Why does Tim Temple hate Metaire?

Louisiana's next Insurance Commissioner is preparing to ascend to that office next year without having had to campaign for it.  No one ran against him for the open seat (Jim Donelon decided he didn't want it anymore) and so voters haven't really had to think about him much yet.  Would you like to meet him now? His name is Tim. 

Hailing from DeRidder, Tim Temple has been working in the insurance industry for 20 years, with the last 13 years of that as an insurance executive, like his father did before him. There is really little to remark upon about his resume – he was presumably very successful in these ventures, donating nearly $2 million to his two campaigns (about $900,000 in 2019 and $950,000 this year). But otherwise, he seems to be a case of an insurance man interested in becoming The Insurance Man.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to know about Temple is that he also served as the chairman and president of the Committee of 100. While that may sound like a secretive organ of the Chinese Communist Party, it is in fact just another “good government” business and industry nonprofit group that advocates for “economic development.” But it is a useful context; Temple is not some wealthy political outsider who has elbowed his way into power over the wishes of the usual interests. He is firmly enmeshed in that crowd, and has simply ascended from “interested party” to decision maker.

And he has begun to lay out the sort of agenda you might expect from someone running in those circles. Temple’s main solution to Louisiana’s insurance market woes? A special session early next year, to push more deregulation, more tort reform, and more incentives for competition.

Our state is one of several right now that exist on the front lines of an acute insurance crisis. Fewer insurers are willing to write affordable policies in the places seen as most obviously vulnerable to climate change. There's an air of inevitability to that. But the shape of the crisis, though, and the shoulders that bear the worst of its costs are all entirely the result of policy choices. Political leaders at the state, local, national and international levels consistently move to outsource climate to private finance.

 

The least powerful individual victims of the system are purposefully left to absorb the consequences. 

Energy bills in New Orleans are rising at the fastest rate in almost two decades, and outpacing increases in the rest of the country.

Despite living in one of America’s most climate-vulnerable and poorest cities, it is still almost impossible for low-income residents such as Jones to reduce their “carbon footprint”. It’s not easy making green choices when public transit options are limited, and where tax incentives for solar panels and electric vehicles have largely excluded low-income households.

“I would love to get my house weatherized. I’d consider an EV if it was affordable – or even giving up my car. But the public transit here is draconian,” said Jones, a volunteer community activist. “Tax rebates don’t help me, because I don’t file taxes. They make it so hard to do the right thing.”

Climate scientists are clear that the world must transition away from fossil fuels immediately if it has any chance of avoiding the most catastrophic climate effects.

In recent years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have pushed the notion that personal choices are to blame for the climate crisis, while at the same time lobbying for policies to ensure their products – and profits – continue to expand.

Americans in every income category have bigger carbon footprints than their counterparts in almost all other G20 nations, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) data shared with the Guardian. But carbon inequality in the US is a complex situation which for many people – particularly those on a low income – has little to do with personal choice.

Tim Temple is fine with all this.  In this interview with Stephanie Grace, he says his main goal is to deregulate the insurers. Maybe then, they will be nicer.  Actually he didn't even promise that. Here he basically says that if you expect affordable insurance rates in Metairie you are shit out of luck and it's your fault for living there

Grace: So I guess the flip side of being able to charge the rates they need is very high prices for customers — perhaps unaffordable.

Temple: It certainly can be. There seems to be an underlying current of well, it's got to be fair: If I, as a consumer, want to go and build a home in the middle of a forest that's 26 miles away from the nearest fire hydrant, or if I want to build my home on the Gulf Coast 10 feet from the ocean, that I should have some type of affordable insurance.

I mean, we don't want it to be a government-funded, socialized type of product. What it needs to be is if you want to exercise your right to build where you are legally allowed to build, then you have to know upfront it may cost you more to build that house on the Gulf Coast than it does to build it in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Grace: When you're talking about the Gulf Coast, are you talking about down in the marsh, or in, say, Metairie?

