The Infrastructure Lottery
January 18th, 2007
From More Rain Yesterday post at Fix The Pumps. Matt McBride’s “400 pound” blog on drainage
From the comments of the Think New Orleans blog, Musa Eubanks asks…
OK! So UNOP will not use data from the “greatest need” questions. Since most of the LRA resources for New Orleans will be spent on infrastructure, we need to know how citizens input will inform this issue. Will UNOP re-ask these questions at Community Congress III? Or will they just make the decisions on their own without the promised democratic citizens input?
We should ask, and someone from UNOP should answer this.
Okay, we’ve asked. Can someone from UNOP please answer this?
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I feel like a fish out of water commenting on this. I have not participated in the community forums that have gotten us here. I have been keeping track of the process through people who have participated.
I do have an opinion and it is jaded by my opinion of government of the U.S.A. from local to federal. Whenever you have the kind of money allocated that has been allocated for gulf coast recovery all of the sharks come out.
I have stated before that the corruption involved with funds slated for the recovery of the gulf coast are sitting in someone’s portfolio and are having very little effect on the recovery.
Well, obviously, I’m not from UNOP… but I think that Concordia’s answer to that question at Wednesday night’s NPN forum was “Yes” but it seemed to be followed by some qualifying statements – does anyone remember exactly what they were?
It must be very difficult for those in districts that do not have access to copies of the drafts of their district plans.
It’ll be another one of those golden rule things in the end (He who has the gold makes the rules). The simple fact is that those of us who are rebuilding are physically and emotionally exhausted. We care about what happens in our flooded and sparsely populated part of the city, but have little time left over after working full time jobs, taking care of other personal responsibilities, working on our houses, and sitting on the phone with the various government agencies in charge of our revovery, to effecively fight for our piece of this financial pie. Not to say that we’re not giving it all that we’ve got, but we’re out manned and out gunned. So in the end, it’s going to be those people who suffered the least and who, for one reason or another, are clueless as to what suffering is, that are going to get the most out of this process.
I hope and pray that I am wrong.
OK, finally the little article came out from Coleman Warner indicating that infrastructure was going to be the priority. Has anyone gotten much confirmation on this? If a decision like this was made, I am glad it FINALLY came.
I would have been much gladder if the process had started out differentiating infrastructure recovery from visionary redevelopment. Instead there were an odd set of reactionary recovery scenarios. Then that shifted toward projects that can leverage better recovery. From those meetings it was often established that function and infrastructure were an immediate priority. In our neighborhood plan, prior to any engagement with the planning process, I outlined the ideas by immediate needs, future and long term goals. I guess that does not sound scientific enough but most people understand that.
But as of now, the district plans are full of items that are not strictly infrastructure. Unless the definition of infrastructure is broadened to include base amenities like economic centers and a certain amount of green space. I think that can be argued but those items don’t fix the problems with gas pressure and pumping capacity.
There have been some releases of news, that are independant of UNOP, that speaks for LRA money. Entergy bailouts come to mind, to keep our bills from escalating. With that rational, why not just buy off the insurance companies with cold cash? They are using extortion right now to gain new incentives to citizens of New Orleans. All they did was pay out on policies they issued.
Now here is a list form LRA as to allocated money-
Med Center of Louisiana- New Orleans. 74 million for design and land, 226 million for construction. Noone can deny that this project is a recovery lever. In fairness, it will help district 4 most directly, everyone else might feel the ripples.
CBDG, which includes infrastructure. 200 million, New Orleans gets 115. This is the money everyone participating in UNOP has been thinking will include recovery in their neighborhoods. 115 million, including infrastructure projects is not worth having all of these meetings for. This is also the meager amount that caused this blog thread. So from the second steering committee meeting I did ask for a good snapshot of the different areas of funding to use when considering the prioritization of the projects. I finally pulled something out of the powerpoint from CSO, which gave some perspective.
Repairs to state buildings (non FEMA reimbursed) 135 million. This one brings up a problem in our area. FEMA only reimburses. Public contracts cannot be let without the public entity having the money budgeted and proven that it exists. so if the money is not there to begin with, there is no beginning. Nagin got his famous line of credit but never did use it and now they have terminated that loan because of usuruous rates and now they have been in New York, right next to the “hole in the ground”, trying to get initial financing.
