Four out of 80

Years of organizing work to get to point where there would be four schools out of the 80 charters in New Orleans where the staff are unionized. That is, if BAE is successful. 

The vote is set for May 28, according to the release issued by United Teachers of New Orleans, a citywide union and local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that has helped the charter school educators organize.

Bricolage Academy Educators, collectively known as BAE-United, spent weeks petitioning the school's governing charter board to voluntarily recognize their union. 

Bricolage organizers have said 80% of eligible teachers and staff signed a petition in favor of organizing, and they submitted the request to the school's board of directors in late February.

Eighty percent of the staff signed up in advance of the vote is a good sign. It's only in the last few years that teachers have gained something like momentum in the long effort to overcome structural barriers to organizing imposed by the depowering and isolating nature of the charter arrangements. When New Orleans Public Schools made the big move to charters, it not only immediately fired 7,000 people, it set back the work of reclaiming power by at least a decade.  Four out of 80 would be better than three.  But there is so much left beyond that.

Feels like a Monday

Try not to go too hard out there. 

A vehicle fire in the eastbound high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes of the Crescent City Connection is snarling traffic on the West Bank, Monday morning.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development reported the fire just after 8 a.m.

I'm certainly not one of these people declaring a return to post-pandemic normalcy yet.. especially with only 25 percent of Louisianians fully vaccinated (31% with at least one shot) as of today.  But certain of the old familiar comforts of home, such as everything being on fire, do seem to be returning. 

Oh also, was there an election over the weekend or something? I found all this trash laying around. 

We'll definitely have to talk about this one later. There are so many bad takes flying around today it's hard to pick out the absolute worst. But this is a contender. 

James Carville, the New Orleans-based political strategist, believes the outcome has national implications, noting that Peterson had the advantage of her side spending more money and a low turnout special election (16.6%) that typically favors candidates who seek to excite their party’s most fervent supporters.

“Voters voted against wokeness,” said Carville. “They just did. Woke did very, very poorly.”

I mean, it isn't very surprising that Carville has adopted the pejorative form of "wokeness" to mean any political platform to the left of, say, Ronald Reagan.  But he's also wrong (or lying, if you prefer to call it what it is) to claim this result is a rejection of such a platform instead of a candidate.   But, more on that later.  

In the meantime try to avoid getting exploded by anything.

Who is Tonya Pope's secret partner this time?

Tonya Pope is appealing (well, at least making  a public appeal through the media) the city's decision to exclude her from the list of finalists in the latest Six Flags redevelopment sweepstakes. 

TPC-NOLA Inc., which has long sought to revive the former Jazzland theme park at the Six Flags site, said in a formal protest Friday that the selection committee used "inconsistent, subjective and biased scoring" when judging six proposals for the abandoned property.

"Inconsistent, subjective, biased," maybe! That doesn't necessarily have to mean gender bias, specifically, although Pope does claim that too.  But, again, maybe. There certainly seemed to be some degree of favoritism involved when the finalists were announced.  And, besides, Pope knows more about this process than just about anybody by now.  Her company has been one of the very very many who have put together multiple proposals over the course of very very many attempts by the city to snag a developer for this cursed property.  

In the most recent round prior to this one, her plan involved... some kind of wax museum or something? Maybe that sounds wacky, but it's hardly the craziest thing that's been proposed so far. Nor is it any stranger than what the current front-runners have on the table. What's intriguing, though, about Pope's current bid is that the city says she was docked points in the evaluation process for not disclosing an important financial backer.

TPC-NOLA received 328 points. Committee member Nicole Heyman criticized that group for failing to identify its partner company, while committee member Jeff Schwartz rapped it for failing to prove it had obtained financing to build its proposal.  

Pope, the company president, said Friday that while her group did not want to out its partner at the public selection meeting, it is willing to provide that information to committee members privately.

Well who wouldn't be reassured by that?   It's not like Pope's partners in previous bids could have raised any questions.  The wax museum project was supposed to involve former Governor Edwin Edwards.  And in 2014, her proposal was backed by a certain financial outfit of note. 

Paidia's bid calls for a $50 million initial phase that would reconstruct the heart of the Jazzland park by next spring. Much of the money would come from a $25 million construction loan financed by First NBC Bank and federal tax credits for revitalization projects in impoverished neighborhoods. Paidia is also counting on another $10 million in private financing for equipment, $8 million in state tax incentives and $2 million in corporate sponsorships, according to its proposal.

 Really, in hindsight, it's remarkable that one didn't get done.  

Anyway, let's hope the committee takes Pope's complaint seriously enough to giver her another chance. If only so we can find out who the heck she's got on the team this time. 

Doing it the hard way

 Looks like the Bricolage board is choosing the way of pain. 

Bricolage Academy Educators United, a group of Bricolage educators seeking union recognition from the Esplanade Avenue charter school’s board, has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board after the charter’s nonprofit board failed to respond to the group’s February request for voluntary union recognition.

Since receiving the group’s Feb. 24 letter, the board has only met once. At that meeting, on March 10, the board met in a closed door session with its lawyers for advice on the union drive. After the private discussion, board president Yvette Jones said the board must do its “due diligence” before it would take a vote on whether to recognize the union. She could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Well it's April now and they still haven't finished the "due diligence" delaying so the teachers have to ask for an NLRB election which is an arduous process that is more or less designed to prevent an organizing campaign from succeeding. That doesn't mean the teachers can't win.  The International School staff unionized via an election in 2016 but not without a fight. And the Lusher board actually beat back a similar effort.

Of course, the PRO Act legislation waiting for action in the US Congress would make things easier. Call or text your Senator.

Lock it up

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus in the US, elected leaders at every level have struggled and failed to agree on an effective and consistent policy response to contain it. Rules promulgated for public gatherings, mask wearing, and business operations have had wide variance from town to town or state to state.  Over the past year, these rules have expanded and contracted again in "phases" shaped not so much by the public health interest as by political pressure from influential wealth holders.  

