You might even say they went marching in

Again, this is all very much on brand for Bensonworld.

But attorneys for an alleged clergy abuse victim allege in new court filings that hundreds of emails currently under seal show the NFL franchise's higher-ups helped determine who should be included on the list, going “beyond public relations.”

The attorneys also assert that the available email exchanges show it was the Saints who went to the archdiocese first and offered their services — rather than the other way around.

The new motion, filed Thursday, purports those services included pitching “favorable stories” about the archdiocese and Archbishop Gregory Aymond to local news outlets, as well as drawing in other unspecified influential community members to help manage “the fallout” from the sex abuse crisis.

This wouldn't surprise anyone who understands the way upper crust New Orleans club stuff works. It's a broad circle of entertainers, cultural non-profits,  business jerks, tourism profiteers, media companies, political cronies, bankers and "philanthropists" who keep themselves enriched and perpetually in power at expense of the city's poor and working classes. And the key to keeping it all running is they always have each other's backs.

So, for example, because Gayle Benson puts time and money into supporting cultural non-profits like WYES, the folks there are happy to promote her various endeavors as well.  Similarly, when Gayle's and Greg Bensel's friends at the Archdiocese need a little logistical support in the PR department, of course they are happy to oblige. 

Update: I kind of think this story from this afternoon belongs in a post about the club of plutocrats who run everything. I'll explain but first, here is the story.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (WVUE) - As taxes begin to be filed for another year, the Internal Revenue Service is still trying to collect a hefty sum from New Orleans’ top-elected official.

Liens filed by the IRS show Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her husband, Jason, owe more than $95,000 in taxes. Federal tax liens have been placed on the couple for eight of the last nine tax years (2010-2015, 2017-2018).

The latest lien was filed on January 28 on the home owned by LaToya and Jason Cantrell. The IRS claims the married couple owes income taxes from 2018 totaling $19,406.99.

When I saw this my first thought was, oh of course, now that it is somewhat popular to go after the mayor in the press a little bit, they are going to pile on.  It's different now than it was before Cantrell was elected when a story on this same issue appeared in The Lens but was downplayed by most of the press herd as a political matter during election season.

But put all that aside for a second and notice this particular detail from the Lens story.

In an interview, LaToya Cantrell did not dispute that she and her husband had underpaid the IRS. However, she said, the IRS should have received it after she refinanced her house in 2013, before the agency placed the lien on her house.

Cantrell blamed the outstanding debt on a bank error by her mortgage lender, First NBC Bank.

I'm pretty sure it was only The Lens who mentioned that much.  Nobody really tried to put it in context, though. Well, almost nobody. 

Safety and Permits

Ever since the day of the Hard Rock collapse, we've been wondering what, if anything the federal investigations into corruption at the city's office of Safety and Permits might have to do with it. It's been a little bit baffling to me that, despite the frequent questions from the public, there's been very little said about such a link either in the media or from any of the principals involved.

Interesting that only now, as City Council prepares to hold public hearings on the incident, does anyone feel obligated to speak up.

.@NOLAOIG warns City Council that its planned investigation of #hardrockcollapse "will interfere" with its ongoing criminal investigation of New Orleans permitting office. The IG's work already led to one federal indictment and multiple firings. https://t.co/Yej6WfdbLd

— David Hammer (@davidhammerWWL) January 28, 2020

Update: Speaking of those City Council hearings, the mayor says here she is still very much against that. She tells Channel 6 (incorrectly) that council has "no authority" to even hold a hearing. Also notice...

“The New Orleans City Council is not accountable and have no authority as it relates to investigating Hard Rock,” Cantrell said. “So, I would say, ‘If you can’t help, don’t hurt. Don’t hurt the investigations that are ongoing right now.’”

Sounds like she's been talking with the IG. 

Okay but what is the impact of not opening it?

Pretty sure it's bad either way.

Two environmental groups are threatening Monday to file suit against the Army Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi River Commission and the Interior Department for failing to evaluate the impact of repeatedly opening the Bonnet Carre Spillway.

They cited the spillway's effects on nine endangered species, including sea turtles, birds, fish and marine mammals.

The threat to sue, issued Monday, is required by federal law to be delivered to federal agencies 60 days before a lawsuit is to be filed. The law gives the agencies time to correct any legal wrongdoing they may have committed before the suit is filed.

Meanwhile, it's high river season already.

Paramilitary experts

Of course all the prominent business persons in New Orleans hire mercenaries with Iraq war experience to do stuff for them. That's just normal.

Sometime after the disaster, the developers hired “paramilitary experts” with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan to try to recover the bodies, but they were not allowed to enter the site because of the danger of collapse, Miller said.

"Sometime after the disaster" is a regular occurrence in this town.  If you can afford to be prepared for that, then of course you are.

So long and thanks for all the ITEP

You sure did a fine job turning out in record numbers to very narrowly save the Governor's bacon in November, New Orleans.  As a reward you get.... your local authority to tax rich people taken away.

The new tweaks of the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program center around the role local governments play in handling the tax break, which exempts manufacturing companies from paying property taxes that would otherwise go to local budgets.

For months, including during a heated reelection campaign last fall, Edwards has alluded to “process changes” his administration plans to make to the Industrial Tax Exemption Program.

Matthew Block, the governor’s general counsel, said in an interview those changes include an effort to prevent local governments from instituting blanket bans on exemptions for projects that are already completed or under construction. That has been a goal of business groups that have sought changes to the program since Edwards overhauled it in 2016.

The system works.

Nobody wants to be D.A. apparently

Is Leon just grandstanding and fearmongering to hear himself talk?

Orleans Parish prosecutors lost almost as many trials as they won last year, a steep drop in convictions from just two years ago, when prosecutors secured guilty verdicts in three out of four of the 60 cases that produced a verdict.

In response, and amid an exodus of mid-level prosecutors, Cannizzaro has asked senior litigators once assigned solely to major felonies to train recent law school graduates.

“Our crime-weary citizens rightly expect the prosecutors of our office to be determined, competitive and proficient in the courtroom,” Cannizzaro said in a recent interview. “We have recognized where our trial numbers have deviated from the usual standards, and that is why we implemented in December a temporary reorganization plan.”

In a better world we might think a declining conviction rate is a good thing since it means, at the very least, that the District Attorney has slightly less leverage to go around bullying people than he currently does.   It also would mean we wouldn't have to allocate so much money to Leon's office which, as we can see, is what he's really pushing for here.

The DA blames the city.

He says that a $600,000 annual budget cut — roughly 5% of his overall budget — imposed by the City Council in 2017 and 2018 prompted lawyers to leave. The funding was restored in 2019, and in the 2020 budget his office has received a $500,000 increase.

But as long as Leon is free to assume that people really are "crime weary" (and the media does nothing to discourage them from feeling that way, he'll continue to push for more money to spend on putting more people in jail.

One would also assume that he's in the news making all this noise because he's gearing up to run for reelection but... there are these "rumors."

Some courthouse observers speculate that prosecutors are leaving because of the uncertainty ahead of this fall’s district attorney election. Cannizzaro hasn’t said whether he’s running, and the one contender who has announced, City Councilman Jason Williams, promises to be a formidable candidate.

“The rumors change from day to day” as to whether Cannizzaro will run, said Gregg Carter, a criminal defense attorney.

Yeah, well, there were similar rumors the last time he was up for reelection too.  Also there are similar rumblings that maybe Williams is thinking about backing out of the race himself. 

If so, it's odd to find him running around downtown with a bullhorn and getting on TV and stuff.  Is there a trick to running for D.A. that involves really seeming like you don't want to run for D.A.?

Who "settled" for what

The lawsuit against Blair Boutte for extorting excessive bail and fees from criminal defendants has been settled. We still don't know exactly what the parties agreed to.

U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter dismissed the lawsuit on Thursday, one day after the parties confirmed their agreement.

