Ghouls and goblins

Governor-elect Landry's transition team is populated with all of the infamous figures you might expect to see. You've got your Grigsbys and your Bollingers and whatnot. There are other things you might expect.  An oil company lawyer will chair the Coast & Environment committee, a charter school guy will chair a K-12 education group.  I also see there's a committee chaired by Gray Stream. That's an interesting character we highlighted last month as well. 

Lane Grigsby will be in charge of something called a "Constitutional Reform" committee which is itself a whole 'nother can of worms we've been trying not to have to open for quite some time, primarily because of some issues we brought up on election night. 

Anyway, I'm linking back to old posts here because we're about to get swallowed up by some monsters that I, like a lot of people, have been warning about for a long time. You might say we're practically haunted. Not sure what anyone can do about it now. After all, the exorcist was two governors ago.

Louisiana's Privatized Utility King

We flagged this a few years ago. Jim Bernhard is slowly building himself a little public utilities empire through his new-ish private equity firm. Today we learn he's about to add a pretty big piece to that. 

Entergy Corp. is selling its natural gas distribution business to Baton Rouge-based Bernhard Capital Partners, part of a broader strategy shift that if approved by regulators will mean a new gas provider for tens of thousands of Louisiana homeowners.

Entergy officials announced the $484 million deal on Monday and said they hope to finalize the sale in mid-2025.

In an email to customers, Entergy executives said there would be no immediate changes to gas service or bills for their roughly 200,000 customers in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

“We will work with our customers, regulators and Bernhard Capital to ensure a smooth transition and minimize any inconvenience,” read the message, which was signed by Entergy Louisiana CEO Phillip May and Entergy New Orleans CEO Deanna Rodriguez. They promised to provide additional information “in the months ahead.”

"Hot commodity"

 Your District Attorney is doing a little forcible real estate flipping. 

The structure is one of three surviving buildings from the Storyville district, according to a 2022 City Planning Commission report. It once housed seminal jazz clubs Frank Early Saloon and My Place Saloon.

In 2019, the location at 1210-1216 Bienville Street was cited for demolition by neglect by the Historic District Landmarks Commission. The case remains open and the $3,075 fine unpaid, according to public records.

Williams described the historic property as a "hot commodity," though its future is murky. Williams said he'd like to see it house fresh produce for sale to the neighborhood. David Abbenante, president of HRI Management, developer of the abutting, mixed-income Bienville Basin Community apartments, said the impact of the market's closure is just beginning.

Civil asset forfeiture is a controversial practice that has been banned in four states. Louisiana's laws are among the ripest for abuse in the nation, according to the libertarian Institute for Justice, which gave the state a D+ grade.

Williams, throughout his career in politics, has been rolling in contributions from developers.  Here's a brief taste from the 2020 Antigravity voter guide, for example. 

Williams has received money from charter school supporter Leslie Jacobs, a point of concern if ending the school-to-prison pipeline truly is a goal, as Williams states. (For a more thorough look at how and why charter schools directly serve the school-to-prison pipeline, revisit our introduction to the school board races in our previous guide.) Williams has also received money from notorious real estate developers Pres Kabacoff and the Motwanis. “Development” and policing go hand in hand, and New Orleans is no stranger to the trend.

Spooky Season Reading

The older I get, the more I find myself becoming a creature of ritual. I don't know why, exactly. I think it has to do with wanting to mark the accelerating passage of the year. At my age, it can slip by almost completely unnoticed if you don't make a special effort to feel it happen. This requires us to participate in the seasons; make the gumbo when the weather turns cold, eat the king cake on Jan 6... wait, are these all gonna be food?  

Maybe not all of them. I'm also in the habit of trying to find the best spooky books to read during this time every year. That's easier said than done. So much horror in books and movies turns out to be trash. It's easy enough to be grossed out by cheap schlock. (And hey sometimes that's exactly what we're in the mood for!) But, like I said, I'm doing these rituals for the sake of.. I dunno... spiritual communion with the season, or something like that. The good Halloween books are more atmospheric than shocking. In the best ones you might even find something profoundly moving.

This October I read six spooky books covering a wide variety here of style, of form and of audience.  There are picture books for children, a graphic collection for teens, as well as some fiction for adults. Anyway, here's list. 

The Skull by Jon Klassen (2023)

Klassen might be my favorite children's author and illustrator.  A girl runs away into the woods. We aren't told why, exactly. She comes to an abandoned house where she befriends a disembodied skull. The skull can talk. It can move a little bit. It can even taste the food and drink the girl feeds it. Or at least it politely says that it can. Like the girl, though, the skull is also hiding from something it will need her help to escape. Klassen's re-telling of this folk tale is, I think, about processing trauma and what it means to choose your own family. The illustrations are lovely and the text is imbued with his trademark existential wit.

How To Sell A Haunted House by  Grady Hendrix (2023)

There's a lot to like in this novel it but it was maybe a little too much TV melodrama for me. The title says, haunted house, but really this is a haunted doll story. A single mother is a tech engineer in Silicon Valley when she learns that her parents way back home in Charleston have suddenly died. This requires her to fly across the county and settle the estate with her estranged fuck-up of a brother. What ensues then is a plot where unfinished family issues must be confronted and secrets... um... unearthed. Drama tropes and horror tropes abound.  Still, it's clever and even a little funny in spots and there are some interesting ideas in it about art and performance and memory.

In The Dark by Kate Hoefler (2023)

This is a picture book about community and acceptance of outsiders. Pages depict alternating points of view between villagers witnessing a mysterious group of newcomers (witches?) to the nearby woods and a competing narrative told by the newcomers themselves. The brief text and gorgeous pictures make this a great read aloud. 

A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories Edited by Richard Z. Santos (2023) 

Mostly a collection of sketches, many of them quite short. Some compelling ideas, though. Does a hurricane leave ghosts in its wake? Is an aging couple stalked by El Chupacabra or the idea of death? Is the noise next door La Llorona or an even more terrifying reality? Little evocative ideas are often better than drawn out novels in this genre.

