana, and several other things. The top of this Lens article covers some of it if you are looking for a quick mode of entry.

Anyway back to this un-permitted driver today.  Why was he denied a permit?

City spokesman Beau Tidwell confirmed the Hammond’s Transportation bus was driven by Chad Rodney, who had applied for a city school bus permit on Sept. 24 and was denied because he had a 2016 conviction for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. By state law, school bus drivers can’t operate within five years of such a conviction, Tidwell said.

Is that a valid reason, though? Weren't we trying to end this kind of employment discrimination against ex-offenders? I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the bus didn't crash because the driver was busy selling coke at that particular moment today. 

What do we want for our city during the brief time it has left?

Gambit asks various political players and advocacy groups what they would like to see from the Governor during the next legislative term. There are some good answers as wells as some bad ones. LaToya says some good words about some interesting topics like the LaSalle Street controversy, the public defender's office, and "rail connectivity." We should wait to hear what she has in mind for those items, though, since she also takes a minute here to thank the Governor for his help with the Fair Sham. If her solutions to the new priorities are involve more giveaways to oligarchs the way that plan did, then that's going to be a problem.

Ethan Ellestad wants the Governor to appoint better people to the Convention Center board and Superdome Commission. But he's not likely to do anything different with those patronage opportunities than in his first term.  If anything, the fact that he doesn't have a reelection campaign to worry about now could make this even worse. Appointments are more likely to reward past donors now than they are to encourage community or labor support in the future.

Ethan also talks about housing but he frames that in stark capitalist terms as an "investment."

“For the culture,” Ellestad says, “it is investing in making sure people can stay in the communities where they’re from, because they are not just the creators of the culture, which comes from working class black communities, but also they are part of the service industry, which is the backbone of the tourism industry.”

Of course we need to make sure poor and working class people are not displaced from their neighborhoods.  But to turn that question of basic human dignity into a matter of "tourism industry" benefit is demeaning.  Your right to your city isn't based on your potential commoditization as a "culture bearer." You deserve more respect than that. I've written about this before. Unfortunately Ethan Ellestad's organization has embraced this dehumanizing and exploitative rhetoric wholeheartedly. It's going to continue to be an impediment to true housing justice.

Gambit also asks for comments from GNO Inc. for some reason.  Nobody should care what they think.

If I had to pick the best comment out of all of these it would probably be this from Anne Rofles.

“New Orleans’ risk of sinking into the Gulf of Mexico is already pretty high, but it is assured if Gov. Edwards continues to allow every chemical plant, oil refinery, pipeline and gas terminal that wants to come here to come here,” says Anne Rolfes, founding director of the environmental advocacy group Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “Right now he is rolling out the red carpet for them, and New Orleans will simply not exist if he does that.”

Last week we learned that, over the past decade, the state of Louisiana, one of the most environmentally threatened places in the nation, has slashed funding for its Department of Environmental Quality more than almost any other state.

In a 10-year period marked by a dramatic increase in newly built and planned petrochemical plants in the state, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has seen its budget slashed by nearly 35 percent and its staff cut by almost 30 percent.

So says a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that terms itself an environmental enforcement watchdog.

Louisiana’s funding cut percentage ranked second among the states, tied with Texas. The state ranked fourth in the percentage of staffing cuts, with Illinois, North Carolina and Arizona seeing larger cuts of 38% to 32%, according to the report.

Meanwhile the state continues to pour millions of dollars into state subsidies for the very industries most in need of monitoring. During this year's election campaign, John Bel told us as plainly as he could that that isn't likely to change in his second term.

Edwards has suggested Louisiana can continue to embrace natural gas for “20, 30, 40 years,” as the U.S. transitions to renewable energy. “There’s going to continue to be a demand for hydrocarbons for a long time to come,” he said, adding, "We are a natural gas state." 

John Bel was just narrowly reelected specifically because New Orleans turned out to vote in record numbers.  And yet he'd prefer to go on subsidizing oil and gas production for "20, 30, 40 years" even if it means New Orleans no longer exists. Enjoy those years while you have them, I guess.

There's a car on fire*

In our excitement to identify and catalog this weekend's various unrelated disasters, we missed the flaming bus that rolled in the Jingle On The Boulevard parade.  We gather this was an unplanned bus fire despite the fact that it was there specifically to carry the "Royal Heat" dance team.  We regret having overlooked the bus fire but are happy to report it is only the second school bus immolated in New Orleans East this year that we are aware of.

