"Roger Williams is the guy standing next to you at the sporting event or at the beginning of the local Rotary club meeting, who still gets a tear in his eye when he hears the National Anthem."
I dare you to read his whole intro. Platitudes for days, hilariously bland.
"People who have heard Roger speak will attest to his infectious enthusiasm, his belief that America’s best days remain ahead of her and only a defeatist attitude among her people can bring America down."
RNC picks Michael Steele, former Lt. Governor of Maryland as new Chairman.
I've been saying that this represents the smart choice for the GOP but given how contentious things have been within the caucus, I'm not sure that conservatives will unite behind the decisions Steele makes to substantively change tactics or expand the coalition.
I've also said that this 'helps' Republicans in the mold of Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal.
The Senate overwhelming passed SCHIP today, a bill that would provide healthcare coverage to children. Seems pretty open-and-shut to me. Is there a single good reason why a 21st century industrial democracy wouldn't want to provide health coverage to little kids?
Senator David Vitter, bastion of Christian morality, apparently doesn't believe that our society has an obligation to provide for the basic health of children. He voted nay.
This was not a straight party line vote.
The following Republicans were reasonable enough to consider health care coverage for kids to be a societal imperative: Specter (PA), Luger (IN), Collins (ME), Snowe (ME), Martinez (FL), Murkowski (AK), Hutchinson (TX), Alexander (TN), and Corker (TN).
Even Bob Corker voted for the damn thing!
It was definitely going to pass, what would have been the harm for Vitter to tack on a 'yay' vote?
Why does Vitty hate Louisiana's children?
Robert Cerasoli, I wish you good health.
This is a big blow for all reasonable New Orleanians.
I think he'll like it there, I can't finger why.
LINK!
UPDATE: Wanna get away?
Unless you've been living under a soundproof rock, you know that this city's been gripped by a particularly nasty wave of violent crime since the New Year and citizens across New Orleans are fed up.
Of course people are fed up with the actions of violent criminals but what makes the reaction to this crime wave different is the overwhelming frustration with the NOPD itself.
This frustration is felt in black neighborhoods, white neighborhoods, uptown neighborhoods, and downtown neighborhoods. People do not trust the police. People do not respect the police. Too many officers have been arrested for crimes themselves. There are too many documented and anecdotal stories of indifference and laziness, brutality and violence on the part of the NOPD. Too many caught criminals have been released because NOPD officers don't file police reports properly or on time. Statistically speaking, if you murder somebody tomorrow in Orleans Parish, there's only a 20-30% chance you'll ever fact legitimate punitive jail time. And so on and so forth...
Again:
[E]xperts have already identified many of the major issues facing the NOPD. The NOPD itself ordered an audit by BGI in 2007. But after BGI identified several systemic failures and prescribed a blueprint toward the superior community policing model, the NOPD suppressed the report for months. To this day, Warren Riley has failed to substantively institute the suggested reforms.
• Chuck Ransdell, chair, Meeting of the Minds
• Eric Reitman, president, French Quarter Business Association
• CoCo Paddison, president, French Quarter Citizens
• Jude Marullo, president, Bourbon Street Merchants Association
• Chris Costello, president, Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association
• Lori Herbert, vice-chair, North Rampart Main Street
• Samara Poché, president, Lower Quarter Crime Watch
• Ken Ferdinand, executive director, French Market Corporation
• Darryl Berger, senior chair, French Quarter-Marigny Historic Area Management District
• Mike Moffit, president, Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents & Associates
• Christine Sory, president, French Quarter Business Women’s Network
• Beth Lovett, representative, Upper Quarter Neighborhood Watch
• Stephen Swain, president, Patio Planters
• Jason Patterson, chair, Frenchmen Street Coalition
"We understand the value of the Quarter to the city, but we also understand the value of every community."
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"This is one New Orleans,” he said. “We are not gonna pull other resources from other parts of the city, to put into the Quarter, when we feel we have a sufficient force there at this point."
In 2009, the fights to reopen Charity Hospital and save Lower Mid City from demolition will come to a head. The proposed $1.2 billion plan to remake Lower Mid City into a biomedical district anchored by an LSU teaching hospital and a renovated VA hospital has been in the works for many moons.
High profile officials have infused massive amounts of political capital into realizing this project and would lose big if this project were to go down.
The Mayor, his recovery director Ed Blakely, and the New Orleans City Council worked in concert to allocate some $79 million of the 2009 budget toward acquiring land in the LSU/VA footprint.
The New Orleans business and university elite have invested considerable resources into developing the Greater New Orleans Biosciences Development District via the Downtown Development District and the New Orleans Regional Biosciences Initiative.
State leaders such as Governor Bobby Jindal and LRA Director Paul Rainwater have made obtaining full FEMA reimbursement for Charity in order to fund the new LSU hospital the state's number one priority heading into the new year and the new Obama administration's proposed infrastructure bill.
That the process for realizing these plans has been so slow in spite of the massive political firepower behind them is a testament to the salience of the arguments against put forth by housing activists, preservationists, public health advocates, and other reasonable progressives alarmed by official refusal to reopen the existing Charity Hospital and by a site selection process that favors the demolition of a residential neighborhood over more cost-effective, less destructive alternatives.
In Part I, I profiled Donald Smithburg, formerly of LSUHSD, now employed by a consultant firm contracted to contrive the $1.2 billion development plan currently on the table.
--
Part II: James P. McNamara
Mr. McNamara is a key player in New Orleans business and political circles and has considerable professional interest in seeing the LSU/VA project realized as currently constituted. He's got a long history. This is just a taste.
