McCain's False FEMA Promise

While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government's response to the Katrina disaster "terrible and disgraceful" and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: "Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse." McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn't even locate its own assets or people.

But it's the belief system that the private sector inherently does things better than government that impelled Bush's first FEMA head, Joseph Allbaugh, to dismantle the agency, notwithstanding its greatly improved performance in the 1990s, by farming out many of its activities to purportedly more efficient contractors.

Allbaugh, acting on the right-wing's hostility toward civil servants, politicized its top leadership with like-minded ideologues to bypass much more qualified and experienced personnel who had demonstrated their effectiveness in the 1990s. He cut programs, like the Project Impact disaster mitigation initiative, even though it had been widely considered to be cost-effective. And he told the states that they would have to bear a greater share of the responsibility for responding to disasters. That's the right-wing approach to government management, applied to virtually every domestic agency throughout the Bush years: politicize, privatize, devolve, and cut.

John McCain's comments give every indication that he would follow the same approach, which isn't surprising since conservatives have little else to say about government other than that the private sector is inherently better. In the Senate, he consistently voted against more funds for FEMA, against making it an independent agency as it had been in the 1990s, and even against the creation of a commission to investigate how the government failed after Katrina. That indifference to learning from experience and adjusting accordingly is a central characteristic of movement conservatism. No matter how many times, say, tax cuts for the rich have failed to provide promised broad economic benefits while exploding federal deficits, it remains a central element of the right-wing --and McCain's--platform. The same rigidity applies to neoconservative arguments about foreign policy, regardless of its self-evident failures.

At the very least, anyone who generally cared about preventing a repeat of FEMA's Katrina failures would want to start by looking at how it improved in the 1990s. Simply restating the right-wing incantations about government's inferiority is sure to cause nothing more than the same failures that conservatism produced in this decade.

BAKER, La. — It was not long after Hurricane Katrina, in late 2005, that local governments all over Louisiana started saying no to clusters of the tinny white shelters now known, infamously, as FEMA trailers.

They did not ban all the trailers, of course; just the ones for people who did not own land, who had no place else to go, who were mainly poor and black and from New Orleans’s toughest neighborhoods. Just the trailers for the hurricane’s most desperate victims.

But when everyone else said no, Harold M. Rideau, the mayor of this small city outside Baton Rouge, said yes.

“We agreed we’d do what’s right,” Mr. Rideau said recently. “It was a no-brainer as far as I was concerned.” Of course, it was not as simple as that.

But in large part because of the mayor, this city — nestled rather uneasily between farm country and the state capital — became home to Renaissance Village. With almost 600 trailers lined up like big tombstones, it was by far the largest encampment for hurricane victims run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now, almost three years after the storm that left New Orleans under water, the trailer park is closing. FEMA’s deadline is May 31. The number of trailers in the “village” is dwindling, to fewer than 200. White pipes mark trailer sites, but more than half of the pipes just poke up out of the weeds, with only muddy tire tracks or old Mardi Gras beads to show that anyone lived there.

As the remaining residents worry about where they will go next, the mayor took time before a recent Rotary Club lunch to talk about the lessons he had learned and how he had become a champion for people who sometimes seemed to get a kinder welcome in Houston than they did in their home state.

The biggest lesson from Baker’s experience may be how few of the predicted problems actually materialized, which Mr. Rideau attributes to lots of planning. Early on, he came up with a long list of things that he felt the trailer community would need, including laundry facilities and legal services.

Some of them he got, like bus service to and from town, job training and a shaded picnic area. But telephones were never installed, and he could never persuade anyone to open a small store so residents would have an easier time buying necessities like milk.

There were struggles, he said, to get the federal government to reimburse the city for its costs, to get post office boxes installed at the trailer park, to ease traffic jams in town, to get the dusty gravel roads around the park paved, and — oddly — to find a home for a new playground donated by the Baton Rouge Rotary Club and Rosie O’Donnell’s For All Kids Foundation. The state and federal governments did not want the liability, Mr. Rideau said, so the playground was installed in a park next to the municipal building, one of the few tangible changes that will remain in Baker after the trailer park closes.

Baker’s City Hall and its churches opened shelters before Hurricane Katrina hit, “with no thought that New Orleans would flood,” Mr. Rideau said. More than 2,000 evacuees poured into a city with a population of less than 14,000; about 500 children enrolled in Baker’s already struggling schools, he said.

He had expected to house people for two days; they stayed in the shelters for two months.
Traffic jammed the city’s streets, grocery stores were packed, lines at Wal-Mart seemed endless. Residents remember a lot of tension between the 504s (people with New Orleans area codes) and the 225s (those with Baker-Baton Rouge area codes).

Meanwhile, the mayor had been approached by a federal contractor about building a trailer park on state-owned property just outside the city limits. The city was asked to provide water and fire protection.

Not everyone in Baker was welcoming; there was a lot of worry about crime, the mayor recalled. Race may have played a role; Mr. Rideau, who is black, said that he was first elected in 2004 in part because of his vow to heal the racial divide in Baker, which before the storm was split almost evenly between whites and blacks.