A mayor might shut down because the cases are spiking but keep inviting tourists to town anyway.  A school board might cave to pressure from bosses to open and deprive parents of an excuse not to come in to work. But if the virus spreads among the school population, officials have plenty of excuses on hand as to why that isn't their fault.

This is the sixth week that the district has reported cases on its website. While there have been new cases each week, officials say they are relatively small numbers and Avegno said new cases don’t appear to come from the classroom. 

“Where we are seeing cases is in gatherings and extracurricular activities outside school. So the slumber party … and we have seen some outbreaks on athletic teams,” she said, noting there hadn’t been athletic outbreaks in the two weeks.

“With teachers, if it’s more than one teacher, it’s if they went out to dinner after school,” Avegno said. “Just like office spread, like in a breakroom. That’s not anything unique to schools.”

Hotel stays, yes. "Slumber parties, no."  Bars and restaurants are open but only the ones that serve the tourists. The more local clientele had better stay home... especially if they happen to be teachers. And this has been the situation in every city and in every state. The resulting chaos has claimed hundreds of thousands more lives than were ever necessary while piling ever greater fortune upon the world's billionaire class. 

Remarkably this situation has only been made worse by the arrival of the vaccines this year.  Policymakers could have taken advantage of the clear "light at the end of the tunnel" offered by vaccination. They could have heeded the advice of most health experts to keep restrictions in place for a few more months until a significant portion of the population was vaccinated.  Instead they quickly shifted into Mission Accomplished mode and loosened the rules around all sorts of activities. It's quite likely that the resulting sense in the public that the pandemic is already over has slowed the pace of vaccinations thus extending the threat further and endangering even more lives. 

Now as the virus seems to be spreading once again, Governors and mayors are even more hesitant than before to take the steps necessary to stop it. Many of them, in fact, are giving up altogether. 

And this spring, many American mayors are explaining their decision to leave office with the same reason: that the pandemic response demanded so much that they could not both campaign and perform their duties; or that the work had become so stressful that their families had recommended that they step away.

“They are just spent,” said Katharine Lusk, executive director of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, which carries out an annual survey of mayors. Mayors surveyed last summer expressed deep anxiety about the effects of lost tax revenue on their budgets, as they juggled the pandemic, economic recovery and their core responsibilities.

Meanwhile the ones who have decided to stick it out are content to leave it all up to the vaccines and shift the blame for anything that goes wrong to the "personal responsibility" of individuals to take them. Inevitably this will mean more people will die than have to. But that's all part of the political cost/benefit analysis. 

Anyway it's only appropriate now that we're back to doing the bare minimum to protect the public health that the one thing we know we can do about the coronavirus is put it in jail. That is going about how you might expect.

Starting in March of last year, New York Times reporters tracked every known coronavirus case in every correctional setting in the United States, including state and federal prisons, immigrant detention centers, juvenile detention facilities, and county and regional jails.

We measured the pandemic’s excruciating impact on prisoners using records requests and interviews with people from all corners of the system. We spoke with incarcerated people and their families, prison wardens, jailers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and civil rights groups.

A year later, one in three inmates in state prisons are known to have had the virus, the data shows. In federal facilities, at least 39 percent of prisoners are known to have been infected. The true count is most likely higher because of a dearth of testing, but the findings align with reports from The Marshall Project and the Associated Press, U.C.L.A. Law and The COVID Prison Project that track Covid-19 in prisons.

The virus has caused misery and loss in many places, but its destructive power has been felt intensely among the incarcerated, who have been infected at rates several times higher than those of their surrounding communities.

Last week, The Lens reported that only a quarter of the  more than 800 people detained at the Orleans Parish jail have been vaccinated. That is a rate comparable with the city's population at large.  The state prisons are a bit behind.  But, as the same article points out, prison is a particularly dangerous place to be during a pandemic. 

Throughout the pandemic, prisons and jails have been particularly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 due to the inability of prisoners to social distance. There have been over 3,000 reported cases of the virus in Louisiana’s prisons, according to data from the DOC, and 36 people have died.

And so you may be thinking all of this should raise the obvious question, why are we still putting so many people in jail? Of course we should be asking that question anyway but especially now, under these circumstances, why are we needlessly endangering more lives?  Well, actually, that question was already asked of the mayor under arguably more dangerous circumstances during the height of the pandemic last year.  Here is what she said.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

Yesterday we watched yet another horrific instance of state cruelty in the form of body cam footage of yet another cop murdering yet another Black person for "breaking the damn law" against having an air freshener hanging from a mirror. Do those of us who are worried about that require a similar talking to from a "streetwise salty tongue?" Or is the summary death sentence for minor offense only acceptable when administered by virus instead of by gunshot?

And there is the catch

Sorry to say this but the only reason anyone with any power can even imagine taking the Claiborne Expressway down now is the same reason it was erected in the first place. It is because we have reached a point in the cycle where tearing it down can and will benefit wealth.  This is going to be the same point I made ten years ago when the gentrification taking place in Treme first set the planners' sights on gussying up the convenient real estate they had buried under that bridge decades before.  But taking down the expressway, in and of itself is not going to magically restore the neighborhood that was broken apart by its construction. 

The 20th Century was a long time ago.  Other things are happening now and they are not great things for poor and working class people in cities. The political game now is all about moving those people out of the way, isolating them in far flung suburbs, and even taxing them if they try to drive back.  The cities (and especially this city) aren't for poor people anymore. Instead they (especially this one) are playgrounds for rich people and tourists where nobody actually lives. All of the planning and policy decisions made now are intentionally meant to facilitate this.  

For years the Claiborne overpass was a public health and "quality of life" detriment to poor people living near it. Nobody who could do anything about that cared.  But now it is in the way of real estate development so it's apparently time to take that problem seriously. 