Similarly this morning's flaming vehicles that caused a French Quarter block to be evacuated are not the first cars on fire to appear in 2019. Today's event is unlike the one over the summer, though, in that because it is not suspiciously coincident to any ongoing political campaigns, there is a much better chance we will actually be told how and why it happened.

Actually, we are being told that this afternoon as I am typing this.  According to WWL:

What caused a loud boom and flames to erupt from the street in the French Quarter around 5:00am?

"This morning we had a challenge in the French Quarter with the explosion and the fire," said Col. Terry Ebbert, New Orleans Director of Public Safety and Security.

He explained that officials are blaming human waste.

"It appears that we had... methane gas underground."

Where did it come from?

"That is probably is due to (the) sewage system."

One thing we have learned this year is that, whether they blast it with flames from below, disable it in a flash flood, or just suck it straight on down into the culvert, Sewerage and Water Board is coming after your vehicle one way or another.

Anyway, another day, another (literal) shitstorm.  I wonder what will explode tomorrow.

*

Day in the life

Oh boy

The Sewerage & Water Board said that an explosion occurred in one of its turbines at its Carrollton water plant Saturday afternoon, injuring two people as residents were told to stay clear of the area.

According to the tweets and such (it's BREAKING news so we can't be sure) this is Turbine 5. Last year this piece of equipment made news when it failed a test of its capacity to run on diesel fuel. At the time, SWB said that was perfectly okay, though. 

A newly repaired turbine at the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board's Carrollton Plant failed a test run using diesel on Thursday, though it is still "fully functional" when using natural gas as its fuel, the utility announced Thursday.

The Thursday test was aimed at seeing whether the repairs would allow Turbine 5 to be switched to diesel in case its main natural gas fuel supply was interrupted during a storm. But officials concluded that "additional repairs are needed" before it'll be able to switch to that backup fuel supply, according to a news release.

After the diesel test, the turbine was tested with natural gas and "continued to show strong performance," according to the release.

Anyway, today it seems to have exploded.

Before we get too carried away, though, it's important to say up front that this probably doesn't have anything to do with yesterday's "cyberattack" on city computer systems.They still have no idea what that might be related to but, apparently, we don't need any of that fancy crap anyway.

Officials said that taking the computer systems offline could result in inconvenience but that city government would continue to operate.

"One positive about being a city that has been touched by disasters ... is our plans and our activities reflect the fact that we can operate without the internet and without a city network," said Collin Arnold, New Orleans' homeland security director.

We should also clarify that, much the same as the computers are not related to the explosion, this water main break in Algiers, which happened today is unrelated to either of those things.  Nor is any of the above mention situations related at all to the other water main break happening Uptown. This is why there is a boil order in effect in Algiers but none on the East Bank.

That's a lot to keep straight, I know. Just be thankful it's a nice day outside so the power is probably not gonna go out and.. goddammit. 

meanwhile at entergy pic.twitter.com/wCsXqU50r4

— skooks (@skooks) December 14, 2019

Well if it's any consolation, this event is unrelated to the computer hacking which, again, is itself unrelated to the explosion that is unrelated to either of the unrelated water mains.

Also it turns out there is something wrong with Drew Brees's elbow. 

NEW ORLEANS — Saints Quarterback Drew Brees is on the team's injured roster, but isn't expected to sit out the Monday game against the Indianapolis Colts.

Brees was listed at the bottom of the weekly injury roster released by the team Friday. According to the report, his right elbow was injured sometime after Thursday's practice.

But just being on the injury report isn't an indicator that the QB will sit on the sidelines. The report notes he attended the full practice Friday.

It's unclear how the injury happened but if Brees practices again Saturday, he will likely start against the Colts Monday.

So that's pretty mysterious. As far as we know this is not related to the already well known problem with his thumb from earlier in the season. And at this we are practically obligated to point out that neither injury is related to any of the above mentioned infrastructure crises which can be a little bit confusing given that elbow joints do occur in both Drew Brees and in water pipes.

Honestly the best advice at this point is not to think about it too much.  Or, as a wise man once said, "Worry about your frickin meat."

Return of the Mack

The Republican caucus has voted to endorse Rep Sherman Mack to become the next Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives. That doesn't necessarily mean he will become Speaker, though. 39 Republicans voted to endorse him. But he will need 53 votes when the full House decides the matter in January. And there are other candidates.