The parties, who have 60 days to finalize the settlement, were mum Friday on its details. But the pact appears to end a lawsuit that leveled serious allegations against a well-connected bondsman and political consultant.

It's hard to know if this is actually a positive end or not.  It looks like Boutte has slowly been winning by attrition since the suit was filed.

The lawsuit suffered a blow in June 2018, when U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo dismissed many of the claims, including one alleging a racketeering conspiracy.

The lawsuit was among a batch of 15 cases that Milazzo, who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, handed over to Vitter after the U.S. Senate confirmed the nominee of President Donald Trump in June. Judges in other sections also transferred cases to her to balance their caseloads.

So unless we learn something really surprising has been negotiated here, such as, Blair's Bail Bonds is going out of business and starting a daycare or something, we're going to assume the SPLC side has done most of the settling.

Oh also Harry Cantrell is in this story. The mayor's father in law is still ignoring orders to reform the way money bail is set in his courtroom since he and the other judges who benefit from bail fees have been found to have an inherent conflict of interest.

Cantrell is appealing the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision on the alleged conflict of interest to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has yet to decide whether to take up the case.

Separately, the lawyers at the MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans and the Civil Rights Corps have filed a motion asking a judge to hold Cantrell in contempt of court.

We have no idea how the US Supreme Court might rule. But Cantrell might end up doing okay politically given the renewed fever for "tough on crime" judges in the more influential corners of the city.   We'll see how that winds up. Maybe Cantrell won't have to settle at all.

Must be Carnival season

Strange new tradition, this setting a house on fire along the parade route just as the season kicks in. Not sure we should keep it.

What did Gayle know and when did she know it?

It's hard to imagine a Benson scandal that could be any more Benson than this.

The New Orleans Saints are going to court to keep the public from seeing hundreds of emails that allegedly show team executives doing public relations damage control for the area's Roman Catholic archdiocese to help it contain the fallout from a burgeoning sexual abuse crisis.

Attorneys for about two dozen men suing the church say in court filings that the 276 documents they obtained through discovery show that the NFL team, whose owner is devoutly Catholic, aided the Archdiocese of New Orleans in its “pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.”

Don't really know what they knew and what they might have helped to cover up.  I don't suppose anyone in the Saints organization is a mandated reporter or anything like that.  If there is anything incriminating in the emails, I'm sure it will come out in Gayle's mental competency hearing.

There is an alternate universe where the Saints have advanced to the Super Bowl and this story is breaking and Roger Goodell is convening emergency meetings to get the Saints disqualified from the game.  Also in this universe Antonio Brown is on the roster.

So, you know, just be happy you live on this, the best of all possible timelines.

Mayoral unitary executive theory

Well for a little while this evening it looked like maybe LaToya Cantrell..  who we've already compared at times to Donald Trump.... the President we have also compared a few times to Ray Nagin...  has, indeed, gone full Trump  Nagin uh... George W. Bush? At least that's what this sounds like.

At least four council members are now backing council hearings into the collapse.

"I believe it is the role of this legislative body to ensure and demand a proper investigation and seek the truth behind this tragedy," Councilwoman Helena Moreno said in a press release Thursday afternoon. "While we have been patient as the official investigation is still ongoing, ultimately, those responsible must be held to account — both for the victims and for the city as well so that we see to it that this never happens again."

Those calls, however, ran into quick opposition from Cantrell and her administration.

"Investigation into this incident will be handled by the appropriate law enforcement authorities within the judicial system," Cantrell spokesman Beau Tidwell said in a statement. "City legislators have no role in that process.”

How do the checks and balances work? Somebody get John Yoo on the phone. Anyway, Tidwell's assertion is nonsense, of course, as reporters have already pointed out.

City Charter, cc: @CityOfNOLA
(1) The Council shall have the power to conduct investigations of:

(a)The operation of any office, department or board administering the affairs of the City. https://t.co/UmURaZaHFH https://t.co/b5sExATqwe

— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) January 24, 2020

  

(b) Any subject upon which it may legislate. https://t.co/xqzm48IgyP

— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) January 24, 2020

 


So, you know, the Constitution does in fact say the House shall have the sole power of impeachment regardless of how many times the President tweets about it. Wait.. which authoritarian buffoon is this about again? 

Delicious but deadly

I'm telling you man, I have an absolute iron stomach.

The same toxic chemicals also found in nonstick pans and shampoo are in New Orleans’ drinking water system at higher levels than previously thought, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released Wednesday.

The environmental nonprofit tested water in 44 areas in 31 states and D.C. and found that New Orleans’ water system had levels of chemicals, known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), that reached 41.8 parts per trillion.

Since 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had a health advisory for lifetime exposure to PFOS and PFOA — two types of PFAS — in drinking water set to 70 parts per trillion, but the limit is not enforceable.

The thing is, they say in there that some of the cleanest water in the country comes from Meridian, Mississippi and I have had the water in Meridian and can tell you it tastes like trash. Maybe the water here has a lot of actual trash in it but.. still....


Meanwhile, have you seen this? Have you heard about this?

The first state to enact any protections at all was Louisiana, in the late 1980s. “It was the only environmental issue in Louisiana anyone ever sprang on me I didn’t know anything about,” says chemical physicist Paul Templet, who as the state’s lead environmental regulator at the time ordered a study on oil-and-gas radioactivity. The results horrified him.

The levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters. Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour. “People thought getting these pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil companies were just getting rid of their waste.”

So, you know, pipes. They've got bad stuff in them.

Throw a tarp on it

RIP Turbine 5.

Regardless of the cause, it's unlikely that the more than half-century-old Turbine 5 will ever be brought back into service, Executive Director Ghassan Korban told the S&WB's board of directors Wednesday.

The announcement marks one of the first concrete steps in what could be a radical shift for the utility, a move away from spending millions to keep its own archaic power system limping along — including extensive repairs to Turbine 5 just two years ago — and toward a greater reliance on power from Entergy New Orleans.

The story also points out that a third party investigation into the cause of the explosion hasn't happened yet and SWB itself has not complied with requests for information about its internal findings.  We are meant to infer here that moving away from in-house power production is a cost saving measure. But given so little information it is difficult for the public to make an informed determination about that.

Meanwhile McBride points out today that SWB approved a pay raise for Director Korban bringing his salary up to $288,000. He also points out that the agency has reinstated its annual awards banquet whicb a previous legislative auditor's report has raised legal questions about. All of this raises doubts about the board's fiscal concerns over the turbine. 

We should point out also that mayor Cantrell has repeatedly advocated for higher Entergy rates in exchange for one or another deal she seems to be negotiating on behalf of SWB. Could that also be related to the decision described to us today? It's a pretty good bet.

The biggest punishment meted out so far

The remarkable thing is, we cannot imagine it having happened any differently.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said all the right things at first: that public safety was paramount; that recovering the remains of the three workers known to have died was just as important; and that the building’s developer would be held responsible.

That last one has not happened. The biggest punishment meted out so far has been to Delmer Ramirez Palma, a Honduran national and experienced steelworker who had repeatedly insisted the construction project was not safe. Two days after the collapse, Ramirez Palma, who had been in the U.S. for 18 years, was arrested for fishing without a license; he was deported to Honduras a month later by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

What is "irresponsible" and "indefensible" exactly?

It wouldn't be permitting and collaborating with a construction project that exploited, endangered, and in fact, actually murdered, its workers.  It isn't doing everything possible to help the developers responsible for the exploitation, endangerment and murder to recover their financial losses (and perhaps then some.)  No, the thing that is apparently irresponsible and indefensible, we are told, is the public noticing and then talking about the obscene evidence of all of the above that confronts anyone passing through downtown.

The City asked residents not to take photos of the remains, which are clearly visible from the street.