Anyway, the Washington Post got in touch with Amy Stelly to for its story on the infrastructure bill that might fund the highway's removal. She's obviously very much aware of the problem.

While activists’ goal, in many cases, is to remove a highway, they say they also want communities most harmed by their construction to enjoy the benefits as their neighborhoods become more desirable. That could mean help for renters to buy their homes or property tax advantages.

“We can’t remove highways in neighborhoods that would otherwise have been very desirable and leave it to the real estate market to govern,” Stelly said. “The people of Tremé should have the right to return when it’s beautiful.”

And, well, that's the catch, isn't it. 

 

The pump uprising

The pumps have had enough of our abuse and are starting to turn against us. 

Part of the West End area of Lakeview flooded Wednesday when a Sewerage & Water Board pump worked in reverse, sucking water from Lake Pontchartrain and pumping it into the streets of the residential area, according to our news partners at WWL-TV.

The pump was working in reverse for nearly an hour before it was fixed, WWL-TV reported, citing information from S&WB officials.

We always suspected this day would come.

Ah they brought in a ringer

For those who were curious about what sort of gimmick could possibly breathe new life into the many-failures-over Six Flags redevelopment saga, well, here you go. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration announced that a partnership that included Brees was among the three finalists chosen to redevelop the derelict Six Flags site in New Orleans East, advancing a highly-anticipated effort to breathe life into the 227-acre park that has been abandoned for almost 16 years. 

After a selection committee scored six proposals based on developers' qualifications, financial resources and other factors, the highest scoring contender was a partnership between Kiernan West LLC of Colorado and S.H.I.E.L.D., a foundation launched by Brees, Saints linebacker Demario Davis and Buffalo Bills cornerback Joshua Norman.

That group wants to turn the park into multiple facilities, including an agriculture innovation center that helps young people learn about urban farming.

The actual developer is Kiernan-West which is a corporate real estate firm that has dotted the US map with logistics centers so we can logically conclude that is at least one of the "multiple facilities" in the proposal, if not the main one.  The rest of it is just branding.  And by that we mean they just grabbed a bunch of progressive-sounding twee business buzzwords and mashed them all into one thing for the professional athletes to pitch.

The nonprofit portion, managed by the SHIELD group, would include a facility for urban farming and aquaponics; a “discovery lab” that would provide science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics programming for New Orleans students; a natural healing center, and a food cultural center that would serve as a lecture hall for culinary arts education. The site would also feature a restaurant. 

Future development phases could include a ghost kitchen that would deliver meals to people in need, and a food truck park.

There are so many half-baked ideas going on there it literally reads as though it were being made up as it was dictated. Either that or they were just trying to make sure they hit whatever sweet spot the consultant's report laid out for them. 

A firm the city hired to study the best use for the park said in 2019 that it would work best as a transportation and distribution hub, though that team ended up recommending an “education destination” that could focus on themes such as resiliency and climate change, after talking with residents.

I'm glad they clarified which consultant's report we're working from here because there have been several.  This is the 2019 report by  TIP Strategies and Perkins & Will.  The purpose of glossy papers like this is always to give the developers a paint-by-number scheme for making their project appear to fit the needs of whatever community they are taking advantage of.   I'm disappointed to see that Brees's group did not throw a zipline in with their proposal as the consultants suggested.  But we got the healing center and that always seems to be the key. 

Anyway, between the pro athletes involvement and the jamming in of all the shiny objects, this seems like the proposal that is going to be selected.  And Brees sure does know how to spit out the jargon. 

“I am excited about the ability to present this transformational proposal to the city,” Brees said in a statement about the plan. “It is a vision that we have been working on for more than a year, actively looking for the right site and the right public/private Partnership to launch our non-profit concept. I believe this is it.”

If this means he and this giant real estate firm he's shilling for are going to get their hands on one cent of the city's stimulus allocation for any of this, then it's all the same to us if the whole site just sinks back into the swamp. 

On the other hand,  we do see Troy Henry involved with one of the competing groups so maybe let's wait and see. They're expecting to decide within in the next two or three months.

Is it possible to do less with more?

Now that the "Rescue Plan" bill has passed, it's time to pick around in it and see what we've won.  Of particular interest now will be keeping an eye on state and local politicians to see if they continue pushing for austerity budget cuts even though the stimulus specifically provides funds intended to prevent that from happening. This morning the LA Budget Project calls attention to one provision of the bill meant to head some of this off. 

The law also contains an important provision for states receiving the aid: for every dollar that a state government spends on net tax cuts, it will lose a dollar of federal support. As lawmakers gavel into session next month, they will have an opportunity to make long overdue investments in Louisiana’s people, families and communities instead of providing tax cuts to businesses and the wealthy. This provision provides an incentive to do just that.  Nicholas Johnson of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the details: 

Cutting state taxes now would repeat a mistake many states made in the wake of the Great Recession: they cut taxes, which harmed families, undermined economic growth, and exacerbated economic inequality and racial injustice. Instead, states should address critical health and economic needs by making investments that can help build antiracist, equitable states. To help them do so, the American Rescue Plan Act includes $195 billion in fiscal aid for state governments (and more for schools and for local, tribal, and territorial governments).

They can't use the one time stimulus payments to create new "fiscal cliffs" made out of tax cuts for rich people.  Republicans in some states are already complaining, of course.  But the truth is there will plenty opportunities in the new law for them to steal whatever they want.  This line, in particular, seems like a just such an opportunity. 

(3) TRANSFER AUTHORITY.—A metropolitan city, nonentitlement unit of local government, or county receiving a payment from funds made available under this section may transfer funds to a private nonprofit organization (as that term is defined in paragraph (17) of section 401 of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 11360(17)), a public benefit corporation involved in the transportation of passengers or cargo, or a special-purpose unit of State or local government.

