Katrina: After the Flood (26 page)

The legislature and the governor agreed on at least one issue: a bill that stripped the Orleans Parish school board of control over most of the city’s public schools. The schools in New Orleans had been a preoccupation of the governor’s even before Katrina. Louisiana’s school system was one of the poorest performing in the country, ranking as low as forty-sixth in student achievement, and Orleans Parish’s scores ranked it second to last among the state’s sixty-four parishes. The year before Katrina, school officials admitted they couldn’t account for $60 million in expenditures. While the main culprit was sloppy accounting, not malfeasance, as a punishment an outside management team was put in charge of the district’s finances. Shortly before Katrina, the state legislature had granted the governor the right to take over schools the state’s Department of Education deemed “unacceptable,” mainly as a tool for fighting school failure in New Orleans.

Two months after Katrina, the state took over more than a hundred schools in Orleans Parish, leaving the city’s elected school board with control over only the eight schools whose test scores were too high to
permit a state takeover. A Recovery School District was formed, and the state’s superintendent of schools signed an “emergency suspension of education laws” that helped ease the way for charter schools by stripping teachers and staff of the right to vote on a school’s fate. “The storm gave us the perfect opportunity to rebuild the school system from the ground up,” Blanco said. “And I was intent on seizing that opportunity.” Critics accused her of using a crisis to overreach her authority, but to Blanco it was possibly the flood’s only silver lining.

“I TALKED A LOT
with Karl and the White House in those early days,” Joe Canizaro said. And Rove had always made it clear to Canizaro that federal dollars for New Orleans were contingent on there being blueprints that they could underwrite. The president had said as much in his Jackson Square speech. “The federal government will undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi and the city of New Orleans,” Bush said, “so they can rebuild in a sensible, well-planned way.”

Whose plan would the president use?

The same day Nagin unveiled his blue-ribbon panel, the City Council announced that it was forming its own advisory group. Nagin had given City Council president Oliver Thomas a seat on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, but that didn’t stop Thomas and his council allies from championing their own panel. In contrast to the mayor’s commission, Thomas said, the council’s panel would be populated by people “who can roll up their sleeves and come out with some real recommendations. Concrete stuff that the city can act on.” Three weeks later, the governor caused more confusion with the creation of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. This twenty-three-member commission, Blanco announced, would set “a body of principles that will guide Louisiana’s long-range recovery efforts.” Presumably, the governor didn’t expect the mayor’s commission to put its planning on hold while her appointees worked out those principles.

The mayor’s panel included two Bush favorites, Canizaro and also Bollinger. Nagin also had a budding friendship with the president. That relationship may explain Bush’s decision that October to meet
with the mayor’s panel for a meal at Bacco in the French Quarter. Such was the chaotic state of New Orleans in the fall of 2005 that Boysie Bollinger used the president’s decision to dine with them as a declaration of victory. “I’m thinking that him coming and having dinner with us and talking about what he needs from us differentiates us from other groups,” Bollinger boasted.
^III

PEOPLE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE
makeup of the mayor’s commission. Where were the artists or writers or thinkers? the
Times-Picayune
’s Chris Rose asked in a column running under the headline “All the Wrong Visionaries.” The mayor had the sense to include a musician among his seventeen picks, but inexplicably selected trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, a terrific musician from a highly regarded New Orleans family, but one who had been living in New York for two decades. The head of the city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau questioned a panel that lacked a single restaurant owner or hotel executive in a tourist-oriented economy.

The commissioners themselves did their share of carping. Many were shocked when the mayor and his people moved them to a big ballroom inside the Sheraton. Hundreds of chairs were set up for spectators and cameras were brought in to broadcast the proceedings on local cable-access television. “I question that decision,” Bollinger said publicly, echoing what other commissioners were saying privately. Their main concern after a couple of meetings was that the cameras were quelling honest debate among them. Already Bollinger was annoyed with Oliver Thomas, whom he described as “always worked up about something and up on his high horse, acting like the harmed party.” Yet
Nagin needed the broadcasts to show the wider world that progress was being made. The cameras remained.