Through The Woods by Emily Carroll (2014)

This graphic collection was recommended to me on Bluesky after I began a thread of these. The stories here have moody elements of folk tales and Victorian gothic. Much like the short story sketches in "Night of Screams" these vignettes are evocative pieces to read at night. Both of those books were great for Halloween mood setting. 

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan (2023)

A not-too-distant future Toronto is falling apart. Its physical and social infrastructure are neglected and rotting away amid the forces of capitalism and climate change. Gig workers and civil servants struggle to keep heads above water (often literally as street floods and sinkholes proliferate.) At the top of the precarious social order, a territorial battle is taking place between a corporation in charge of a "smart cities" style privatized district and an old line set of real estate developers trying to maintain family legacies. 

The titular "Marigold" tower is one such legacy. Permitted, we learn, through a ritualistic boardroom gathering of oligarchs somewhat reminiscent of a Comus ball and built, in accordance with custom, on top of a literal human sacrifice, the building is a manifestation of the city's longstanding way of doing business. One of Sullivan's characters describes it this way.

"They would say they aren't monsters. The system works out, so their hands are clean. In the past, people were walled into these places alive. Now when they do it, they'll say it's humane. These people don't care, and they want you to not care either. Everything you own comes from bodies and blood, one way or another. Your phone. Your clothes. The good things you have are primarily drawn from the misfortune of others. Blood, sweat, tears. All of it literal."

In the face of the economic and climate crisis, though, the condo development, like the entire city, is failing. Meanwhile, a mysterious mold is growing out of the ground where all this blood and exploitation was sewn and is beginning to threaten everyone. 

The Marigold is set in Toronto but I kept thinking about New Orleans.  You could probably insert any city into this narrative. For example, it was hard not to read this novel without thinking of the conglomeration of private real estate developers, university boards, and tax exempt non-profits in control properties like Charity Hospital. 

Nearly five years after a team of developers was selected to bring Charity Hospital back to life, the landmark building's renovation is at least two years behind schedule and in need of more money to get the project back on track.

Officials involved with the project have recently brought in a new developer to help jump start the renovations, which have seen delays due to the pandemic and soaring construction costs.

According to one person familiar with the project's financing, the costs have risen to well north of $500 million from around $300 million two years ago.

The image of a city's social elite literally building their wealth on top of the bodies and bones of the poor comes further into focus with this macabre bit I remembered from having read Kathryn Olivarius's Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom last year.

If we were to travel back in time to October 1833, when John Wyeth was digging mass graves, and sat in the Cabildo's public gallery to listen to the deliberations of New Orleans's city council, we might not realize that the city was in the grips of its worst yellow fever epidemic in a generation. We would hear detailed discussions concerning the oyster shells being used to pave a new road out to Lake Pontchartrain; debates about city attorney salaries; estimates for the amount of wood needed for a flying bridge; and fights about the cost of lantern oil for the cotton exchange. Across the road in the mayor's office, the conversation might center on city finances or the schedule of the city guard. There would be little to no discussion about the horrific situation at the Charity Hospital less than a mile away, where unclaimed corpses baking under the sun outside had recently exploded. Nothing either about the roughly 300 immigrants around the corner in Marigny who had just died from yellow fever. 

The elite culture of apathetic fatalism ran deeper than silence. New Orleans's city fathers actively avoided discussing yellow fever, even at the height of epidemics, instead preoccupying themselves with finances, zoning, and parochial matters like bread weights. Aldermen considered it a poor use of political capital to seek out means to resolve or ameliorate disease. Some believed the fatal status quo was intractable and that there was nothing to be gained by raising controversial topics like quarantine, which did little but produce shouting matches and inflame the ire of businessmen. Others were weary of discussing disease which inevitably morphed into conversations about other sensitive issues like taxes, regulation or immigration

There's much in Olivarius's book about Yellow Fever that foreshadows the political response to COVID, no doubt. But the larger point, I think, is illustrated in Sullivan's novel, where the fundamental issue, as always, comes down to who decides who gets what, no matter the circumstances, and the futility of thinking that those fundamentals could ever change. As one of his protagonists concludes, "It didn't matter what you knew. The future was owned by someone else, someone bigger than you, someone or something that didn't even pay taxes." 

Anyway, Happy Halloween.  I suppose it was the spirit of this real estate horror novel that inspired this year's Jack-O-Lantern.  I give you, Joe Jaeger's Crumbling Plaza Tower of Terror.

 

And one more passage from Sullivan describing what's going on with one of his characters whose family has parlayed its wealth from slumlording into luxury condo development.

Another revenue stream, another way to maximize return on tragedy. A building wouldn't do anymore. The very act of holding onto a property was immoral. He reconciled himself to that years ago, welcomed his role as the villain. To be an owner, to be a landlord, meant someone had to be subjugated. The other developers who talked around those facts were kidding themselves, doing their best put some polish on an ancient profession. Humans couldn't survive without a roof over their head. A building gave you more time, sometimes decades. To deny anyone that, well, you'd need to be a monster, wouldn't you?

Still pretty far from getting it right

This could be the week we get a ruling on the latest legal challenge to the latest attempt by City Council to rein in the plague of short term rentals on our city where nobody actually lives. We keep saying the only remedy for this is a full ban on these in our neighborhoods. When we say that we mean a full ban on the residentially zoned AND commercially zoned parts of the neighborhoods.  Which means we've got a long way to go with all of this. But it does like we're about to get one step closer. 

In September, U.S. District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle suspended the city’s regulatory system governing STRs. As a result, there are essentially no rules governing the industry while the city awaits Lemelle’s decision on a suit filed by the industry in May. Although the judge hasn't explicitly said which way he's leaning, his suspension of the rules, apparent skepticism of the compromise and a lack of movement on the issue since then has opponents of the industry increasingly convinced he'll strike them down. Lemelle is expected to make a decision during a Nov. 2 hearing.