Temple: Metairie, you can argue, is dang near the Gulf Coast. If you've ever flown into the New Orleans airport, you know that. Again, the concept is to create an environment where companies can come in and be treated at least not any worse than Texas or Florida treats their companies.

Metaire. People shouldn't live there.

You are required to vote again for some reason

Here is your AG guide in case that helps.

I can't say much about what's on the ballot today other than this. 

1) The Republican candidates are all going to win the remaining statewide offices. Murrill winning Attorney General is particularly troubling because that will green light a lot of the coming monkey business that Jeff Landry is about to throw at us. Republicans holding the Sec of State office would be a problem in the Presidential election if Louisiana were at all in play. It could still be an issue as struggles over voter registration and access in New Orleans become more of an issue.  It often doesn't matter who the Treasurer is. But John Fleming will figure out how to be a bad one. For example, if Landry wants to keep attacking the city via the bond commission, Fleming won't stand in his way. Anyway, there's nothing anyone can do about any of that at this point. Go vote against the bad guys. But they are going to win today.

2) There are some runoffs in legislative races still pending. Locally the new District 23 in Mid-City is on some of your ballots. Like a lot of things this cycle, the field attracted by that brand new open seat was disappointing. All of the candidates were either empty retreads from among the usual suspects or clueless novelties. The remaining two are one of each of those. Pick your poison. 

3) All four of the constitutional amendments are basically bad. At least if number 2 passes, it doesn't actively harm anything. But I'd vote against it anyway. There are also some of those private security districts up for renewal in a few neighborhoods. None of those should exist. 

In any case, the news is bad. It's all bad. But here we are. The 2020s have not been a fun time for anyone anywhere. In Louisiana, they're about to become more difficult. We'll start working on what to do about all that next year. 

But for now, just be careful out there. 

Groundhog Mitch

Will he see his shadow this time?

All of this has the chattering class wondering if another Democrat should pick up the mantle. A half-dozen recently published lists of possible candidates — should Biden withdraw — all include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 41, who retains support among younger voters; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, 52, who won a state that backed Trump; California Gov. Gavin Newsom, 56, who has money, popularity and a growing national profile; and Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, who is the first woman in history to hold that office and is arguably the default choice.

So: What about Landrieu?

He has spent the last two years traveling tens of thousands of miles around the country. It's a role that has involved helping state and local officials, of both parties, quickly navigate the bureaucracy to get the federal money to start often long hoped-for infrastructure projects — not a bad launching pad for a campaign.

Of all the speculative lists of possible Biden replacements, Landrieu, 63, was mentioned in only one, in what amounted to a footnote.

While Landrieu has given no indication he's interested — and there's no way he could do so right now, without sabotaging Biden — five years ago he was openly flirting with a run.

 Back then, Landrieu said he would never challenge Biden, and presumably that rule still applies.

Okay, well, consider the appearance of this article an "indication he's interested."  That's how this sort of thing works. Mitch was extremely close to doing it last time around.  Like, really close. A media whisper campaign had been dropping his name into the rumor mill as early as 2017. By mid-2018 the whisperers were clearing their throats and speaking more loudly.  It came so close, in fact, that Mitch's  friends at the Bayou Brief  even coordinated an announcement day campaign puff feature that got posted prematurely and then quickly taken down.  I happened to see it come across the RSS and read it in the meantime. I hope everyone involved is still embarrassed. 

Anyway today's article doesn't mention this but we read a few weeks ago that Mitch's former deputy mayor and longtime political operative Ryan Berni has taken a job working for Biden 2024.   In 2020 Berni was one of several familiar soulless Louisiana Democratic Party professional assholes who ended up collecting a few checks from the money bomb set off by former New York City Mayor/billionaire Michael Bloomberg's spectacular failure of a campaign flame out. One assumes they were all available to jump on board with Bloomberg because their schedules were cleared for Mitch.

Four years later there's an incumbent Democratic President on the slate. That's where all the dirty money is. And so that's where characters where Berni are going to be. For now, anyway. But that Democratic President is looking shakier every day.  And maybe some of that money is looking for other places to go. The appearance of fresh rumors in the press would indicate someone is at least hedging bets on it.