Which suggests that the city of New Orleans, still beset with serious infrastructure challenges, and which has spent the past year threatening layoffs, furloughing workers, and dropping cryptic hints about "shared sacrifice," could still move ahead with its plans to do all of those things while shoveling the federal stimulus funds out the back door to non-profits controlled by the NOLA Business Alliance or Leslie Jacobs, or even Stephen Perry with very little accountability for any of it. Especially interesting thing to watch for just ahead of an election season when people will need paying off.

It's not yet time to be hugged by any neanderthals

Again, I really am having trouble understanding why this is going on right now.  

NEW ORLEANS — The city of New Orleans will move to a Modified Phase-3 COVID order starting this Friday, March 12. The order in Orleans will mirror the state's Phase-3 measures in many ways, but differ in some key ways.

The State of Louisiana will allow full capacity at houses of worship, while Orleans will continue to limit capacity, now it will be 75 percent of capacity with social distancing and mask guidelines required. 

We just need another couple months to get the vax numbers up to something more comfortable.  People should be able to handle that kind of an ask by now.  Opening everything now is specifically the thing these public health experts warned everybody not to do just one week ago. 

But the next few months in the pandemic are critical. Concern is growing over moves by some states to lift restrictions already, while new variants of the virus are on the rise in the U.S. Experts warn that actions taken now risk delaying getting back to some semblance of normal.

Health officials are urging restrictions to remain in place for the final stretch, saying that it will not be much longer before the situation markedly improves, and it does not make sense to lift all restrictions when widespread vaccinations are in sight.   

The President of the United States has characterized the rush to lift restrictions during this final stretch as "neanderthal mentality."  Most experts agree that we can expect to reach herd immunity from COVID when somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of the population has been vaccinated.  The CDC expects that to happen in about three months if we don't do anything stupid right now such as drop the emergency restrictions. 

Thomas Tsai, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that by summer, “I think we can have a much more, I don’t want to say normal, but at least a 'new normal' summer."

But experts warn that the return to normal could actually be delayed if restrictions are lifted too soon, causing a new spike in cases in the near term.

Tsai likened the current situation to the seventh inning stretch of a baseball game. “Progress has been made; it’s OK to take stock of that,” he said. “How we play the next two innings determines if this is a single game or turns into a doubleheader.”

Sports analogies like that one are flying around this discourse right now.  We've heard it's the 7th inning, or the third quarter, or "maybe the end of halftime at a football game." But really the thing we would like to avoid right now is this. 

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According to this poll, a plurality of voters (34%) would prefer that restrictions remain in place until we reach 75 percent vaccinated and a majority (55%) would like to wait at least until we get 50 percent done. As of yesterday, CDC reports that just under 10 percent of the US population was currently vaccinated.  According to the Louisiana Department of Health, that number for Orleans Parish is 12.33%.  

So what are our local leaders doing with that information?  Well, first of all they are lying about it in their campaign emails.  But also they are throwing open the doors for all sorts of things that we really don't actually need to do right now.. especially with a new round of stimulus on the way.  Some days we really have to wonder if they are even want to end this thing.  In today's Advocate, Will Sutton writes that he wants to get back to hugging people again... but maybe not just yet.  

Yes, it’s true that the crackdowns have hurt us economically. And it’s true that far too many have lost jobs and income, adjusted, gross or otherwise. But I’m still seeing too many people not cooperating, and I’m not comfortable with guessing who out there has been vaccinated and who hasn’t. I know I’ll feel safer with more people fully vaccinated.

Let's take the guesswork anxiety out of this thing. It only takes a few more months.

Can we please just wait another month or so?

This morning I opened Twitter and saw that practically everyone who had fingers to post was posting that they are making appointments right now to get vaccinated. That is a thing that you do very much in fact love to see.  The surge comes as the Governor announces a major expansion of eligibility to those over 16 years old who can claim any of a list of conditions some of which are quite expansive.  For example you can now get a vaccine appointment if you are a smoker or if you are "overweight" as measured by a BMI number that pretty much includes everyone. 

That's great news but it's a little bit sudden given what we had been hearing about vaccine supplies and various plans for "intentional" distribution strategies over the last few weeks. It's enough to cause one to wonder if there's even a bit of panic behind it. 

The expansion comes as Louisiana enters a familiar — and perhaps foreboding — stage of the now year-long pandemic: hospitalizations, deaths and the rate of positive tests have all plateaued after declining from a post-holiday surge. Paired with rising case counts of the more transmissible variant of the virus from the United Kingdom, health officials worry another spike is lurking around the corner.

“We’ve stopped improving, and in every previous instance when that has happened there was another surge,” Edwards said. “We are literally in a race against transmission of the virus —  especially the new variants.”

Why is it, then, that given all of this experience with "foreboding" plateaus and concern about the new variants, that the state and the city are once again rushing to relax precautionary restrictions?

New Orleans officials plan to announce details on eased coronavirus restrictions on Wednesday as cases in the city have slumped in recent weeks. 

"All the numbers are moving in the right direction, and we do anticipate an additional easement of the guidelines," said City Hall spokesperson Beau Tidwell during a press conference Tuesday.

Wait a minute, the governor just got finished saying the numbers had stopped moving in the right direction and plateaued. Which is it?  Anyway, if we really are in a "race against transmission of the virus," doesn't it make sense to keep doing everything we can to keep our opponent  in that race moving as slowly as possible?   Just keep the restrictions where they are until we get more people vaccinated.  It looks like the plan is for that to start happening quickly enough.  We've waited a year. What's a few more months?

Who audits the auditors?

This is more from that David Hammer series on building inspections we mentioned the other day. All of this has gotten more attention after the Hard Rock collapse but it is important to remember that the trouble at New Orleans Safety and Permits began before that. There were have been competing investigations run by the city, by the feds, and by the Inpector General underway for well over a year. 

Hammer's report focuses on an internal audit of Safety and Permits run by City Hall. Not sure how it relates to the multiple other investigations, exactly, but according to Hammer's source, there are problems. 