I don't care for the way John Stanton frames things in that article. In lines like this one, he buys into a bullshit myth that the app-i-fied STR business is merely a noble purpose corrupted. 

What originally started as a gig economy style way to temporarily rent out a spare bedroom has turned into a multi-billion-dollar, global industry dominated by large corporations.

He also goes heavy into flourishes about the aesthetic consequences of STRs, "predatory packs of bachelor and bachelorette parties," and so on. And while that's unpleasant, it's just a symptom of the more fundamental illness. A community is being destroyed for the benefit of capital. 

This "gig economy" Stanton seems neutral about is just a new name for an old process. STRs, rideshares, delivery apps, all of these arbitrage businesses that turn workers into independent contractors or demand that people commodify their private living space just to get by, all of this is just the same logical progression of unfettered capitalism we've always seen. The alienated subjects of this regime have always been vulnerable to more intrusive and efficient extraction of value from their time, their bodies, their privacy. The "innovative technology" here is really just a means of circumventing existing rules protecting us from these intrusions.  This is why we've always needed to band together and work out ways to protect ourselves. That's democracy.  And so we need new rules to keep the beast in check.  Hopefully we can still get there.

Or maybe we won't.  Democracy is hard to accomplish but easy to subvert.  It often comes down to identifying the most venal or willfully ignorant political power brokers and buying them off; sometimes with bribes, but also with bullshit if they're stupid enough. 

The one major exception is sales tax collections, which have been below projections in the second half of this year. Cantrell’s budget anticipates a slight decrease in sales tax collections, about $3 million, next year from what was budgeted this year. During her speech, Cantrell appeared to blame the shortfall, in part, on the council’s attempts to rein in short-term rentals, on which the city collects taxes. Cantrell has repeatedly expressed frustration with recent council-backed restrictions on the industry, saying in September that she felt the city’s original short-term rental law — passed in 2016 and criticized as being too lax — “got it right.”

From the looks of things we're still years away from getting it right. Maybe by that time there will still be some city left to save. But it's slipping away fast. 

Tell me more about the vending machines

Yeah yeah Susan Hutson is being sued by a guy she fired for whistleblowing over the Mardi Gras hotel rooms. (allegedly!) And yeah yeah there is a salacious bit about an (alleged) affair thrown in because that is how we sell any story nowadays. But what I'm really interested in here is this. 

Trautenberg says he investigated, and alleges that Hutson told him to stop, and if he didn't, "she would fire him for insubordination,” the lawsuit states.

Hutson defended the spending to WDSU Investigates.

OPSO now says they used the money they collected from donations, fundraising, and vending machines to pay for the rooms and not tax dollars.

I've already said, I don't think that accepting the hotel stays from "donations and fundraising" is necessarily better than just using department funds to pay for them.  If anything, it's worse, actually!  But what is this vending machine money all about?  The Sheriff has vending machine money? How much? From where? How does that normally get spent anyway?

But what about the monorail?

This week, Troy Henry and the city's economic development team he has been negotiating with over the Six Flags site showed up at a convention of water park operators to do a little carnival barking. 

The yearslong effort to redevelop the former Six Flags amusement park in New Orleans East took a major step forward Wednesday as the 227-acre property was formally turned over to Bayou Phoenix, the local group selected to tackle the ambitious project.

At a ceremony held during the annual meeting of the World Waterpark Association at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, Troy Henry, who leads the Bayou Phoenix consortium, signed the lease to cheers from residents and applause from public officials.

Henry's one dollar per year lease now gives him permission to demolish what remains of the flooded and shuttered park. Beyond that, though, nothing is guaranteed. In fact, Henry even says here that the master plan he's been waving around in order to drum up public support and secure his bid for the project will probably be altered once the demolitions are done. 

Now that the document is finalized and Bayou Phoenix has control of the property, Henry said his group can begin the difficult task of figuring out how to turn their vision into reality.

“We just got the keys, so now we have to assess the property because we need to understand if the master plan we have designed can physically be located in the way we have laid it out,” Henry said.

While today’s ceremony was a significant milestone, many questions about the project remain.

Over the next 12 months, the developers plan to assess the site and clear it out, demolishing the rusting old amusement rides and removing junk from the property. The Bayou Phoenix master plan will also likely change during that process as the partners get a better understanding of the land and determine what is feasible.

In other words, yes, we have been plying you with bullshit for years now. But trust us.  

A few months ago, WWLTV helped spread some of that bullshit by running a little feature about Tyler Perry's music partner. Apparently Henry had trotted him out to say vague things about how he could do Hollywood things of some sort on whatever the Six Flags site becomes. 

His next venture takes him from Hollywood back to his hometown of New Orleans as he tries to help revive the Six Flags site.

“I walked in there and immediately went into reimagining what the space could potentially be, including equity and inclusion. Being able to have representation for the unrepresented."

The former church organist from Hahnville has big plans for Six Flags and his own career. They include technology centers on the abandoned site and partnering with industries that can help teach the courses and plant the seeds in the next generation.

But at this week's signing ceremony, we learn that Henry doesn't actually have any partners lined up to operate any of the "attractions" he has promised. And, of course, it follows that there's no financing lined up for anything. 

The developers have had initial discussions with several operators, including nationally known brands that are interested in taking on various pieces of the project, Henry said. Because Bayou Phoenix did not have a signed lease agreement until Tuesday, however, it has not engaged in serious talks or, even, secured letters of intent with any specific partners.

For those same reasons, the group has not secured any financing commitments yet. The price tag for the project has previously been mentioned as ranging from $500 million to nearly $1 billion, though Henry said Tuesday that it will likely be closer to $500 million. 

It's well known that Henry and his friends in media and entertainment pull this sort of stuff all the time. It's also fairly well understood that this circle of friends extends into politics. 

