Moving City Hall - Is there a real plan?

Update: See also this Gambit commentary

I'm not in love with our current City Hall building and it seems clear that it doesn't quite have the capacity we need for all of our departments. However I really question the efficacy of the purchase of the Chevron building for conversion.

I wrote this late last week at SaveCharityHospital.com about attempts in the legislature to undermine the New Orleans Master Plan:

It has become increasingly clear to us that the Master Plan has been partially undermined by the failure to include the city's major development projects in its scope. Without a substantive evaluation of the impacts of the two competing hospital plans - the LSU-preferred $1.2 billion medical campus or the less expensive and faster alternative to renovate Charity Hospital - the Goody Clancy Master Plan remains insufficiently comprehensive. The failure to critically analyze other large development projects such as the potential abandonment of City Hall in the wake of the proposed purchase of the Chevron building, the Reinventing the Crescent Waterfront riverfront project, and the proposed sports entertainment district around the Superdome.

Taken individually, none of these are necessarily catastrophic proposals. On balance, however, they represent an enormous commitment of recovery dollars to projects not subject to the skeptical analysis of the Goody Clancy planning process.

The failure of City Council and the City Planning Commission to acknowledge and deal with these deficiencies has created a climate that has invited such bold moves which undermine the master plan concept, such as those attempted by Senator Murray and his allies.

Should attempts to undermine the Master Plan ultimately fail, the City Planning Commission and the City Council will be charged with approving or rejecting the version being crafted by Goody Clancy. Yet, the deficiencies in the scope of the plan will still remain and so too will public queries to the CPC and Council about the strength of the document.

Now I didn't support SB 75 because I would like to see New Orleans adopt a comprehensive plan that might help us make smarter development decisions going forward. I do think there are legitimate criticisms of the process that need to be made but those that offered the bill weren't making them.

That the City Planning Commission has given their trademark rubber stamp to this proposal to relocate City Hall is really frustrating and speaks to their overall abdication of responsibility over the last several years.

City Hall wasn't built all that long ago and when we built it, the city razed a whole section of the city to do so. It was planned. The streets were planned that way. That's why when you stand on Rampart you have this site line to the neon sign atop that building.

I'm wary of the casual way in which we're about to entirely abandon all of that. Especially since we don't seem to have a plan for that entire area of downtown we're prepared to leave vacant. Think about it. Between City Hall and the state office building (currently under demolition) and all those nasty parking lots around Loyola Ave., what exactly is planned for that huge swath of real estate?

Surely someone will propose a really neat sounding project - maybe a park. And maybe it will be a good idea in isolation.

But again, what exactly are we doing? How many more critical recovery projects will get pushed off because of some absolutely critical political legacy project like a new downtown park or a new city hall?

Are those really our priorities?

How much longer are we going to have to put off sustainable investment in neighborhood nodes because of the apparently pressing need to move money around in downtown New Orleans?

Making such a big decision to abandon large swaths of the old administrative and downtown medical district (Charity and the VA), will leave a big gaping hole in the middle of the CBD with absolutely no public plan for what we're going to do with that land.

For the City Planning Commission to be so casual about approving the purchase of the Chevron building strikes me as pathetic.

Why are they so eager to undermine the master plan they worked so hard to create?

I really appreciate Arnie Fielkow's stand on this issue. It takes guts even if this statement kind of sounds like a tweet.

"Great city needs such as the reopening and enhancement of playgrounds, police and fire stations, street repairs, etc., certainly should be top priority when competing with limited city funds," Fielkow wrote.

Yes! What exactly is the vision here? Are we in the business of making this city livable for residents or are we just leaving legacies? Let's put the brakes on this train.

This is precisely the type of thing I thought a comprehensive master plan was supposed to address. I'd love for someone to get Dave Dixon of Goody Clancy on the record about some of this stuff.

Look, I think we need better administrative buildings for municipal government. I also think a monorail rising above the Mississippi River from Riverbend to Holy Cross would be awesome.

Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean we should put it at the top of the list.

Additional notes on SB 75, Mayor's race

In my latest Mayoral race roundup, a reader wrote in to suggest that I'd been too hasty to remove trumpeter Irvin Mayfield from the list of potential contenders. This is probably right. He should be on there. It's hard to gauge where he'd fall on that list. People love Irvin Mayfield but I kind of doubt people will love him in politics.

Also, I indicated that State Sen. Murray might be playing to developers because of his sponsorship of SB 75, which would put the master plan to another referendum after a charter change was passed by voters last year. A commenter indicated that this was likely as HRI Properties, Pres Kabacoff's development firm, had paid for the T-P add that urged support for the bill.

Now, proof:

sb75ad

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Ways and Means

I actually did download and watch.

Link.

