The Hospitals and the Mayor's Race

Some stunning new poll results.

City Hall and the LSU/VA, A Comparative Study

Earlier this week I did a post at SaveCharityHospital.com that I'm particularly happy with. It illustrates how the law was followed when it came time to evaluate the potential purchase of the Chevron building but not when the Mayor signed over Lower Mid-City for demolition to make way for the proposed LSU/VA.

There was a total surrender of oversight authority that occurred when the Mayor signed over Lower Mid-City homes and businesses to make way for a proposed LSU/VA medical complex.

The "Memorandum of Understanding" between the City and the Department of Veterans Affairs is the document authorizing expropriation in the proposed medical center footprint, permitting street closures, and allowing for taxpayer-financed damages to be paid to the VA. The "MOU" was not announced as a proposal to the public, which would have seemingly triggered hearings and votes by the City Planning Commission and the City Council.

Instead, Mayor Nagin simply signed the city into the legally-binding MOU. Neither the City Council nor the City Planning Commission has held a public hearing. Neither the City Council nor the City Planning Commission has held a vote. Rather, both bodies have avoided executing their legally-mandated authority amidst vocal calls from New Orleans residents for the City Charter to be followed.

Instead, city officials locked into a plan for medical facilities that is now stuck in the weeds, soberingly low on funds but apparently high on the prospect of neighborhood demolition and land acquisition.

If you haven't seen it yet, please go read the whole thing.

Tom Piazza on Charity Hospital

Biotech Industry Falling Apart?

Wow.

Check out this Voices of San Diego piece about the failure of Metabasis Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech firm.

It sounds like the biotech industry is really messed up right now.

Here's another piece possibly foreshadowing all this from back in January.

Additional thoughts at SaveCharityHospital.com

Soup to Dessert?

Or are we just demolishing Lower Mid-City to desert downtown?

Five to None

Department of Administration drinks truth serum on proposed LSU medical center financing:

LSU Admits It Has Had No Business Plan For Proposed Hospital

Check this out...

Wheels off the wagon

WTF is going on in Baton Rouge today?

State halts land acquisition in Lower Mid-City. Check out the latest at SaveCharityHospital.com.

Don't Miss

Dennis Woltering's interviews with Lower Mid-City homeowners from last Friday or Lower Mid-City businessman Mickey Weiser's op-ed in the Times-Picayune from yesterday.

My favorite line from the Woltering interviews belongs to Gail Ruth:

"I think people are getting screwed."

My favorite part of Weiser's op-ed:

HB 780 breezed through the House, 94-2. It crashed and burned in the Senate Education Committee, where it was "deferred" by a vote of 6-1.

You have to ask -- why are LSU and the State Office of Facility Planning so afraid of this bill? This bill should be embraced by LSU and any reasonable and thoughtful legislator. Wouldn't having a valid, up-to-date financing plan help speed the process? Who builds property or opens a business without clear and present funding? That's Business 101.

I should know; I took the course at LSU.

I further highlighted both today at SaveCharityHospital.com.

Abandonment canard dead and buried

LSU Med School is not going to leave New Orleans.

Bigger Gamble Than We've Been Lead To Believe

If you haven't read this NY Times article from last week about the private biosciences industry, it's a must. I've never really challenged GNOBEDD and LSU/VA boosters' assertions about job creation and economic impact of investing in attracting the industry but the Times seems to indicate that it's not the silver bullet they've made it out to be.

At a recent global biotech convention in Atlanta, 27 states, including Hawaii and Oklahoma, paid as much as $100,000 each to entice companies on the exhibition floor. All this for a highly risky industry that has turned a profit only one year in the past four decades.

Skeptics cite two major problems with the race for biotech. First, the industry is highly concentrated in established epicenters like Boston, San Diego and San Francisco, which offer not just scientific talent but also executives who know how to steer drugs through the arduous approval process.

“Most of these states probably don’t stand much of a chance to develop a viable biotech industry,” said Gary P. Pisano, a Harvard Business School professor and the author of “Science Business: The Promise, the Reality and the Future of Biotech.”

“You can always get a few top people,” Mr. Pisano said, “but you need a lot of critical mass.”

Second, biotech is a relatively tiny industry with a lengthy product-development process, and even in its largest clusters offers only a fraction of the jobs of traditional manufacturing. In the United States, only 43 biotechnology companies employ more than 1,000 people, according to BioAbility, a consulting firm in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

There is no guarantee that if a blockbuster drug materialized, it would be manufactured and marketed in the same place it was developed and tested.

See also savecharityhospital.com

Next Up on HB 780

The Senate Education Committee.

TOMORROW.

Click the link for details and an easy way to email the Senators about your strong support for a viable business plan for the possible LSU medical complex BEFORE demolitions can occur.

On the threat that LSU will abandon New Orleans

I think it's dishonorable and immoral but I also think it's inaccurate.

See here.

Dead Ringer?

Go check out the latest at SaveCharityHospital.com. Last week LSU President Dr. John Lombardi made some rather impolitic remarks at a university get-together in New Orleans to discuss the floundering hospital process.

Make sure you go take a listen.




I mean, c'mon. Which one is John Lombardi and which one is Uncle Junior? Even he'd have to admit the resemblance is quite striking.

They're both equally foul-mouthed apparently, too.

Oyster once pointed out that Dr. Lombardi has apparently had some issues with his language in the past. See this column referring to an incident that occurred while Lombardi worked for the University of Florida.

He got into more hot water not long after that for allegedly bullying some visiting law school deans.

Not classy, not at all.

UPDATE: James Gill has also picked up on Lombardi's salty tirade.