Republicans came to Baton Rouge for a delegation meeting that was supposed to start at 9:30 a.m., but haggling over the endorsement vote delayed the start time. Mack and Schexnayder were among the candidates that gave presentations before a question-and-answer session, and Mack won 39 votes, which were cast by ballot. That was the exact number he needed to win the endorsement, as it required a two-thirds vote of those present. (Clay) Schexnayder won 17 votes, while Chalmette Republican Rep. Ray Garofalo won one vote.

“I would hope all the Republicans would get behind Sherman Mack now that he has been selected as the Republican delegation nominee,” said state Rep. Jack McFarland, of Jonesboro and one-time speaker candidate who got behind Mack in recent weeks. “That’s the purpose of having that vote.”

If Shexnayder retains his support that would mean the votes of Democratic House members will come into play. This week, John Kennedy and Jeff Landry have been urging the Republican members not to let this happen although it's difficult to imagine it will make much of a difference.  Should the speakership go to Mack or to Shexnayder or to Mack or to some compromise candidate in the event of a deadlock, the Republican agenda is pretty clear. And they all seem to be on the same page more or less. However it is worth noting that Mack is thought by the "Kingmaker" to be somewhat more on that page.

Mack, the preferred candidate of influential GOP donor Lane Grigsby, had emerged as one of two front-runners for the top post in the House, along with state Rep. Clay Schexnayder, of Gonzales. The two both offered up the exact same policy priority, tort reform, a long-held Republican priority that has recently evoked heated battles in the Legislature and in elections.

Pro-business groups and trial attorneys, who are on opposite sides of the issue, poured millions into the governor’s race and legislative elections this year. Business groups were generally successful in electing favorable lawmakers, while Edwards, a Democrat with big support from attorneys, won the governor’s race over Mack’s preferred candidate, Eddie Rispone.

Don't let John Bel's narrow escape fool you. This election was a major right wing landslide and the new legislature is going to reflect that. Whoever the new speaker is, that person's top priority will be "tort reform." Which means they will work to protect corporate entities such as polluting chemical companies or labor abusive contractors such as Citadel Builders from facing any consequences for their crimes.

Which points us to one more reason why Mack might have distinguished himself as the most Republican of this batch of Republicans. Recall that during the previous term, Mack was among the few holdouts agitating against and watering down the set of bipartisan criminal justice reforms the legislature eventually passed. So he's keen on seeing to it that the legal system punishes somebody.  But only certain somebodies.

Seems fine

Just regular doings this week.

Georgia Moving Forward With Mass Voter Purge Monday

ATLANTA — Georgia election officials are set to begin a mass purge of inactive voters from the state’s voting rolls on Monday.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being cancelled, about 4% of the state’s total registered voters. Those voters were mailed notices in November and had 30 days to respond in order to keep their registration intact.

Walter Jones, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said the purge would take place overnight Monday into Tuesday. He said the exact number and names of voters removed wouldn’t be known until then and that more information would be made available after.

 

Wisconsin Judge Orders 200,000 Voters Kicked Off Rolls Ahead Of 2020

A state judge on Friday ordered more than 200,000 voters to be kicked off of voter roles in Wisconsin ahead of the 2020 elections — just three years after President Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes.

The voters were initially listed in an October letter from the Wisconsin Elections Commission as having potentially changed addresses.  They would have been purged in 2021, but a lawsuit from the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argued the date should be pushed up to before the 2020 election, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Ozaukee County Circuit Court Judge Paul Malloy ordered the government to do so, and rejected calls from the commission and the League of Women Voters to stay his order pending an appeal, according to the Sentinel.

Looking forward to the happy new year

Is the Mosaic waste pile too big to fail?

The Mosaic mound of waste crisis is apparently over.  Although maybe someone can explain why this is the acceptable level of comfort.

The movement of the waste pile, which is about 185 feet tall and has its own nighttime warning lights for aircraft, had  raised worries early this year from state and federal regulators concerned about the integrity of a large lake inside the pile. The lake holds hundreds of millions of gallons of acidic and radioactive process water.

Regulators and the company now say the risk of a catastrophic failure and release of the water is minimal.

The movement of parts of the pile's north wall and the earth deep beneath that wall have slowed significantly after a series of emergency measures. The movement went from more than a half-inch per day to one-tenth to one-hundredth of an inch per day, on average, state reports show.