He made a big portion of his fortune in the late '80s and early '90s as President and CEO of McNamara Associates, a commercial real estate consulting firm. His company would represent commercial property holders in the CBD in their appeals against inflated property tax assessments.
In 2006, New Orleans voters voted to reform the tax assessor system into one office. However, until 2010, the city continues to operate under the old seven assessor system, which has been wrought with corruption for decades. Your tax assessor sets your property value, which determines the amount of property tax you pay. With seven assessors, personal and economic relationships have often played a role in the original property value set or one's chances at winning an appeal. Property values were generally set extremely low but were pumped up to reflect something closer to actual value upon sale, at which point one could appeal directly to the district assessor.
Mr. McNamara took advantage of this system through his close relationship with Kenneth Carter (father of Karen Carter-Peterson) via the political organization BOLD. Ken Carter was one of the city's first two African American tax assessors after being elected to represent the CBD as first assessor district in 1985.
McNamara's firm represented commercial clients who acquired property in the CBD only to see their property taxes skyrocket following reassessment. McNamara and Associates would be hired to appeal the value to Ken Carter's office and negotiate a lower property tax bill. This relationship obviously went pretty smoothly, as McNamara became closely involved with Ken Carter's 1994 mayoral campaign. Carter had to leave his assessor seat to run for Mayor and replacing him was Patricia Johnson. The Times-Picayune in 2004:
Johnson won the 1st District office in 1994 when incumbent Ken Carter, a fellow member of the BOLD political organization, ran for mayor. But she soon became unpopular, in part because of her aggressive upward valuation of downtown office properties.Johnson had other problems as well. She feuded with BOLD, her methods were called into question and the state legislative auditor reported that her books were in shambles. But rocking the boat was certainly one cause of her 2002 defeat by Darren Mire.
The New Orleans Regional Biosciences Initiative (NORBI) is the action arm of GNOBEDD, a collaborative of a myriad of public and private entities all working to ensure that bioscience and healthcare sectors combined are a well-promoted and well supported pillar of the New Orleans economy.
James McNamara is the President of the GNOBEDD, though the true composition of that organization remains difficult to ascertain. He also sits as a Commissioner of the Downtown Development District and on the Board of the New Orleans Bioinnovation Center.
All of these organizations worked in concert to imagine the LSU/VA development and pass it through the relevant governmental bodies. It is easy to infer that Mr. McNamara's long standing political connections were an enormous help.
With so much at stake, personally and professionally, you'll have to excuse him if he considers the residential neighborhood facing demolition to be collateral damage:
Given that New Orleanians have just given a new zoning master place the force of law to prevent private development deals born and bronzed outside the purview of the public, it is curious that it is such a disservice to the residents of this city to ask questions about this particular insider development deal and the process that lead to it.“For us, that is enormous,” he said. That some will lose their homes as a result, he added, is “just the reality of life.”
So over a year ago, the ACLU calls up Sheriff Marlin Gusman's office about conditions at OPP. Gusman thinks it over and figures there will be some expenses incurred by his office in the preparation of relevant documents. So he comes up with a number for the ACLU to compensate his office: $1.75 million.
One million seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. For copies of public documents.
That's an insult. Gusman should be ashamed.
Had the ACLU gotten the public documents on time, they might have been able to expose the poor conditions that perhaps contributed to some suspicious deaths of overnight inmates. Including someone close to many bloggers and friends of mine.
Oyster highlights an old quote from a few weeks ago by one of New Orleans' benevolent business overlords.
From the NYT:
At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.
“Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”
--For Mr. Hope, the Whitney National Bank chairman, “the main motivation for TARP” was not more loans, but rather to safeguard against the “possibility things could get a lot worse.” He said Whitney would continue making loans “that we would have made with or without TARP.”
“We see TARP as an insurance policy,” he said. “That when all this stuff is finally over, no matter how bad it gets, we’re going to be one of the remaining banks.”
The House version of the stimulus bill passed yesterday and included something in the order of $5 billion for the state of Louisiana. Big chunks of that are going to go toward state highway projects and existing Army Corps projects.
I'm also happy to report that Louisiana schools will see a big infusion of funding.
There will be some help for our public transit system, but nothing in the order of what the RPC and the City proposed. This is regrettable given the needs here but considering how little advance planning officials did in anticipation of this stimulus money, Louisiana came away with a respectable haul with perhaps the least amount of Congressional support out of any state in the country. Besides Charlie Melancon and Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Congressional delegation has tried to obstruct the flow of money to our state. Not one Louisiana House Republican crossed over to support the bill and Vitter has positioned himself as the most belligerent and reactionary member of the Senate.
Congressman Bill Cassidy of the 6th Congressional District had an interesting rationale for his nay vote yesterday. Try to wrap your mind around this.
Cassidy voted against a massive stimulus bill that would send checks to working families, build infrastructure, and cut business taxes because...
A better bill, Cassidy said, "would focus on providing tax relief for working families and small businesses and strengthening our infrastructure."
Maybe it's not such a bad thing that Republicans have been outnumbering Democrats on TV over the last few days...
Mike Pence is supposed to be one of the face cards in the House GOP deck, isn't he?
Not to mention Dick Armey on Hardball tonight. Watch that clip (start at about 9:30 in), not to rubberneck at Armey's sexist remark but to listen to Joan Walsh's defense of Democratic principles in response to Armey's insults.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Not one Republican crossed over to support the bill. Nice to see the GOP coming out 100% against job creation, tax cuts, and infrastructure improvements. That's right the caucus voted against tax cuts.
