Progress For New Orleans

Ok, so I got a little irritated.

Apparently a magazine voted New Orleans people “America’s strangest people”  http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/americas-strangest-people/1

I don’t get it. Or maybe they are just slow.

For me it’s just simple. New Orleans people like doing what they want to do, are friendly (mostly), don’t have a problem if you have a good time (mostly), likes a bargain, wants you to ask nicely, works hard, plays harder, and will generally tell you just what’s on their mind whether you asked them or not.

You didn’t ask me about who I think are stranger people than New Orleanians but I’m gonna tell you anyway.  And I present this a little carefully cause people I know and love are living in some of these cities, and are some of these people. But it’s strange to me.

So, here we go: The Top 5 Places with the Strangest People In America.

5) Philadelphia – They got a jail at the football stadium. They pelted Santa Claus with snowballs. There is clearly an anger management issue here. Or even if it was all alcohol induced then no one should be getting that violent just cause they’re drinking. Hell, fighting cause you’re drinking is just crazy.

4) Utah – Maybe it’s them, maybe it’s me. Utah has always seemed to me like something out of a David Lynch movie where everything seems hyper-normal but there is a horrible secret that no one is talking about.

3) New York City – Seriously, I love New Yorkers, LOVE THEM. But New Yorkers walk around as two people every day. Outside New Yorkers and Inside New Yorkers. Outside New Yorkers, there on the streets of the city are rude, gruff, focused and ready to run you over. Once you get them inside and they become Inside New Yorkers they transform into friendly, nice, helpful and funny people. It’s strange to me and makes me think they are all sort of suffering under some bipolar disease they get from eating pizza & riding in the subway.

2) San Fransisco – OK. I know there are a lot of different San Franciscans. And I’m not talking about Mission taqueria employees or Chinatown dumpling cooks. And I know a LOT of San Franciscans and I like the ones I know but I still think, as a group, they are a little strange.  There is a certain mix of self-righteousness and naivete that can be either charming, amusing, irritating or infuriating depending upon whether you are a target of their wrath or just a bystander. My initial takes on the people from my visits were that 1)Half the folks were working a scam and the other half were naively hoping the first half weren’t working a scam (ok so I exited the BART in the Tenderloin) And 2) They would stand in the longer line just to prove that they were somehow “better” than you. (I wasn’t sure what they thought this proved, that they were more patient, willing to endure more suffering? so altruistic that  they were willing to forgo ANY advantage? )  And there also seems to be a lot of working very hard to try to “be unique” and a level of busy-bodyness that would make Ms. Kravitz from “Bewitched” seem laid back.

1) The bible -belt south.  OK. This is gonna be a laundry list of strangeness to me. Dry Counties when you know most folks drink (Hello Lynchburg Tennessee, home of Jack Daniels), Criteria for dating that includes mandatory church attendance. Saying “Bless your heart” when what you really mean “My god, are you an idiot?” A sense of entitlement based upon church attendance (or even in some cases a passing familiarity with the Bible). It’s all very strange to me.

Now, this isn’t intended to hurt anyone’s feelings. This is all stranger to me than anything I see in New Orleans.

Oh, and the runners up are:

San Diego – Cause even the homeless people look like they came out of a Land’s End Catalog so you don’t know they are crazy until they are right there on top of you.  And

Portland – This is based mostly on the folks who have come to New Orleans from Portland who seem to try to project all the “do good” spirit they can but also seem to have a lot of contempt for the folks they think they are “doing good” for. I suspect this is also how it operates in Portland itself.  And hearing about their zoning code I tend to think they just like making things difficult for themselves.

Well, that’s about it. 5 places that a New Orleanian thinks have the strangest people in the country.

In industrial accidents such as the Deepwater Horizon and subsequent oil leak, there is a usual but unfortunate pattern to civil litigation and victim compensation.

It seems to me that the person who’s on the lease would bear full responsibility for everything that happens on that lease, but generally the way these things shake out is that the partner with the least to lose, and therefore pay out, will get thrown under the bus and the victims will get screwed.

There is another method for ensuring that all victims are compensated and all costs associated with the oil spill are paid.

Place a lien on BP’s existing gulf leases.

Place a lien on BP’s Gulf leases until such time as the full cost of the clean up is paid for, personal losses of Gulf coast residents are covered and the states recover the lost tax revenue they miss collecting because economic activity along the coast is disrupted or curtailed.

The state legislatures of Gulf coast states need to place liens on BPs Gulf Coast leases equal to about half of the production from their active wells and future exploration. We don’t want to undercut all incentive to produce but we need to ensure that all financial costs for this spill are paid for by the responsible parties.

We need to do this and do it now.

Lien on BP until they pay for everything they need to.

It is kind of harsh to start with such an emphatic title. Particularly when I know that all of the volunteer’s hearts are in the right place and it’s kind of like the little old lady telling you she doesn’t need your damn help crossing the street.

But seriously, there should be NO volunteers working on oil spill recovery work on the Gulf Coast. NONE.