The fertilizer company had slowed production while "responding to" the wobbling wastewater lake which itself may present a problem because...

A halt in production affects the company's ability to manage the supply of the process water on site, company officials have previously said. Rainfall expands that supply while continued fertilizer production causes the water to evaporate.

Leave aside the question of whether or not it's good to just let the "acidic and radioactive" waste evaporate into the open air.  Are they telling us here that the only way to stave off environmental disaster is to make sure production doesn't shut down? 

"The street has changed and we didn't change with it"

The owners of Cafe Rose Nicaud are in their 70s now and ready to cash out. You can't really blame them for that but also it's kind of a shame. Especially so since it seems clear the space will very likely not continue as a cafe in its next incarnation.  We'll know more about what that is when we find out who is the new owner.

Melba Ferdinand, who started the cafe with husband Kenneth, said the couple, now in their 70s, are retiring.

“It’s that time for us, and just as important, the street has changed, and we didn’t change with it,” she said. “That’s not regrettable, we love what we did and how we did it.”

The couple own Café Rose Nicaud’s property, a two-story historic building near the corner of Royal Street. Ferdinand said a sale of the property is in the works, though she could not name the prospective buyer.

Which Motwani is it this time? Also how many Chicken Shacks do we think can fit on Frenchman Street if there even is a limit to such a thing?

Republicans are typically better at using power

When you just clobbered the opposition in an election, the thing to do is use the gains you have won to maximum effect. Otherwise, what will have been the point of doing the clobbering in the first place?   Louisiana Republicans clobbered their opponents in the legislative elections this year. Why would they not demand the maximum benefit of that?

The House Republican delegation meets Friday in Baton Rouge, with the speaker’s race expected to be among the top discussions. 

Negotiations with the 37 Democratic and independent members could assist a speaker candidate to reach the majority needed to win the top job. Talks across the aisle often have helped determine legislative leadership in prior terms.

But Kennedy and Landry called on Republican lawmakers to attend the Friday gathering, choose among themselves “and come up with a consensus candidate we all may rally behind to advance a conservative agenda” when the vote is held Jan. 13 with the start of the new term. 

“Whatever member is able to gather the majority of Republican votes, should be unanimously nominated and supported by our 68 members,” the two GOP leaders wrote.

They didn't have any problem freezing the Governor out of the process last time. Why would we expect them to do anything but freeze out the irrelevant Democrats now?

The Six Million Dollar Men

We now know who picked up the six million dollar contract to operate the ferries.  Linguists will ruminate for decades over the commonalities in corporatespeak nomenclature that produce trash Mcfuture names like "Transdev" (the company RTA just fired from this gig) and "Labmar" the entity who they have just hired.  Labmar is apparently a portmanteau of Laborde Marine. But it also includes these people.

Labmar, which is a joint venture made up of Laborde Marine, Circular Consulting, Royal Engineers & Consultants and MSF Global, beat out HMS Ferries, a firm based in Washington state, for the contract.

The firms' proposals and the scoring sheets from the agency's evaluations of them were not made available Monday.

There are so many Labordes to keep track of in this town. J. Peter Laborde Jr. is one scion of the Ocean Drilling-Tidewater Laborde offshore oil and support services fortune and is pretty much carrying on that Uptown family's traditional business. Royal Engineers are familiar city contractors on several projects including the Canal Street Ferry terminal so now they will be managing the boats that land there. MSF Global is the tech services company who built RTA's app.   

Anyway it looks like one result of the RTA/Metal Shark ferry debacle is a couple of RTA contractors and a classic New Orleans plutocrat get to pick up a bit of a windfall. They say in the article that it also means ferry services could be restored as early as this week.  So everybody wins, really.

I'm guessing Duck Tours?

RTA is supposed to vote this coming Monday on a charter boat operator who will provide temporary ferry service until either the broken down old boats get back up and running or Metal Shark's tin can catamarans ever pass a Coast Guard inspection.

Some of the council members like Kristin Palmer, who district includes the French Quarter and Algiers, displayed signs indicating it's been 67 days with no ferry. "The management system was flawed, deeply flawed," Palmer said. "The operations and maintenance of the ferry system has been deeply flawed. So, we're hear to get some answers."