 

Equity Media bought WBOK making Troy Henry, who also runs Bayou Phoenix, Councilmember Thomas’ boss. Seems like Troy is gonna have to give out some raises if Oliver secures the bag 💰 pic.twitter.com/knYh56H8fT

— Down For Whatever (@dadioonthepatio) May 12, 2023

Which, in turn, is one reason Troy's project, which may not have any solid partnership commitments or private financing, does have access to $100 million in public subsidies. 

Of that, an estimated 20%, or $100 million, is expected to come from city, state and federal funds, including the possible creation of a special taxing district and “other creative, innovative government programs,” Henry said.

Anyway as of right now, Troy has a one year lease. Let's check back next Halloween to see how many of these deadlines need to be extended.

Its first deadline is 12 months from the date of the lease signing, October 25, by which time it must have a sublease in place with an operator for at least one component of the project. That portion of the project must be completed in early 2027, according to the lease.

The developers will be considered in default if they do not hit the milestones, though the lease contains clauses that allow for extensions.

What happened?

We did it! We're back, everybody. 

Revenue projections

The Cantrell administration expects general fund revenue of more than $762 million, driven by sales taxes, property taxes, licensing and permitting fees, and more. The remainder of the operating budget is funded via revenues earmarked for specific purposes like federal and state grants and specific districts' property tax funds. Those revenue projections suggest that the majority of the city's revenue streams will return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Montaño.

A whole year ahead of time, according to 2021 Monatno, anyway. 

New Orleans is set to receive $388 million from this year’s coronavirus stimulus package, and while council members are calling to spend at least some of that money, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration is urging a slower approach.

Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño on Monday resisted calls from the council to hold mid-year budget hearings on the funds and urged that the vast majority of the money be held back, with the first major round of spending not coming until next year. And even then, Montaño urged council members to take the long view and parcel out spending through 2025, when some projections say New Orleans will finally emerge from its pandemic-induced deficits.

At the time, Montaño and Cantrell were resisting calls to spend the federal relief money on housing and other support for service industry workers facing evictions. In other words they were being asked to use the funds to help poor people affected by the pandemic; the purpose they were actually intended for.  Instead, Montaño wanted to squirrel as much of it away to address his 5 year "projected" deficits.  

But, here we are. Not even 5 years down the road and the deficits seem to be over.  Maybe it's finally time to make good on the original promise of the American Rescue Plan? 

Or maybe not. As these counter-programmers to today's hearing pointed out, we're mostly spending it on cop stuff.

At a press conference outside City Hall before the mayor's budget presentation, advocates with the Big Easy Budget Coalition issued their demands once again.

"The American Rescue Plan dollars really offered New Orleans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move in a different direction and recover from the pandemic and recover from years of inequity," said Sarah Omojola, director of Vera Louisiana, a local initiative of the Vera Institute of Justice. "Instead the ARPA dollars— the American Rescue Plan dollars— were used to plug budget holes and invest in policing."

Are they definitely building it ON the park, though?

This is a good quick summary of the history of Duncan Plaza and its environs. But I'm still not clear on whether the plans for the new City Hall will maintain the park as a park or will the new building go on top of it? 

Duncan Plaza has always been more than just a green space in a concrete jungle. 

For decades, the park has served as the backdrop for protests and gatherings. Now, city and state leaders have struck a tentative deal to construct a new City Hall on its grounds.

On Tuesday, the New Orleans City Planning Commission okayed the plan for a land swap so that the city can reacquire the portion of the park owned by the state of Louisiana.

The lots they're getting from the state are the flat vacant area where the State Supreme Court building used to stand.  Is that where the new City Hall will go? Or will it take over the rest of the park? Or both? I still don't know. 

Mondays

 Oh man, well, that's not good. 

Contractors are attempting to recover as much as 15 barrels of crude oil released from an Extex Operating platform near Turtle Bay, about 9 1/2 miles south of the Jean Lafitte Harbor, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. 

The Coast Guard received a report of the release at about 4:30 p.m. Saturday. A team of LSU researchers in Turtle Bay also videoed the release on Saturday, showing crude oil spewing from a pipe atop the platform into the open water of Barataria Bay. 

There are so many little oil spills happening all the time along our coast from both active and "orphaned" or abandoned wells that it's really a mundane sort of thing to report. 

Meanwhile, watch out for "superfog"

Area residents should expect repeated bouts of “superfog” through at least mid-week, thanks to a stubborn dome of high pressure sitting over southern Louisiana, National Weather Service meteorologists said Monday.

The dense fog resulting from the combination of clear skies, light winds and overnight temperatures dropping to levels where dew forms are pretty normal for this time of year, said Ben Schott, director of the weather service's Slidell office.

What became more problematical was that the fog combined with smoke, creating superfog conditions, he said. "Smoke naturally diminishes visibility, and in combination with particles from the fires it can enhance the already foggy conditions by creating even more droplets of water in the air to make visibility worse, dropping visibility on roadways to zero visibility in some cases this morning across the region," Schott said.

They say the smoke is mostly coming from marsh fires in the Bayou Sauvage area. All weekend it smelled like burning plastic. Today, the superfog is causing even worse problems. 

Parts of interstates 10, 55 and 310 are closed after dense fog and smoke led to a massive pileup and other isolated accidents Monday morning. 

Authorities are asking drivers to avoid a roughly 20-mile stretch of I-55 running alongside Lake Maurepas and the entirety of the Bonnet Carré Spillway. 

So avoid that area.  Also, maybe just avoid all the areas today.

 

#BREAKING car on fire on interstate near dome. @wdsu pic.twitter.com/i51RIIRbuJ

— AUBRY KILLION (@AubryKWDSU) October 23, 2023

"Violent people"

Going to be a fun time figuring out how the legislature defines that next year.

“Violent people can commit nonviolent crimes.” - Rep. Villio, who (I believe) is suggesting that perhaps Louisiana should consider stiffening penalties for nonviolent convictions as well as violent convictions. #lalege #lagov

— Julie O'Donoghue (@JSODonoghue) October 18, 2023

Weird how deeply this line of thinking permeates the political discourse in this country. 