Now, the results of the full audit, obtained by WWL-TV last month through a public records request, suggest that the audit itself had several issues.

The sample of 720 inspection files reviewed in the audit showed around 20% noncompliance, as Montaño said. But the audit turned out to be composed of what one auditor who spoke to WWL-TV called a “haphazard” mixture of inspections conducted by in-house city inspectors — with GPS data to track whether they showed up at construction sites — and inspections conducted by private, third-party inspectors with no GPS data to track their whereabouts.

According to the auditor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the audit also didn't employ a regimented process to review the inspection files. Each auditor did it their own way, the auditor said, making it much harder to determine if the city had indeed made the type of progress Montaño touted.

“It shows an incohesive, improper audit,” the auditor said. “It was not a proper, across-the-board, cohesive methodology to determine which inspections were accurate and which ones need (additional) review.”

The other bit of context here is that this was taking place at the same time the city was reorganizing the whole Safety and Permits department into a new entity run by a short term rental executive. At that time the declared purpose of the new agency was to "shift the paradigm"of Safety regulation toward helping businesses and landlords "get creative" with the rules.

“Instead of someone saying no immediately, it’s someone saying, ‘Let’s find a way to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish and still stay within our rules and guidelines, not skirt the system, but let’s get creative on how we can help you succeed. Because you succeeding is us succeeding.’ “

Hammer's story concludes by noting the new agency will "focus continually on auditing the inspectors' work." Very reassuring.

Who inspects the inspectors

Basically the Code Enforcement Director for the City of Kenner also works for the building inspector that he outsources his department's work to. That is supposed to be fine because the work he does for the inspector doesn't happen in Kenner.  It happens in New Orleans and in Jefferson.  The "gotcha" in this story is that some of those New Orleans jobs might have been fraudulent (or just sloppy mix ups, you will have to decide) but it's the obvious conflict of interest that is the problem. 

Surely we wouldn't let anything like that happen in our city.

The first of the month is coming

 There's one every month. 

Now, thanks to the coronavirus aid package passed by Congress in December, DuBois and thousands of others across the state could soon see the crushing weight of debt lifted off their shoulders. DuBois is one of about 4,000 people who have signed up for New Orleans' rental assistance program in the last week, hoping to tap into the first infusion of what is expected to be about $26 million in cash from the U.S. Treasury Department's $25 billion rental assistance program.

$26 million sounds like a lot but it's nowhere near enough to fill the need. So the city will have to ration it.

The city's program, which can be applied for in the coronavirus section of the ready.nola.gov website, is going to pay all past-due rent for qualified applicants, plus one additional month going forward. The guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department allows for up to three months in advance, but given that demand will far outstrip supply, the city decided to pay just one month to help reach more people, Willman said. The city also decided not to use any of the money to pay residents' past-due utility bills, even though the Treasury funds are approved for that purpose as well. 

Willman said the city is working with applicants to get all the necessary supporting documents and once that happens, it will be 10-14 days for payments to be made directly to landlords.

Not that it won't help. It will. But it helps only just enough to keep desperate renters just as desperate. It's really more of a landlord assistance program.

Big dickish Entergy

Sometimes you have to wonder if they're just doing it to be mean to people. 

Entergy officials explained that the cuts were mandated by the regional independent system operator, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), in order to prevent the system from completely overloading and triggering a wider and more severe blackout.

However, Entergy also revealed that Entergy New Orleans shed power load of 81 megawatts, when it was asked to shed just 26 megawatts. That resulted in thousands of customers losing power for more than an hour last Tuesday night as temperatures plunged below freezing.

City Council (in their capacity as the regulatory body here) called Entergy in to yell at them. Although judging from David Ellis's response it's not clear that did any good. 

Moreno stopped the meeting to demand that Entergy New Orleans chief executive David Ellis attend immediately to explain why the outages had been so extensive.

Joining the virtual meeting, Ellis said Entergy New Orleans was still investigating why its computer programs ended up shutting off power to so many New Orleans customers.

"We will provide you with infinitely more information once we know," Ellis said, but he explained that Entergy had been dealing with the emergency situation for most of last week, even after the rolling cuts on Tuesday.

 New computer who dis.

Sites vs doses

The state wants to set up a mass vaccination site at the Convention Center. Sounds like a great idea. We've been trying to put that public facility to work for the actual public for so long now. Also there's nothing else going on there right now, anyway. Of course a nice open public vaccination facility isn't much good unless it actually has vaccines to dispense. 

Kanter said the city is prepared to staff the vaccination site itself, working with LCMC Health, which operates six hospitals and urgent care centers in the region. But Kanter said the city "would like some financial reimbursement on it. And the doses would be important to all of us. So, those are the two biggest things."

The Biden administration said it intends to open 100 federal vaccination sites by the end of the month in an effort to speed the immunizations, with the first two locations opened Tuesday in California. But governors and health officials around the country are mixed on the offer because they don't necessarily need more places to administer the vaccine, but simply more doses overall.

Kanter said FEMA has set the distinction that a "pilot site" comes with extra vaccine doses supplied by the federal government, while other federally-supported vaccination sites will not.

If I am reading the current stimulus proposal correctly, I think I see $7.5 billion in federal support for vaccine activities so one would hope the reimbursement issue wouldn't be a problem.  Maybe it has to do with FEMA's procedures.  Anyway the other interesting thing here is the Biden people seem to be measuring their goals in the number of sites open as opposed to the number of doses available which sounds like it could lead to some problems if those things get too far out of sync.

Whoops!

Looks like they weren't intentional enough about how to do the intentional power shut-offs Tuesday night.  

NEW ORLEANS — When Entergy cut power to customers in the Carrollton and Riverbend areas during Tuesday night's freeze, the Sewerage and Water Board was one of those customers, and a key piece of critical public infrastructure lost power for almost an hour.

