According to City Business, “units range in size and price from roughly $200,000 for a 573- square-foot condo to $2 million for a 2,900-square-foot, two-story penthouse.” I get allergic smelling hay and just adore a penthouse view like the next Gabor, but not on Calliope between low warehouses and the old beauty of the Lower Garden District! The people who named this building should understand that le contexte est plus fort que le concept. In other words, the building doesn’t fit the local scenery, goes against the city’s required grain of affordable housing, will probably turn into urban blight borne by locals and makes no economic sense, even using the “what the market will bear” mantra. It ain’t no architectural marvel, either.

Senators Boxer (CA) Chair of the Environment & Public Works , Isakson (GA), Vitter (LA), Cardin (MD), Klobuchar, and Whitehouse.

There will be 3 panels:
(1) Debris Management – Wilma, Father Vien, Secretary DEQ
(2) Coastal Restoration, and
(3) Hurricane Protection (Corp of Engineers)

[Via Editor B via Wynecta Fisher]

Can you help me by giving me exact routes that some Mardi Gras Indian communities, St. Ann’s parade and other smaller Uptown and non-Uptown krewes take? In return, I will publish these routes as Google maps, on Google Earth or as PDFs. Thanks in advance for your help. Remember, exact routes with start and end point will be much appreciated as these are going on maps.

For instance, take Question 1: What are your top priorities for economic development in Louisiana? Have a look at the answers. How am I supposed to pick my top three among seven different interrelated requirements for building a better Louisiana?

Onto the topics of community preservation, habitat preservation, hunting and fishing (commerical and recreational) and oil & gas infrastructure, which the poll collectively places under the heading of Protection From Storms. Each one of us likes and doesn’t like ALL of the above. For southern Louisiana, however, ALL of the above are important, but are not going to protect us against storms.

Seriously, this poll feels like questions on the SAT/GRE for which an essay is required, but all you are allotted is one of four or five mind-numbing and exasperating choices. This is real life and not a standardized test, and there is still time for a grown-up discussion. Furthermore, just like a multiple choice test of progression, all this poll offers is yet another illusion of participation.

Amusing side-note: The poll is another one that keeps track of online respondents by requiring an email address. I offer you the letters a, b, c, x, y, z, the symbol @ and the extensions .org and .com – that’s a lot of permutations for one person to work with.

The Police Department – Gambit Weekly interviews Police Chief Riley

GW: What is your plan to lead New Orleans out of the current crime wave, and how will you make the city safer in 2007?

RILEY: We have reformatted the New Orleans Police Department in the aftermath of Katrina. We have put some very serious plans in place that unfortunately have been diminished because of our attrition rate. Today our department has 1,401 officers, which includes 41 recruits. We have 107 officers that are out sick. We’re operating a department with about 1,200-and-something officers. And that has hurt us.

The DA’s Office – WWLTV.com: Algiers community outraged over dropped robbery case

Tuesday, prosecutors dropped the case [and set the defendant free], because they said they could not find their key witness: A New Orleans Police detective who was the lead investigator on the case and has since retired … after about an hour of searching, Eyewitness News located former officer Ed Dieringer at his home in New Orleans. It was the same house he’d lived in before he resigned in September and the same home where he has received subpoenas for court cases in the past.

The Mayor – New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, in an interview with Anderson Cooper on January 11, 2007

“We check ourselves against everybody around the country, to make sure we’re using the most state-of-the-art techniques that are out there. The crime element is very sophisticated in some respects. So, we have to adjust accordingly.”

nola.com: Murders up over the past 3 months

In a press release, NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley touting the statistics,, noting that the number of people killed in the third quarter of 2006 was 22 percent less than the same period for 2005. In those months, 68 people were murdered. But that comparison is skewed because it includes the month of September, when the city emptied out almost completely.

What was the following sentence supposed to say? How exactly are we supposed to stay informed when the local Pulitzer-winning paper acts best as dog-crate lining?

Murders, often cited as the best gauge for how crime in post-flood New Orleans, because the virtual collapse of the police department hampered its ability to collect statistics on crimes that didn’t leave bodies behind.

If New Orleans doesn’t know the facts and, even worse, denies them when it does, we’re in for a world of trouble.