"Capturing or sharing images of the victims in such a condition is irresponsible, it is indefensible, and it is not who we are as New Orleanians," Norton said.

It's not putting the victims in that condition that is the problem. It's acknowledging what's happened that really goes beyond the pale.  

Just gonna leave the spillway open all the time now

It's another January high river season.

“This morning, the National Weather Service forecast has the river getting to 15.1 feet here at the Carrollton gage,” Roe said. “We are watching that very closely. Trigger point for phase 2 flood fight is 15 feet and rising so we are seeing if that forecast is going to come in a little bit lower of a little bit higher and we will make a decision of whether to go into phase 2 based on that.”

On Jan. 9, the Corps entered its stage one flood fight following the river’s rise to 11 feet. Roe said the high river is due to heavy rain to our north that is now making its way to the coast.

In recent years, flood fights in January have been followed by springtime openings of the Bonnet Carre Spillway to relieve pressure on levees from New Orleans south.

2019 was an absolutely devastating year for oyster fishers on the Louisiana coast.  It would be a while before they'd begin to recover either way. But now they face the prospect of going through it all over again.

Meanwhile, in  other flood control news, just as the corps of engineers begins public discussions of necessary upgrades to our perpetually sinking levee system, the big question we've been worrying about for over a decade is coming to a head.  How do we pay to maintain the system we have?

The multiparish dispute is complicated by many factors, but the principal one is that the Lake Borgne levees protect parts of Orleans and Jefferson parishes in addition to St. Bernard. The agreement calls for St. Bernard to bear most of the cost of maintaining them, and many residents and officials see that as unfair.

The parish’s residents have twice voted down a proposed 7.5-mill property tax that would have raised new money for levee maintenance. St. Bernard residents already pay an 11.33-mill tax that mostly goes to levees. Had the new tax passed, the various levee district millages would have been reallocated, with 15.4 mills going to levee maintenance and 3.43 mills transferred to the parish for drainage.

That’s more than St. Bernard’s neighbors pay their local levee districts: New Orleans residents pay a little over 10 mills for levee maintenance, and East Jefferson property owners pay just 4.02 mills. However, New Orleans residents also pay 16.23 mills for drainage, and Jefferson residents pay between 4 and 5 mills.

The parish governments and flood protection authorities each have their own pots of money and constituencies, but, as we all know very well, they're really maintaining one big interdependent system. So, even under the wholesale reorganization of the regime after Katrina, there will always be disputes like this to deal with.  Apparently, there is a fix in the works, albeit a potentially problematic one.

CPRA officials said Wednesday they plan to submit a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would address such funding disparity issues for both the east bank and West Bank regional levee authorities. The legislation might allow the authorities to set regional tax rates to pay for levees' operation and maintenance.

I'm very curious to see more about how that works.  I assume it still means that tax rates have to be authorized by voters in one way or another.  Or maybe not?

A modest proposal

I realize that it's bad that the Convention Center has been hiring prison slave labor for many of the vanity projects for wealthy New Orleans insiders it spends its slush fund on.  And at first glance we would like to put a stop that.

And now, board member Robert “Tiger” Hammond told The Lens he’s going to try to create a living wage requirement for Convention Center contractors. Unlike the New Orleans city government, the Convention Center doesn’t have conditions for how much its contractors have to pay their workers. The Convention Center board made an attempt to create a living wage requirement in 2017, but it didn’t get off the ground.

“Stay tuned on that, because next month I’m bringing that up as a proposal again,” Hammond told The Lens. “We have a much friendlier board now and next month I will be bringing that issue back up to light on the living wage.”

Hammond is the President of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, a union and labor advocacy organization.

“As a guy who represents labor, it doesn’t sit well when a person comes to me and says, ‘Wow, looks like you have to go to prison to get a job with the Convention Center these days,’ “ he said.

Hammond said he will propose that the Convention Center simply adopt and mirror the living wage ordinance used by the city, which requires contractors to pay employees a little over $11.19 per hour, adjusted each year for inflation.

On the other hand, I think a more elegant solution might be, if we actually put the corrupt operators who enable this system in the first place in prison themselves. That way we could pay Walt Leger 20 cents an hour to build fences and stuff. I mean if they're going to work for the tourism cabal anyway, they may as well do some actual work.

The people for whom none of this means a thing

Speaks volumes about the Democratic Party in Louisiana. 

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has selected a team of prominent Louisiana campaign veterans to work on his 2020 efforts.

The Bloomberg Louisiana team includes Richard Carbo, who just ran Gov. John Bel Edwards’ re-election campaign; Ryan Berni, a longtime aide to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; and Bill Rouselle, a long-time strategist who worked on campaigns for Edwards and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell, among others.

The pinnacle of success for your most influential political consultants is about electing a meal ticket. Anyone who is in this because they actually care about things is a chump. 

Why do so many people want to burn it all down? It's a mystery.

A Muse or a Nyx or whatever

Looks like an interesting memoir to add to your reading list this Carnival season.

“Singing Out Loud: A Memoir of an Ex-Mardi Gras Queen” chronicles Eaves’ life in New Orleans, her struggle with mental health, her unease with the city’s hierarchical social code and her journey to selfhood — standing on her own two feet and deciding for herself what she wanted in life. In some ways, the book could be about almost any questioning young woman born in the early 1940s who did not yet have the strength of the feminist movement to bolster her. But in other ways, it could only have happened here.

Deb Interrupted, maybe?  This article hints that readers will get some insight into the social and racial dynamics of Carnival society. It also notes that Eaves's daughter produced one of the more compelling documentaries that covers much of the same ground.

I'm not sure how to read this quote. It doesn't have to mean she thinks it's all better now. But it can suggest that. 

Homesickness brought the couple back to New Orleans, where Eaves discovered Carnival traditions had expanded to include many more forms of expression, well beyond what she described as the restrictive, hierarchical practices of the old line krewes.

“During the time that we were gone, Carnival expanded so much,” she said. “Now, anyone who wants to can be part of the festivities in their own way. They can be a Muse or a Nyx or whatever suits them. It’s a wonderful evolution of the culture.”

You can be a Muse or a Nyx or whatever now. It's progress, I guess.

Out with a bang after all

Well this is like the third or fourth reversal of plans now. But somehow this just feels more like the way we do our business anyway.

NEW ORLEANS — The city is speeding up the Hard Rock collapse demolition timeline. Officials will now use a controlled implosion to bring down the building and destroy three buildings surrounding the collapse site to do so.

Engineers are shooting for the implosion to take place in mid-March. Debris cleanup will take another two-to-three months.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced the new plan Friday afternoon after meeting with the building’s owners and insurers.

“We are going to revert back to implosion of the site as being necessary to insure public safety as well as being aligned with a timeline that is more suitable for the city of New Orleans,” Cantrell said.

Cantrell also announced her support for destroying three buildings that surround the collapse site to make that happen.

The most likely explanation for the change is this is the fastest and most emphatic way to ensure the whole block gets demolished. Which, in turn, is the best way to ensure the owners of those properties (i.e. the villains responsible for the hotel collapse in the first place) can sell the land for the highest possible profit.

In other words, it's Cantrell looking out for her wealthy allies again.  But, hey, more explosions!

Redistricting nightmare

Some mornings you are reminded that the new legislative and congressional districts drawn after the 2020 Census will be handled by the most right wing legislature in recent memory. 

Senate rules require the Senate Finance Committee to include at least one member from each congressional district. But Cortez also extended that to the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee that will be overseeing the politically sensitive task of redistricting, the remapping of legislative and congressional political boundaries.

“I asked for requests from everyone, and I tried as much as I could to meet their requests by interest area,” Cortez told The Associated Press. “That played probably as big a part in it as anything.”

He noted, for example, that senators from coastal areas wanted to serve on the natural resources committee, while senators from rural farm areas sought seats on the agriculture committee.