Louisiana tally:
Yeas: Melancon
Nays: Cao, Boustany, Cassidy, Alexander, Fleming, and Scalise
For whatever reason, I've been following the race for the new Chairman of the RNC especially closely. Many bloggers have found that little campaign to be an exercise in unintentional comedy - and I'd have to agree - but I think it also happens to be fascinatingly microcosmic of the GOP's larger need to reorient given the new political environment.
I was almost certain after the election that Michael Steele, the African American former Lt. Governor of Maryland, was a sure thing. I felt this way because the Republican brand had become such poison to the minds of... well pretty much everyone outside of Southern White Men.
I figured, because it was statistically evident, that Republicans would realize that they couldn't continue to hemorrhage Latinos, white Catholics, and suburbanites from their caucus. I imagined that, if only out of the need for self-preservation, that RNC voters would elect someone that could help reinvent the GOP as a legitimate national party.
Steele, in addition to being a token minority in the GOP, also happens to be pretty smart and charismatic. He's also from a 'northern' state, one with a huge suburban population that has become non competitive for the GOP.
Given the leadership vacuum in today's GOP, Steele seemed like a sensible choice, one that would have mirrored (image-wise, to become a national party) what the DNC did (substance-wise, to become a national party) under Howard Dean after Kerry's loss in 2004.
After Gingrich opted out of the RNC race to sort of? back Steele, I figured Steele's chances had only improved. Gingrich is a huge mark for Bobby Jindal and it seemed intuitive that RNCers would start orienting themselves to take advantage of some of their younger rising stars.
But that's not what has happened at all...
Nobody's getting whipped into line for this. In fact, the race has seemed to grow more fractious over time.
On one end you have nonmember candidates like Steele and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. On the other you have several current or former heads of state party organizations including Saul Anuzis (Michigan), Katon Dawson (South Carolina), Mike Duncan (Bush's appointment, formerly head of the Kentucky GOP), and Chip Saltsman (Tennessee).
This Perry Bacon Jr. article in the Washington Post indicates that RNC voters are reluctant to vote in a nonmember. It also says that Chip Saltsman's 'Barack the Magic Negro' giftbag has effectively killed his chances, contrary to reports of a reactionary boomlet in favor of his candidacy after news of the giftbag leaked. That leaves Azunis, Duncan, and Dawson. (Never mind that Dawson has struggled to explain his long-standing membership in an all-white country club. Guess it hasn't been as big a media-issue as the Saltsman CD)
How interesting it is that so many RNC voters have decided to disqualify the two African American candidates. The rationale for Steele I stated above. Blackwell, for his part, recently racked up the endorsements of many of the major influentials of the conservative movement including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Toomey, Phyllis Schlafly, etc.
But none of that seems to matter since RNC voters have decided to discriminate against nonmember candidates, regardless of qualifications, conservative credentials, potential effectiveness...
Why do you think that is?
Giggle away.
But I'm not really okay with this.
Juveniles should be tried as juveniles, right?
Call me old fashioned.
I've tried to stay on top of the New Orleans implications of the big federal stimulus bill being negotiated in Congress. When I last broached the topic, I discussed the competing asks coming from the state and municipal levels.
Under a directive from Governor Bobby Jindal, the Department of Transportation and Development released an approximately $1.4 billion plan that is almost entirely comprised of major highway expansion projects outside of Orleans Parish. DOTD Secretary Ankner is on the record saying that the state is really only expecting to receive something in the ballpark of $400 million from the feds.
That's not very much money at all, and almost none of it would go to New Orleans, you know, the place with the most crippling infrastructure needs in the United States of America.
But as it turns out, New Orleans has come up with it's own ask. I alluded to the competing plan by the Regional Planning Commission, Regional Transit Authority, and the City of New Orleans.
Here are some more details:
Total ask: $6.3 billion
Estimated "shovel ready" spending for 2009: just under $1 billion.
First up is public transportation, where we request a total of half a billion dollars,
This portion of the draft document proposes seven streetcar projects, including:
-extending the Carrolton ave. line to connect to the Canal st. line
-extending the riverfront line to Jackson Avenue, building a new line north along Jackson Ave to St. Charles
-extending the riverfront line to Poland Avenue, building a new line along Poland from the river to St. Claude
-building new line to link union passenger terminal to Canal
-new line from Canal to Elysian Fields along N. Rampart and then from N. Rampart to the river along Elysian Fields
-a new line along convention center boulevard
-a new line connecting Canal all the way to Poland Ave, perhaps extending the proposed line along N. Rampart all the way down St. Claude
Also there is several tens of millions of dollars in spending proposed to build Bus Rapid Transit lines from the CBD to N.O. East and Algiers as well as for shelters, new buses, kiosk technology, etc. etc.
Then there's what is known as 'infrastructure resilience' spending, which actually comprises close to half of the city's total request. This includes an ask of $2.5 billion to supplement efforts to replace our sewer lines and pipes and half a billion to bury electrical and telephone wires.
Another section details our requests for regional rail spending, about $1.2 billion. There's a 450,000,000 request for a light rail line from downtown New Orleans to the airport. The city also proposes high speed rail connections to Baton Rouge, Mobile, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Hattiesburg, and Meridian.
Then there's just over a billion dollars proposed for "pedestrian enhancements" like new sidewalks, curbs, gutters improved drainage systems, street lights, trees, crosswalks, etc.
What else?
$120,000,000 for airport improvements
$240,000,000 for road repaving in Orleans Parish
$65,000,000 for bicycle infrastructure
Of course, all amounts are approximated and project details are heavily annotated.
But after a quick browse, it's a pretty solid package. I'm not sure what's "shovel ready" for 2009 but it's not hard to imagine how helpful these projects would be for our short, medium, and long term regional health.
Just think if all we got funded out of this was half of the proposed streetcar lines and half of the proposed sewer replacements. Even that would be an extremely significant, if not a game-changing investment.