BP, Transocean, Halliburton and who ever else is involved in this massive catastrophe needs to pay the full costs of the clean up.  They took a calculated risk for what would have been, and may yet still be fabulous rewards. But sometimes the dice come up snake-eyes and things go spectacularly wrong. This is the cost of being involved in the petro-chemical industry. They need to write the checks.  

The state of Louisiana and the Federal government should not be in the business of wrangling free labor for what should be well compensated positions doing hot, messy and dangerous work. Working in the marshes along the Louisiana coast isn’t a day at the beach.

This oil spill threatens to impact the Gulf Coast economy for years to come. A billion dollar impact on the seafood industry and the ways that the money that won’t be coming in will ripple through the rest of the economy in lost taxes. The visitors that won’t be coming to Gulf Coast beaches. This is going to add economic dislocation to environmental disaster.

So BP (which I am using as shorthand for the consortium of contractors responsible) needs to hire people. They need to replace the money that would have flowed through the economy via the ways in which it has in the past, and free labor via volunteers just undercuts these workers and in a sense lets’ BP off the hook for the full cost of the clean up.

Everyone who is cleaning off a bird, everyone who is scooping oil out of the marsh, everyone who is grading the crude off the sand, needs to be paid for their effort.

If non-governmental agencies are called in for their expertise, and they should be, they need to document the man-hours involved and present BP with a bill and send checks to those working.

If this oil spill is going to suck 100 of millions, or even billions of dollars out of the Gulf Coast economy then it is up to BP to replace that by paying EVERYONE involved in anyway with Oil Spill Recovery.

And if they won’t pay? Then they need to have an assessment placed on their existing offshore leases which will have them forfeiting a significant portion of the money from their production from producing fields until everyone is paid.

So, I’m making a plea against the use of volunteers in the oil spill recovery. If you are coming to the Gulf Coast to work to clean up BP’s mess then you should be paid by BP.

One of the things I have found missing from the post-Katrina recovery landscape is a unified media message about the importance of rebuilding and a sense that our efforts are being cheered on by our fellow citizens. I always thought that the World War II US propaganda poster was a good model for creating both a unified message and crafting a consensus. Some would be cautionary, others would exhort citizens to productive measures and still others would be of a celebratory or mission defining nature.

So, I started creating posters. They were on the previous incarnation of this website, and while some of them are clearly post-storm in their focus others tackle larger issues. Some of the issues of the previous posters have been settled for the most part.   Eventually, I’d like to get together a budget to produce these and bring them to the city.

We could have used this whole experience to fundamentally remake the city into one that provides opportunity for its citizens and perhaps create a new prosperous city. We could have used this to create a new New Orleans based upon economic opportunity but instead we are continuing to pursue the same methods that have led to our stagnation and decline.

Economic development sections put low wage tourism first and follows it with the dubious concept of the “cultural economy”. The rest of the chapter seems to be focused almost exclusively on the ‘public private” partnership. It almost ignores our place in the global economy and the benefits that has brought us over the course of our existence.

And all of this is premised upon a dubious new theory that contradicts millennia of observation on the growth and prosperity of cities. The planners brought to the table the idea that a diverse and cosmopolitan population will drive economic development instead of what has actually been the case since the dawn of civilization, that economic development will bring a diverse and cosmopolitan population. We didn’t get built on this swamp because our forefathers came for the culture, they were the culture, they came for the economic opportunity and that’s how real, vibrant cities maintain themselves.  We can’t pretend we can pay people to BE the culture, we have to recognize that we have a culture because people got paid doing other, more productive things.

The one thing this master plan desperately needed to do was to sweep away the 70s CZO that zoned our neighborhood businesses out of existence. The empty storefronts that dot our city are the legacy of a previous plan, more suited to Slidell, that painted on zoning with a paint roller rather than recognizing the diverse land-use mosaic that is our streetscape. This plan pays lip service to opening up these locations to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of the city but it should be boldly declaring that these storefronts can be a force in our economic renaissance.

But of course they are being cautious, lest they upset the forces of NO, that are holding this city back economically because it may, possibly, make their lives the slightest bit less comfortable or not cater exclusively to their needs. Well, we have a whole passel of city ordinances to deal with any disturbances and better we use them than foreswearing commercial uses and leaving our city filled with vacant buildings.

In a city that is going broke, the Planning Commission gave themselves another 14 or so district planners. Instead of eliminating the need to “kiss rings”, the so-called Citizen Participation Plan adds another layer of rings to kiss as they empower the most obstructionist elements of our city to stand in the way of new development or request kickbacks from projects.

We have already seen this play out as a neighborhood association already requested a cut of the operating funds of the ill-conceived “Re-inventing the crescent”. Not only unhappy with getting a park that will further erode New Orleans’ raison d’etre they wanted to be paid. And this is a public project. How many developers looking to bring jobs and sales tax revenue will be similarly held up?