New Orleans City Councilwoman Helana Morena said it wasn't supposed to happen. An Entergy spokesman said it was an error on their part.

"It was our water system, our groundwater intake," the councilwoman said. "It was resolved quickly, caught quickly, but in my opinion, it should have never happened to begin with."

The Sewerage and Water Board said it lost power at its Hamilton Station, where motors pump water from the Mississippi River into the Carrollton Water Plant. That water is then treated and sent out to homes and businesses across the city.

A S&WB spokeswoman said the executive director of the water utility, Ghassan Korban, had to call Entergy's CEO David Ellis to complain. Entergy spokesman John Hawkins said it was their mistake.

"Those (electricity) feeders shouldn't have been on that (blackout) list, and they have been removed," Hawkins said. "That was addressed last night, so it won't happen again.

So far it hasn't happened again.  Although, they did threaten to run us through the drill again last night to find out.

NEW ORLEANS — Entergy is asking customers to use less power with another night of freezing temperatures ahead for the New Orleans area.

Freezing weather is causing a critical shortage of electricity in our area. It got so bad Tuesday night that Entergy and Cleco implemented rotating black outs in New Orleans and on the Northshore to preserve the integrity of the power grid.

Notice Entergy has gone out of its way to warn customers expecting to be able to heat their homes in dangerous freezing conditions that this is probably their fault for being so greedy. 

Entergy asked customers to be especially conservative between the normally heavy use times of 5 pm to 10 pm.

"This unusual request is due to the demand for electricity potentially exceeding the available generation due to the extreme cold and weather conditions currently impacting our service territory," said Lee Sabatini, the Entergy New Orleans Communications Director. "Current load forecasts are approaching an all-time peak, even greater than those experienced during the polar vortex of January 2019."

But it isn't your fault. It is theirs. Specifically it is the deregulated US energy market that allows this sort of catastrophic failure to happen in the first place. 

Instead of state agencies regulating the business of monopoly utilities in a centralized manner, deregulated grids create a series of perpetual auctions running across the country. Electricity arrives in your home as the result of nonstop bidding and profit-maximization. Put very simply, does Alice’s natural gas plant generate the next unit of electricity that feeds into the grid, or does it come from Bob’s wind farm? Place your bets, Alice and Bob, and let’s see who wins!

Now imagine that happening every five minutes every single day, twenty-four hours a day. There’s also a separate auction for day-ahead dispatch (who plans to generate it twenty-four hours from now?) and, in most RTOs except for Texas, an auction for reserving some amount of power capacity over a year in advance (who plans to have power available in a year?), a market-based perversion of centralized planning.

If the fundamental objective of a grid is to produce enough electricity to meet demand at all times — in other words, reliability — then how does the deregulated market accomplish it? Not through direct coordination of productive assets but through an endlessly complicated system of auctions, requests, incentives, and price signals. Regardless, the blackouts in Texas prove that it doesn’t always accomplish reliability, just like it didn’t in 2011, the last time extreme weather led to major blackouts in Texas, or last summer in California, to pick only a few examples.

What’s worse, there’s nobody to blame because, hey, the grid operator is just the auctioneer who set up the technocratic process to incentivize private development of those productive assets. With wholesale electricity prices hovering at the $9000/MWh maximum price, about three hundred times the normal price, scarcity of life’s necessities means scarcity price signals to encourage future investment. But with average prices far lower due to increasing gas and wind, it’s not economical for private plant owners to weatherize their plants better. Truly, it’s the invisible hand that keeps your lights on — too bad that hand is just as ephemeral as the electricity that powers them.

Nobody to blame, maybe, but also plenty of customers to blame for.. not knowing how to use an oven?

Staying in from the cold weather may make you want to cook a nice, hot meal. To help conserve energy be sure to cook food at the lowest possible setting and refrain from opening the oven door while baking. More tips at https://t.co/DVdrzhqUOV pic.twitter.com/oY7McSlwyD

— Entergy New Orleans (@EntergyNOLA) February 18, 2021

Anyway, it's this thing where individuals are forced to bear the cost of price spikes in the natural gas and wholesale electricity market and pay for the mistakes and negligence committed by utility companies that is the problem. Not regular people trying to stay warm. 

If your power has been deliberately shut off because we live under a failed neoliberal regime that can't supply life sustaining necessities to people unless corporate entities realize massive profits, don't worry too much. Remember your bill doubled last month because of a "planned outage" that somehow overlapped another unplanned outage or something.  This time all the outages are definitely planned so that shouldn't be a... oh. 

Consumer advocates also voiced concerns that ratepayers will now be looking at another big jump in their energy bills, which spiked in December because of high use and higher rates for importing out-of-state power supply.

"There is no doubt that customers can expect to have really high electricity bills when they get them next month," said Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a New Orleans-based consumer advocacy group.

She said New Orleans customers are particularly vulnerable to big spikes because the city's antiquated housing stock is among the least energy efficient in the country. New Orleans homes use, on average, 30% more energy than those in other cities.

"Our houses are old and beautiful and historic, but they're leaky," Burke said.

Okay well we get what she is saying here. Obviously there needs to be a massive public investment in weatherizing homes and infrastructure.  That's one important lesson in all of this.  If only there were a policy outline just sitting on the shelf the congress could turn into law tomorrow if it wanted.  Doesn't look like that's happening, though.  In the meantime we'll just sit around in our "leaky" houses tonight trying to resist the urge to bake too much bread.  If the lights go out anyway, surely nobody will blame us.

Big dickish Entergy

 That crazy spike in your bill last month? Yeah, according to Entergy, that's how it's supposed to work. 

Responding to Entergy customers who in some cases have taken to social media to blast sharp spikes in their power bills this month, utility officials said they can blame colder weather, reduced holiday travel and a longer-than-typical billing cycle.

Other factors contributing to increases include a rise in natural gas prices and power purchases Entergy made in December, the utility said. 