The public complained about the commission, but the commission also complained about the public. Its mandate was to have a viable rebuilding plan on the mayor’s desk by year’s end, but in anxiety-filled New Orleans, the commission served as a proxy for all levels of government. Vexed that no one at FEMA or the Small Business Administration would respond to your requests? Frustrated that city officials would still not let you see your home more than a month after Katrina? Angry that the cleanup crews and other contractors were out-of-towners when New Orleanians desperately needed jobs and the business? In a town where residents were desperate for answers, people knew that this group blessed by the mayor would be meeting in a Sheraton ballroom every Monday starting at 2:00 p.m. The first hour or so of every meeting would be devoted to housekeeping chores, and then the public would be invited to share their ideas for rebuilding New Orleans. Yet rare was the citizen taking a turn at the microphone who actually shared a concept related to the job at hand. “We were there to develop a plan for the city, not to talk about who would pick up their trash or to open the schools,” complained Tulane University’s Scott Cowen. The commission would endure two or three hours of public venting before adjourning until the next week.

To get some work done, the commission broke itself into committees. Cowen was put in charge of education, and Entergy’s Dan Packer headed economic development. Given all he had to do running a bankrupt utility, Packer went outside the commission to choose Bill Hines, the high-profile lawyer and Nagin confidant, as his cochair. Jimmy Reiss led the committee on infrastructure, which would dictate the schedule for repairing the city’s broken systems. Joe Canizaro, because he was either brave or foolish, volunteered to chair Urban Planning. Canizaro’s committee would decide the fate of New Orleans East, Lakeview, and other low-lying neighborhoods.

Canizaro also went outside the commission when he named as his cochair a local architect named Ray Manning, who was black. And with the permission of his fellow commissioners, he sought to enlist the help of the Urban Land Institute, or ULI, a nonprofit research organization funded largely through developers like himself. Canizaro, who had served
as ULI chairman, had seen firsthand how the organization mobilized teams to help after earthquakes, floods, and other disasters. “Mr. Chairman, they have the experience and they have the expertise,” Canizaro said. They would also bring the more removed perspective of outsiders. In the first half of November, the best and the brightest from around the country would come to the city for what the ULI billed as a “summit” on dreaming up a smarter, better version of pre-flood New Orleans.

The anticipated summit gave the commission a reasonable excuse for putting on hold any discussion of the fate of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods. Yet rather than wait for the ULI’s diagnosis, Oliver Thomas proposed that as a body they commit to rebuilding the entire city, the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East included. Every commissioner voted in favor of Thomas’s resolution except Canizaro, who abstained. “I don’t want to see people rebuilding on quicksand,” Canizaro said during debate over the vote. “I think it’s important that we make sure that all of the people in New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward have an opportunity to live in a safe and secure area that is not susceptible to destruction in future disasters.” The next morning, he was less diplomatic. Eating $25 scrambled eggs in a dining room graced by a chamber music orchestra, Canizaro shook his head over “Oliver’s grandstand.”

He groused, “I thought the whole idea here was that everything would be on the table.”

I.
Donald T. Bollinger struck many as an unusual choice for the commission. He lived in Lockport, Louisiana, fifty miles to the south and west of New Orleans (he also owned a pied-à-terre at the foot of Canal Street), but he was also a good friend of President Bush. His family had called him Boysie since childhood, but he said, “When the president of the United States started calling me Boysie, that’s when the name really stuck.”

II.
For months, defense attorneys, private investigators, and others were finding lost inmates. That included many doing what insiders dubbed “Katrina time,” such as the woman picked up just prior to Katrina on a prostitution charge who was locked up for seven months on a charge that carried a six-month maximum, had anyone bothered to find her guilty of anything.

