New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu hopes to make contracting more fair, and to help local businesses. (Flickr, dsb nola)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

Two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ mayor, Mitch Landrieu (D), just three months into his tenure, made a major announcement. A hundred recovery projects, from libraries to fire stations to parks, were ready to go after years of red tape and implementation scandals.

[Environment1] “I can say this with certainty: that these 100 projects are a priority in somebody’s mind in the city, that they are 100 percent funded, that they are part of the city’s long-term master plan and will be built, or are in the process of being built,” Landrieu told The Times-Picayune. “Some of them are further along than others. But you can take these to the bank.”

In a city that has long suffered from halting and ineffective efforts to contract municipal recovery funds, the news came as a welcome relief. It stoked hopes that Landrieu’s administration would offer a clean break from Mayor Ray Nagin’s (D) fraught eight-year tenure. “I think this city is ready to soar,” declared City Council President Arnie Fielkow.

But as the mayor gets ready to cut ribbons and break ground, a number of local labor and anti-discrimination groups are voicing worries that the new projects will not benefit the city’s local businesses. Their concerns center around the city’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program, intended to make good-faith efforts to help local, women, and minority-owned firms secure city contracts. Wary due to rampant cronyism and corruption in the past, leaving local companies adrift, the NAACP and other groups are seizing on Landrieu’s announcement. For them, turning around the DBE will be the litmus test for success.

Even before Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans, activists and businesses charged that the city had an opaque and cronyism-ridden system for awarding building and contracting deals — a major hurdle for local firms. The Bureau of Governmental Research, a private, independent research organization released a major report entitled “Contracting with Confidence” to call attention to the matter and make recommendations in March.

“An $81 million energy efficiency contract saddled the city with two decades of excessive payments and resulted in the convictions of an administration official, political supporters, and contractors who skimmed money from the deal,” the report said in its lengthy summary of recent examples of political patronage. “A contract for home monitoring of municipal offenders went to a politically connected firm that possessed no experience providing the service and that scored lowest on the city’s evaluation of proposals. The public paid 60 percent more to install and manage electronic parking meters than it would have had the city contracted with the firm that scored highest in the city’s own evaluation. A post-Katrina car removal contract went to the most expensive of 14 bidders through an evaluation process that did not account for the cost of services. The list goes on.”

Former Mayor Ray Nagin was implicated in the political patronage system as well after revelations that his family vacationed in Hawaii and Jamaica due to the largess of Mark St. Pierre, who held numerous city technology contracts. Later, St. Pierre was indicted, along with Greg Meffert, Nagin’s chief techonology officer, on 63 federal counts of bribery, money laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.

In the wake of the hurricane, when federal recovery money began pouring in and outside firms often secured work for complicated projects, rather than local businesses, the city’s opaque methods and history of corruption ginned up anger and outrage from an underemployed citizenry. Particularly troubling in the eyes of local business owners, particularly black business owners, was the persistent sense that the city was allowing the money to be funneled to out-of-state contractors who made little effort to hire local businesses.

“We’re dealing with local contractors on a daily basis and they’re not getting the work,” argues Barry Kaufman, secretary treasurer of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “There are more out-of-state contractors in here than holes in cheese. Local contractors are being low bidded by out-of-state contractors. It’s a shame how [Nagin] let that happen.”

When, in February 2009, the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance that required Nagin’s closed-door review panels to meet in public, the mayor vetoed the bill and later issued an order that scrapped the evaluation panels altogether. That process, or the lack thereof, remained in place until Landrieu assumed office in May and made contracts reform a signature priority of his administration.

In addition to restoring transparency and expertise to city contracting, Landrieu’s administration also tried reaching out to disillusioned local groups. The mayor set up a “provisional certification program,” which allowed businesses certified as “disadvantaged” by state and other agencies to compete for city contracts alongside City Hall’s previous designees. He also created an Office of Supplier Diversity, tasked with enforcing city ordinances and implementing programs like DBE.

These new programs and agencies, however, have yet to perform up to expectations. A report on DBE released by the city’s Office of the Inspector General in early August made a number of damning observations about its effectiveness, including, “(1) that the personnel responsible for implementing this program did not have a clear understanding of the applicable legal standards; (2) that the certification procedure implemented did not have written rules or comply with open meeting laws; and, (3) that the responsible office lacks sufficient staff and funding to carry out its intended functions.”

The Inspector General’s observations, the report noted, reflected more on the failings of the DBE program over the years than any of Landrieu’s specific efforts, but they also highlighted that, thus far, progress has been substandard. Groups like the NAACP seized upon the report, voicing fears that the administration is faltering on its promise to help New Orleans-based and minority-owned businesses secure contracts on new recovery projects.