I'd been wondering why it was that the city of New Orleans and the RPC were putting out a plan that would compete with the state plan, why the DOTD plan didn't just include our region's requests.
It turns out that this was by design - as a result of lobbying by the Mayor - to counteract what might happen if states were not given strict guidelines on how to allocate federal money. This was something discussed within the US Conference of Mayors, so I don't mean to insinuate that Nagin just invented the strategy out of thin air.
In fact, it would appear that the USCM thinks that a lot of the infrastructure money in the stimulus bill can and will be funnelled directly to cities and regional planning organizations through existing programs like CDBG.
--
I have also heard from a couple of different sources that, to a significant extent, the amount of stimulus money allocated for New Orleans depends on the lobbying efforts of folks like Karen Carter Peterson and Desiree Glapion Rogers instead of the Louisiana Congressional Delegation.
My question now is why our Congressional Delegation isn't up to bat for us. Is it just because New Orleans doesn't have political clout within our state delegation? Or is it because Congress in general isn't actually doing much "earmarking" of the package?
I have some theories but I'd like to know what you guys think...
The Times-Picayune, September 27th, 2005 (only as pdf, sorry):
The Department of Health and Hospitals has declined the bulk of $352 million in disaster assistance handed to the state by the Federal Emergency Management Agency late last week, with agency officials saying that they spent only about $10 million during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The $352 million showed up in a list of projects approved by FEMA totaling $457 million, which was deposited by the federal government last week in the state of Louisiana’s bank account. But the state health department has taken only the roughly $10 million that it is entitled to so far, said Bob Johannessen, the spokesman for the agency.
--
While the federal dollars are beginning to pour in, some agencies are still waiting for help. Officials with the Louisiana State University Health Services Division, which runs the Charity Hospital System, expect that they will eventually be asking the federal government to pick up about $625 million of their interim costs as they try to rebuild the public hospital system in New Orleans after the storm.
No "pork" in the stimulus bill means no "pork" in the stimulus bill.
"Somebody's going to earmark it somewhere,"
That was the weekend forecast and it was unfortunately accurate.
It is ubiquitous. It is in every neighborhood in this city, it affects every group of people in this city.
On Friday night, I was sitting on the stoop of a friend's house in the LGD and heard that morning's double shooting on the 700 block of Ninth.
On Saturday, I went to Wendy Byrne's memorial second line parade.
Today, Sunday, I learned that my old landlady was nearly beaten to death by her own son.
The Times-Picayune was chock full of long pieces detailing the many ways crime hurts our communities.
From Laura Maggi, Brian Thevenot, and Brendan McCarthy, on getting away with it:
District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro said the daylight killings speak to a pervasive lack of respect for the justice system."They are not concerned about the consequences," he said. "They are not concerned about who might be watching."
That attitude stems from a grim reality: Most killers here do get away with it.
So far, the New Orleans Police Department has made arrests in 59 of the murder cases in 2008, or 33 percent of the total. Prosecutors have accepted 32 of those cases, refused 11 for insufficient evidence and are considering whether to pursue the remainder. None of the cases has yet been tried.
Even if convictions are secured in every case accepted so far -- highly unlikely -- that would mean the city would punish just one in five killers. Police could secure more evidence and make more arrests at any time, but homicide cases generally do not age well, becoming tougher to solve with every day that goes by.
From Keith Spera, on front doorstep gunfire:
Until now, my wife and I have chosen to remain in the neighborhood and accept whatever risk that entails. But what of our responsibility to our child?
Does it make sense to raise her in a neighborhood, or a city, where killing is routine?
"To me, I'm making American art; to a lot of folks, I'm making black art," he said. "It's the same with the murder problem -- people see it as a black issue. ... How can we get people to see that we live in one world?"
It was a good week to be a friend of Charity Hospital and Lower Mid City. Advocates successfully took to the airwaves to highlight the fundamental flaws of the monstrous LSU/VA redevelopment being proposed. Their most effective tool this week in Baton Rouge was the presence of architects from RMJM Hillier, who believe that renovating Charity into a modern facility would bring state-of-the-art medical care back to New Orleans faster and cheaper that the state plan, all without demolishing a residential neighborhood. Anyone who watched or listened to the LA House Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday was treated to lots of stammering two-steps by flummoxed LSU officials unable to provide satisfactory answers to simple questions raised by curious legislators.
With Barack Obama taking office, proponents of the LSU/VA redevelopment have a lot working against them. They certainly can't afford to keep losing the PR war.
I won't be surprised if we experience a last-ditch barrage from groups quietly allied with the LSU/VA-GNOBEDD crowd.
For instance, let's say take, I don't know, the group Citizens for One Greater New Orleans, you know, the red coats.
Citizens for 1 GNO was founded after the storm by a group of highly influential uptown women. The imitative has worked on some pretty important issues such as assessor reform, levee board reform, and helped lead the push to establish the office of the Inspector General.
About them, emphasis theirs:
Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans is a non-partisan, non-sectarian grassroots initiative formed to be a voice for reform and renewal for Greater New Orleans and a better Louisiana. The community group provides a venue and resources for citizens to voice their opinions and concerns and to take action for rebuilding Greater New Orleans.
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The group was formed in November 2005, when a group of 120 citizens gathered for the first meeting in New Orleans. They came together after the state legislature failed to pass levee board reform legislation. The Times Picayune reported, "These citizens want a safe city behind sound levees so that no generation would endure what we have endured, and more than that they want honest and efficient city government, one free of old habits of cronyism and patronage that stifled progress and made us all unsafe."