From the absurdly morbid to the morbidly absurd …

The future of New Orleans – its children and their education – is no laughing matter, however. With a combination of poor leadership (don’t even get me started on the Gang of Four), underpaid and underequipped teachers, absent parents, political contracts and citizen apathy, we failed the children of the New Orleans Public Schools up until August 29th of last year. Left Behind, the much-touted documentary which tells this tale, premiered at the Landmark Theatre in Canal Place last night (with possibly the longest line for popcorn in the history of that building). The movie lived up to my expectations so much that I hope it airs on PBS and HBO. Vincent Morelli, Jason Berry and their team of moviemakers and three John McDonough High School students – Mario, Jonathan and Joshua – give us one hour of research, interviews, timelines and on-site footage of what we always knew but still shocks us into submission: A large majority of the New Orleans Public Schools were a travesty of education, and the products of that system were a powder keg waiting to explode given the right circumstances. That time and opportunity arrived in the days of the Flood, when the world saw New Orleans break down.

Left Behind must be watched in its entirety to see where the moviemakers go with it. While indicting a broken schools sytem, Morelli and Berry construct a thesis that a poor education results in violence and instability, if the motive, means and opportunity are present. As always, I encourage you to draw your own inferences from the facts and opinions presented. That said, the following movie fragments stuck with me and are pointed out for discussion.

*Begin spoilers*

- Before the storm, 97% of NOLA public school students were African-American. Of this group, 70% came from single-parent homes; each parent worked two or three jobs in the name of family survival. Additionally, these schools suffered a dropout rate of 70% and, according to a McDonough student, 80-85% of students had guns.

- Karen Carter’s and other state legislators’ removal of support for Anthony Amato early last year may have stemmed from his recommendation of out-of-state Deloitte & Touche auditors. These state politicians punished Amato as a nod to their corporate constituents, i.e. in-state auditing firms who weren’t offered the contract, out of fear of political retribution.

- Did anyone finally audit the school system and detail the use of the $566 million budget? With $7000 spent on each student, why did few teachers and students possess the requisite educational materials such as books, stationery, computing and utilities? Bueller? Bueller?!

- While not touched upon in the movie, one cannot help noticing repeated school and neighborhood violence among teenagers as related to a revolving-door criminal justice system that does not adequately punish offenders.

- Motive = income disparity; Means = guns; Opportunity = Katrina/Flood

- Towards the end of the documentary, the interviewed Noam Chomsky makes a statement that “we should care whether the kid across the street gets an education” because it is the nice and altruistic thing to do. No, no, no, no, no! That kid’s schooling matters to me because I want to live in a better city in a better nation in a better world, with a better quality of human interaction and business. If Mario, Jonathan and Joshua come up in their lives, my life and surroundings are that much safer, happier and fulfilling. To say that their schooling is the selfless thing to do divorces you from them, when it should be all about enlightened self-interest, when the reality is the tangled and unbreakable web of our lives. Like it or not, we are all in this together.

*End spoilers*

So, why showcase something we already know? Because the time has come and gone to do something about the pathetic state of our public schools, and the motive, means and opportunity still exist for another sad episode of chaos and frenzy as we saw in the days following Hurricane Katrina. Also, as one John McDonough High School student in the audience proclaimed after the screening last night, “Y’all have the balls to tell the truth!” This “simple act of publishing” the data and despair in the form of a cohesive documentary may just force us not to continue on a path of academic self-destruction.

It’s so easy to sound the clarion call of “Come Back Home!” from the comfort of our middle-class and employed lifestyles, with our kids in the best parochial and public schools around the city. What do our poorest children have as we sail into a city on the remake? With housing and jobs harder to find, how can parents, themselves struggling products of the NOPS, find the time and effort required to keep their children in school and render them successful? When Nagin and other city leaders beseech everyone to return home, what do they offer the youth on whom the future of this city rests? Is a world-class education a large part of the Road Home, Unified New Orleans Plan and Rebuilding efforts? While great teachers still work hard each day in the new New Orleans, I’d be a bald-faced liar if I asked the displaced poor and lower middle class to usher their children back to this.

A compelling and competitive education, concerned parents, conscientious and well-equipped teachers, comfortable schools filled with cheer, supplies and questioning minds, a career and a peer group of the similarly-educated and self-made. Is that too much to offer the children of America? All they want is for us to give a damn.