The utility, which provides electricity for more than 1.2 million customers and natural gas for more than 200,000 others across the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas, was responding to a scourge of recent complaints from residents on social media about higher bills. 

Strange that Advocate article maintains Entergy's emphasis on the "y'all use too much power"  issue and doesn't elaborate very much on the "power purchases Entergy made in December." Instead it just passes on David Ellis's assertion that, "the utility shut down two of its plants for routine maintenance, which likely added between $8 and $12 to the average customer's bill."  There's a little more detail on that available from Channel 6 here. 

While the increases surprised customers when they received January’s bill in the mail, the utility did forewarn the New Orleans City Council of anticipated higher costs, in a letter dated Dec. 18.

In it, the utility writes: “ … the key driver of the variance is a $3.9 million increase in the fuel costs. Most of this increase is due to two generating plant outages, one at Grand Gulf Nuclear Station (“Grand Gulf”) and another at Union Power Station (“UPB1”). Grand Gulf entered an unplanned outage on November 6, 2020 during which necessary maintenance work was performed. Following completion of the unplanned outage, the unit entered a planned outage that ended on December 3. UPB1 took a planned outage to install a 2.0 MW emergency diesel generator, which outage lasted from October 23, 2020 to November 24, 2020."

"Unplanned outage" at the nuclear power plant (yikes!) necessitating repairs in November. Was the "planned outage" affected by or related to the unplanned one?  Also, how often does this happen?  Pretty often, apparently.

Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, said the causes of these spikes are multi-faceted. She said there is a two-month lag for fuel adjustment charges, so any increase in usage from the holidays and the colder weather between Thanksgiving and Christmas will be seen now.

However, there were two Entergy power plants that went down in November. The Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Mississippi and the Union Power Station in Arkansas both suffered outages.

Why does this matter?

When those power plants go down, Entergy customers still pay for power from those plants and for whatever additional power Entergy had to buy on the energy market to compensate for their plant outages. The Grand Gulf plant, in particular, has had many problems in recent years.

“Grand Gulf has been having difficulties since 2016,” Burke said. “Every time it goes down, we (the customers) have to pay for it.”

In 2019, The Lens asked about the ongoing problems at Grand Gulf which happened at the time to be, "the least reliable nuclear generator in the US, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group."  They also asked Entergy about its management of the "planned" outages and their effect on people's bills. 

The Lens sent the company a list of questions to the company about reliability problems at the plant. In response, spokesperson Neal Kirby provided a brief written statement that only addressed the planned 2020 outage, but wrote that he could not reveal how long it will be. 

“The 2020 outage at Entergy’s Grand Gulf Nuclear Station is planned for refueling and maintenance at the plant,” Kirby wrote in an email. “We time these refueling outages when other generators and market purchases can be available to supply power economically to our customers. It is not appropriate to discuss the timing or length of outages because that is market sensitive business information.” 

No matter how long it is, the outage could be expensive for New Orleans residents. According to Entergy, outages at Grand Gulf can cost New Orleans customers upwards of $100,000 a day. In a letter to Councilwoman and utility chair Helena Moreno, Entergy New Orleans CEO David Ellis revealed that an eight day outage in December 2018 cost residents $1.15 million.

Notice that the company's response claims that planned outages are timed not to overlap (but also the timing is none of your business because of "market sensitive information" matters.) And yet here we are looking at bills inflated at least in part because of overlapping plant outages which Entergy claims (and the Advocate uncritically reports) to be "routine maintenance." 

The company pulled two power plants offline this winter for routine maintenance, which meant it had to purchase power on the open market as well. Natural gas costs rose by 12%, and a bill credit related to a 2017 corporate restructuring expired.

In any case, the ratepayers have to cover the cost of those plants whether they are buying power from them that month or not.  Sounds like a raw deal baked into the city's agreement with the utility. The good news is, as the regulatory body managing Entergy's monopoly, the City Council still has a few things it can do to provide relief.  For example it can direct Entergy to maintain the COVID emergency  moratorium on shut offs for overdue bills which it did this week.

It can also push them to implement more customer friendly policies such as the billing "heads-up" CM Moreno suggests here.

Before the vote, Moreno and Joe Giarrusso also urged Entergy to create programs to alert customers in real time about their power use.

Though that function was a promised capability of the advanced meters, Guillot said Entergy won't have it ready for another six months. 

Telling people 10 or so days into their billing cycle that they are using more power than normal will make higher bills less of a surprise or could prompt people to dial down their use if needed, Moreno said.

"There’s got to be some type of trigger to let customers know, over the phone or over email or whatever, so that habits can be changed," she said.

Although, frankly, that just reinforces Entergy's premise that it's really more the ratepayers than the company who are responsible for the high bills. In fact, it seems like they're already building on that narrative this week ahead of an expected change in the weather.  

At a recent council meeting to discuss Entergy customer bills that had doubled and in some cases tripled in January, council members asked if Entergy could provide notice if it saw conditions that were increasing usage - and bills.

Wednesday the company sent out a news release to advise customers of just that.

"Entergy’s Louisiana utilities are encouraging customers to prepare for cold weather and increased energy usage as portions of Louisiana could see low or freezing temperatures into the weekend and next week," said the statement in part.

Entergy also advised that heat usage can be up to 50 percent of a customer's bill during cold weather. The utility company advises people to set their thermostat lower, look for leaks and to reverse ceiling fans to push warm air down.  

Again, the problem is, "y'all use too much power." So turn down your thermostat and stop asking for "market sensitive business information" about whether or not that nuclear plant you are paying for is broken again. It's really not your place to know more than that.

Shooting stars burn bright but...

In a different universe tonight would have been the night when we kick off parade season's heavy hitters with the famous "self-proclaimed superkrewe" we all hated to love. On the one hand, Nyx had become the one parade that every New Orleans resident who wasn't actually riding in the parade knew 10 to 20 people who were.  On the other hand, it was led by a con-artist who everyone understood was taking advantage of those 10 to 20 people we all knew. Peruse our Nyx/ Julie Lea archives for a deeper dive into all of that, if you like.  