Local government emergency infrastructure activity, 100 million. I had an incident where a friend of money was working with FEMA for some local government projects. The FEMA reps went on vacation for the holidays in 2005, came back in Jan and said “this has been too long, it is no longer an emergency”. So, I am sure the state can think of some good reasons to hold on to that money by now.
So what else? Road Home and Economic development programs. It might be good to check this out before tomorrow-
http://www.doa.louisiana.gov/cdbg/DR/Policy/Reports/CDBG%20Disaster%20Recovery%20Allocation%20Overview_06_11_02.pdf
This also has some perspective on $$$$;
http://www.unifiedneworleansplan.com/uploads/CSO-Presentation-11-09-06-(3)-68762.pdf
Anyway, I think we all need to get a good idea of the money involved and where projects are being funded from.
I also think that the community congress number 3, needs to outline what ought to get done, with reasons why and explain where the money will come from. Differentiate construction projects from programs and studies.
Blakely should speak, since he is the czar and he is going to be facilitating the implementation and he is promoting certain redevelopment concepts, such as relocating people to centers of population.
If these things do not happenI will be alarmed.
Thanks for using my graphic. I did want to note that when I made that picture, I accidentally cut a pump station off. PS#15 is way out in New Orleans East, off the right end of the picture.
Thank you Jay for the illustrative post. WHen I saw the $115m I thought, ‘that’s not worth all this hoopla” then you said it.
Is Dr. Blakely really still promoting relocating people after the idea was soundly rejected at CCII? If so that would indicate that our voices truly are not being heard. I would like to know what is the purpose of these set up sessions where we are not looking at the proposals for infrastructre. I have been challenging this all along and the best I can gather the ‘city wide technical team ‘ is Steve Bingler and Steve Villavaso and they are doing all the decision making for infrastructure which they defined at our 1st district meeting as “Everything above the ground and everything below the ground.”
FurtherI have repeatedly nicely in writing asked to participate in the planning process for schools. Concordia and RSD decided there was no need to do a public process and told me so directly. RSD and Alverez and Marcel come out with a plan that is disasterous for us and they want to get paid to do more planning ahead.
UNOP did selective groups of students which is rediculous since the children are going to have to live with this the rest of their lives. They also presented the footprint question to them after they said it was asked and answered. At our last District meeting, I asked Steve Villavaso for the UNOP schools report and he said no. I said can i have a draft? He said no. He said it was done, they would not release it until after the CCIII. Not a date, no reason, just waiting until after the public event. Can someone from UNOP answer that?
Back to infrastructre, while we were “prioritizing” projects, I asked for specific examples about what a vote for priority meant. I got fussed for trying to be too specific and was told that designs were developed at prior meetings but were not available now. I used St. Bernard and Claiborne as an example. If we are voting for “nodes” and vote this one a priority, does that mean new traffic lights or a grant to the owners of Circle Food Store so they can reopen and be the only grocery for a wide radius? “oh, Amy, that’s too specific, we can’t answer that right now.” I said please give me any specific example so i can understand what I’m being asked to vote on. None was ever given, we just had to keep going.
I think this is an excuse to get pet developments into the ”master plan”. I don’t feel as though we are being treated honestly, call it a gut feeling. I’m in a district that has not been provided a copy of our plan and when we meet our input has not been accurately reflected so we’ll see what tomorrow brings. I still expect UNOP to answer the greatest need question here. don’t they have a PR person?
Greatest Need??? Tough problem. Isn’t this what we usually ask of our leaders? To have a plan, a priority, a way to move forward. Oh, I forgot, “plan” is a dirty word in N.O. because it means someone gets something and someone gets nothing. And that’s not politically correct.
Firstly, there will NOT be enough money to solve every problem. I assume everyone agrees with this, but the reasoning is that “fixing” something frequently costs more than putting something in “new.” Also, people will ask to fix things that were disfunctional prior to Katrina…and it makes sense to do so.