“We have requested documentation from the city on previous contracts, but our focus right now is not what has happened in the past but on the one hundred projects just announced by Landrieu,” explains local NAACP chapter president Danatus King. “That’s a billion dollars worth of projects that the mayor publicized in the media last week. No matter what happened in the past, we want to make sure the law is enforced with respect to that.”

In order to keep tabs on all the contracts, King and other leaders have demanded that the city gather records for all its contracts — and all the required documentation contractors are required to submit for them — in publicly accessible folders that volunteers can access and use to monitor for compliance. “If the city doesn’t have the manpower to do it,” King explains, “we’re asking for citizens to get involved.”

Neither the city nor activists possess data on whether New Orleans is complying with an ordinance requiring that half of public spending go to locally owned companies and 35 percent to “socially and economically disadvantaged businesses.” It is not even clear which businesses qualify as “socially and economically disadvantaged.” While the ordinances originally included race- and gender-based criteria, the Supreme Court has since declared such rules to be unconstitutional. As a result, the city has tinkered with its certification process over the years but has yet to come up with firm criteria.

And while the DBE participation goals are “aspirational” in nature, the paperwork required to demonstrate a good faith effort in achieving them is not. Despite this fact, the Inspector General’s office noted that the current panel that approves companies for the city’s DBE program holds monthly meetings that are not advertised and are not open to the public — nor is there an adequate avenue of appeal if a business’s application is rejected. Moreover, the city’s Office of Supplier Diversity currently has only one employee, who has no time sufficiently monitor or enforce compliance on the part of contractors with the DBE program’s participation goals.

The mayor’s office announced earlier this year that it would undertake a “disparity study” to begin putting numbers on the debate. (The office declined to speak to TWI about the issue.) In the meantime, businesses, unions and activists remain unconvinced.  “I can tell you at the Langston Hughes school right over by the race track,” notes Kaufman, of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “This contractor from Biloxi, Miss., built that school. You’re telling me, with all the local contractors in New Orleans, we can’t build a school?”

“I think there’s one person in the office [of Supplier Diversity], but that’s no excuse,” he notes. “I think they’ve been doing this for years and years, and I think it’s business as usual. I hope it changes. We’re going to give Landrieu an opportunity to prove us wrong.”

Hurricane Katrina victims take note. Michael Brown is safe.

A series of wind-whipped wildfires north of Boulder, Colo., have forced the evacuation of more than 11,500 residents — including Brown, the vilified ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency head.

Brown was lauded by President Bush for doing a “heckuva job” in the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, which took the lives of 1,836 people and caused more than $81 billion in damage. Brown resigned in disgrace and the event looms as a national turning point against the Bush administration.

This week, PBS’s “Frontline” broadcast a heart-wrenching investigative report, “The Old Man and the Storm,” about struggling post-Katrina rebuilding efforts more than three years after the massive hurricane destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

FEMA has promised to pay up to 75 percent of firefighting costs, according to a Daily Camera story.

The latest images and ground reports via Twitter can be found at twemes.com/boulderfire.

h/t Westword

Wendy Norris is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Colorado Independent. ]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/24440/ex-fema-head-michael-brown-evacuated-from-colorado-wildfire/feed 0 http://washingtonindependent.com/3745/obama-texts-hurricane-relief http://washingtonindependent.com/3745/obama-texts-hurricane-relief#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:25:08 +0000 Ari Melber http://www.washingtonindependent.com/?p=3745 Sen. Barack Obama is tapping his sizable political cell phone network to help Hurricane Gustav relief. On Monday, he issued a personal plea via text message to his supporters:

Barack asks that you give to the Red Cross…

The short message encouraged supporters to give money online, by calling an More...

In the sweltering heat, Palin received an enthusiastic greeting from an audience that the campaign said numbered more than 17,000, but was almost certainly considerably smaller. her speech was periodically interrupted by chants of “Sarah, Sarah,” and five audience members held up giant white letters that spelled “PALIN.” For the first time since McCain added her to his ticket, Palin sought to demonstrate that her experience in Alaska prepared her for the reponsibilities of the federal government. As Hurricane Gustav moved steadily toward New Orleans, three years to the week after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city, McCain and Palin paid a quick visit to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Operation Center in Jackson, Miss. yesterday, where they met with the governors of all four Gulf Coast states. Palin used this as a jumping off point.

