Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Five weeks after they started, Folse and his father started to rebuild. Tired of driving back and forth across the bridge to their temporary perch in the West Bank, Folse, who was fifty-three, camped out in a bedroom on the second floor, though technically he was in violation of the mayor’s look-and-leave policy. “The first thing we did was put in a hot-water heater so I could wash up,” Folse said. Let some blue-ribbon commission tell them Lakeview should revert to swampland. By the time the mayor’s commission would get around to making any grand pronouncements, Folse, Osborne, and other like-minded pioneers scattered around the flooded zone would have invested tens of thousands of dollars in their homes. Declaring any part of the city off-limits to redevelopment would mean destroying homes for a second time.

  FREDDY YODER DIDN’T PLAN on giving a speech at the big rally some of his Lakeview neighbors had organized near the breach in the Seventeenth Street Canal. But even the elected officials who spoke that day weren’t providing answers. “People were desperate for information,” Yoder said. “They were desperate for some semblance of hope. And they were getting neither from their government.” Would people need a city permit to start gutting their houses? The answer was no, but the question elicited an ambiguous response. Whose job was it to cart away the ruined insides of their homes? Yoder knew the Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for the cleanup, but the person posing the question was told, “I don’t know.” So in front of a crowd he estimated at five hundred people, Yoder stood up to share what he knew.

  Yoder was president of Durr Heavy Construction, one of the largest construction companies in the New Orleans metro area. His firm laid the sewer and drainage lines in the city’s public housing projects; they installed water and electrical systems in buildings throughout the region. In the aftermath of Katrina, no one needed Yoder for the kind of underground systems that were Durr’s specialty, but his firm owned trucks and other heavy equipment. A call from Phillips & Jordan, one of the big multinationals hired by the federal government to help with the cleanup, proved a double payday for Yoder, a past president of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association and still a member of the organization’s board. “I was hired to do all of the storm-recovery work in Lakeview,” Yoder said. “Helped with the dewatering, pushed aside debris, removed vegetation, picked up debris, hauled it to the landfill.”

  Yoder is heavyset with sleepy eyes and a matter-of-fact attitude even toward the eight feet of water that covered his neighborhood for weeks. “To me Katrina was just something you’d have to get past,” he said. At the rally, he answered people’s questions, but more important, he reminded the community that it had the resources, the pull, and the drive to survive. “Don’t let anyone tell you Lakeview isn’t coming back,” he told his neighbors. “We’re coming back and stronger than ever.”

  A WEEK AFTER THE city’s finance director laid out the grim news for the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Nagin held a press conference to announce he was laying off half the city’s workforce—nearly three thousand people. Each of the laid-off employees would receive three months’ pay, dating back to the day of the storm. “We’ve talked to local banks and other financial institutions, and we are just not able to put together the financing necessary to continue to maintain our City Hall staffing at its current levels,” the mayor told reporters. Most of those laid off were clerical and support staff, so the city was cutting closer to one-third its personnel expenses rather than half. One exception was the Planning Department. At a time the city seemed desperate for experienced planners, the mayor shrank that department from thirty-six to eight.

  All seven-thousand-plus employees of the Orleans Parish schools were placed on what the district called “disaster leave without pay” and then laid off en masse. That meant more than ten thousand public employees, a large portion of them black, were out of jobs at the same time most were also without a home. Layoff notices had been sent to people’s pre-Katrina addresses and directed teachers seeking an appeal to show up at an office that had been closed since the flood. Teachers had contracts and most were tenured, yet the authorities maintained no recall list. Teachers were free to apply for a job when new schools reopened, but no one would be guaranteed a position, no matter what his or her seniority. A lawsuit filed by teachers would drag through the courts for years.

  The city looked to Baton Rouge for help, but it was New Orleans’s further misfortune to need the state when officials were reeling not just from Katrina but also Rita. The twin strikes meant disaster zones in both the southeast and southwest corners of the state that flooded a combined 125,000 homes. New Orleans would need to share whatever money the feds disbursed through the state with more than a dozen other parishes. Workers who had lost a job because of Rita or relocated to someplace outside the state meant tens of millions more in lost state income tax. Fewer cash registers operating in the southwest corner of the state meant millions more in missing sales tax money. Greg Albrecht, the chief economist for the state’s Legislative Fiscal Office, calculated that the two storms added up to nearly $1 billion in lost revenue.

  Citing a state statute that dictated that a governor must keep her budget in balance, Blanco, at the start of October, summoned legislators to Baton Rouge for an emergency legislative session. Then even before they arrived, she announced more than $400 million in unilateral cuts, including the entire budget of New Orleans’s Charity Hospital. Charity had suffered relatively minor damage, but keeping the hospital closed saved the state tens of millions of dollars. “Charity’s patients aren’t in the city,” Blanco rationalized. “They’re in Houston or Philadelphia.” Blanco proposed that the state cover the remaining $600 million deficit by dipping into its reserves and issuing bonds.

  The emergency session proved another blow to a governor whose approval rating had already fallen from a pre-storm 55 percent to 38 percent. Blanco took flak from Republicans, who charged that she didn’t go far enough in making cuts, but her left flank was what worried aides. The governor had good relations with the legislature’s black caucus, but several days into the two-week special session, they sued, charging Blanco with breaking the law when she slashed the state budget without legislative approval. “In this tragic time, we can’t balance the budget on the backs of poor people and the backs of the very people displaced,” said Representative Cedric Richmond, who represented parts of New Orleans in the state legislature. No one questioned the governor’s claim that Charity’s patients were living elsewhere, but members of the black caucus and others argued many couldn’t come home without a hospital for the working poor and others without insurance. Charity would remain closed while their suit worked its way through the courts.

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

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

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

  Whose plan would the president use?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  12

  SHRINK THE FOOTPRINT

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

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