III.
The City Council’s commission proved to be more press release than alternative effort. “The council pledged to provide the committee with adequate staff resources and set a date for the first meeting for mid-October,” Robert B. Olshansky and Laurie A. Johnson, a pair of planning professionals, wrote in their book,
Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans
. “That meeting was never held, and there were no subsequent announcements regarding the existence or intentions for this committee.”

12

SHRINK THE FOOTPRINT

Nagin was back in his City Hall office. His suits and dress clothes, like the rest of his home, had survived Katrina, but for months he continued to dress in his Katrina wear. No matter whom he might be meeting—the president, the governor, Larry King—Nagin wore a short-sleeved polo and dress slacks. The mayor chose not to move home and instead secured an apartment in one of the historic Pontalba buildings on Jackson Square, a pair of matching redbrick beauties with wrought-iron-lace balconies that had been built in the 1840s.
^I
A common sight in small-town New Orleans was the mayor and a large bodyguard bouncing between his City Hall office, a meeting at the Sheraton, and his new digs in the French Quarter, just steps from Café Du Monde. “He always had this glazed look,” said one city worker who ran into the mayor regularly.

A fragile Ray Nagin was overseeing the city’s recovery in the fall of
2005. In early October, the mayor arrived at the Sheraton to address three hundred people there for a meeting to help locals get work with the big outside firms descending on New Orleans as part of the cleanup effort. The NAACP, AFL-CIO, and others who had organized the gathering had invited the mayor, hoping he could use his pulpit to convince those outside the city to view the recovery as a vehicle for bringing people home. Instead the mayor chose that moment to take a swipe at the thousands of Latino laborers who had descended on New Orleans after the storm—people whom most locals, black or white, seemed to appreciate for their willingness to do the miserable work of gutting homes and cleaning out ruined, malodorous restaurants in a hot city. “I can see it in your eyes,” Nagin began. “You want to know, ‘How do I take advantage of this incredible opportunity? How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?’ ”

At a press conference a few days after his Mexican workers comment, Nagin said, “Now is the time for us to think out of the box”—and Sally Forman flinched. He had been thinking about the gambling industry, he told the assembled reporters, and all those billions they had to invest. Why not create a casino district in the center of the city? He hoped to enlist the governor’s support, he said, perhaps unaware that Blanco had campaigned on a moratorium on new casinos. “We’re a cash-strapped city,” Nagin said. “I know of no other way.”

The casino proposal seemed to perturb the Uptown establishment as much because the mayor had failed to vet his proposal with them as because of the idea itself. As director of the city’s zoo and aquarium, Ron Forman was a key member of the city’s hospitality industry, yet he hadn’t heard a thing about a proposal to build as many as six casinos in the center of town until Nagin floated the idea at the press conference. “It came from nowhere—and then the next week it was gone,” Forman said. Another Nagin story that had Uptown talking was Nagin’s trip to the capitol and the tongue-lashing he took from the city’s black legislators. After the meeting, Nagin was spotted slumped against a wall, half sitting, half standing. “I did not sign up for this shit,” the mayor cried out. “I did not sign up for this shit!”

Maybe it was just as well that the mayor was out of town when the Urban Land Institute’s all-star team of planners, architects, academics,
ex-politicians, and others convened in New Orleans that November. Greg Meffert, who prior to taking a job at City Hall had founded a pair of encryption-technology start-ups, had rented a place with his wife in Jamaica. Why not join us? Meffert asked Nagin. To further entice the mayor, Meffert made sure free first-class airplane tickets for Nagin, his wife, and his three children were part of the deal. Feeling he needed another break, Nagin told Meffert yes. He would be back in town by week’s end, when the press would show up at the Sheraton to hear what the ULI had to say. When anyone asked, the mayor’s people said their boss was in Washington on city business.

OF COURSE JOE CANIZARO
was in town that week. He was glad that with his adopted city in crisis he was in the position to offer them this gift. “We need to hear how other people dealt with tragedies of this magnitude,” Canizaro said. “We need the best minds in this nation on this.”