I’d like to add my call also for every person and every family in danger to make a straight path toward safer ground. As governor of Alaska, I recently just signed a disaster declaration myself last month, when the people of the Fairbanks region, they faced the worst rainfall and flooding in decades, and when any governor calls for evacuation, these instructions need to be taken very seriously. To citizens in the Gulf Coast area, your lives and many others are in the balance, and the success of law enforcement, and of emergency workers, and our great National Guard, depends on your cooperation.

Palin’s remarks about the hurricane preparations were boilerplate, but her delivery was relentlessly upbeat. Even as she talked about the impending doom and gloom facing New Orleans, she spun just about everything she said in an optimistic light.

As we’ve seen in other disasters, crisis on this scale can bring out the best in our country. They show the resourcefulness, the resourcefulness of our people shine through, and the heroic kindness of which we are capable. And whatever the scale of destruction, grief, perhaps loss of life that this hurricane might inflict, people in the Gulf, that region will once again be counting on the good heart of America, Americans like all of you. I know that relief workers and charitable groups, and volunteers, they’ll be up to the task. So I join Sen. McCain in urging all of our fellow Americans to stand ready to help in the work and relief effort to rebuild. Some terrible days may lie ahead for New Orleans, again, and the region. But my fellow Americans, we’re going to get through this crisis, as we always do in our finest moments, by pulling together, and by helping where the need is greatest.

Palin’s speaking style is reminiscent of a friend’s impossibly cheery mother. It’s difficult to imagine her as an attack dog. Palin could provide relief from the near-constant negativity coming from the McCain campaign’s ads. In a reversal of the typical roles of running mates, McCain and the rest of his staff will be able to keep doing what they’ve done all along — launching broadsides against Sen. Barack Obama, while Palin can spread rays of sunshine throughout the battleground states where she will likely be spending the bulk of her time. If Palin largely refrains from going negative, it will make it all the more difficult for the Obama campaign to attack her without appearing to be “picking on the nice lady.” Palin can play the good cop, pushing her message of government reform and change to the masses, to the rest of the campaign’s bad cop.

The Sierra Club sent out a press release about one of those lessons — perhaps not the most important, but certainly one that finds relevance today. The environmental group points out that the Gulf Coast hurricane caused oil spills both on- and offshore, and urges supporters of offshore drilling to recognize the potential for future oil spills.

From the release:

New Orleans, LA: When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29 2005, millions of people suffered a tremendous loss. This tragedy was only compounded by incompetent government response both in the immediate aftermath of and in the long-term recovery from the historic storm.

In the three years since Katrina struck, numerous problems have surfaced related to government inaction and official misinformation ranging from the problem of formaldehyde in emergency housing, and now to myths about whether the hurricane really did cause any oil spills along the Gulf Coast.

As we reach the anniversary, our presidential candidates should be talking about ways to get our government working for people again. But John McCain and other supporters of more offshore drilling are trying to rewrite history and perversely use Katrina as evidence that drilling and oil spills aren’t threats.

Fact–Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Oil Spills and damage to both off-shore rigs and on-shore infrastructure:

• More than 9,000,000 gallons of oil were spilled as a result of the two storms.
  (Source: U.S. Coast Guard)
• Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone “totally destroyed” 113 offshore oil platforms. One platform drifted 66 nautical miles before running aground on a beach in Alabama. Hurricane Dennis in 2005 nearly destroyed the then brand-new, state-of-the-art $1-billion Shell Thunder Horse platform—the largest of its kind in the world.
  (Source: Minerals Management Service)

Yet at campaign events last month, Sen. John McCain said, “I would remind you that off the coast of Louisiana and Texas, they both had hurricanes that did not cause any real difficulties. So the environmental side of it I think is pretty well okay.” Two days later he said, “I’m aware that off the coast of Louisiana and Texas there are oil rigs, as we well know, and those rigs have survived very successfully the impacts of hurricanes, Hurricane Katrina as far as Louisiana is concerned.” (campaign events 7/15 and 7/18/08)

When I talked to the California-based conservation group the Surfrider Foundation for my story on offshore drilling last week, the spokesman Matt McClain said much the same thing that the Sierra Club release:

When Hurricane Katrina hit back in 2005, there was a lot of attention in New Orleans to all the devastation and destruction that took place on land, and rightfully so. But when that story was breaking, what didn’t get a lot of attention was that over 100 offshore drilling platforms were destroyed or damaged during the storm. And they spilled a significant amount of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s kind of funny, because the energy secretary, as recently as last month, got on the news and had said, “We didn’t lose one drop of oil.” Meanwhile, there are copious amounts of satellite imagery showing the spills taking place.

As McClain and other sources discuss in that story, such oil spills can do a lot more than look ugly. They can destroy ecosystems, kill off wildlife and shut down beaches — costing local businesses and the tourism industry a whole lot of money.