But the mayor, a Vietnam veteran and graduate of Southern University at Baton Rouge who had retired after working for decades at the Exxon Mobil chemical plant here, said he felt compelled to help evacuees the way he had been helped when he was growing up poor in Bunkie, La.

“I’m going to die, I’m going to have to stand before the good lord and account for what I’ve done,” the mayor said. Besides, the evacuees “had nowhere to go — what are you going to do?”

Nobody who has visited the camp, much less lived in it, thinks it was an ideal place for evacuees, especially after it turned out that many trailers were tainted by formaldehyde fumes. But many people who have worked there credit the mayor with making it a more humane place than it otherwise would have been.

“I’m his biggest fan,” said Sister Judith Brun, executive director of the Community Initiatives Foundation.

Wilbert L. Ross Sr., a member of the residents’ council at the trailer park, said the mayor had intervened in crises, like when water was shut off to some trailers on the Fourth of July. Mr. Rideau also helped with some nagging problems, Mr. Ross said, like telling the police to back off when residents were getting tickets for trespassing or jaywalking because there were no sidewalks on which to walk to town.

In fact, Mr. Ross said, “I really care more about the mayor of Baker than I do about Ray Nagin,” the mayor of New Orleans.

For his part, Mayor Rideau said he thought that the federal government should have done more to rebuild housing in New Orleans, and more to help poor residents of the trailer park move on with their lives. But in general, he said, “I have no regrets.”

Neither, apparently, do most of his constituents; in February, Mr. Rideau was re-elected, by a margin of two to one.

It's official: Hurricane Katrina chased out a huge chunk of N.O. voters, remaking the region's electoral landscape

A new study by a political scientist confirms what election-watchers have suspected since Hurricane Katrina: The number of voters in the New Orleans area has fallen sharply, with African-Americans and registered Democrats losing the most ground.

The political landscape has shifted, especially in New Orleans.

Though voter rolls have remained virtually untouched since the flood, the comparison of voter turnout in the 2003 and 2007 gubernatorial contests shows that about 100,000 fewer people cast ballots last year in New Orleans and seven surrounding parishes than in the 2003 race.

Losses weren't borne equally by racial and party-affiliated groups, according to the analysis by University of New Orleans political scientist Ed Chervenak. For instance, a disproportionate loss among black voters across the region helped drive up white voters' share of the electorate, from two-thirds in 2003 to nearly three-quarterslast year.

Democrats also lost ground, with their participation sliding from 58 percent of the electorate in 2003 to 51 percent in 2007, the report shows. Republicans, meanwhile, saw their share of the voting population jump from 28 percent to 33 percent during the period.

With the number of voters across the rest of the state staying about even during the four-year span, the drop in turnout in the New Orleans area suggests the region has lost political clout since the 2005 storm, Chervenak writes in the report.

"The city's political voice was weaker in the last gubernatorial contest as voters here comprised only 6 percent of the state's overall electorate," compared with an average of 10 percent in the previous six races for governor, according to the report.

The study also offers a far clearer picture of how the voting population has shifted within city limits.

Reflecting patterns of damage from Katrina, turnout across Gentilly, eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward dropped nearly 60 percent from 2003 to 2007, while turnout across the rest of the city dipped between 27 percent and 36 percent, depending on the neighborhood, the study concluded.

Reshuffling the deck

After reviewing the report, Silas Lee, a local pollster and political strategist, said that although it's impossible to know how New Orleans' repopulation will affect future elections, the UNO study portends new dynamics in regional and statewide races.

"Anytime you lose 100,000 voters, it impacts influence," Lee said. "New Orleans will still be significant. However, you have somewhat of a different political ideology than you had pre-Katrina -- different kinds of voters with respect to social and economic and demographic status and political affiliation."

Christine Day, chairwoman of UNO's political science department, said the report offers a glimpse into how the region's politics might change after the 2010 U.S. census.

"It has really important implications for the redrawing of districts -- congressional districts and all the way down," she said. "Presumably, when districts are redrawn, Orleans Parish could lose clout. That said, the suburban areas probably will gain some clout, especially Jefferson and St. Tammany."

Unlike previous analyses of voter turnout, which generally have relied on precinct estimates to gauge participation based on race and party affiliation, the UNO study uses hard numbers compiled by the secretary of state. Records of who showed up to vote are matched with information provided in voter registration documents; which candidate each voter chose remains a secret.

Chervenak reviewed voter turnout data from 2003 and 2007 for eight parishes in the New Orleans area: Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany and Tangipahoa.

The decline of more than 100,000 voters between the two elections represented a 23 percent drop across the region.

Not surprisingly, change figures varied widely by parish.

Faring best was St. Tammany, where 3 percent more voters turned out last year than in 2003, a bump that likely owes to the migration of residents from more flood-ravaged parishes. All other parishes saw drops in voter participation, ranging from a 2 percent dip in St. Charles to a 53 percent plummet in St. Bernard.