Pearls before swine is putting it mildly. The sparkling intellects of LSU offer New Orleans a lifeline, but the populace is too stupid and backward to be roused from its torpor. Time is running out to get the rabble in line.

So says LSU President John Lombardi, who nevertheless remains determined to save New Orleans from itself. Lombardi is just the man for the job, being, as he is fond of pointing out, from the efficient north.

--

LSU, of course, would never do that. It doesn't deal in such small sums. For a few hundred million, however, it will let its superior imagination run riot. In seeking the full replacement cost of $492 million for Charity, LSU provided an account of the storm damage that was wildly exaggerated.

Doctors and military personnel who worked at the hospital immediately after the storm have testified that the hospital had been readied for re-use within weeks, and have produced photographs to prove it.

But LSU told a tale of terminal destruction in hopes of grabbing the maximum loot. FEMA was smart enough to see through the misrepresentation, setting fair compensation at $150 million.

Far from being embarrassed by its duplicity, LSU still hopes to get the full $492 million on appeal. Lombardi told his audience that the feds "owe" the state that much and that it is "the critical linchpin point amount." Does that mean the medical complex won't happen unless LSU can pull the wool over FEMA's eyes? That must be a challenge even for the geniuses who run LSU.

It may not be enough anyway, for LSU will still need to borrow at least $400 million, and state Treasurer John Kennedy said last week that bond underwriters will laugh LSU out of the room when they see its business plan for the medical complex.

Kennedy uttered those unkind words just hours before Lombardi addressed the troops, assuring them that the business plan had, in fact, been "validated by every smart consultant in the western world." You'd have to be as dumb as Lombardi thinks we are to believe that.

Gov. Bobby Jindal isn't. The LSU plan, he declared Monday, is inadequate.

We did it! HB 780 passed unanimously out of committee!

Thanks so much to readers and friends who called and emailed their legislators!

It mattered!

HB 780, which to us at first seemed like a real long-shot, passed out of the Health and Welfare UNANIMOUSLY!

HURRAY!

Big thanks to Rep. Nowlin of Natchitoches for sponsoring and fighting for this bill.

Additional thanks to Reps. Hines and Abramson of New Orleans. They seemed skeptical at first and asked some legitimate questions as to what the consequences of this bill would be but took everyone's testimony into consideration and were won over.

Even Treasurer John Kennedy sounded like his old self again. Check it out:



There were some real fireworks between Kennedy and LSU's Dr. Fred Cerise. You don't want to miss the full report at SaveCharityHospital.com!

I can't say it loud enough: those phone calls, those emails, the testimony of affected New Orleanians - it made all the difference.

When the bill goes before the full Legislature, we'll need to do it all over again.

A simple but important request

Last week at SaveCharityHospital.com, I wrote about Rep. Rick Nowlin's House Bill 780 which provides some very basic protections for homeowners in Lower Mid-City, residents of New Orleans, and taxpayers statewide.

Click here to register your support for House Bill 780

Update: THE COMMITTEE VOTE IS THIS WEDNESDAY! I NEED YOUR SUPPORT!

The bill prohibits the state from expropriating private property in the hospital footprint until the Legislature approves a financing plan from LSU.

This very simple measure will safeguard against possible botched developments that languish as empty lots for years or are outright aborted prior to completion. One doesn't have to look any further than the DOA convention center expansion or Central City Albertson's to see evidence of that here in New Orleans.

Given that there are very real questions about LSU's financing outlook for the proposed $1.2 billion development, it seems like plain common sense to require that a funding plan be in place BEFORE the state starts razing homes and businesses.

The convention center and Albertson's footprints once held structures that were prematurely razed to make way for development that never occurred. New Orleans residents, Lower Mid-City property owners, and state taxpayers deserve protections to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

The National Trust has made it very easy to lobby for the passage of HB 780 right from the comfort of your desk, couch, or bed. It will take less than five minutes and you'll be making a difference.

Click here to support House Bill 780!

The more involved I get with this fight, and with the processes of government in general, the more I have come to recognize how critical every little email or phone call is. It's easy to be cynical about this kind of basic participation because it's so hard to see where your 5 minutes makes an impact. But trust me - it does. When politicians see their inbox explode, votes change. I know that a lot of legislators are on the fence. This one is going to be close. Every single phone call or email is going to make an important difference.

I know that there are a lot of mixed opinions about the LSU/VA vs. Charity controversy out there, even just within the comments section here at WCBF. House Bill 780 is not an either/or proposition as far as that controversy is concerned.

It does not matter whether or not your are for or against the LSU/VA plan. This bill protects everyone from abusive expropriation policy. It does not further delay LSU; instead, it forces them to prove they have a plan to finish the job.

Please, click here to send letters to the legislators of the Health and Welfare Committee.

Have you done it yet? Let me know with a comment below.

If you want to be really really cool, you'll call the Committee Clerk in Baton Rouge at 225-342-2404. Just say "I'm calling to register my support for the passage of HB 780!"

Then, there are three New Orleans area reps on the Health and Welfare Committee. If readers are represented by any of the following, please make an additional special call to their office.

Neil Abramson (504) 275-8051

Walker Hines (504) 756-4675

John LaBruzzo (504) 833-7788

Yes on 780

Link!

Common sense insurance policy to protect Lower Mid-City from demolition if LSU doesn't have financing.

"Completely Destroyed"

Charity Hospital or Congressman Cao's shot at reelection?

Link!

Ways and Means

I actually did download and watch.

Link.

Strange...

Vitter, according to spokesman Joel DiGrado, believes that a public hospital should have already been rebuilt downtown, that LSU has delayed that far too long, that its plan is too big and expensive and that "gutting the old Charity shell and rebuilding a state-of-the-art hospital in it could save a lot of money."

... let's go with bedfellows.

Link