What did John Bel know and when did he know it?

We've been waiting a long time to find out. We may have to wait a lot longer.  

Gov. John Bel Edwards has declined to testify Monday before a special legislative committee probing the 2019 death of Ronald Greene at the hands of Louisiana State Police troopers and an alleged coverup.

In a letter Thursday to the committee, Edwards’ executive counsel, Tina Vanichchagorn, cited short notice and scheduling conflicts that include an out-of-town event.

Technically the House now has the power to subpoena the Governor and compel him to testify.  They don't seem eager to break the seal on that, though.

Troy Henry's goal is full privatization

From the outside, this looks a lot like Henry's group is negotiating in bad faith with the explicit goal of getting complete control of the Jazzland property and avoid any accountability for their use of infrastructure created through a massive amount of public investment. 

Businessman Troy Henry, the public face of Bayou Phoenix, has claimed that NORA is demanding unreasonable approval power over tenants, contractors and other aspects of his future plans for the site. Henry, who reiterated those claims in a public meeting on Thursday, said Bayou Phoenix will never agree to those demands.

“No deal is better than a bad deal. And having one hand on the steering wheel trying to drive with somebody else having another is a bad deal, and a disaster waiting to happen,” Henry said at a meeting of the Industrial Development Board.

In one regard, he's right. No deal really is better than a bad deal. It's just that the deal he is angling for is one in which he fully privatizes a public project and collects the profit with no accountability or oversight. That deal would be the bad deal. 

The current plan the Henry is bucking against would have the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) take over nominal ownership of the property from the Industrial Development Board (IDB) and act as a landlord leasing it to Henry's development company.

NORA’s executive director, Brenda Breaux, said at a city budget hearing on Thursday that Bayou Phoenix is asking for a lease that's below the fair-market rate. She said NORA can live with that, but “there has to be an exchange for what the public benefits are, to protect the public’s interest.”

“It's not that (NORA) is intending to approve every tenant or whomever goes on that site, but there are some safeguards that the general public, the 390,000 citizens of New Orleans, would like to see,” Breaux said.

But now it looks like Henry prefers to own the land outright. His strategy for getting it in that case would be to clam up these negotiations and deal directly with the IDB who may be more willing (maybe a little desperate, even, at this point) to sell. 

With prospects for a master lease looking dim, exasperated IDB members on Thursday refused to consider extending an agreement with City Hall that gives the administration the right to lead redevelopment efforts. The agreement expires at the end of November, after which the IDB would seemingly be able to do as it pleases.

That's not an ideal outcome.  We talked about this in greater detail last month on the CBC podcast. You can find that in this post. The land now formerly known as Six Flags/Jazzland was purchased and developed through a large public investment of federal and state dollars. The public, through its elected representatives, should maintain control of its destiny and it should be used for the maximum benefit of the public. IDB can't just dump it to Troy Henry so he can turn a profit doing whatever the heck he wants.  The city's economic development director Jeff Schwartz agrees. 

“If that site is not redeveloped through a solicitation process, whether the existing one or a future one, there’s no guarantee that someone who buys the property on the private market has to do anything with it,” Schwartz said. “They could sit on it for another 10 years. They could turn it into a gas station.”

If that is allowed to happen simply because IDB is tired of dealing with this, it would be a monumental betrayal of the public trust.

Election Day

I'm traveling during the worst possible week. There was an LSU-Bama game I would have liked to be closer to home during. There was a Saints game on Monday night I could have had tickets to. Apparently there are also Hubigs pies again? Maybe? I'll find out when I get back, I guess. This is also very likely the last week that the website Twitter Dot Com will exist and, even though that technically follows us everywhere in our phones, it feels weird to be watching from unfamiliar places while that news breaks as well. 

I am going to miss having an easy way to do quick, words based, posts from the phone, though.  Because, even though that's what I'm doing right now, this site really isn't for that. My thumbs are already tired.  

And yet there is plenty to say about today's elections which we'll have to get to later. A tl;dr bit would say that the Democrats are about to reap what they've sewn through their failures to pass a more robust stimulus in general, and their failures to protect voting and labor organizing rights in particular.  Those would have been the best ways to build real power for real people.  But the Democrats, being Democrats, aren't sure that's what they really want to do. They're about to get wiped out because of this. I'm not sure the myopic and careerist party leadership will even see that as a setback, though. 

Locally, it's even worse. The stakes remain limited to the career advancement of minor functionaries in the New Orleans area and the state Dem party's maintenance of inconsequential sinecures within its shrinking sphere of influence. 

Meanwhile the city, the state, and the nation are sinking further into a depressing kind of neo-fascism or neo-feudalist techno dystopia. Whichever term you prefer is fine. Neither really describes it clearly.  But they do sort of evoke the mood of it. In any case, thanks to the complete failure of those who place themselves into positions of political "leadership" no one is able to do anything to stop it. 

When I get back home, (and when Twitter finally dies leaving me nothing but time to write here) I'll try going into more detail.  But while we do still have Twitter, I can link to some threads and put the phone down. 

Here is the DSA guide for this cycle.  And here is the Antigravity guide. 

This is a thread where I read and added some notes on the guides.  And this is a thread where I punched out a couple of predictions even though I should not do those. Nobody actually knows what will happen in the future and it's important to remember that when one wants to recover one's hope.  

We'll work on that when we get home too, I guess.