RTA Board Chairman Flozell Daniels' agreed. "The process was managed poorly," Daniels said. "There was not as much accountability as there should have been The contractor did not do what we thing was the right job to make sure it was managed appropriately."

Daniels promised the RTA is now trying to do better for the public. Two new ferry boats, delivered about 18 months ago have yet to pass Coast Guard inspection. The $10 million vessels were supposed to replace two older boats, neither of which is currently in working condition. People who rely on the ferries to get to work are hurting.

"We've ignored the fact that this is a commuter problem," commuter Fabienne Keenum said. "This is public transportation and I and other service industry and lower income workers rely that ferry to get across."

It's good to see something being done about the "commuter problem," at least. Last week, the city seemed more focused on compensating Algiers Point business owners for our sudden inability to deliver tourists for them to cater to.  There's no doubt those businesses have suffered, of course. But for some reason the city always seems to consider workers as an afterthought. (Did you know, this week, an American city implemented fare-free transit for its riders? Can you even imagine New Orleans RTA currently helmed by a "fare enforcement" specialist considering such a thing?)

Anyway, why won't they name the charter boat operator? Obviously they have somebody in mind.  Please don't tell us we can "Ride The Ducks" across the river anytime soon. You laugh, but thinking about public transit exclusively in terms of amusement rides for tourists is exactly how Mitch Landrieu got us into the Metal Shark problem in the first place.  Here's a public post by Clark Thompson that's been making the rounds on Facebook. I assume it's okay to share here, in a different public part of the internet. He introduces it as a letter to the mayor he wrote in 2016.  Basically, the style of boat that Mitch ordered was never fit to operate on the Mississippi River.

I am not a bidder on the RTA ferry project, therefore I am late to the game, but I recently learned some details of the RFP (for some reason the document is not publicly available).

As a long time ferry user, a USCG licensed captain, a Naval Architect, a builder of aluminum boats, and a principal investigator on marine building materials for Army Research Labratory, I have grave concerns regarding this RFP.

This RFP requests a high speed, catamaran hull, fabricated from aluminum. Such a vessel is well suited to the long runs on the Hudson River, and in Sydney Harbor. Such a request flies in the face of hundreds of years of experience of operations on the Mississippi River.

First, this is a short run, and a high speed boat will have no time to get up to speed before it must slow back down. The medium speed diesel engines will not have time to blow themselves clean, and will end up running dirty. This will in turn lead to considerably higher than projected maintainence costs and downtime. Furthermore, in order to obtain the required speed, larger engines must be selected, further driving up total cost of ownership.

Second, catamarans have poor low speed manuverability. The complicated eddies on the east bank ferry landing require a highly manuverable boat. Bow thrusters are a poor substitute for a proper initial design and are another item of maintainence that will further drive up total cost of ownership and downtime.

Third, aluminum is a poor material for impact. While this lightweight material is acceptable for the garbage strewn waterways of the Hudson or Sydney Harbor, it is ill suited to the frequent impacts with whole trees, oil drums and other large debris carried by the Mississippi river. Look along the waterfront and you will find centuries of experience dictate steel as the prefered material for watercraft along the Mississippi. Only small response boats are build in aluminum here. This flawed material specification will result in a high risk of downtime for the ferry, and much higher than projected total cost of ownership.

I address this message to you as a lover of the city and the river. Our city will suffer with the impact of a bad decision on this contract for 30 years or more and it is critically important to get it right.

Please consider delaying this contract award until the RFP has been corrected to properly request a boat suitable for the Mississippi River operating environment.

We've also noted previously and repeatedly, the various concerns with the contractor itself.  I think this post has most of that in one place.  But the overriding factor seems to be that Mitch thought the catamarans were cool. So that's what he bought.  Let's hope the charter contractor is chosen according to more reasonable criteria.

So many Motwanis

You may be thinking of the different Motawanis that own all of the property in the French Quarter.  But we assure you, these Motwanis who also own all the property in the French Quarter are entirely different Motwanis. 

Though Kama Sutra’s various records list Motwani’s father, Chandru “Charlie” Motwani, as its manager, investigators determined Bobby Motwani actually operated it, the state ATC has previously said. Investigators also established that Rancifer was a club manager despite being a convicted felon who could not legally hold such a job, the ATC said.

Furthermore, the ATC said its investigators collected evidence of “solicitation of sex, lewd acts, underage alcohol sales to patrons as well as teenage dancers performing at the club.”