As Wild told fellow House Democrats that she didn’t want any religious community to feel ostracized — noting that Muslim leaders weren’t present at the event she participated in — Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), a moderate Jewish Democrat and Israel hawk, loudly interjected.

Accounts differ, however, on whether Gottheimer was referring to Muslims or made an ill-timed remark in an unrelated conversation, with some attendees overhearing him saying “because they’re all guilty” and others saying he stated “because they should feel guilty.” A spokesperson for Gottheimer strongly denied that he was talking about Muslims.

It's almost like decades of waging repressive wars of empire start to leave their mark.  Eventually you end up with a lot of "violent people" walking around the halls of power.

Ghost bus

 Clearly this app is haunted.

RTA launched a new app called Le Pass in August 2022. The app uses GPS technology to track buses. While it does include information about route delays, Ride says the updates don’t appear quickly enough, leaving riders waiting at stops with no idea when to expect to get picked up or whether they should change their transportation plans.  

“What we’re frustrated by is that we don’t have real information from the RTA on how the service issues are affecting different parts of the system,” Buckley said. 

Buckley said riders are reporting to Ride that sometimes the Le Pass app will sometimes show a bus’ location where there is no bus and sometimes a bus will be running and won’t show up on the app. 

And when a bus breakdown causes a delay, the app only tells users there are “significant delays,” but it doesn’t offer added information about a vehicle being taken off its line.

That's great. I've literally had RTA workers tell me not to use Le Pass. It can't even tell you whether or not a real bus is coming, let alone begin to figure out why it isn't. 

Hankins said she’s trying to work on getting more accurate information out to the public, but it’s hard to know how long a delay might take. 

“What I have gleaned from my peers across the country is they will say there is an incident on this line [or] police activity on this line, but they can’t describe how long the delay will be. Whereas our app just says there’s a delay. And so how do we … give riders better information?” Hankins asked. “That is something I’m challenging our team to try to figure out.”

To be fair, there are a lot of factors to consider in estimating delays in New Orleans. Maybe a tree has fallen on a bus. That could take an hour or so. A flooded street might mean two or three hours. But what if a sinkhole has swallowed a bus whole?  That might take longer. Perhaps a building has collapsed onto a streetcar line.  Now we are talking about a years' long delay.  All of this may be beyond the app's ability to compute efficiently.

Or maybe the delay is caused by something more mundane. Like, for example, decades of negligence. 

On its worst day the agency had only 78 buses available. At its best, it had 89, one shy of what the agency says is the ideal number — 90 buses — to accommodate. 

In an interview last month, RTA CEO Lona Edwards Hankins acknowledged that the transit agency is facing a number of challenges in providing reliable service to its bus riders. 

The fleet size is down by more than 50 percent from its pre-Katrina number, when it was about 370 strong, according to media reports from the time. Much of that fleet — about 200 buses — was destroyed in the citywide flooding that followed the 2005 storm, The Times-Picayune reported in 2009, and the remaining buses were aging out of usefulness. 

After receiving funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and settling with its insurance company, the RTA purchased 137 new buses between 2008 and 2012, officials told Verite.

But Hankins, who was named CEO in March, said there wasn’t a long-term purchasing plan in place.

Whatever the case, you're probably gonna be waiting a while. Maybe just have the app say that.

All clear for profit taking

 Election's over. No longer any reason to pretend anyone will stand in the way of Elevance. 

Baton Rouge-based Blue Cross officials notified the Louisiana Department of Insurance in late September it was withdrawing its application for the necessary state approval of the deal. The pause came amid growing concerns from policyholders, local politicians and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now governor-elect.

At the time, the company said it would refile its application with the state later this year or in early 2024.

Landry had expressed concerns about whether the deal was in the best interest of the policyholders and had said he thought the incoming Commissioner of Insurance, Tim Temple, a new governor and a new crop of state legislators should be in office before a deal of such magnitude is approved.

More than 1.9 million people in Louisiana have some form of Blue Cross health insurance. Of those, some 92,000 are policyholders.

Good luck, everybody!

Long termism

 This is what Sam Bankman-Fried told people.

Long-run savings

Rodriguez said the company’s pitch to customers is that they will save money in the long run if the plan is approved. The company’s leaders have argued it will cost less over time if the company can avoid costly replacement projects after storms, and that customers may not have to spend money evacuating.

If approved, New Orleans customers would see higher bills. The utility has said bills would gradually rise from an additional 20 cents in surcharges per month in 2024 to $11.86 per month in 2028.

For this very simple investment in our company making its quarterly profit goal so it can spit out obscene dividends to shareholders, you get the peace of mind that you are doing a... good thing for... the future.. maybe. 

Also resilience! Don't forget that we said resilience in this pitch. That always seems to work

MMT is real

 Certainly enough money can be found whenever you like.

The nation's top treasury official said the US does not have to pick and choose between aiding Israel and Ukraine in their ongoing military conflicts.

It's been just over a week since Israel officially declared war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas after the group attacked several towns in southern Israel. Since the war began, President Joe Biden and US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle offered support for Israel, while at the same time pushing for the country to preserve innocent Palestinian lives in Gaza.

The war between Israel and Hamas started at the same time as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing for over a year now, and Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen has no doubts the US can afford to aid both Israel and Ukraine.

"America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel's military needs, and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia," Yellen told Sky News in a Monday interview.

*stares in health care/housing/infrastructure/student debt etc. etc......*

Breaking the city

With the election already upon us, I just wanted to highlight this one aspect of your presumptive next Governor's campaign I don't think has been centered in the press the way it probably should have been. Of course, there's a lot we can say about Jeff Landry's venality or his stupidity, or even his bigotry. But the most alarming matter that confronts us this month is his outright hostility toward the city of New Orleans in particular. 