Fun years ahead

It appears Gov-elect Landry will abandon @LouisianaGov current plan/path to be carbon neutral by 2050. Says everything he’s read shows carbon neutral policies ‘extremely destructive’ to economy’ #lagov #lalege

— Greg Hilburn (@GregHilburn1) November 15, 2023

 

And, as we've pointed out many times and in many ways,  the state's carbon goals, such as they are, are not sufficient to the problem. Remarkably, all Jeff has to do is run with the same program JBE is leaving behind, and there will be plenty money to be made poisoning the environment and sinking the coast.  In fact, it's likely we're going to see very little substantive change. But the hooting and braying about it will be turned up several levels. Maybe that's better than John Bel's lying pretense that we can keep burning gas all over the place and still care about the climate if we pretend the carbon capture boondoggles actually work. Or maybe it doesn't matter.

Looks like maybe the "making amends" step?

Or maybe something else is going on. Anyway, here is Karen Carter Peterson, still serving a prison sentence for defrauding the state Democratic Party, asking the state to take back one of the last public-private partnership schemes she signed off on before the downfall.  

In early 2022, shortly before she resigned her post amid a federal investigation into her embezzlement of Democratic Party and campaign funds, state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson helped earmark $7 million in state funds for the Odyssey House in New Orleans to create southeast Louisiana’s first residential gambling treatment center.

More recently, less than seven months into her 22-month prison sentence, Peterson was moved from a minimum-security camp in Dallas to a re-entry facility in New Orleans, and she quickly became a central figure in the project. She is now pushing to get the state money moved from Odyssey House, a nonprofit, to the Metropolitan Human Services District, a state-run entity.

Peterson, who is working as an advisor to the Davillier Law Group, says she believes the Human Services District, which gets state money annually for gambling treatment services, is better equipped to stand up the facility.

Peterson goes on to say she "has no financial role in the project."  And we have to assume that is true... now. At the time she approved the earmark? Who knows. Since that time, a lot has changed. Peterson is where she is and the real estate deal Odyssey House had in mind isn't looking viable anymore for some reason not quite given. 

For its part, Odyssey House, which runs treatment centers around the state, raised concerns about the proposal last week, with its CEO saying he wasn't given a rationale for transferring the money. Peterson and the Louisiana Department of Health have asked Odyssey House to sign off on transferring the funds through a mid-year transfer process that requires buy-in from area lawmakers and all parties involved in the transaction. 

But on Monday, Ed Carlson, CEO of Odyssey House, said his board has decided to go along with the request and sign off on the deal. (Note: The deal signed off on here is Odyssey House giving the money back)

Carlson said Peterson approached him about the project ahead of the 2022 legislative session. She put the nonprofit in touch with a real-estate agent to look at a building, but it wasn’t suitable for the project, he said. With most of the money still not available, Odyssey House has so far been unable to move forward, he said.

Carlson said he found out only a few days ago that Peterson and the LDH wanted to see the money transferred to the Human Services District — a division of the LDH. He said no one had discussed it with him beforehand. 

"At this point, we just want to get as far away from this as possible," Carlson said Monday.

Anyway whatever the original plan was is in the trash now.  We'll never know who was kicking what back to whom.  One footnote that didn't get mentioned in the article is Ed Carlson was the third candidate in this year's bizarre and acrimonious District 91 race for State Rep.  For some reason, he still thought he needed friends in Baton Rouge as late as this fall.  Interesting.

Bus nap

RTA says it has a strategy to improve service and get the busses running on time more often. Apparently this involves reducing the number of busses in the "active fleet" and by adjusting the schedules so that they don't look like they're overpromising. That sure sounds like a service cut to me. The dreaded phrase "more with less" is ringing around in there somewhere.  But RTA insists it will make things better in the long run if they aren't spending as much time dealing with maintenance issues and after the new busses they bought with COVID money get up and running. We'll see. 

Anyway I thought this was funny. 

