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.

You can build it back better later

The Governor's budget proposal is due out this week. It looks like they are going to plan for cuts now that they expect to undo once the stimulus comes in. 

Jay Dardenne, the commissioner of administration for Gov. John Bel Edwards, plans to kick off the negotiations on February 26 by presenting a budget proposal to the Legislature that includes spending cuts based on current revenue projections.

But the potential for more federal aid is on the horizon. President Joe Biden’s push for a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which would be the third federal aid bill since the pandemic started, could ease the state’s losses, and put Louisiana in a stronger position for fiscal 2022, which starts July 1.

“It's anticipated that we get a federal stimulus. If that's the case, then we'll be in better shape,” said state Rep. Jerome Zeringue, R-Houma, the chairman of House Appropriations Committee. “Because the economy is in such bad shape right now, we’re hoping we'll have a similar situation to what we had last fiscal year, and we won't know that until the federal stimulus package comes in. We're anticipating it, but there's no guarantee until it comes. That's kind of what we need and are depending upon to continue to get us through this crisis.”

A month ago, the Revenue Estimating Conference deliberately chose a more conservative projection than was really necessary, not only because they didn't know the size of the stimulus, but also because they chose to lowball projected tax collections.  So there should be ample opportunity to add back later whatever cuts show up in the proposal now.

Of course, the last time this legislature had to figure out what to do with federal stimulus funds, they carved out $300 million for John Schroder to dispense on his own.  So we'll have to see what they come up with this time.

 

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.