Certain things have happened over course of the past year, though. It's a long story but the upshot is we are not going to watch that parade tonight. We do, however, find ourselves treated to some measure of entertainment.

Julie Lea, the captain of the Mystic Krewe of Nyx, and the all-female Nyx organization were sued in Orleans Parish Civil District Court on Wednesday on behalf of former riders in a potential class action that could allow for 3,000-plus ex-members to collect $10,000 each in damages.

The suit, filed in Division G of the Orleans Parish Civil District Court, is a grocery list of accusations against Lea, including allegations of inappropriate use of krewe income, of forcing members to buy supplies exclusively from her husband, of refusing to refund dues from resigning members and of the filing of false public documents.

The suit describes Lea’s alleged pattern of personal profit-taking as “racketeering.”

Here is an absolutely perfect Twitter thread by @FQMule from earlier this week that practically everyone had to fav and share. It gets at the heart of the ritual that so many of us are missing this year.  It talks about the process of cathartic healing and renewal of community that comes at this time. Here's a quick bit from it.

New Orleans has a reputation for being a community, for helping each other in our times of need. It is a well deserved reputation. During this pandemic, New Orleanians have surpassed themselves on giving back and making sure people are taken care of. Why are we different? Well, there is a tie made by shared culture. But Mardi Gras also deserves credit. You see, when we gather for parades, we stand shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors. We may only see them 2 weeks out of the year but they are friends. We share food and laughs and catch up.

I will add one more point. We gather in the streets to see our friends, our neighbors, visitors. But, just as crucially, we see quite a few people we probably don't get along with very much as well. And they, like us, are also at their most.. well.. themselves that they can be. The whole city is there performing a public pageant of itself.  Our floats and costumes convey silliness, joy, imagination, but also frequently they delve into satire placing all of the accumulated angst and absurdity of another year in this strange place on display for us to confront... even if only to laugh at. The exercise allows us to grapple with the most carnivalesque versions of ourselves, our city and all of its problems. We don't solve anything by it. But by immersing ourselves in it we renew our bond with this community and prepare to go through another year with its frustrations and its rewards. 

Anyway tonight is the part of that weeklong ritual when we would have been watching Julie Lea lead a parade of many of our dear friends who we all knew she was ripping off.  Instead we're.. not doing that. But thanks to a lawsuit cleverly timed for filing today, we do get to feel those feelings a little bit. It's nice, kind of. 

Despite its ginormous size, Nyx never really grew into the grand spectacle worthy of that membership. That, in itself, was a sign that something was amiss.  There were a few signature floats like the purse in the photo above. But, mostly, it was a long string of big box double decker floats full of tightly packed riders. The theme was never anything clever. I mean, it was a perfectly cromulent parade by most standards. People always had fun, the krewe members were proud of what they were doing and they did always throw a lot.  But the "superkrewe" status was never what Lea claimed.  It seemed like she was promising everyone something more than she offered. 

At least Lea has made up for some of that now with this year's spectacular crash and burn.  Or, as Doug MacCash puts it in this article,

"Founded in 2011, Carnivals’ most meteoric krewe has since been in disarray."

The most meteoric of meteors has come crashing to Earth. It's not quite the show we wanted but it certainly has been a show. Hopefully some good things come of it in the future.

Seperate but equal grifting

Imagine your critique of the New Orleans Public Schools is that our balkanized model dependent on private fundraising through shady non-profits results in systemic racial inequity.

The campaign seeks in part to bring attention to a report, "Black Brilliance: Field Notes on Black Education in New Orleans," that spans topics ranging from the history of New Orleans public schools to systemic racism, which authors say is perpetuated in the charter school system.

This is all correct, by the way. So, pretty good so far.  The charterization con has not only deliberately established a school system segregated by race and class. It also just as deliberately ripped the heart out of the city's pre-Katrina Black middle class through the mass firing of teachers. The legacy of this is also acknowledged by the group in this article. 

Black educators make up 53% of the teacher workforce in NOLA Public Schools, down significantly from the 71% proportion in place prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a study by another nonprofit, New Schools for New Orleans, found. African American students comprise nearly 80% of the system's enrollment, according to the Louisiana Department of Education.

So the problem is pretty clear.  New Orleans's post-Katrina educational landscape is unfair, elitist, and racist because it is controlled by undemocratic private "philanthropy" networks.  If you are someone who has correctly identified this problem, then why is your proposed solution just to create a different undemocratic private philanthropy network? 

The report concluded that more resources should go to Black-governed and Black-led schools, and more CEO, principal or other leadership roles should be filled by Black men and women. It demands district and school leaders address a "standardization of whiteness" in curricula and hiring and promotion practices, and asks for an audit of charter school grants and other funding to ensure more equity.

"The truth of the matter is no school here in New Orleans is doing an excellent job educating children off MFP alone -- it’s just not enough money," Adrinda Kelly, the executive director of BE NOLA, said about the state's per-pupil funding system.

New Orleans is a unique district because it gives a lot of autonomy to the individual charters, which have their own leadership structures, are in charge of their own curricula, and have the ability to collect grants and fundraise to bolster budgets outside of the per-pupil funding received from the state and local tax dollars.

The MFP is not enough. In other words, Louisiana's political leaders have deliberately left the schools underfunded and therefore open to predation by the non-profit industrial complex.  A truly equitable and democratic response to that would be to fix that problem in particular and demand the universal public education that every child in the state is entitled to.  Instead, these individuals have decided to just go off and create their own separate privatized model.  That's no way to deliver a just and equitable school system. But, really, is that so important as long as we have a few "Black-led" charter organizations to point to in consolation?  The corporate sponsors seem to think so.