Hours after she learned of the state's action [on levee boards], Frierson was visited by her neighbor Jay Lapeyre, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council. Low-key and conservative in temperament, Lapeyre looks as if he stepped from a box labeled Reluctant Public Figure. Laitram Corp., his family company, manufactures and distributes the creations of his inventor father: shrimp-peeling machines, alternating-tread stairs, and modular plastic conveyor belts.
--"I said to Jay," Frierson recalls, "We ought to get signatures on a petition to reconvene the legislature for levee board reform. "He said in passing, 'Oh, that would be great.' I said, 'No, Jay, I want you to draft it with me.' "
Frierson and her husband combed through their Rolodexes. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, their house was packed with 120 friends and acquaintances, many of them wives of Business Council members, most of them from Uptown, the lush neighborhoods around St. Charles Avenue. Lapeyre spoke. The group named itself Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans and formed an executive committee, which met in Frierson's dining room to plot its course.
"The politicians in Louisiana are knitted together underground like an old root system," says committee member Kay Kerrigan, wife of a prominent city attorney. "We realized this has got to change. If we want to rebuild this city, we can't go back to the way it was."
Kay Kerrigan, whose husband is a wealthy corporate lawyer that once represented Pan Am against the victims of the '82 Pan Am crash in New Orleans, is the Vice Chairwoman of Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans.
Jay Lapeyre is indeed the President of the shadowy New Orleans Business Council. You might remember him from such shady deals as the arranged consultant gig for former DA Eddie Jordan.
Unsurprisingly, the New Orleans Business Council is highly vested in the Downtown Development District, and the Greater New Orleans Biomedical Economic Development District. The LSU/VA redevelopment is their baby boy.
To the degree that the same social circle that is fighting for the current LSU/VA redevelopment project also funds the Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, it is feasible to think that Citizens for 1 GNO might be tempted to help rescue the redevelopment scheme by taking a public position on the matter.
However, doing so would directly contradict the group's founding principals. It would forever malign Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans as just another sectarian, tribal social network with an untrustworthy agenda inseparable from the selfish economic interests of their funders.
LSU/VA proponents are definitely looking to rebound. It will be interesting to see who they call upon for help.
I missed this from earlier in the week.
Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman helps administer a state fund, the Louisiana Crime Victims Reparations Board, which helps families pay for funeral and hospital expenses. But the fund hasn't been making very many payouts, which is surprising considering that New Orleans has the highest murder rate in the industrialized world.
Gusman's office submitted 203 applications to the state board last year and 150 in 2007, resulting in a total of $330,000 delivered to victims of crime in Orleans Parish. The parish's convicts have kicked in $86,000 to the fund during the same time period, Gusman said during a City Hall meeting of the council's Criminal Justice Committee.
"That (payout) figure should be so much higher and it's not," said Capt. Mechelle Delahoussaye, who orchestrates the crime victims' reparations fund for the sheriff's office. "It looks great on paper, but that's in the year and a half in Orleans Parish. We're not running out of money."
Victims' rights advocates, including David Kent of Victims and Citizens Against Crime Inc. said NOPD officers aren't routinely handing out information about the assistance program.
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Victims don't always get an item number from responding police officers, let alone the brochure about the compensation fund, said civil rights attorney Mary Howell.
"This (informing victims) needed to be done yesterday," Howell said. "I'm sick of talking to people who don't know about it. This is not complicated. If you get into a car accident, you get an item number. But you don't get that slip of paper when your child is murdered."
NOPD Detective Latina Thomas interjected, "Every victim in any crime receives an item number. That's part of our procedure."
"It's not happening," Howell responded, adding that police are by law supposed to notify victims of the fund.
Jeffrey highlights some choice quotes from Jan Moller's piece on yesterday's hearing of the House Appropriations Committee.
If Jeffrey is finding something "encouraging" about the situation, then things must really be going good. If you haven't yet signed this petition to stop the demolition of Lower Mid City, it's not too late.
Last night's VCPORA forum featured a panel of preservationists and the architects responsible for the alternative plan to build a new state-of-the-art hospital in the old Charity building. After the presentation, one belligerent mumbling guy got real upset because the speakers didn't present the LSU/VA side of the debate.
The response was that representatives of LSU/VA were invited to participate but declined.
That was in fact the case. WCBF has obtained a copy of the correspondence.
Dr. Larry Hollier, the Chancellor of LSU Health Services, responded to the VCPORA invitation quite curtly:
Thank you for your invitation. However, I do not see any value in prolonging this type of discourse. As you well know, the State has already made the decision to proceed with the process for building the new LSU/VA Hospital on the announced site and are in the process of property acquisition. Any further "debates" such as you propose are a severe disservice to the people of New Orleans and can only delay the development of the badly needed Academic Teaching Hospital.
Admittedly, I've been very sensitive to the Times-Picayune's coverage of the LSU/VA and Charity Hospital controversies. Today's article, by Bill Barrow, isn't the worst example I've ever seen but it isn't exactly a shining achievement in objective journalism either. This is how it starts:
Addressing several hundred New Orleans business and community leaders last month, representatives from the Louisiana State University System and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spoke definitively about their plans for a $2 billion investment in a joint medical teaching facility near downtown.
VA construction manager Don Orndorff promised a new federal hospital would be opened in early 2013. Dr. Larry Hollier, chancellor of the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, was less certain about a possible opening date for his school's portion of the project. But he was no less matter-of-fact about the imminence of a project that proponents pitch as the largest economic development undertaking in New Orleans history and a necessary linchpin in the positioning the city's medical enterprise to compete with those in Houston and Birmingham, Ala.