The ATC — which last year stepped up enforcement of a law that prohibits dancers younger than 21 from performing topless in strip clubs — suspended Kama Sutra’s liquor license on Feb. 17, and according to information online, it has closed permanently.

Kama Sutra in 2017 replaced a strip club named Babe’s Cabaret, which itself closed after drawing ATC citations during an earlier enforcement sweep. Charlie Motwani opened Kama Sutra in his own name after searching in vain for an operator to lease the vacant space.

An attorney for Charlie Motwani said earlier this year that Kama Sutra was separate and distinct from the better-known land and retail holdings of his brother Mike Motwani.

I know, I know, it's difficult to keep up.  But when our entire system is based on... *checks notes* ... the neo-feudal rights of land barons... then understanding the complex lineages of the great families becomes a fundamental civic responsibility.

Speaking of asking the council for stuff

Tomorrow, they're set to vote on the jail expansion. (Yes, it's already been rejected by CPC but City Council always has the last word on these things so tomorrow is the day.) Also please see the below post and everything we've noted about short term rentals since the city began dealing with them to get an idea as to why we don't trust these people to do the right thing ever.

And then go see them tomorrow if you can.  Here's a Twitter thread from the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition explaining what to expect if you are going.

Surely no one could have known

Apparently there was a massive run on short term rental permits just before the new rules went into effect this week. Anyone who got in under the wire is now effectively grandfathered in by right.

The final number of legal rentals could end up being significantly higher by the end of the process, however.

There’s a backlog of more than 1,000 applications that have yet to be processed, and unbuilt projects that could contain another 1,000 commercial units are still on the drawing boards and could come online years down the road.

In both cases, “they were legally allowed (at the time they applied) and will continue to be legal,” said Zach Smith, director of the Department of Safety and Permits.

The imminent approach of the new rules has brought a surge in applications. The city has issued nearly 620 licenses to residential properties since the beginning of September, and nearly 390 more applications are waiting to be reviewed.

This is, of course, exactly what affordable housing advocates said was going to happen if the city did not act to freeze the granting of new permits between the time new rules were passed and the date they went into effect. In fact this is what they chanted out loud in the city council chambers as members were debating the ordinances.  But somehow nobody could have predicted....

The only fair conclusion to draw is this is what the mayor and council wanted all along.  And now they've got what they wanted. Brand new STR hotels are coming soon to Canal Street, and to the former Charity Hospital, and to Mid City along the Lafitte Greenway. The recently passed 2020 city budget is depending on short term rentals to proliferate, in fact, in order to gain revenue via a new tax approved by voters in November.   Your elected leadership has ignored your clear objections and sold you out entirely.  Remember that next time you go to ask them for anything. They hear you just fine. But you aren't important enough to be listened to.

Apologies to the vultures, but the body has already been picked clean

Now that the body of the Kamala For President campaign has officially floated on out to sea, everybody wants to know who benefits. The immediate answer is nobody. The eventual answer might be a little bit different.

The immediate problem is there aren't very many Kamala supporters to divide up at this point. So there isn't much for any candidate to pick up now that she's gone. If Warren was the second choice among most Harris supporters as the polling seems to have indicated, most of those supporters had probably already gone over.  I wouldn't expect Warren to gain an obvious bump now that Harris is out. However it probably helps her down the road.

The game right now is about figuring out where the Biden voters are going to go after Biden inevitably implodes which is what everybody... including a lot of Biden supporters.... expects to happen at some point. Biden is the nominal front runner but his support is softer than conventional punditry suggests. It also is not monolithic. Conventional punditry assumes the majority of the voters considering Biden are "centrists" in search of a conservative Clinton style candidate but this ultimately may not be the case. Because the Biden campaign isn't really about anything besides name recognition, there are many different kinds of  Biden supporters who will end up making many different kinds of choices when the Biden campaign ends.  That doesn't mean the majority of them will land with the most ideologically comparable candidate to Joe Biden.  The Biden campaign isn't about ideology. Voters won't necessarily be drawn to their second choice for the same reasons they have been drawn to Joe.

The main reason the Biden campaign is associated with the more conservative elements of the Democratic Party has to do with its network of surrogates tied to the party power structure. Apparatchiks like Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond for example, are with Biden now because it's the professionally appropriate place for them to be. For the time being, the Biden campaign is the de-facto home of the institutional Democratic Party. A broad base of party insiders are hanging around it at the moment because it suits their personal ambition, or at least their general sense of obligation in some way. After Joe drops out, they're all free to move on, of course. But, unlike the free agent Biden voters among the general public, the party insider class is much more likely to land on a single second choice.