On Wednesday, Willy Lee, a dishwasher at Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse in the French Quarter, sat on a bench at a stop on the currently out-of-service Rampart streetcar line watching videos on his phone, waiting for his shift to start. He left home two and a half hours before his 4 p.m. shift began. 

“I leave home around 1:30 because the bus be kinda late,” he said. 

Lee lives in the Little Woods neighborhood in New Orleans East and must transfer buses in order to get downtown, adding more possibility for delays. He said sometimes buses don’t arrive at their expected time shown on Le Pass, the RTA’s app.

In a September interview, Hankins blamed the problems, in part, on a lack of qualified mechanics to quickly fix problems, perform routine maintenance and get buses back on the road. 

The plan announced Thursday will address that by reducing the number of buses that the agency’s mechanics have to work on. Of the 18 buses being pulled out of the active fleet, 10 are being “to sleep.” The RTA will hold onto them, but they will be removed from the roads and the maintenance pool. (The agency currently has 14 buses in that category, bringing the total to 24 beginning in January.) The other eight will be permanently retired.

Anyway, wake me up when a trip downtown from Little Woods doesn't take the same amount of time as a flight to Philadelphia. 

Hot streak

 Always nice to be thought of as a global leader. 

The last 12 months were the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and New Orleans had the second-longest streak of days with extreme heat across the world, a new study found. 

Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate change and energy issues, released the study to the public on Thursday and looked at major cities across the globe that had long streaks of extreme heat.

Houston had the longest streak with 22 days, and the extreme temperatures lasted in New Orleans for 17 days. The Crescent City tied with Jakarta and Tangerang in Indonesia, according to the study.

Can't say we haven't earned it.  Everyone knows well the amount of Louisiana's public capital and natural resources are sacrificed each year to make the demon live. Today The Lens highlights only one recent example. 

Now, a new industrial operation is taking shape in the unincorporated community of Port Sulphur, which remains a working-class, rural area. The silhouette of Venture Global’s colossal LNG gas-export terminal looms over the surrounding marsh, visible from miles away to cars driving downriver from New Orleans on Louisiana Highway 23.

When the plant is finished, natural-gas-fired turbines will supercool gas down to -260 degrees Fahrenheit to turn it into a liquid 1/600th its original volume that can be shipped overseas. But at this point, it’s still in progress, a 630-acre construction site, with tower cranes and 130-foot storage tanks peeking over its walls. 

Venture Global did not respond to questions about its terminal under construction in Plaquemines Parish. Once complete, it’s expected to employ 300 operational workers, according to Board of Commerce and Industry meeting notes. 

Those 300 jobs are subsidized to unbelievable levels, thanks to the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP), a state tax-incentive program for manufacturers, created with the goal of luring jobs to Louisiana. 

For its local payroll of a few hundred workers, Venture Global’s ITEP abatement over a 10-year period totals $834 million, said Erin Hansen of Together Louisiana, which monitors ITEP incentives and jobs created. 

That works out to $2.8 million in tax breaks per Venture Global job, Hansen said.

During the campaign, Jeff Landry (sort of) led the public to believe that he would let John Bel's rather moderate limits on ITEP remain in place.  We'll see how that plays out.  I do have my doubts.

3-D Spidermans

Amusing bit from this past weekend's T-P politics round up.  The issue at hand here is the ongoing legal dispute between the mayor and the city council over who gets to pass around Wisner trust money to whose patrons. The council's position is that the mayor is "wrongfully handing over city money to private parties." And that is, of course, true. But the only reason the councilmembers are so hot to challenge her on this is because, in their estimation, wrongfully handing over city money to private parties is supposed to be their job. 

Really, both sides are kind of right. Ordinarily they all work together to figure out all the spoils. But lately nobody at City Hall is getting along with anyone else. When that happens the little understandings that normally obtain start to break down and the system can no longer function. For instance...

Below the surface, the case involves a more fundamental question: Can the council sue the mayor, as an independent component of city government?

No, it cannot, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled in June, a decision that is now before the Louisiana Supreme Court. Before that is settled, however, the council is trying a new tactic, one that will test its power in a different way.