Now I think that's quite the lede. I'm an amateur so I don't know but it would seem to me that you'd want to start a new story by mentioning why the hospitals are in the news this week. For instance, you might want to mention that RMJM Hillier architects had come to town to testify about their alternative plan to restore Charity before the House Appropriations Committee in Baton Rouge. Or you might want to start the article mentioning the big event that occurred last night where preservationists and architects spoke to a packed house of hundreds of influential New Orleanians instead of an LSU/VA event from last month.
In fact, the Times-Picayune does not mention the VCPORA presentation anywhere in their article, which is curious given that WDSU and WWLTV considered it significant enough to merit coverage.
The Times-Picayune piece is quite long and does delve into many of the relevant details. It also includes maps and a timeline. But the manner in which those critical details got buried behind a loaded lede is indicative of the Times-Picayune's pattern of lackluster coverage of matters related to Charity and the LSU/VA redevelopment scheme.
Update: I should also mention that today's Times-Picayune also included an op-ed in support of the RMJM Hillier plan to rebuild Charity. It's by Jack Davis of Smart Growth Louisiana and it's a good read. Link
Tonight's forum by the VCPORA can't be described as anything other than a smashing success. The Orleans Bourbon was packed, there must have been 250 people in attendance.
[recognizable faces: Karen Gadbois, James Perry, Juan Lafonta, Stacy Head, Lolis Eric Elie, Jimmy Farhenholtz, Tracy Washington and many others.]
The forum featured advocates determined to find an alternative to the current LSU/VA mega-hospital development that would permanently shutter Charity and bulldoze Lower Mid City. Naturally, they reiterated that it has become an especially bad idea to knock down Lower Mid City since prospects for funding the LSU portion of the project seem increasingly unlikely. But the real focus was on why the Foundation for Historical Louisiana's alternative plan represents a superior option.
The proposal, by the pretty damn prestigious architecture firm RMJM Hillier, suggests that a restored Charity Hospital could be remade into a top notch facility in less time and for less money than the LSU/VA mega-development slowly forcing itself through different offices and agencies in bits and pieces. This August clip has a bad score but effectively illustrates the remade Charity:
Two things to emphasize:
1. This wasn't some nobody architecture firm hired just because they do preservation work, they've done huge, prestigious projects all over the world. And they do health care facilities. I checked.
2. They say it can be done faster and for less money.
It's important to remember the sloppy way state officials went about trying to throw cold water over the RMJM Hillier proposal. I highly recommend skimming through all of it. They whine that the firm didn't do what it was asked because RMJM Hillier was only supposed to look into whether or not it was smart to reopen three floors of Charity on a temporary basis and instead came back with a cheaper, faster plan to reopen the entirety of Charity on a full time basis. (In other words admitting that they had purposely constricted the rfp to prevent any kind of inconvenient objective assessment of the building's actual feasibility.)
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Tomorrow morning, the team goes to Baton Rouge to make their case directly to the House Appropriations Committee in an informational hearing.
The Louisiana House Appropriations Committee can halt the plan to demolish Lower Mid City.
Not a done deal.
No not that VA, I'm talking about the race to for Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I wrote a few weeks ago that the Democratic primary fight was a sure bet to be the big flash point for progressives to watch during the off-year election cycle.
Yet, aside from Andrew Sullivan's properly-titled post, I hadn't seen too much reaction on the blogosphere.
But this news will surely result in some serious keyboard pounding across the country, if not now then in just a few short months.
It isn't automatic that just because Joe Trippi signs with an underdog candidate that progressives will flock to that candidate, but Trippi has a lot of residual progressive 'street cred' from his days on Howard Dean's campaign. And it's not as if progressives (or anyone else for that matter) need that much help finding reasons to oppose Terry McAuliffe.
At the very least, Brian Moran's hiring of big-leaguer like Joe Trippi signals that he intends to run a competative campaign. McAuliffe is raising obscene amounts of money so Moran and Trippi have their work cut out.
Those pushing to demolish Lower Mid City as part of the LSU/VA redevelopment project would have you believe it's a done deal: that there is no reopening Charity, that there is no stopping the razing of an historic residential neighborhood.
It's not so difficult to postulate as to why hammering through this redevelopment scheme has become so important to some state and local officials. Certainly many people have worked extremely hard to get it done. Some of the more public players have staked their reputations on the deal.
But is it in the public's interest? And is it inevitable?
VCPORA has put together a panel for tonight at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel to consider the issues at hand. Lolis Eric Elie's column from last week discusses tonight's forums and fills in some of the background.
Details here.
717 Orleans St.
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM.
Speakers:
Bill Borah, attorney and author
Okay, Obama is President. It's starting to sink in.
Now let's get to work.
There are not one, not two, but three whole articles linked on Nola.com that discuss Obama's website rhetoric on Katrina.
But the President isn't saying anything different about Katrina and New Orleans on whitehouse.gov today than he's said throughout his campaign and throughout the transition.
There isn't going to be any special immediate direct intervention here in New Orleans.
Not unless we start organizing to get it, not unless we loudly demand it.
For the rest of the week I'm going to continue to look into the brewing Charity/LSU/VA controversy as well as on going efforts to get funding for New Orleans from the economic stimulus plan under construction on Capital Hill.
Update: The Times-Picayune takes a deep breath and clears the record with all the whitehouse.gov stuff, definitely after reading my blog.
The statement, however, is not some new initiative. In fact, it's a carryover of Obama's campaign. With the exception of the honorifics, it is word for word what appeared on change.gov, the Web site of the Obama-Biden transition team, which was itself taken verbatim from what appeared on www.barackobama.com, Obama's campaign Web site.It wasn't just nola.com that went bonkers over the Katrina section of the new whitehouse.gov, a lot of bloggers got very excited also. But again, no new news on Obama's position on Katrina. No news at all.
