Alan Gutierrez

Riddle me this, New Orleans.

Do you know the name of the man in the photograph above? Do you know what firm he works for and his title(s)? Most importantly, Louisiana, do you know how hard he screwed you?

It’s time to play, Name That Shyster!

Mayor C Ray Nagin managed to forget to spend our recovery money on us. The AP is reporting in La. officials rebut Nagin’s money complaints.

That leaves over $595 million in federal money that is available to the city but has not been requested, said Col. Jeff Smith, chief of the homeland security office. Once the proper documentation is submitted, the money is available for replacing city property and structures damaged or ruined in Katrina and its aftermath, such as police cars and buses, the city jail, roads, and the sewer and water systems.

Those things all sound so nice.

Dr. Blakely says that we must go to New York, not to Washington. Don’t worry. He has friends in New York.

When is it okay for us to draw conclusions?

An email is circulating that has the New Orleans bloggers fretting. Gina Lampard wrote:

There is some email (AGAIN) going around comparing the recent snow storms to Katrina, and blah blah blah . . . they were much better ‘behaved’ than those folks in the gulf regions for all these reasons. I detest this stuff! Here’s a link to a blog where my FRIEND rebutes some of the indiocy — but the pieces of the email are in her post - so maybe its something we can work from. This stuff grates me. GRRRR!

Greg Peters responsed that Snopes had covered this in Snow Comparison stamping it with the status false.

I don’t worry about these thing as much as the other bloggers. I’m afraid that the time spent researching and debunking email chains is not as effective as doing the sort of research that Levees.org, 1 Greater New Orleans, or CHAT have been doing.

Good to have Snopes around. One of the things that I’ve learned is that if a journalist calls, give them homework. Rather than try and debunk all this stuff ourselves, feed it to Snopes and feed them some a few head pointers. They’ll do the work. They’ll publish it with authority.

Thank you to the people who have been playing along with the Creative Commons. It has made it much easier to post at Think New Orleans. Because we’re sharing our photos in Flickr photo groups, I can pluck an image to put a post in context, in the context of our lives that we’re all living together.

I was invited to a meet and greet with Dr. Ed Blakely last Saturday. I’ve not had time to write about it until now.

The meeting started with M.T. Sanyika and Shelia Danzy talking about how we are going to start to press for a recovery implementation. These were people who were part of the summer planning, so it was people from flooded neighborhoods, including Mid-City, Northwest Carrollton, the Historic 7th Ward, the Historic 9th Ward, and all over the East.

Talking about an implementation was heartening. We were told that primarily, recoveries need unity, and that we are all begining to display that unity. I can’t quite describe how they were hitting every cord, presenting funding matricies, where neighborhoods had detailed each park, school, commerical development, and how much each cost. It was recovery buffet. Just add political will.

For example, Steven Dominick said that plans for parks are not pie in the sky. If the park has been used as a FEMA trailer park, then the park will be remediated by the federal government to return it to a park, when the FEMA trailers are removed. This is where you start the funding the park, and use your political will to find other sources of federal and state funding.

Blakely started out talking about how he is spending a billion dollars of his own money to build a development in California. It was strange. It’s nice to be a player, but building a development in California is not the same thing as leading a recovery in New Orleans.

He talked about the 1991 Oakland fires, his recovery experience. It sounded good. Turn a Safeway into a reccovery center. Call your friend at Allstate to get people settled out when they walk in the door. That sounded reassuring.

He talked about basing the recovery around job creation, which resonnated with me. He spoke ill of the tourist industry, which really struck a cord. Spoke highly of medical and information technology. He made a case for New Orleans as a port city, gateway to Latin America, and a cultural center that uses the Internet to export that will begat the next Pixar with all this raw talent.

Then he said that we are not going to Washington, we are going to New York, which sucked the air out of the room. It was deflating. We need to take this to Washington this year.

Political will.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis spoke before Blakely. She was on message with recovery implementation, rather than planning, and afterwards, I told her that I for one, believe that Washington should be engaged.

A quote that I reference frequently in post-Katrina New Orleans is Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

In our recovery we frequently find instances of people who are acting in their own selfish interests, or so it seems. Often times, someone will note that the person is well intentioned. Whether it is promoting outragously expensive “green” construction, endless planning processes, preposterously large-scale civic participation programs, or stalled payment programs, the question of intent is used to mitigate the outcome.

I’m of the mind that malice and incompentence are two sides of the same coin.

However, in the New Orleans recovery, incompetence is offered as a legitimate reason for failure. Don’t be so hard on us, we don’t know what we’re doing. You try and fix New Orleans.

It boggles the mind that this is offered with a straight face. Questions about progress are taken personally, as if they were accusations, which they are, only because those quesitoned have no answers.

It prays on the decency of New Orleanians, because we’re all traumatized. We don’t want to beat anybody up. We just want answers, but the response is one of indignation.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, shouldn’t you step aside?