A win by Landry would return unified control of Louisiana’s government to the GOP. But it would also elevate and empower a man who has tirelessly sought to undermine the political power of the state’s major cities and shield law enforcement from local and federal reform efforts.

“The place is being run like a third world-country,” the attorney general said of New Orleans during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last October. “Why doesn’t the state just take it over?” Carlson asks. “It’s a great question,” Landry responded. “In Louisiana, we have one of the most powerful executive departments in the country. The governor is extremely powerful. He has the ability to bend that city to his will, and he [Edwards] just doesn’t.”

“But we will.”

This is something that has been a long time coming. The political independence of the city and its capacity to protect its residents from the worst abuses of state government has been under constant attack since Katrina. The privatization of the schools, the destruction of public housing, the rampant and unchecked gentrification has chipped away at the city's heart. 

We semi-sarcastically lament from time to time that nobody actually lives here anymore. But the truth is, New Orleans is the state's leading city in name only.  It isn't even the most populous parish anymore. More to the point, the political base it once held has reduced to a shadow.  In recent cycles, local elections have taken on a chaotic nature. The so-called "machines" and patronage networks that once defined city politics don't really exist anymore.  Their surviving remnants, inheritors of diminishing sinecures in the con-profit space, or in neighborhood churches, or in bail bonds, etc. operate in ad-hoc coalitions but none of them command the GOTV apparatus that was once overwhelming and automatic. Intra-city politics in the Cantrell era is the age of incoherence and power vacuums. 

In state politics, that manifests as a lack of clout for the city overall. Once upon a time, a gubernatorial candidate with a strong showing out of New Orleans was at least a third of the way to winning. That's no longer the case. In 2019 it took a massive, unlikely to ever be repeated, effort to shake out every last vote in order to save John Bel Edwards's reelection. Even just four years later, there are fewer votes to shake out now. The COVID and (I know it's a problematic term) post-COVID era has brought an accelerated exodus as housing and insurance costs rise, and as the threat of hurricanes and sea level rise makes life here seem ever more tenuous. The city never fully recovered from Katrina and what remains is fading away.  

And it won't end there. Like I've been saying all these nearly twenty years, now, this is more or less a deliberate project of our city and state's ruling classes who are just as happy as ever to swim in a smaller pond as long as they remain the big fish. Last year's recall petition was a flex by that class in more ways than one. Even though it didn't remove the mayor from office, it did impose a kind of discipline on the mayor by demonstrating a threat.  The fact that a millionaire can always throw the administration into chaos on a moment's notice by funding a recall establishes who is the real boss. The concurrent emergence of the NOLA Coalition and crime panic reaction shows how effective this tactic is at setting the agenda. The other thing the recall did was open up the voter rolls to scrutiny by dishonest and politically driven actors.  Regardless of who becomes the next Secretary of State, there will almost certainly be a full purge of Orleans voters in the coming term.  

The goal in view now is a state whose politics turns less on the concerns of a political base in the city and the people who live there and is more at the whim of the Governor and his much smaller base of a few millionaires and associated kleptocrats with little or no friction from outside. Kind of like some other states we know. 

.@jefflandry says his vision is to make Louisiana more like Mississippi. #lagov

— Jan Moller (@jmollerLBP) April 26, 2023

I believe this was a hearing about establishing law and order

I hear there were a  lot of fun public comments but I still was hoping I wouldn't have to watch the recording of this one. Unfortunately, now I may have to.  

A New Orleans City Council committee on Wednesday voted to move the nomination of Mayor LaToya Cantrell's nominee for police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, to a full council vote, although the 4-1 vote was not technically an endorsement.

Kirkpatrick, a West Coast transplant and veteran police chief, seemed to garner support from committee members in a first-of-its-kind confirmation hearing. Council President JP Morrell's motion for "no recommendation" was something of a compromise after hours of virulent opposition from public speakers and a shouting match between Morrell and Council member Oliver Thomas.

Thomas said he had been leaning against voting to confirm but was open to changing his mind. He took offense when, in his view, council members seemed to presuppose a vote in favor of Kirkpatrick. Morrell and Thomas traded accusations of being out of order, and Thomas suggested they settle the argument outside before tensions cooled.

Imagine challenging someone to a duel right in front of the police chief. 

Anyway, it looks like the hearing and the public comment covered a lot of ground. The article doesn't catalog everything that might have been brought up. It does mention a little bit about Kirkpatrick's experience in Oakland although it isn't clear if that was addressed. 

In Oakland, Kirkpatrick took heat for what critics have called a lack of progress on that city’s court-enforced police reforms, and for her handling of discipline for officers involved in the killing of a homeless man, among other controversies. She was fired by a newly formed police commission. A licensed attorney, Kirkpatrick later won a $1.5 million settlement for wrongful termination after a jury ruled in her favor.

There's a little more to that story. I wrote a little about it a few weeks ago.  It seems to me like the candidate's actual record ought to have at least as much scrutiny as her promises to learn about "local culture" and so forth. But, honestly, this all seems like a formality at this point.

What are "pro-choice proclivities"?

 The entire premise of this Prospect article is wrong.  

Since Dobbs, voters in Republican Kansas, Ohio, and Montana have rejected far-right overreaching ballot measures and affirmed their support for the right to abortion even with curbs in place. In last year’s midterm elections, voters’ concerns about the loss of that right helped keep the Senate in Democratic hands and blunt the Republican wave in the House that overconfident prognosticators repeatedly claimed was nigh.

This fall, upcoming gubernatorial elections in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana will test just how deep the revulsion over these far-right Republican excesses runs in the South, and what those races may presage in abortion access politics beyond the region. All three states have Republican supermajorities in their legislatures. The Dobbs decision specifically affirmed a Mississippi statute devised to explicitly challenge Roe v. Wade. But many Republicans have been shaken by the backlash.