The plan is overly protective of the housing for 650,000 plus people that we don’t need and hostile towards the commercial property that we desperately need for the jobs and the sales tax revenue they produce. It has removed most commercial zoning west of the industrial canal unless it is adjacent to a housing project.

There seems to be notion in this town that we can complain about section 8 housing and property taxes and in the same breath stop the businesses that bring jobs and sales tax revenue as if these two aren’t linked. That we can call for more police and better schools without understanding how more and better employment opportunities help both these situations.

At a time when we are struggling to maintain and grow our population we should be making it EASIER for people to rebuild and businesses to open. But instead of a growth plan, this thing focuses on a preservation plan.  But here is the bottom line, without a robust economy there are no resources to preserve anything and without a prosperous population there is no reason to preserve anything.

Throughout the process there have been calls for “input” but when it comes to the actual plan it seems to stick pretty closely to the desire of special interest groups with their obstructionist agenda. So much so, that the Fairgrounds Racetrack isn’t mapped to be commercial, like it should be, but is mapped for doubles, like we need

yet more housing without jobs.

Additionally, have we told the people of Lakeview that a new massive interstate interchange is coming to their

neighborhood or the people of New Orleans East that we don’t really care if they can get to work downtown or the people of the Treme that Claiborne is probably going to be 8 lanes of traffic at highway speeds, if we keep the destruction of I-10 in the plan. The only thing that works in the plan is the new hospitals, which it gives rather tepid support to.

My wish? Send it back to the City Planning Commission with the notation to make the entire plan advisory only. Take the destruction of the I-10 out of the plan. Open up the “Citizens Participation” Groups to all comers and not just members of unelected neighborhood associations. Short of going back to the drawing board to build a plan that embraces progress and puts economic development first, without the fantasy that either preservation or culture is economic development, a plan that opens up the city for development and redevelopment rather than giving into the forces of NO and their desire to hold the city back. We needed to start with the idea that everything not explicitly forbidden is allowed,

rather than the other way around. We need to find ways to say YES. It is the only way for New Orleans to survive and thrive.  Thank you.

The small airport satisfaction  rankings are out and it is no surprise that Louis Armstrong New Orleans International is near the bottom of the list.  You can check them out here. ( http://www.jdpower.com/travel/ratings/airport-ratings/small/sortcolumn-1/ascending/page-#page-anchor ) The only airport with lower ratings is San Jose (SJC), which lacks jetways for half its concourses and reminded me of a used plane sales lot the last time I flew through it.

The issues with Armstrong are fairly evident to anyone who has ever flown through it. It is inconsistent across the concourses with some very modern and well designed (C & D) and others horribly dated (B). The baggage claim for the majority of carriers is in need of significant updating. The passenger pickup area is a dirty and dank cave. The food is generally bad and the kiosks providing most food and drink have inconsistent quality and service and hours that don’t meet the needs of all the travelers particularly those leaving very early or arriving late.

The current Louis Armstrong International Airport (MSY) is an outdated airport. It needs to be updated to remain viable. Expansion would be difficult due to jurisdictional conflicts between the City of New Orleans, City of Kenner, Jefferson Parish and St. Charles Parish.

There has been talk for decades about building a new airport to either compliment or supplant MSY, in New Orleans East or between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

I’d like to take this opportunity to suggest another option.

Revamp Lakefront Airport as a new international airport.

With the airport designation NEW, New Orleans Lakefront Airport is an overlooked asset for the city. And since the creation of a new airport is a time consuming and arduous process, we should focus on revamping Lakefront and expanding it to handle international service.   Give incentives to international carriers to come into the market by giving them breaks on landing fees.

An aerial view of NEW, Lakefront Aiport

It’s location on a man-made peninsula on Lake Pontchartrain means that it could be expanded without using  already occupied land. With a new connector road in the corridor between Downman road and the Industrial Canal the airport would be minutes from downtown. It’s position next to the Industrial Canal and with a major rail link backing up to the property makes it a natural for inter-modal transportation opportunities.

Then we could move most of the national carriers that also handle international flights (Continental, Delta, American, United, etc) to the new airport, leaving MSY to handle carriers that don’t have international flights (Southwest, JetBlue, etc)   This is a model used successfully by cities like Houston (Hobby and IAH), Washington (DCA and IAD), Dallas (Love and DFW) and the Bay Area (SFO and Oakland) to grow their airlinks.  Build the New Airport with expanded cargo facilities and make a significant attempt to lure cargo flights from Miami, Memphis, Atlanta and Dallas. It’s position next to the Industrial Canal and with a major rail link backing up to the property makes it a natural for inter-modal transportation opportunities. Connect the new airport to rail lines that run directly to the port facilities.

This new airport and an expanded list of direct air connections are essential for the goal of being involved with the business of international trade and would also enhance our ability to attract both visitors and new businesses.

Revamping Lakefront Airport (NEW) as the new New Orleans International Airport positions our city to truly take advantage of our geographic location and enhance our position as Gateway to the Americas.  And the world.