The council on Thursday voted to order the City Attorney’s Office to make the city a plaintiff in the lawsuit, even though city lawyers have already made arguments on Cantrell’s behalf. The strategy is to pre-empt any dismissal based on the council’s lack of authority to independently sue the mayor. And the result, if it works, will be a spectacle: a mayoral administration suing a mayor. Might New Orleanians have the privilege of witnessing one city lawyer arguing against another in open court? Seems highly unlikely, but one can dream.

The headline for this column makes reference to the Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman meme but doesn't explain the joke in the text of the article. On the one hand, it's refreshing to see the T-P assume even a minimal degree of sophistication in its readers. On the other hand, maybe some clarification is in order. We're pretty sure they mean the two Spidermen here are the hypothetical dueling city lawyers. But they could also be every councilmember and the mayor pointing at each other in every direction as well. Maybe it's all of that.

Imagine if everyone could do this

During the record heat wave of summer 2023, Entergy and Sewerage and Water Board denied City Council requests to suspend utility shut-offs for New Orleanians behind on their exorbitant (and often inaccurate) bills. 

Advocates for utility customers say the number of households vulnerable to losing electricity and water has grown in recent years as heat waves, gas prices, hurricanes and rate hikes have made it harder for New Orleans residents to keep up with their utility bills.

“Folks are absolutely struggling,” said Jesse George, policy director at the Alliance for Affordable Energy. “We were getting calls on a weekly basis from people struggling with outrageous bills.”

Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, said that energy bills have been a major part of the city’s housing affordability crisis, and that high utility bills are starting to impact more people.

“I’m hearing from people who don’t normally struggle with their bills, which is never a good sign,” Morris said.

According to that article, during the summer there were something like 24,000 accounts considered "delinquent" by S&WB 1,100 of which were facing disconnection. Meanwhile, Entergy is a little more shifty with its numbers. But one out of five accounts behind on bills seems like a lot.

It is harder to pin down how many Entergy New Orleans customers are vulnerable to shutoffs. Customers owe $6.2 million in electric bill debt and $639,000 in gas bill debt, according to numbers the company provided to the council in late August. But neither the council nor Entergy provided any estimate on the number of customers in debt to the company.

Entergy executives did tell the council in Dec. 2022 that 36,000 customers — roughly one in five New Orleans accounts — had entered deferred payment plans to keep up with bills they couldn’t afford in 2022 alone.

This week we also learned that Entergy bills are higher than they've ever been for most New Orleanians. Perhaps not coincidentally, so are Entergy profits. 

At the same time as bills have reached historic highs, so have dividend payments to Entergy shareholders. Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corp., has paid out $3.2 billion in shareholder dividends since 2020. 

Burke and other advocates have long warned that the company has effectively shifted most of the risk of the business onto the shoulders of customers, who have to deal with erratic bills while shareholders enjoy steady, rising profits.

In any case, it's a lot of people who Entergy just figures it can ignore repeatedly. 

And then there's this story.  

The lights are back on at Saint John and the French Quarter restaurant is planning to reopen, marking a swift turnaround from just a day before.

Thursday afternoon chef/owner Eric Cook announced that Saint John was closed "indefinitely" amid a dispute over an Entergy bill for $40,000 that resulted in the restaurant's power being disconnected.

In a statement released Thursday, and in a subsequent interview, Cook described the decision to close as a culmination of frustrations with doing business in New Orleans, and the Entergy billing dispute as the last straw.

However, Cook said Friday that after a morning meeting with representatives from City Councilmember Helena Moreno's office, he heard from Entergy that power to the restaurant at 1117 Decatur St. would be restored while he and the utility work through the billing issue. Moreno sits on the City Council's Utilities, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology Committee, which oversees the council's responsibilities as regulator of Entergy New Orleans.

And so there you have it.  If you want to be heard fairly by Entergy, you should simply own your own restaurant and have enough reach to get enough people mad on the news.  Why doesn't everybody do that?

Ghost meter

 While we're on the subject of Entergy today. 