No. Louisiana's gubernatorial election will not test voters' aversion to GOP anti-abortion politics in any way.  I understand why national political analysts would like it to. It certainly could do that.  The mid-term results and the single ballot issue results this article cites do, indeed, indicate that abortion rights can be a winning issue for Democrats in supposedly "red" territory.  But that can only happen if the Democratic candidates run on defending those rights. The Democrat in our Governor's race is decidedly not doing that. 

The Prospect article wants to pretend that he is, or could be. But the closest it can come to achieving this pretense is to describe him as having "Pro-choice proclivities." 

Louisiana holds its open primary in mid-October. Gov. John Bel Edwards, an anti-abortion Democrat, is term-limited. Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is running to succeed Edwards, sticks to the loud and proud extremes favored by the far-right Republicans on abortion. If he survives attacks from his Republican opponents in the already nasty “jungle” primary, he appears to be poised to romp over Democrat Shawn Wilson, an African American former state transportation secretary and first-time candidate with pro-choice proclivities and little statewide name recognition. Like their Mississippi neighbors, Louisianans mostly vote along racial lines.

To demonstrate those proclivities, the Prospect cites Wilson's extremely milquetoast rhetoric in support of rape and incest exceptions as well as the fact that he affirmatively answered a yes/no debate question about a hypothetical statewide referendum on abortion.  This is hardly anything.  Certainly it is not indicative of the "Post-Dobbs strategy" of full-throated support for abortion rights the article wants these elections to "test." 

In fact, in interviews, Wilson sounds very much like a 90s Third Way Democrat seeking to accommodate anti-abortion sentiment while also not posing a direct threat to an individual's "private decisions." 

In an interview last week, Wilson didn’t describe himself as being “pro-choice” like abortion rights supporters typically do.

The Democrat said he personally opposes abortion except in cases where a pregnant person was a victim of rape or incest – or their health is at risk. But he also believes his personal beliefs shouldn’t be imposed on others, and that individuals need more flexibility to make their own decisions about ending a pregnancy. 

When asked about abortion, Wilson said he is “not interested in preventing folks from making decisions that are private,” and “I dare not question their doctor’s expertise.”

But after Dobbs, those private decisions are already threatened. State laws that are on the books now criminalize them.  Wilson is not promising to do anything about that. He's meekly defending a status quo that doesn't exist anymore.  During the third debate, Wilson was asked why he had begun the campaign with the words "Pro-life" displayed on his website but then taken that down. All he said was, "I am personally a decision maker for me and my family." We can barely even understand what that means for his family members, let alone what it might mean for the people of the state.

What a waste. The thing is, it is probably true that Democrats can make up some ground in GOP dominated states by running campaigns that speak up for abortion rights rather than just hint a candidate's "pro-choice proclivities." The "Dobbs strategy" does, in fact, seem viable.  Shawn Wilson isn't running on that, though. 

It's afraid

 The salt water wedge is backing away. 

The Mississippi River saltwater wedge threatening New Orleans-area water supplies has retreated more than five miles, marking another positive development after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced last week that the salt water creeping upriver wouldn’t arrive at local intakes until weeks after initial projections, if at all.

The wedge was at river mile 63.9 as of Monday, according to information available on the Corps website. It had reached River Mile 69.4, or about six miles south of Belle Chasse, as of Oct. 2.

No idea what happened. Maybe the rent was too damn high. 

It flows downhill

This new S&WB substation has gone on quite a journey. First, Entergy was going to pay for it outright. We thought that sounded suspicious. And lo and behold, it was. After that fell through, the plan was to pay for it out of the city's American Rescue Plan allocation.  But that also sounded suspicious to us because it was already clear the mayor wanted to spend that money on cops and discretionary nonsense. Those suspicions also turned out to be well founded and now here we are back where we always thought we would be.  

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and the City Council responded in unison last July when Assessor Errol Williams announced that citywide property assessments had jumped by more than 20%.

They said City Hall would not “roll forward” property tax rates under its control, meaning property owners would not face additional liability for a little more than half of all citywide millages.

But the Sewerage & Water Board’s executive director, Ghassan Korban, has different ideas than his elected overseers when it comes to the utility’s tax rates. At the board’s Sept. 20 meeting, he said that he will argue for a roll forward, as the S&WB is in full tree-shaking mode to pay for a critical drainage power upgrade and a citywide meter replacement project.

Eventually the burden finds its way downstream to where the least important people are. And that's who has to bear it.

The boats must flow

There are priorities here that simply will not be questioned.  The matter of whether or not anybody can live in the city takes a very far back seat to the matter of how much profit can be sucked out of it.  Can you afford the rent/mortgage/insurance? Nobody cares about that compared to how much houses are flipping for in the neighborhood. Do your kids have a good school? Nobody cares about that compared to how much can be grifted away by private charter operators? Are you safe from floods? From poisons in your air and water? Nobody cares about that compared to how much oil and gas can be extracted and refined and sold into global markets. Is there a reliable source of fresh water nearby? Nobody cares about compared to... 

The Army Corps of Engineers has known for decades that its continual efforts to deepen the Mississippi River for bigger ships would eventually trigger the saltwater crisis that has now gripped the New Orleans area for weeks.

“This is certainly something that everybody knew was going to happen,” said Cecil Soileau, a retired Corps engineer who warned in a 1990 report that dredging the lower river would threaten the region’s drinking water.

Gotta have the boats.  Recall, also, the last big channel we dug for the boats also killed the city in 2005.  People are disposable. The boats, the oil, the money; that's what matters.

Very accurate leaning. The most accurate leaning. More and more people are saying this

 It turns out we've got plenty time left. 

A new forecast for saltwater intrusion moving up the Mississippi River has surprisingly bought lots more time for the New Orleans area — and raised the possibility that most of the city and Jefferson Parish could be spared from the threat altogether.

The change in forecast had to do with factors related to the river’s flow, work by the Army Corps of Engineers to elevate a sill and the Mississippi’s depth at the salt water’s current location.