July 2004:
February 2007:
January 2008:
January 2008:
January 2008:
February 2008:
March 2008:
June 2008:
August 2008:
November 2008:
January 2009:
A pubescent America.
It won't be easy, it won't be pretty, but we'll be so much stronger for it.
Sad weak old man can't even stand to shake Barack's hand tomorrow.
Here's a nice retirement community that I've taken the liberty of picking out on evil grandpa's behalf:
One of the main reasons I started supporting this commie pinko so many months ago:
No other politician in America could propose something like this, no matter what the details look like when they emerge.
Update: Vincent Sylvain's newsletter says Cynthia Willard-Lewis is going for one of the at-large seats on City Council. She has a good shot to win one of them, at least right now.
It's been almost a month since the last time we broke bread over the Mayoral race. You can check out the last line here.
Though the election is over a year from now, the campaigning has already begun.
My list of contenders should not be considered completely exhaustive. If you or someone you know is a candidate for Mayor, feel free to say so in the comments below.
First, the ground rules:
- Contenders are ranked from least likely to win to most likely to win.
- Individuals that have confirmed their candidacy or are known to be running will earn a better ranking than they otherwise might.
Now, enjoy:
Tier IV - Almost irrelevant
25. Eli Ackerman - Botox will be well worth it, people. Send in those checks.
24. John Georges - I hear he's not interested anymore. He can self-finance his own campaign so he'll move up if he changes his mind.
23. Emile Labat - Sylvain says this funeral director is definitely running. Nobody else has ever heard of him.
22. Rob Couhig - Talk show host has limited fan base and a host of divisive political positions. Does he run again?
21. Michael Cowen - Loyola administrator is apparently interested, but I don't see any compelling evidence that he's serious about winning. He's done some good work on racial dialogue but I haven't seen where he's been vocal about municipal policy. Have I just not been paying attention? I don't get it.
20. Virginia Boulet - Not sure if there's a compelling political rationale for her to run, she should probably be thinking about Council if she's still interested in elected office. It's hard to tell. Anyone heard from her lately? Maybe I've dropped her too far.
19. Ron Forman - I'm not sure the business crowd wants him to run.
Tier III - Window shopping
18. Troy C. Carter - Still dangerous because he somehow earns a few thousand votes every time he runs for office. I don't see how he raises the money it would take to really make a play. He should set his sights lower.
17. James Carter - Probably not going to run for Mayor, if he even decides to continue working in politics. I hear he's pretty fed-up. I've been frustrated with him at times but I don't want to see him quit. What about City Council at-large?
16. Austin Badon - The papers say he's interested but I don't see how anyone from the East mobilizes enough voters to make a go of it. If he's interested in municipal level politics, he should look at running for Willard-Lewis' seat. He's sold out on progressive issues like vouchers, so maybe he's looking to couch himself as some sort of independent centrist. He has precarious connections to the city's sanitation contractor elite. I don't trust this dude.
15. Eddie Sapir - Former Councilman wants back in for some reason. I don't really know where to put him. Hard to picture him running a citywide race, the rumor stoking seems like an ego exercise to me. Thoughts?
14. Cheryl Gray - I hear her name in connection with the Congressional seat often enough that it would lead me to believe she's more interested in that seat if she's at all curious about higher office. She did recently get engaged (congratulations), so she may be in the process of reevaluating her career goals.
13. Cedric Richmond - Probably more interested in Congress than in running for Mayor but it's hard to speculate as to what his next move should be. Curious for comment.
12. Cynthia Willard-Lewis - Unpopular Councilwoman has absolutely no chance but has been politically hemmed and needs to find a new job eventually. [Update: Running for Council at-large. She has a good chance to win one of the two seats available.]
11. Helena Moreno - She's a wild card. She needs a job right now, we're in a recession people.
10. Cynthia Hedge-Morrell - Unconfirmed interest. She might fair surprisingly well in a citywide race. Could she be mulling an at-large bid?
Tier II - Legitimate contenders
9. Roy Glapion Jr. - He's apparently curious and has a famous name. Could be dangerous later on if he raises money. Tough to handicap.
8. Ed Murray - He's really running but I don't see how he sneaks into the runoff given the rest of the field. Putting together a winning coalition is another thing entirely. I don't think he has much of a shot.
7. James Perry - Believe it. He's the only person running that has already built a campaign blueprint. He is surrounding himself with smart and motivated young people and has a rare command of the actual issues faced by the city. He's taking this very seriously and soon people will notice. Princeton professor and political pundit Melissa Harris-Lacewell already has, comparing Perry to her friend Barack Obama. So much for the advantage of stealth. Fundraising will be key early on, so will ensuring that other potential candidates who fit the 'progressive outsider' label decide to take a pass.
6. Jackie Clarkson - I know some people can't believe it but I keep on hearing that she's interested in running for Mayor. She has a strong geographic base and this fact scares me to death. The West Bank is going to have a lot of stroke in this election and I'm not sure there are many East Bank candidates that know how to campaign effectively on the other side of the river.
5. Irvin Mayfield - He's juggling an increasing number of political roles and seems very interested. He's been quietly cultivating political relationships but will still be able to run as an outsider. He has big name recognition and should be considered a threat in the fundraising department because of his national reputation.
4. Marlin Gusman - The more I think about it, the more viable his candidacy seems. His background "fighting crime" is going to be a big advantage that not many other people are going to be able to match. Plus, I've heard that the Nagin administration isn't particularly fond of Gusman, which could turn out to be an advantage, depending on how he structures his campaign.