Cowen's Concerns Indicative of Swirling Skepticism

In a letter to the editor responding to James Gill's passionate criticism of LSU's entrenched stance in the debate over whether to restore Charity Hospital, Tulane President Scott Cowen asks the following questions:

-- Given the current health care reform movement, do we remain comfortable that the proposed hospital meets the medical needs of our wider community and its citizens, especially those who are under- or uninsured?

-- Do we have sufficient funds to build and operate the hospital without it being a drain on the state's future resources, especially in these economic times?

-- How can any new facility best meet the educational, research and clinical care needs of the institutions that rely on it to support and advance their academic missions? Some of these institutions include Xavier, LSU, Dillard and Tulane.

-- Given the importance and wide impact of this hospital to our community, who should own, govern and manage it to ensure that the proposed facility meets the needs of its various stakeholders while being operated in the most cost effective, efficient and transparent manner?

These are the issues that have been flagged at every turn by proponents of Charity. It is about time that LSU, the GNOBEDD, and the DDD be forced to provide legitimate answers. There has not been one public hearing in Orleans Parish on the matter. Not one. Not in front of the City Council. Not in front of the City Planning Commission.

Goody Clancy, the firm that just released a master plan draft online, was told not to evaluate the GNOBEDD or the LSU/VA footprint.

But it is clear as you're browsing the draft plan, that the issue of Charity Hospital was simply unavoidable. The public health challenges examined by Goody Clancy clearly underscore Mr. Cowen's first question above. Check out Chapter 9 on Health and Human Services (pdf)

What else?

And more still:

Given the distubing public health crisis, why are we so convinced that the LSU/VA complex is the way to go when there's another proposal on the table promises the same first rate medical care without nearly the same wait. LSU does not have the funding to proceed with their plan but they've blocked any and all attempts to evaluate it side-by-side with the alternative from RMHM Hillier. It could take another decade if we continue to subject our health care emergencies to their incompetent guidance.

Early Reaction to the Zoning Master Plan

That's right! A much-anticipated draft of the zoning master plan from Goody Clancy is available online.

This past November, I was pretty torn about giving any zoning master plan the rule of law given the nasty legacy of past planning efforts (see Back, Bring New Orleans).

But I reflected after the fact that the zoning master plan enshrined in law might be the only way to rebuild the sagging neighborhoods of places like New Orleans East, which has otherwise seen way too little institutional investment since Katrina.

So this is the area that I was most interested in upon the release of the plan.

Check out what's in store for New Orleans East on this pdf map.

The most remarkable decision was to zone for high density mixed use urban development around Read Blvd. This, to me, is precisely the kind of thing that the East needs. Without some sort of urban core, I don't see how the East attracts the kind of population it needs to continue to beat back the resistant footprint shrinkers who still advocate for the razing of that entire section of town. One example of what this kind of new urban development could look like is Atlantic Station in Atlanta. Given the rather nasty medium term outlook for the East, I think this kind of urban anchor would be a huge victory.

So I was disappointed but not surprised by the initial reaction of Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who "represents" the East. In a two paragraph response distributed via Vincent Sylvain's political consultancy email listserv, Willard-Lewis' primary message is a quite pathetic complaint that she was not given an advance copy of the draft before the public:

The Council President announced at the Recovery Committee on last Wednesday, that she wanted Council members briefed on the draft of the Master Plan developed by Goody-Clancy before there was public discussion. This was to take place before the draft was released to the community and press. Unfortunately I was never contacted by anyone regarding this briefing. Needless to say I was surprised to read in the local newspaper that the draft is on the website and the press had a copy before my office had access.

Of a greater concern to me were the recommendations in the draft regarding the development of eastern New Orleans. The consultants are recommending commercial and multifamily land uses. That is a major concern considering that eastern New Orleans already has high density multifamily projects which are not in proportion to the rest of the City. I understand this is a draft and I will be working with my constituents to address this disparity. This again points to the problem with citizens approving legislation, planning and zoning policies into law sight unseen.

Now let's not ignore this second paragraph, which is at least on-topic, though it may ultimately be deemed uninformed. It doesn't take much analytical skill to understand that Willard-Lewis' concern is that the East will become a dumping ground for the city's poor because she equates high density multifamily residential development with poor people. While this might demonstrate the Councilor's unsophisticated view of urbanity, it also underscores the class conflict inherent in a lot of the redevelopment debates that have occurred in the East.

Willard-Lewis should be looking to make sure that the rest of the city is building high density affordable housing as well and that it's not all just being concentrated in the East. This was a problem before the storm and it is certainly fair to be on the lookout for inherent biases in this regard. I have not yet gone into the specifics of the draft plan to see if that's true. But I doubt that Willard-Lewis had finished reading the entire draft plan herself when three days ago, she decided to stake out her oppositional posture.