Secondly, the concept of “greatest need” neglects to tell the whole story. If this were a business I would propose a plan called “greatest value.” That term is intended to represent the biggest change, most positive outcome, greatest result, etc. that can be achieved for the fewest dollars. Now I don’t mean this in a short-sighted way. A piece of plywood might very efficiently cover a hole in a wall, but if you don’t buy nails, the plywood is useless. Value implies a positive active finished result overall. If I had to dig up a street to restore water to a whole neighborhood, dollars must be allocated and included to fix the street afterwards…common sense stuff! I wouldn’t spend money in an area until I knew there would be the necessary infrastructure, or I would incorporate the infrastructure replacements within the project as a sub-project and look at the total cost of the overall project.
Hypothetically we could create a list of all projects (and follow-on or sub-projects, see above.) If we (and here’s the tough one) quantify the good a project will do and divide by the cost, those with the highest value will float to the top. Do the ones at the top and work your way down the list. If the ONLY thing stoping the restoration of the entire St. Charles streetcar line was a hundred dollar part, just watch how fast I would order it. If the cost to restore the street cars were equal to the entire cost to restore infrastructure to Lake View, I think I’d choose Lake View…busses work just great on St. Charles. I hope you get the picture. These are only meaningless examples, not representations of actual projects.
It’s that “quantify” word above which gets tough, if not impossible. What if neighborhood A needs to restore their police station and neighborhood B needs to restore their fire station? Well, that’s why we study the problem. What if neighborhood A has 500 residents with the potential to go to 1000 and neighborhood B has 10,000 with the potential to go to 20,000? See what I mean? No perfect plan can be made. Hopefully there is enough money for both. But there WILL be a cut-off line in the budget; many projects will NOT get done until later. But we will have the satisfaction of knowing that we spent what money we did have to product the absolute maximum amount of good in the city.
Why assume that there won’t be enough money? The plans are supposed to give us a direction for our recovery. Shouldn’t we plan to rebuild every neighborhood, since they’ve all begun to repopulate?
The money that was allocated to rebuild New Orleans was intended to provide releif for flooded neighborhoods, devistated areas. There will be strings attached to federal recovery money, you must spend it on recovery, not beautification.
Which is, in part, why the Mayor is not even spending that money, but rather going to New York to find investors that will not be focused on recovery, but on new developments.
http://blogometer.com/2007/01/19/did-you-forget-to-spend-595-millon/
I am glad to see others are understanding that true priorities need more thought and concrete info than is allowed during a 20 minute round table conversation. Saturday’s CC3 was another nice set of 20 minute roundtable conversations. So nice that the ladys at my table really want to get together again in the near future.
It seems the issue about the plans being focused in “infrastructure” was a red herring. If you look across the district and city wide pans, it looks like a mix of realistic redevelopment ideas and infrastructure improvements. At this time we just don’t see this “stitching together” of the district wide plans and city wide plans.
They asked to us to vote on these plans without a chance to read the yellow copies that fleshed them out a little bit. Anything could be interpreted out of these “plans”.
By this CC3, we should have had more definite projects defined, that would be starting immediately and a phasing strategy for more along the way. The actual time frame of the planning process, from start to end date, was too short to get all of that done and have all of the public involvement.
A listing showed up for something I wrote into my notes for the table. A recovery “scorecard”. Though it did not make the top tier, it did get a 16% vote, so this something I am going to try to do, as we move along.
Another theme in the speeches is that we are going to be frustrated by what we hear on TV, in the coming months. Sheezum, I sure do look forward to MORE of that!
But it was good to hear something from Dr. Blakely, especially with strong sections on economic development, crime and safety. Not to diminish any of the other concerns, because I think it is going to take recovery in all of the planning elements to come out with a vibrant city in the future.
Communiy Congress 3 was an even more anemic stab at planning. To gather a room full of New Orleanians in a room to vote on Flood Protection is a no brainer.
Would you ask folks in San Francisco if they want Bridges?
As we steadily work our way to the 1.5 year mark in this recovery ,we are faced daily with a benign neglect of the people and neighborhoods who suffered as a result of negligence and dis investment in our infastructure.
Where do we go from here?