Nagin Picks Director for Recovery Office

More than 15 months after Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin is ready to open a city office to direct New Orleans’ recovery, with a leading regional planner and disaster recovery expert in charge. Ed Blakely, who helped coordinate recovery planning in California after two natural disasters and in New York City after Sept. 11, has been chosen to lead what is expected to be a five-person office and to serve as the leader for marshaling a recovery process that critics have derided as too slow.

Correct me if I’m mistaken, but shouldn’t this have happened fifteen months ago, fourteen at the latest? I hope it isn’t too little too late.

Also, no recovery talk should take place without addressing the quality of the New Orleans Public School system. We want our people back, we want our kids back, and to what kind of a future? As Laureen mentioned recently, Vince Morelli and Jason Berry have just completed their documentary on the New Orleans Public Schools system. The premiere is tomorrow, December 5, at Canal Place at 7 pm. Seating will be limited and I don’t think tickets go on sale until tomorrow at 5 pm.

And yours truly! Don’t miss it. Help support Krewe du Vieux!

… those living close to New Orleans are not adequate “representatives” of citizens in the uninhabitable or barely inhabitable portions of our city, however well-intentioned (or not). Public hearings, meetings, and comment periods are indispensable to democratic government, but they’re never a substitute for proportional representation.

Sometimes, especially times like ours, the representation allowed for by our constitutions and charters – the mayors, city councils, governors, senators, representatives and presidents – aren’t enough; legislation doesn’t conveniently exist for the level of public involvement required for a whole region’s reconstruction.

Becky speaks for the diaspora and their silence, self-imposed or not, in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Regardless of their desire to return to this city, there is no conduit for the input of the displaced. As for the people who are here: We see more people at Saints games than at the polls or planning meetings that readily impact the future of this city, even the continued stay of the Saints here. But, is that entirely the fault of the people or a direct result of a system designed not to engage their participation and answers they already have?

Despite its status as Broken capital of America, the lack of representation here is not a local epidemic, contained by Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi (or the Gulf of Mexico as a southern boundary, if you so choose). America as a whole worships complacence, and this is only encouraged by a system ostensibly set in stone by our Founding Fathers. Not so. Bill Maher, my favorite Libertarian, writes in A Re-Look-See At The Constitution:

Oh, Congress looks like America — we’ve got blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and whatever else is in Barack Obama. But diversity of thought? … Right, like 66-year-old grandmother of five Nancy Pelosi is some raving, twig-eating Marxist ideologue. If only she were … Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to try to legalize drugs or socialize hospitals or really tax gasoline or tell the Pentagon to cut its bloated, corrupt budget.

There’s no out-of-the-box thinking in this country. If we were really looking for a new direction, we’d not just change Congress, we’d have another Constitutional Convention, as Jefferson suggested we do. Jefferson said: “Let us provide in our Constitution for its revision. . . every 19 or 20 years. . . so that it may be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation.” … But that’s Jefferson’s phrase: periodical repairs. This thing needs periodical repairs, but it hasn’t been in the shop for 219 years. Of course it’s belching oil. Literally.

America had its chance to diversify and radically alter the face of its government. At the hyperlocal level, New Orleans has a lot more leeway and has every reason to think outside the box. But, it doesn’t. For, as Becky suggests, the representation afforded by our current system of local government is insufficient. New Orleans cannot reform or re-form within the boundaries of a set of rules too outmoded to be useful. While lame duck is the political term-du-jour, it readily applies to many local-, state- and federal-government-sanctioned efforts going on here.

Constant communication is key. A couple of suggestions to overcome this feeling of uselessness on both sides of the apparent fence:

1. Make friends with your government representatives and continuously instill in their heads the idea of progressive change. Conscientious and involved individuals may get more mileage out of their effort by teaming with members of City Council and Government, constantly bringing them back to reality and offering them the tools and ideas with which to break down the barriers of the box.

2. As we have recently shown, the power of citizen journalism is tremendous. It would not be inappropriate in the New Orleans of today for government members and their contractors (such as UNOP, etc.) to become more active on local and diasporic blogs. If they listen and respond, they may get a better idea of how to help shape things. Communication need not be relegated to overstuffed meeting rooms and offices.

In so many ways, our hands are tied, but we move forth at the level of neighborhood, planning district, school and hard-forged community bonds. This is not enough; the slow pace of decision-making puts viable recovery in great peril. We have to garner more of the power we voted for. Within our heads and hands lies the future of New Orleans. And the future of America.