Chef Eric Cook opened his French Quarter restaurant Saint John two years ago with an aim to showcase traditional New Orleans cooking. Today he announced he’s closed the restaurant “indefinitely” in exasperation over the city’s leadership and its utility providers.

In a statement, Cook said Entergy New Orleans cut power to Saint John, at 1117 Decatur St., over a bill for $40,000. Cook claims this bill is for “a ghost meter that they cannot even determine its location on the property.”

That's a shame. I do sort of expect maintaining a meter that tells you how many ghosts are in the restaurant would be kind of expensive. At the same time, though, I thought that's what the big Varg piece on the wall of the dining room was for.

You are the resilience plan

This is a comprehensive study of Entergy rates going back 20 years by Verite's Michael Isaac Stein. If you've been thinking your bills are higher than they've ever been, then, yes, you are correct. In the last year, alone, the average annual bill in New Orleans is up by 60 percent. The article also points out the City Council is poised to approve an additional 20 percent hike for "resilience upgrades." 

We've been on this horse for a while now. See here and here for some relatively recent posts about this. But, long story short, the main thrust of Entergy's "resilience" strategy is to shift the growing costs of climate change down to its captive ratepayers while investors and executives continue to reap extraordinary profits. You pay more for everything; that's the resilience strategy in a nutshell.  The Verite article shares comments from several parties who also make this point well. 

Some Entergy critics argue that there is also a broader and more simple reason bills are rising so fast — Entergy is favoring its shareholders over its customers. 

“Entergy’s mission is to enrich shareholders, so it’s a contributing factor for certain,” Harden said. “It’s about trapping New Orleans residents to ensure we’re always paying high bills, a cycle of billing we have no control over.”

At the same time as bills have reached historic highs, so have dividend payments to Entergy shareholders. Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corp., has paid out $3.2 billion in shareholder dividends since 2020. 

Burke and other advocates have long warned that the company has effectively shifted most of the risk of the business onto the shoulders of customers, who have to deal with erratic bills while shareholders enjoy steady, rising profits.

“Why should only residents be the ones who suffer as a result of climate change and international markets?” Burke said. “Why should people, especially in cities like New Orleans where a vast percentage of our population is in poverty, be holding up these Fortune 500 companies and their shareholders who are insulated from every risk at every turn? I don’t think there’s any world in which that is just or equitable.”

Why should the poorest and least powerful shoulder the burdens of maintaining capital through a global disaster? The short answer is, because that's always been how it's done.  Shifting the inevitable risks of climate change onto the most vulnerable is at the heart of US industrial policy now. You are the resilience plan. Your blood and your bones. It's not going to stop, either. Verite pulls a quote from Monique Harden for its headline that is apt enough here. There's simply "no end in sight" for the costs we're going to endure.

Holiday spirits are up

 It's right around the corner. Have you sent your emails to Santa yet? I think this guy got the wrong address.

Schofield, 76, was charged late Monday in a bill of information, typically a sign that a defendant has signed a plea deal and will cooperate with the government. Schofield's lawyer, Steve London, declined to comment.

Federal authorities in April secured a guilty plea from the restaurateur, Fouad Zeton, and assuming Schofield pleads guilty, prosecutors are expected to take aim at their next target, New Orleans police officer Christian Claus. Claus, a seven-year veteran of the NOPD and a former lawyer who also hails from Nevada, has been on desk duty since at least December, when news broke that he was the subject of the investigation.

Claus is described clearly but not named in the documents, instead referred to as "Individual A," in keeping with Justice Department policies that frown on defaming people in court documents who have yet to be accused of crimes. Schofield is accused of sending Claus an email that "misrepresented [his] honest assessment of the appraised art's value."

Somebody's already made a list of naughties, anyway. I wonder who this is. 

Court documents in Zeton's case say that Claus was to receive a kickback from the proceeds resulting from the false insurance claim. In addition, prosecutors alleged that Zeton had promised to use his influence with “a high-ranking NOPD official” to get Claus better posts and promotions. It’s unclear who that official is, or whether Zeton or his friend ever attempted to help Claus.