Baton Rouge area Sen. Mack “Bodi” White will helm the Finance Committee that draws up the state’s annual operating budget. Sen. Bret Allain of Franklin will oversee the Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee that handles tax policy. And Slidell Sen. Sharon Hewitt will take charge of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee that governs redistricting. All are in the GOP.

Hewitt very nearly ran for Governor last year but decided to come back to the legislature for another go at passing Medicaid work requirements maybe? Or maybe she can vote against equal pay for women again.   Anyway, she's in charge of drawing up the new districts.

See here for a full list of Senate committee members. 

Flooding the zone

Columbus remarks here that there sure are a lot of people running for seats on the state and parish party executive committees this year.  How grass rootsy!

By the time qualifying closed last Friday, a surprising number of candidates had qualified for parish and state Democratic and Republican committees. “There was obviously a feel in the community that new faces were needed at the grassroots level,” said a former elected official.

But when you look through the list of names qualified in each district (and Columbus lists some of them) you'll see that there are more than enough familiar folks in there to load the committees up with insiders and crowd out whatever grass roots insurgency might be brewing. Stacy Head and Seth Bloom are here to help guide the Democrats into the future. How exciting. 

In other words, they've got it covered

Any way you slice it, a $7.2 million hit to the city coffers to clean up after a "cyberattack" is.. well it's not nothing. But it's important to point out to that, so long as it doesn't get much worse than that, it's within the bounds of what's been budgeted.

Officials have also paid for technical help to move and integrate the city's software. All told, the price tag has hit $7.2 million, a figure Cantrell said could grow.

The city's cybersecurity insurance will cover about $3 million of those costs. But the city will have to pull the rest from its emergency fund, which Montaño said totals about $27 million.

"We do anticipate increasing the level of (computer) insurance for the city moving forward, upward of maybe $10 million," Cantrell said.

Also god bless all the city workers and just people who do business with them for dealing with all the headaches this has caused everyone. If you are sending in your property tax bill by the extended February 14 deadline, maybe include a nice little Valentine's greeting with that.

Anyway, it's expensive, but they've got it covered. Remember that when people start fighting over money again come budget season.

Music ain't a crime... yet

City Council may or may not figure out if it should be, though.

The New Orleans City Council instructed the City Planning Commission on Thursday to study the city’s current laws and “existing ambiguities” on outdoor live music and entertainment, and to suggest necessary amendments to local law.

The motion, passed unanimously, comes months after city officials announced that live outdoor entertainment was no longer allowed at any business in the city without a special permit. The change came although no new laws or regulations were passed.

The "announced" change in policy referred to here happened when Safety and Permits decided that a zoning regulation that requires music venues to close their windows and doors during live music performances must mean that all outdoor music is prohibited by default. 

The ambiguity city council is trying to resolve is deliberate, though.  

The interpretation does not appear on a list of Safety and Permits interpretations listed on the city’s website. The department’s director, Zachary Smith, told The Lens last year that interpretations can be less formal, including emails and even verbal communications. When The Lens asked him to point to where and when this interpretation was introduced, he could not.

“We believe we’ve made a decision. Whether it’s verbal or in writing, it’s something we don’t have a specific copy of it,” he said in August.

With no written policy to refer to, it makes decisions by the department more difficult to challenge. The reasoning isn't formal. It's just kind of out there; not something you can just find by opening a door or window, for example.

Anyway now we have to have a study. Then we'll have to have a law change. Eventually they'll probably just codify the policy as currently iterated. You know, because "balance" or whatever.

Palmer said that the study was vital considering rapid changes happening in New Orleans.

“I believe we are at an inflection point in this city,” she said. “We have seen an increased influx of different development pressures, population shifts, some by choice and others not.”

Councilman Jay Banks held a similar sentiment.

“The magic of New Orleans is its culture,” he said. “This study will give us the information necessary to balance the needs of the new developments and new residents and all of the other stuff that’s happening, but not losing sight of what makes New Orleans New Orleans.”

Oh look here is something else that is apparently a crime

Enjoying a National Championship victory cigar.

Saying it was against building policy, a police officer with the Mercedes-Benz Superdome told a group of hyped-up LSU football players celebrating their national championship win Monday night to extinguish their victory cigars inside the team's locker room.

That's when he felt NFL pro football player Odell Beckham Jr. slap him on the backside.

Odell, who was also spotted handing out cash* to athletes exploited by a corrupt and hypocritical system on Monday, now has an arrest warrant out for him. In the locker room incident above, we find him just trying to stop some Dome mall cops from harassing the kids.  The dude is a freaking hero.

* The cash may actually have been intended for the band. But that's a whole 'nother case of official overreach causing bigger problems than it solves.

Why isn't Walt Leger in jail?

Seems like if you write the bill that allows the tourism cabal to continue stealing public money for another sixty years or so and then immediately take a job working for the tourism cabal, that would be the kind of corruption we might want to discourage.

Also on Tuesday, the Convention Center board’s finance committee voted to advance a resolution that redefines how its dedicated taxes are collected and how the money can be spent. The resolution is in large part a reflection of legislation passed by the Louisiana Legislature last year that allows the center to spend tax revenues on the $675 million hotel project and the entertainment district development. The bill was sponsored by then-state Rep. Walt Leger, who now works for New Orleans & Co., formerly the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Not in this city, though. Here we consider that sort of thing "business and economic leadership."  The Advocate invites such "leaders" to summits like this one where they hold forth on the great matters of business in the city for the upcoming year.  Walt was on that panel last week.  He told everybody there that it was time to "get creative."

Walter “Walt” Leger, the former Speaker Pro Tempore of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who now is head of strategy and top legal adviser at New Orleans & Co., said there is a need to "be creative" in terms of raising money for needed education and infrastructure, like implementing a gas tax or public-private partnerships.

That's interesting. Walt's bill "creatively" preserved a public slush fund for the Convention Center to use for its own purposes of handing money over to rich developers for at least the next 50 years.  Meanwhile his advice for funding public transit and infrastructure seems to involve privatization.  How much is New Orleans and Co. paying him now?  And why do we not putting the entire lot of these grifters in prison?   

Probably because the systemic and massive theft of public resources by politically important oligarchs isn't nearly as worrisome to people as their suspicion that some teenagers they read about on Nextdoor might be doing some petty theft and vandalism in Lakeview.  For that, we lock down the schools and call half the NOPD in full body armor to come out and shoot at a 17 year old.  Afterward, the Advocate's opinion page makes certain to heap thanks upon the police and the paranoid residents who called them.

Walt Leger and his cronies are never going to jail. Because the ruling class of this city and their mouthpieces in the media decide what justice even is in the first place.

Oh no where did all our teachers go?

We used to have thousands of experienced, home grown, professional unionized teachers here in New Orleans. And now we need to spend $7 million recruiting to fill a shortage. What happened?

However, following Hurricane Katrina, the city's school system morphed into a decentralized system of scores of largely autonomous charter schools, overseen partly by the Orleans Parish School Board and partly by the state-run Recovery School District. Over time, all schools were converted to charters, and the local school district regained oversight over all schools only last year.

Meanwhile, teacher hiring became trickier, as the 38 separate nonprofit organizations that operate the city's charter schools gained control over hiring, without the benefit of a single, centralized office to provide talent.

LOL the system spontaneously "morphed." I hate when that happens. 

Has anything been going on?

I've been watching a lot of football these past few weeks. So I know there's a lot to catch up on.  A bit of a haze going on today, though, on account of the fact that watching football often involves intoxicants. Did they sort out which tigers were "real"?  It's still a little foggy to me.