Tier I - Early front runners
3. Mitch Landrieu - I get mixed signals about the potential for his candidacy. On one hand, the last race was brutal and if he loses again he's pretty much toast as a big time Louisiana politician. He could lose to Jindal in 2011 for Governor while still maintaining political respect, but another municipal loss and he'd be SOL. On the other hand, there are a lot of people in New Orleans that wish they could have a mulligan. Plus if he decides to run, he'd become the odds-on favorite, no? He'd certainly make the runoff. He's staying right where he is on the line for now.
1b. Arnie Fielkow - He's almost definitely going to run. He has had a knack for generating positive press for himself and he's going to be able to raise a ton of money. I wonder whether he can generate widespread appeal in the African American community if he's put under attack for being too close to the business community.
1a. Karen Carter-Peterson - She has maintained solid relationships with national Democrats who remember her fondly from her 2006 loss to Bill Jefferson. She also has good ties to the Obama team. It is improbable that she would take a pass on this and run for Congress again, because I think that would tick off some of her deferential allies. She's a formidable candidate for any office and I think it's safe to consider her an early top contender.
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What does everyone think?
Certainly there are some other names being whispered around town that are not listed. I've also purposefully left off many of the perpetual 1%ers like Quentin Brown and some more "serious" long-shots like Jimmy Fahrenholtz in order to keep this post at a reasonable length. However, it's important to continue to keep an eye on the peripheries. Any candidate capable of earning votes can swing this election. Feel free to submit some of those names in the comments section for future consideration.
Ranking the top ten or so this time around felt a lot less arbitrary than it did a month ago, I'm curious as to how other people might pick their top 10 and why.
Following up from earlier...
Bobby Jindal was early proponent of a possible infrastructure stimulus package. Here's what he had in mind in December:
At a news conference before leaving for the Philadelphia meeting, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said he would like to see more federal investment in coastal restoration projects, barrier island recovery efforts and the project to close the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. He also listed hurricane protection and levee projects in Jean Lafitte and the restoration of a Charity Hospital medical complex in New Orleans as priorities.
"There are literally billions of dollars that can be pushed through the pipeline that have already been allocated by Congress that have yet to come to our communities, that have yet to come to our state, " Jindal said, before leaving for the summit with Obama.
"I think it's unprecedented for a newly elected president to sit down with Democratic and Republican governors, " Jindal said. "We're going to have the opportunity to share with him what's going on in our states and make some recommendations to his administration so they can hit the ground running."
The Times-Picayune made it seem as if Jindal would be making hurricane protection and coastal restoration the centerpiece of Louisiana's ask. We also know that the funding shortfall for the LSU/VA hospital development is a big priority.
Jindal has remained in control of the state's stimulus strategy. He held a press conference announcing the state's priorities last weekend. The article only briefly summarizes what might be in Louisiana's request but there are some interesting things to infer. For one, many of the things that Jindal has put on the table are not actual infrastructure projects. In no order, some examples of that from the article include:
- aid to farmers who experiences losses from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike
- "removal of red tape for local governments negotiating with [FEMA]"
- "changes to the Medicaid financing formula for states affected by disasters"
For flood protection, the article alludes to the Governor's desire to address the issue but the only concrete measure that gets fleshed out is the long-requested rule change that would mandate the Army Corps to use materials collected from dredging for existing coastal restoration projects.
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So what is actually concrete?
Highways. We can build highways.
"I'll make the case that projects like I-49 north should be a priority for his administration.
I will personally be advocating to President-elect Obama that this project be included in the stimulus package that the federal government is hoping to get done by Jan. 20 at the latest next year."
In fact, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has been hard at work in anticipation of a federal infrastructure bill since summer.
DOTD started compiling a list in August - three months before the presidential election - because "I assumed that whoever was elected president was going to have to do something like this," Ankner said. "But I didn't think it was going to be this big."
Because of DOTD's planning, it was one of the first states to submit a proposal and one of only three states that included a separate plan for improving ports and airports, too.
The list of projects comes out to a price tag of $1.314 billion. But Secretary Ankner is setting lower expectations:
“I think $400 million is a good number for us to think about,” Ankner said.We know that finishing the I-49 project around Shreveport and renovating I-12 and I-10 around Baton Rouge are major state priorities. In the metro area, we know that there are projects already underway on I-10 in Jefferson Parish that have made it on the list. What's going to be left over for New Orleans?
Part of the issue, I suppose, is that only a small percentage of the projects in the city are "shovel-ready." The Obama administration apparently favors projects where construction can begin immediately and be completed within the next 2-3 years. This, they say, will maximize the extent to which federal spending stimulates economic growth over the short term.
I've argued that those strings shouldn't be attached when it comes to allocating resources to New Orleans because of the last administration's broken promises and our city's sobering list of imminent needs. Given the political opportunity, it makes sense to approach the infrastructure stimulus as an opportunity to secure money that might not be available at any other time. Whatever limits the Congress or the President want to attach to how that money is allocated by local officials are more than fine with me. The important thing is getting the money through Congress, especially since it isn't at all clear when or if New Orleans might get its own turn at the top of the docket or if there will be any political will to allocate resources when or if that time comes.
In fact, I have recently learned that New Orleans, the Regional Planning Commission, and the RTA are indeed drafting their own list of smart-growth transportation infrastructure projects totalling a very large number. It will be very interesting to see how the Louisiana Congressional delegation reconciles competing lists.
Other state agencies will be submitting their own recommendations for stimulus dollars. We should be careful to monitor those also.
I don't like this process at all. There is very little information in the public domain and it doesn't seem like the local professional media is particularly curious.
Am I overstating the local implications of the stimulus? Why isn't all of this a much bigger deal in the papers?
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