The cone of uncertainty for the arrival of this wedge must be pretty wide. Who even knows the correct speed of salt anyway?  Anyway, the wedge isn't coming as quickly as they thought.  There's a bunch of reasons listed for that in this article. The river didn't lose as much flow as they thought it would. The salt is also sinking into a "pocket" in the riverbed near Belle Chase. Possibly a tandem float ran into a tree. I don't know. 

But it does change the plans a bit. Maybe by a $250 million bit, in fact. 

On top of that, based on modelling through November, the Corps now thinks the leading toe of the salt water — at the bottom of the river — could stop somewhere between river mile 112-113, or in the River Ridge-Kenner area.

If that does occur, the toe will not have reached far enough to cause salinity on the surface of the river at the locations of the West Jefferson plant in Marrero, New Orleans’ Carrollton plant for its east bank and the East Jefferson plant.

As a result, chloride levels in drinking water would be expected to remain below the 250 parts per million threshold for those plants. Surface water tends not to exceed that standard until the toe advances 15 to 25 miles upriver from it, given the wedge shape of the intrusion.

New Orleans may be able to avoid having to build an emergency pipeline to dilute the salt water at an estimated cost of between $150 million and $250 million. The Corps cautions, however, that forecasts could very well change. It now plans to update its forecasts for the public every Thursday.

That's quite a difference from just a few days ago when it looked like the pipeline wouldn't even make it on time. A similar effort in Jefferson Parish appeared to be moving faster which led everyone to begin making the usual jokes/trolls about comparative governmental efficiency.  Little did they know Orleans was "leading the way," the entire time. 

When it comes to where Orleans parish stands currently in its effort to mitigate the saltwater intrusion, when compared to neighboring parishes, Cantrell says the parish is ‘leading the way’.

“I'm saying don't believe the hype. The city of New Orleans, Sewerage and Water Board, we're leading in this capacity, or we're getting the responses that were due,” she said.

“Again, at the federal level. I've been always leaning in, always attached to the briefings, always advocating picking up the phone and calling myself so no asks have been done by anybody else. First, but me. But of course, echo, you continue to ask. And you continue to serve, circle the wagons to demonstrate why the solution is a collaborative one, that there's buy-in across the board, that we can actually get it done, that we have the talent to get it done. And we need the resources the federal government is listening, and the state is listening.”

Always leaning in, yes. That's what you have to do when you serve, circle the wagons.  But then we found out it is just as important to lean in with accuracy. 

"So, make no mistake about it, the city of New Orleans is not behind anybody, or anyone. The city of New Orleans is leading in this capacity. You know, regardless of what you hear," she said.

But not long after she said that, Jefferson Parish began construction on their West Bank pipeline. Meanwhile, Orleans is still nailing down contractors. Usually, the city's procurement process can take months. When asked if they were expediting the process, she said the city is moving ahead.

"So again, working aggressively every day. The contract and procurement process has started, in short order will be completed, because the time is now. We all understand that. And everyone is lean, leaning in with urgency, but also wanting to lean in with accuracy," Mayor Cantrell said.

On second thought, maybe the thing that's actually holding the wedge back is the great wall of sound that happens whenever the mayor speaks.  Whatever it is, it's working. Keep doing that.

In the park? On the park? Next to the park?

There's an update this morning on a plan to finally build a new City Hall. This time they're aiming to put it in what many of us have always believed is the only location that makes any sense; the same location as the current location... basically.   I say basically because they're actually moving across the street.  But exactly where across the street is difficult to pinpoint from the article. 

City and state officials have reached a tentative agreement on a complicated land swap that would allow a new City Hall to be built in Duncan Plaza, said Jay Dardenne, the commissioner of administration for Gov. John Bel Edwards, who negotiated the deal for the state. The swap, which still needs to clear several procedural hurdles, would also allow for a new Civil District Court building that judges have been clamoring for. 

City officials confirmed they've come to an agreement, but cautioned that much needs to happen before committing to the relocation plan, including subdividing Duncan Plaza and getting City Council approval — not to mention figuring out how to pay for a new building.

Back in May, when we first learned this might be in the works, we tried to get clarification as to how much of Duncan Plaza would be needed for the new building and how much would remain a public park. Although we didn't get a straight answer, I came away a little bit encouraged by the implication that the land under discussion was the vacant lot where the State Supreme Court building once stood and the Heal garage behind it.  But today, this looks a bit different. 

Again, this is all open to interpretation but it looks like the vacant lot is slated now for the new Civil District Court while the garage is out of the deal.  

The Civil District Court plan calls for its new building to go on the now-vacant site in Duncan Plaza that once housed the Louisiana Supreme Court before its move to the French Quarter. City Hall would be a separate building. Plans discussed last spring contemplated a 57,000-square-foot City Hall building and 32,000-square-foot court building. 

Is there enough room for all of that on the vacant part of Duncan Plaza? Or do they need the park too?  Seems like a simple enough question. But I still can't answer it.   

Congratulations

Congrats to the various landlords and contractors and politicians responsible for the deadly collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel construction site in 2019. You're all free to go. 

NEW ORLEANS — A state grand jury voted against indicting anyone for causing the catastrophic Hard Rock Hotel collapse four years ago, essentially ending a two-year criminal investigation by Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams with nothing to show for it.

Thursday’s grand jury meeting was held in secret, but Angela Magrette, whose brother Anthony was killed in the catastrophe, told WWL-TV she was informed of the decision not to press criminal charges. The grand jury meeting was the last one before a deadline to file criminal charges. Next Thursday, Oct. 12, is the fourth anniversary of the catastrophe and state law gives prosecutors four years to file gross negligence charges.

Congratulations, also, to Jason Williams and his excellent decision making.  

Williams chose to have a grand jury hear testimony on the matter and vote whether to bring charges, rather than simply filing them. The grand jury returned “not a true bill,” meaning at least nine grand jurors heard unrefuted testimony and didn’t think there was enough evidence to hold someone criminally liable for the collapse.