The little things

The Louisiana Democratic Party, such as it is, has spent much of the past month backslapping and high fiving over its last second muster to very narrowly reelect a conservative Governor. But if they're being honest, they have to admit the 2019 election was close to a total disaster. Republicans hold historically large majorities in the legislature (a "supermajority" in the Senate, in fact.) Their agenda is going to begin with limiting your right to sue if you are injured by corporate malfeasance. There will probably be another stab at tilting the ITEP rules back (further) in favor of big business. And, of course, there will never ever ever be a successful attempt by this legislature to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard.

So it could have been a lot worse if John Bel weren't going back up there to stand around and frown at the Republicans until they behave somewhat. But it's still going to be very bad.  In the meantime, it's the little wins that matter. And from the looks of things, today's election of Clay Schexnayder to the Speaker's chair above Sherman Mack is probably one of those little wins.

The speaker’s race pitted Republicans against one another, as Kennedy and Landry ran negative ads against lawmakers allied with Schexnayder and Baton Rouge businessman Richard Lipsey funded digital ads against Mack. Republican donor Lane Grigsby also pushed for Mack.

Hard to know what the long term consequences will be. But any time you can make John, Jeff, and Lane upset on the same day, has to be considered at least a little bit good.

Does anybody remember DXC?

I wonder if anyone understands that DXC was never going to hit its stated hiring targets.  I wonder if they understand that even with when we consider the clawbacks described here that the city and the state are still spending millions of dollars to subsidize this company. 

That explanation didn't stop Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration from cutting DXC's first-year incentives payout by 45%, the amount its payroll fell short. That's in line with rules meant to ensure an economic return on the $6.5 million the city invested in the deal.

Similarly, the state, which was due to reimburse more than $3 million of DXC's first-year expenses, is likely to withhold about $235,000 of that amount, according to records at Louisiana Economic Development. 

The low payroll was discussed at a meeting of the city's Industrial Development Board last week. The public board must pay a portion of the money New Orleans has committed to DXC over the next decade. It will also cut its first-year share by 45%.

I wonder if anyone understands this entire deal happened in the first place because it serves DXC's global cost cutting strategy. DXC is still getting everything it wanted.  It wanted to lay off workers worldwide and move the remaining bits of its hacked up operations to "lower cost labor markets." That was where we came in.  We were the lower cost labor market. Well, that and we were the suckers who agreed to just subsidize their payroll costs regardless. It's fine with DXC if it doesn't pull down the full subsidy because it doesn't really need to hire 2000 people.

But to fake a little bit of good faith, they did manage to hit a first year target of 300.  You'll never guess how they did that.

“This newly formed IT services company will create thousands of job opportunities for New Orleanians, adding to our rapidly growing digital economy,” then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in 2017, when the deal was announced.

But over the next two years, they filed more than 150 documents asking for federal approval to hire workers from overseas.

According to a Lens review of data from the U.S. Department of Labor, DXC has filed 152 applications for H-1B visas for foreign workers in New Orleans in the last fiscal year. Some of the applications were for up to 24 employees, but it’s not clear how many DXC is actually trying to hire.

DXC spokesman Richard Adamonis did not respond to The Lens’ questions about how many foreign workers DXC is planning to hire, or how many of the 300 hired this year were on H-1B visas. Most of the applications had starting dates in the fall of 2019. He instead provided a brief written statement.

“Our agreements with the State and City establish specific goals for job creation within the Greater New Orleans region, without regard to employee origin,” Adamonis’ statement said in part. “Many of these new hires join DXC through our local educational partners.”

Ha ha joke's on us, I guess. Failed to read the fine print. Maybe that's what the local educational partners will teach the future hires.. if there are any.  Anyway, wow, what a totally trustworthy partner Mitch and John Bel and LaToya have chosen for us.

At least LaToya says she had a hand in it.  Here she is during the final 2017 mayoral debate saying she played a role in landing the DXC deal as a city councilmember. She also goes on to talk about how she wants to "depoliticize" the process by which these corporate giveaways are handed out. This is the same line taken by LABI and Republican agitators in Baton Rouge who spent the 2019 election complaining that John Bel's changes to the Industrial Tax Exemption process allow for too much democracy. It's possible the current mayor is even more right wing than either the governor or her predecessor.

Meanwhile, we read at the bottom of this story that DXC fired its CEO in September. It's hard to read between the lines here but it sounds like the shareholders are convinced his cost-cutting strategy that brought the company here was good for them in the long run. Even if it was "brutal," it was also "effective."

Lawrie had led the legacy Computer Sciences Corp. through a turbulent period for the IT services industry, which had to deal with low-cost competition from India and elsewhere.

But DXC shares have since recovered to nearly $38 as analysts began to recognize the change was necessary.

“Lawrie’s tenure is commonly acknowledged to have been brutal in style (even if) it was effective,” according to Rachael Stormonth, an analyst at Nelson Hall, a consultancy. Salvino, on the other hand, immediately emphasized that he would seek to rebuild morale, and he is thought to have a good grasp of the "solutions" approach needed in the industry now, Stormonth said.

And now the job is to "rebuild morale."  Probably should start in the PR department. 

Was "everything fine" before Trump?

Here is one of those annoying political profile articles that treats individual politicians like Hollywood celebrities. But you should read it anyway because it is about AOC and contains a couple of items worth making note of.

The first is this little bit of reflection on one of her first public acts upon arriving in Washington.  She participated in a sit-in protest in Pelosi's office organized by the Sunrise Movement. It's kind of a forgotten episode now. But it still says something about Ocasio-Cortez's instincts.

“I was terrified,” she told me. She doesn’t regret it — though it set the stage for a very complicated year with Pelosi. “I learned a lot about how fear shapes the decisions of elected officials: ‘I know this could be bad, and this could make someone mad, and I don’t know exactly how they would drop the hammer on me or what hammers would be dropped.’ It felt like the right thing to do, and when you say that people think it’s a form of naïveté and that it’s childish, but I don’t think it was.”

It can be very easy to back out of doing what you think is the right thing because of institutional pressure to get along.  The implicit threat that publicly challenging the Speaker of the House would have debilitating consequences for a freshman Rep. was real. Typically the way to build a career and reputation in the party is to keep your head down and definitely not make anybody mad.  The only way you might decide to buck those rules is if you understand the actual nature of "the party" and which side of it you are on. 

She said the Congressional Progressive Caucus should start kicking people out if they stray too far from the party line. Other caucuses within the Democratic Party in Congress require applications, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out. But “they let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive. There’s no standard,” she said.

The same goes for the party as a whole: “Democrats can be too big of a tent.”

It is comments like that that kept Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Democratic Party from reaching any kind of meaningful détente. I asked her what she thought her role would be as a member of Congress during, for instance, a Joe Biden presidency. “Oh God,” she said with a groan. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

That's the line that got this story shared all over the internet today.  For some reason people are having difficulty with it. But it's actually very easy to understand.  If you want to know which Democratic Party you happen to be in, just ask yourself whether or not "everything was fine" before Trump?

“This whole primary,” she went on, referring to the one Biden and Bernie are in, “is going to be about the soul of the Democratic Party. I think it’s a referendum on whether we think everything was fine before Trump. People who live in a lot of privilege, who think of public programs as charity, they often think there was nothing wrong before Trump. They think Hillary was the problem. But it’s much deeper than that.”

This morning, Atrios put up a blurb to the effect that the Bush Administration was also quite monstrous, you know.  Which doesn't seem like something that even needs saying to those of us old enough to have been paying attention back then. I mean I would assume anyone old enough to have a living memory of the Bush years who says Trump is any sort of unique and radical departure from that is lying.  If you are a Democrat who tells that lie, it is because your political program is specifically about guarding your own privileges with minimal or no changes to the system that grants them. Where do adherents to such an agenda get to describe themselves as "progressives"? Only in America. 

Somebody finally woke up Arthur Morrell

Usually Morrell times his shutdown fits to coincide with the annual budget negotiations for maximum leverage. He was bit late this year. Wonder what happened.

Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal District Court Arthur Morrell has called off his plan to furlough nearly all of his office's dozens of employees, a day after announcing it.

Morrell said Saturday that he was backing down on his threat to furlough about 80 workers at the request of Karen Herman, the chief judge of Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.

The two were set to meet to discuss the situation on Monday, the same day that the furlough would have gone into effect.

In a telephone interview on Saturday, Morrell said the furlough was being called off until further notice.

Again the timing is weird. If you are going to do this after the budget is already active, you basically have to call your own bluff the next day.

"Grateful"

I know this is a small thing but because there is no other new information in this statement besides the fact that the mayor is "grateful" to the krewes, then we have to consider that was the entire point of saying anything.

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is "grateful" that Carnival krewes have been willing make adjustments to their routes to avoid the site of the Hard Rock Hotel collapse.

At the city's annual King's Day celebration Monday at Gallier Hall, marking the beginning of Carnival, Cantrell said krewes have been "overwhelmingly supportive" of the decision to avoid the collapsed hotel at Canal Street and North Rampart Street.

"I’m very grateful to the krewes being receptive to the changes. It wasn’t a battle to fight, it was one we could all agree to," Cantrell said.

But why wouldn't they be supportive of this? Can you imagine a krewe captain insisting on running a great big carnival parade and the noise and crowd and mess that comes with it directly into the shadow of an unstable husk of a building which, as of this writing, is still so dangerous that search teams can't remove the bodies that are trapped there? Well, okay, actually maybe some of these entitled individuals would insist on it. But that's all the more reason not to be "grateful" to them.  There's a hazard there. Just plan around it.

This is an announcement that they are going to plan around it. But it could have been saved for when they told us what the new plan actually was.  So we have to assume there was a reason the mayor wanted to get into the paper expressing deference and gratitude to the krewe captains for some reason. It's weird.

Anyway, hey, it is Carnival Time now.  Gonna need to take a minute after the Saints loss yesterday to decide if we're ready.

The New Boil Order Decade

The answer is five. If you were keeping score at home, write down five was the number of consecutive days we were able to go before the first boil order of 2020.

The Sewerage & Water Board issued a boil water advisory for the West Bank Monday afternoon, the second time such a notice has been issued for the area in less than a month.

In a press release, the S&WB said water pressure dropped on the West Bank while crews were making a repair to Mardi Gras Boulevard.

Reset your counters to zero. 

Year of Demolition

They announced today that the Hard Rock hotel demolition process has been pushed back again. 

The previous timeline of stabilizing the building to begin recovering evidence of the collapse and the two bodies trapped on the site on Feb. 28 has now been pushed back until May 7. That delay will also effect when officials believe the building will be completely demolished to an empty lot, pushing it back to December rather than late summer as previously projected.

It says "more to come" at the bottom that NOLA.com article so maybe they'll tell us more later about how soon the bodies that are still trapped under the rubble might be recovered.  Also this doesn't say anything about how the possible demolition of the adjacent properties might play into this plan.  We already know what the mayor thinks.

Answering questions about the proposal at a press conference on Monday, Cantrell said she decided to support the additional demolitions after consulting with engineers who said the work is necessary to safely use the cranes that will be engaged to take down the half-collapsed Hard Rock.

“My initial response to that is public safety first,” Cantrell said. “What the engineers have indicated is that a clear line of sight when utilizing the large cranes that will be used is just the top priority.”

“Public safety has always kind of led us and it will continue to (do so),” she added later. “As it relates to the adjacent buildings, I would say I’m absolutely in favor of demolition” if it is needed to create that clear line of sight.

I dunno. I kind of think if "public safety" had always been the priority with these developers, the building inspectors responsible for approving their plans, or anyone responsible for labor standards enforcement who ignored the complaints of their workers prior to the collapse, then we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.  Much more likely the mayor is concerned with making sure the developers pay whatever it takes to clean up their mess. Which is fine, except this sounds like she also wants to help them recoup their losses by maximizing the resale value of the property. Knocking down the whole block instead of just the hotel is one way to do that.

Leftover money

Obviously it would have been less than what we might consider ethical for this PAC to hang onto "leftover" money from the Governor's election and plow it right into their next cause. But would it have been technically illegal if they had?  It doesn't say here. But I'd like to know.  Anyway, they're going after Leon now.

People Over Politics supported Edwards during his successful re-election bid, paying for a billboard in the same location and paying for canvassers during the race.

The current version of the group is not affiliated with the Edwards campaign, Greene said. Leftover money collected by People Over Politics as part of the gubernatorial race was sent on to Edwards’ leadership PAC, and the group has secured new funding for the district attorney’s race, she said.

A list of donors to the group was not immediately available. The group's chairman is Anthony Marullo, a real estate developer.

The organization is not supporting any specific candidate against Cannizzaro, Greene said.

Also if that is the same Anthony Marullo I'm thinking of then, yes, he is "a real estate developer." That's a bit of an understatement, though.  Marullo's family has owned the French Market Restaurant for decades. Here is an amusing story from 2016 about Marullo's dispute with a health inspector he says was shaking the restaurant down.  The family also controls numerous other properties including several hundred apartments in several locations as well as a somewhat controversial CCs franchise. 

As for their interest in the District Attorney's office, we can only guess what that might be.  The PAC spokesperson says they plan to go after Leon's record on prosecuting domestic abuse cases as well as his use of so called "fake subpoenas"  to compel witnesses to testify. While we agree that those things are bad, we'd like to know more about what is actually motivating this PAC's (currently anonymous) contributors and the Marullos specifically.   Because odds are it's something besides just an earnest concern for the victims of Cannizzaro's practices.

Happy days are here

Excellent news for Louisiana's petro-based economy! - The Advocate Editorial Page, probably.

LONDON — The price of oil surged Friday on concerns that Iran might respond to the killing of its top general by the United States by disrupting global supplies of energy from the Mideast.

If sustained, the rise in oil prices could lead to more expensive car fuel, heating and electricity bills, stifling the global economy at a time when it is already slowing.

One thing I am thankful for during this particular cycle is that there is no cable news channel blaring in my household.  Just because the rest of America is being bombarded with war opinions from people who should be in prison doesn't mean you have to listen to it too.  Most people's TVs still come with an off button. Might as well make use of it while you still can.

Meanwhile, your Democratic Presidential candidates are weighing in. That includes those among them who have been a troop.

Mayor Pete doesn’t oppose the Trump administration assassinating an Iranian government official on Iraqi territory, he’s just not sure is was done in the best way.

This sort of response is why democrats might be the worst opposition party in history. https://t.co/G1ta3phb47

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 3, 2020

Pete is just going to accept, on its face, the premise that the US launching an assassination attack on a high ranking Iranian military and government officer is a justified action.  Anything he says after that is pointless. It would be one thing if it were just Pete. But it's also coming from every other Democrat to have weighed in so far.

Well.. not every one of them.

Sanders took a different tone, one drawn from a wing of the party that has opposed American wars since Vietnam.

“Trump's dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars,” Sanders said in a statement, after noting his opposition to the Iraq war and without mentioning Soleimani by name. “Trump promised to end endless wars, but this action puts us on the path to another one.”

Gotta love the way they write, "a wing of the party that has opposed American wars since Vietnam," as if that's a bad thing.

Billyworld

Nungesser is still trying to privatize the state park system.

Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser will speak to Northshore residents at a Mandeville community meeting Wednesday, Jan. 8 about a controversial proposal to build a 150-room hotel and conference center on state land next to Fontainebleau State Park.

The St. Tammany Parish Tourist and Convention Commission commissioned a $28,000 feasibility study on the project by Tennessee hospitality consulting firm Pinkowski & Co., which released its findings last summer. The study projected the lodging and conference center would generate almost $2 million annually in cash flow right off the bat if it were to open Jan. 1, 2021  — $1.8 million in 2021 and almost $2.3 million by 2025.