Early on, Kamala was a good bet to become the safe Biden replacement. She cultivated a similar appeal to conservatives and professional class Democrats. And she was never shy about courting wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists. Despite all this she never got it together for a bunch of complicated reasons. Last week's NYT feature shines a light on some of the inside baseball.  There were other problems as well with regard to the "messaging" and "positioning" that cynical political analysts like to fixate on.  But when you boil all of that down what you find is an elitist, conservative, corporate-friendly prosecutor failing to convince enough donors that she can lie her way around that effectively. When you think about it, it's pretty wild that the main idea behind Harris for President in the first place was that a lot of people liked the faces she made on TV during the Kavanaugh hearings. But then again, the current President is a game show host so who are we to say that this is any less valid as a marketing gimmick. Anyway it didn't work out.

Now that she's gone, the game is still about catching the windfall when Biden drops out. Kamala's goal was to be the obvious landing place for ex-Bidenites when the time came. But her campaign never demonstrated any growth as Kamala-curious Bidenites started kicking the tires on Warren instead. And in recent weeks, it looks like voters she might also have targeted began gravitating toward Mayor Pete.

But the bulk of the voters waiting to move are still tentatively with Biden. Which is why having Kamala out of the way is probably helpful to Warren down the road a bit. I also believe it opens up some possibilities for Bernie but nobody seems to want to hear that right now. Maybe we'll come back to that later, though.

Of course Bernie will never be the new favorite of the party insiders once Biden is out.  That is a thing that Pete and Warren are battling over behind the scenes. Expect that little campaign will only intensify now.

Coach O: "Not me, us"

Go read this ESPN feature on the undefeated LSU head coach.  I hope Coach O wins ten national titles before he's through.

"My dad always told me, 'Son, you have to do everything twice,'" says Orgeron, who called some of his former assistants to apologize. "You live and learn. If you want it bad enough, you'll change, and I always wanted to be a head coach. I wanted to be a successful head coach, and I had to try it my way first to see if it would work. In those years I was out from Ole Miss, I just wrote stuff down every day. I changed, and it was a process. ... I had to learn to be a head coach."

For starters, he says he learned to treat people better. That meant handling players as if they were his sons and treating assistants the way he'd want to be treated, with respect. If he saw something wrong, "I'd bring the coach to my office and talk to him like a man," rather than airing things out publicly.

Next, he wanted to cultivate a leadership style that wouldn't be defined by anyone's self-interest. He had seen selfishness of players and coaches creep in during his time as an assistant at USC and LSU, and vowed to create an environment where that attitude couldn't exist.

"I see myself coaching from within," he says. "I don't want to coach from above. I don't want it to be me looking down on everyone else. Na-ah. I want it to be all of us together."

The paranoid style in policing

It is a sad enough statement that we have to note this past weekend's Canal Street shooting is far from the first such incident in recent memory. It's not the first shooting to occur in a large crowd during a major event. We can easily call to mind previous similar episodes during Mardi Gras along the parade route, or during a Second Line, or on Canal or Bourbon Street during a big game or holiday weekend.  We literally hate to see it.  But we have seen a lot of it.

So we can say that it's frusrating or we can say it's depressing, but the one thing we can't say about it at all is that it is surprising. And, if we are the police, who are professionally tasked with responding to these incidents, our training and experience should prevent us from lapsing into paranoid fantasyland when they occur. And yet, here we are.

Ferguson said officers were on the scene immediately after gunshots started to ring out, as patrols had been beefed up for the game. He said that officers at first thought they were being fired upon since the shots rang out so close to them. No police officers were injured, Ferguson said.

What. Why? Why would they think that?  When, in the long sad history of gunfire breaking out in a New Orleans special event crowd, have police ever been the intended target?  It says something about the NOPD's culture that this is their first thought. It says they instinctively view the public as an enemy threat. 

Without getting off onto a tangent about the fundamental nature of policing and criminal justice as an institution of state control, let's agree, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as an equitable police department culture and that such a thing does NOT encourage an adversarial relationship with the community at large.  Accepting that premise, this reaction should be a clear warning sign that NOPD is falling alarmingly short of the standard there.