But some residents and local leaders are not sold, citing environmental concerns as well as what some consider a struggling hotel industry in the area. The Clarion Inn & Suites Conference Center in Covington, which was St. Tammany Parish’s largest full-service hotel, closed in May 2019.

Billy's been trying to cut that  Fountainebleau deal for a while now along with various schemes to turn as many state parks as possible into privatized "revenue generators."  At one point he even said he was working out a deal with the mayor to put Confederate monuments back on display in Fontainebleau.  I wonder if we'll hear more about that any time soon.

It is the Twenties now

Happy New Year. Did you know today marks the second consecutive day in the year 2020 without a boil order having been issued in New Orleans?  Let's keep that going. Good riddance to The Boil Order Decade.

Meanwhile, it turns out that being in a real decade now with a readily comprehensible name brings new responsibilities. People were never comfortable saying "the tens," " the teens" or, god forbid, "the aughts" with any sort of conviction so instead we've spent the past twenty years floating in a vast directionless cultural drift. What was the defining aesthetic of The Aughts? We were never told.

On the one hand, this probably means we've spent the past two decades living more honestly. Marketing departments were never able to sell anyone on the concept of an Aughts or Teens, therefore nobody knows what was the dominant style they were supposed to consume.  On the other hand, it has also felt a bit like being stuck in a vortex where our perception of the passage of time is flattened... perhaps into a circle, if you like.  For example, see here.

The Wonder Years aired from 1988 and 1993 and depicted the years between 1968 and 1973. When I watched the show, it felt like it was set in a time long ago. If a new Wonder Years premiered today, it would cover the years between 2000 and 2005.

Anyway since we're about to get back in the mode of pretending there's some sort of unifying spirit to the arbitrarily defined age we're all living our otherwise disparate and isolated lives through, this also means we're going to have to ret-con themes onto the preceding period as well.  Luckily we already have Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine theory so we don't have to work very hard at it.  The disasters of the 2000s, the big endless war, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, Avatar, etc. led directly to the broken infrastructure, inequality, privatization, gentrification and cultural destruction that have characterized the 2010s in, well, in many places, but certainly in New Orleans.

So, you know, welcome to the 21st Century. We're finally here. The first thing we'll have to do in the Twenties is figure out whether or not we can survive it.

Extreme Emergency

After the December we've just had, it's hard to blame Sewerage and Water Board for busting out a whole  new level of emergency declaration.  Otherwise, we might be so numb as to ignore their missives altogether.

NEW ORLEANS — The General Superintendent of the Sewage & Water Board of New Orleans has signed an extreme emergency declaration amid concerns over a potential water main blowout in Gentilly.

The document said sewage from Lakeview, Gentilly and the 7th Ward flow into Sewer Pump Station D, which is located at Florida and Peoples avenues. The station is one of the two major sewer pumping stations on the East Bank.

Actually, "extreme emergency" is a real thing. It's a specific designation for expediting the procurement process during situations of imminent danger to the public. And, yeah, I also thought that's what regular emergency declarations are for but apparently this just goes one more.

McBride talks about it at the bottom of this post albeit skeptically.

WDSU did get comment from the Board when they covered this story Tuesday night. The statement is pure spin, given the plain verbiage of the emergency declaration is generous in its use of words and phrases like "catastrophic," "imperative," and "significant risk to public health:"

"We want to emphasize that the health and safety of our residents was never at risk. At no point did we release sewage into the Mississippi River, had circumstances forced us to do so, we would have alerted the public and all necessary agencies as mandated by the EPA and LDH. It is important to note that we are not in a state of emergency. The phrase 'extreme emergency declaration' is a legal condition that allows us to more swiftly order equipment, hire any necessary contractors and expedite our response and repairs to prevent a true emergency. The decision to enact an emergency declaration is indicative of our commitment to being proactive as we work to keep New Orleans safe and healthy."

I would just like to say that the fact the situation got to a point where they needed to bypass public bid laws shows the opposite of a commitment to the public, as it will now cost more and the work will have to be hurried, which practically guarantees sloppiness and mistakes. And they clearly don't know what "proactive" means.

Either "the health and safety of our residents was never at risk"or it was. SWB seems to be saying both.  Maybe it still is. You never know what is going to flood, back up, or explode at any given moment. This description doesn't inspire confidence.

The emergency declaration, passed unanimously by the board, will allow the job to be bid out and repairs made more quickly, as the broken valve at Pump Station D is currently being held open by a hydraulic jack and wooden wedges.

Crews discovered the problem Dec. 2 and spent about six hours trying to get the valve open as sewage backed up into the system.

It was during this period that the agency considered the possibility of diverting sewage away from the valve and dumping it into the river in order to keep it from backing up into the streets, or worse, causing a blowout that would be a "significant risk to public health," the emergency declaration reads.

Ultimately, the agency did not need to take that step, Executive Director Ghassan Korban said.

Yikes! They almost dumped raw sewerage into the river.  Can you imagine what would happen if somebody dumped raw sewerage into the Mississippi River? Who could even contemplate such a thing?  It would be a national scandal, right? Surely, the federal government would have to intervene.  Well, it turns out that's exactly what's already happened. There's already a federal consent decree in place because dumping raw sewerage into the Mississippi is something SWB used to do it all the time

The prospect of releasing sewage into the river would be an apparent violation of a federal consent decree under which the city's sewer system has operated for two decades.

The S&WB was put under a consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Justice in 1998 after it was accused of violating the Clean Water Act by dumping untreated sewage into Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and other water bodies.

Speaking of federal intervention, there's more where that came from.  A lot of people may have missed this bit because it was wedged in between the turbine explosion, the French Quarter sewer fire, and this latest nightmare scenario with the sewerage back up, but we also learned this month that the IRS has placed a lien on all Sewerage and Water Board assets for failing to pay $185,741 in payroll taxes withheld from employees between 2015 and 2018.

What were they spending the money on instead?  Certainly, the ballooning cost of turbine repairs must have had something to do with it.  According to the legislative auditors' office, emergency spending on one of those projects had blown up to eight times its initial cost in 2017. 

Following established approval policies that govern contract changes is important to evaluate whether work changes are necessary and fairly priced. For example, a 2017 emergency contract to repair a turbine was originally approved for $500,000, but the contract had $4 million in contract change orders. While change orders may be appropriate and necessary, the S&WB does not always conduct a review or obtain the documentation needed to monitor the reasonableness of costs and necessity of work performed. For example, in one contract, a change order was approved via email and did not go through proper approval procedures. 

One can understand, then, why the latest "extreme emergency" declaration might make us extremely nervous.  In order to deal with the sewer back-up, SWB is going to need to throw a lot of money at it very quickly and with little to no oversight. 

By approving the emergency measure, the S&WB is allowing all of this work to be done without formally advertising for bids, without a cost cap and without designating where the money will come from. There were no estimates provided on what the work could cost, though the declaration said the work would take "several weeks."

Already they can't pay their taxes. What happens if the feds decide to foreclose?  If we lived in a better world, under a different regime, this might be one vector by which the federal government could step in and help. Cities all over the country are in dire need of a massive infrastructure overhaul. Utilities in crisis, such as our beloved Sewerage and Water Board, would be prime subjects for such a renewal. Unfortunately the current administration in Washington tends to harbor somewhat less benevolent motives.

Trump’s plan turns infrastructure investment on its head in another way as well. Traditionally, the selection of projects to be funded by the federal government emphasized benefits to the public. The administration’s plan weighs the ability to attract sources of funding outside the federal government at 70 percent when considering whether to support it; economic and social returns from the project count for just 5 percent. Federal funding will go to projects that are most attractive to private investors, rather than to those, like clean water, that meet the needs of communities.

The CPA interviewed by Channel 8 for their story on SWB's tax lien says, “technically the IRS could foreclose and force the sale of assets." So, rather than an opportunity to help, the powers that be, as currently configured, are far more likely to push for privatization.  Which is a troubling prospect now given that the local political climate has never been more ripe for it.

To begin with, the state legislature coming into office for the 2020 term will have the most right wing make up we've seen in that body in our lifetimes. Things are going to get super free market solution-y real quick.  More so than they are now, I mean. It's "unprecedented."

“It’s unprecedented. The Legislature is more conservative, more pro-business than ever before,” said Stephen Waguespack, head of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, the powerful lobbyist representing the business community. “The final tally shows that you’re going to have Legislature with a lot of fresh faces and a lot of new ideas.”

Don't expect the newly reelected John Bel Edwards to be much of a backstop to any of that. Already one of the more infamously "pro-business" governors in the country, in his now weakened position, John Bel is likely to be more eager to please than ever.

One item that caught our eye during the lead up to this year's election season was Edwards's gift of a multi-million dollar state energy systems privatization contract to Bernhard Energy Partners.  The deal was announced one year after Jim Bernhard decided, entirely by coincidence we are sure, that he didn't want to run against John Bel for Governor after all.  Anyway, in light of Jim and John Bel's well consummated friendship, we thought it newsworthy this week that Jim's company was investing in privatized water systems. 

The equity firm, which is led by former Shaw Group CEO Jim Bernhard and has raised more than $3 billion in capital, is interested in regulated utilities and has viewed Ascension Wastewater as a good foundation to get into the regional utility business, already drawing interest from other communities.

The article doesn't say much about which other communities are showing interest. But, with every passing plant failure, tax lien, or extreme emergency declaration, it becomes more likely that New Orleans would be among them.

If it is going to happen, the key decision maker will be the mayor.  She is the nominal President of the board and the prerogative to set its policy direction rests with her. And if LaToya decides she wants a major overhaul for Sewerage and Water Board, this legislature is likely to give her one. Typically the city's legislative delegation takes marching orders from the mayor.  After the success of several of her endorsed candidates in this year's elections, Cantrell's hand has only been strengthened there.

SWB has been the number one issue on her plate since before she even came into office. The 2017 citywide flooding dominated the campaign that year. And ever since she took over, the agency has done nothing but produce headaches for her administration. In addition to the continuing recurrence of street flooding and boil order crises, the mayor has also had to contend with a billing SNAFU to which she inartfully responded to by threatening to shut off water to residents, frequent turnovers in leadership and the ongoing financial problems of an agency incapable of collecting bills owed to it or paying out bills owed to vendors.  Her most public battle of the past year has been over the so-called "fair share" deal with the hospitality industry. Regardless of whether one believes that deal actually accomplishes what it claims (and we definitely do not believe it does), the bargain was, at least ostensibly, driven by the need to better fund Sewerage and Water Board.  It seems safe to assume that the time is fast approaching when Cantrell is ready to be done with this problem one way or another. 

We won't be surprised, then, if LaToya decides that privatization is a perfectly acceptable way to accomplish that.  There are a couple of reasons to expect this.  The first is political expedience. A privatized Sewerage and Water Board might still be fraught with unaccountable runaway corruption and incompetence. But at least this will make that somebody else's responsibility. Moreover, with the problem passed off, Cantrell can claim to have "done something" about the agency regardless of that something's objective merits. Once embarked on, the results of such a change won't be obvious to the political press for some time.  In all likelihood, a true verdict on New Orleans's experiment with a private water utility wouldn't arrive for several years.  They still haven't come around to acknowledging the total disaster wrought by school charterization, for example. And we're already well past a decade into that adventure.

In addition to just being politically easy for her, placing public services into the hands of for-profit private interests is very much in line with Cantrell's ideological approach to governing. Here are a few recent examples of this approach in action.

In November, Cantrell also spoke up on behalf of higher profits for Entergy in direct contradiction to a lower rate schedule negotiated by the city council and its consultants. The mayor intervened on Entergy's behalf because it was offering her a one time $75 million kickback meant for Sewerage and Water Board upgrades. Councilmembers didn't go for it.  But, amazingly, Cantrell and Entergy came back again with a second push for rate hikes in December this time citing the emergency situation brought on by the turbine explosion.  Even in the face contrary public opinion and council opposition, Cantrell' preferred approach to city infrastructure always begins with making sure one or another "private partner" is profiting from it.

Another private partner in receipt of the mayor's enthusiasm has been the "Blue Bikes" rental scheme the city has entered into with Uber. The company announced in December it will be replacing all of the bicycles with hybrid electric scooter-bikes and jacking up prices for all riders in the process.  The city is disingenuously promoting this private for-profit business as a "public transit" solution. It's probably something they consider a revenue generator, although I'd like to see the costs in dedicated infrastructure, promotion, etc. compared to the 2 percent kickback Uber promises. In any case, it's definitely not a money maker for riders. Public transit, ideally, should be free to use. Or, failing that, it should be as close to free as feasible.  When the city and its private contractor are expecting to turn a profit from those users, though, they are no longer really providing a public service. It's not clear the mayor understands, or cares much about, this distinction.


There was a line from the mayor in this WWLTV recap of 2019's disasters that best sums up her philosophy of governing.  Essentially, it's all about her. Or, at least, it's about her vs. whoever was doing her job before she was.

Cantrell said the city will continue to invest in drainage improvements and maintenance next year.

"Unfortunately...previous administrations did not own up to existing conditions within our built environment, throughout the city of New Orleans, did not deal with the Sewerage and Water Board accurately or appropriately, did not deal with even maintenance," Cantrell said.

Now, technically, what she is saying there is true. There is a long history of negligence, graft, and decay that's brought us to where we are. And that pattern has persisted throughout the course of several "previous administrations." But in Cantrell's mind, this isn't a systemic question of power and class politics so much as it is about the specific individual who happens to be mayor at any given moment. The way she puts it, it sounds like she is saying "Nobody before me knew what they were doing" and that's the reason we are where we are. But that isn't the reason. In reality, there are lots of reasons, personal, political, and, I guess, natural/cosmic that have contributed.

In a broad political sense, we've been under the sway of a national conservative movement for decades that has abandoned urban infrastructure. Federal money has dried up. State houses have become more hostile and conservative. The general philosophy of government that obtains generally leaves cities to fend for themselves. It's no surprise that most cites haven't handled that challenge gracefully. Petty local politics and small time corruption only becomes more of a problem in the context of diminishing resources. New Orleans is certainly no exception to that.

That doesn't mean we let any of the players in that off the hook. Ideally we'd like to see our local politicians join in a democratizing movement to take public resources back from the oligarchs. But failing that, at least, we should expect them not to make choices that actively exacerbate matters. In any case, we're describing a much larger circumstance than just, "Those were bad mayors and now I am a good mayor so don't be mad at me" which seems to be LaToya's take on things. Maybe that's all that matters to her.

Or, worse, maybe she really is a true believer in Free Market Uber Alles neoliberalism.  According to this story, she's starting off the new year at an international conference that appears to center on that ideology in particular.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and two staffers are headed to the African country of Ghana where they will attend the Essence Full Circle Festival and create an agreement to strengthen relations with a city there.

The trip will feature Cantrell as a speaker on the Essence Global Black Economic Forum, a news release said. The forum brings together government officials, entrepreneurs, executives and entertainers from around the world to discuss economic development opportunities and cultural exchange and ways for the private sector to lead this development. The festival marks 400 years since the first slave ships left Ghana.

Anyway, when the mayor does return to us from Woke Davos, it will be time to dive back in to a whole new year of extreme emergencies.  Whether or not this is the year those emergencies lead to serious talk about privatizing the city's sewer and water systems remains to be seen.  But the elements that could take us there do seem to be in place.