'More racially balanced'

In hard numbers, Orleans Parish showed the largest decline, with 60,000 fewer voters heading to the polls. That loss, Chervenak writes, accounted for most of the region's decline.

Across the eight parishes, the number of black voters dropped 41 percent between the 2003 and 2007 gubernatorial races, while the number of white voters dropped just 15 percent, the report states.

The analysis suggests there has been a sharp change in the racial composition of the region, particularly in Orleans Parish. In City Council districts B and C, a black majority in the electorate slipped away, and the districts are now almost evenly divided by race.

The city now has a more racially balanced electorate," Chervenak writes. "The days when local candidates could appeal to Orleans' overwhelmingly black electorate and receive a handful of white votes to win office may be a thing of the past."

He acknowledges that the analysis excludes children and teenagers who are too young to vote. But the "precise nature of the data makes it a robust measure of the population decline," he writes.

However, Allison Plyer, deputy director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, cautioned against using the numbers to estimate population shifts across the region. With many variables affecting whether voters go to the polls, the measure can be wildly uncertain, she said.

"You can imagine that media spending and/or enthusiasm would differ greatly among certain populations," Plyer said. "It could be raining that day. Literally, weather on the day of the election could have an effect on turnout."

Panel questions law as solution to homeless colony

Councilwoman Shelley Midura on Monday summarized why Mayor Ray Nagin's administration wanted a new public habitation law to move vagrants to a bunkhouse at the New Orleans Mission.

"What you're saying is that we need a way to round them up and get them into the bunk beds. Is that a fair statement?" Midura asked Anthony Faciane, deputy director of neighborhood stabilization for the city's Office of Recovery Development and Administration.

That was fair, he told the council's Housing and Human Needs Committee.

But more than a month after city officials announced an initiative to enact a new law, which outlaws people living in public spaces and replaces one declared unconstitutional more than 20 years ago, the homeless compound under the elevated section of Interstate 10 remains entrenched.

"Is it legal? Has it worked?" Midura asked.

"Has the method worked anywhere?" Councilman James Carter asked.

When told by Faciane that the city couldn't yet afford to house and provide social services to Claiborne Avenue denizens, Carter responded, "So, the ordinance is premature?"

The meeting was punctuated with expressions of impatience about the visible homeless colony, a collection of people and bedrolls just off Canal Street. "What button needs to be pushed -- what needs to happen?" Midura asked Faciane.

Discussion about the public-habitation ordinance gave way to its underlying motive: making the Claiborne Avenue tent city disappear.

In the end, Faciane and Martha Kegel, head of the homeless-services collaborative UNITY of Greater New Orleans, agreed: The colony's days are numbered. Within three months, it'll be gone, said Kegel, who said state funds expected within the next few weeks will help move many of the homeless from under the bridge into government-subsidized apartments.

Moving many of the homeless awaited completion of a city-financed renovation of the dayroom at the New Orleans Mission, Faciane said. Finished Monday, it transformed the shelter from nights-only to a round-the-clock operation. Next week, the mission also will open a family center, for women with children, he said.

What the mission calls its "bunkhouse," an air-conditioned, heated Quonset-style tent erected at the back of its property, can hold 140 men. About 100 more men can sleep on the mission's second floor, but only if the shelter hires a "firewatch," because of its building's current fire hazards. Women stay in a separate house, which has space for eight more, said Ron Gonzales, the shelter's director.

But the Nagin administration insists that the proposed ordinance is intimately connected to the fate of Claiborne Avenue's tent city.

"The public-habitation ordinance is a critical tool that will greatly enhance our ability to address issues of homelessness in New Orleans .¤.¤. such as what is occurring near the intersection of Claiborne Avenue and Canal Street," Nagin said in a statement released during the committee meeting.

In February, Nagin announced a plan to move the camp to the mission. New Orleans would begin enforcing its "habitation laws," he told WWL-TV. "We have beds for these folks and they just don't want to take them. ... So we're going to try to push the issue, if you will," he said.

But in 1986, a federal judge found the city's public-habitation ordinance unconstitutional. It was stricken from municipal code six years ago.

As drafted, this ordinance is different, in several ways. The newly proposed law mandates that no one will be arrested for inhabiting public spaces if all local shelter beds are filled. Neither Faciane nor the city attorney's office lawyers could provide detail about ordinance-described "safe" zones: public places to sleep lawfully on public property.

Still, a long line of citizens spoke against the ordinance. Offering shelter beds in lieu of arrests won't work for those suffering from mental illness, who typically cannot tolerate the crowded, noisy conditions in a shelter, said Kathleen North, a social worker who works with the homeless. "To many mentally ill people, saying, 'You have to go to a shelter,' is like saying to someone in a wheelchair, 'You have to go up those stairs.' "

Scandalized HUD Chief Got Royal Send Off

How do you say goodbye to a HUD chief who ineptly presided over the worst national housing crisis in recent memory, who made HUD a byword for cronyism, and who resigned under the cloud of a federal criminal investigation?

Last Wednesday, Alphonso Jackson got the send off he deserved, as you can see from the cover of the program for the event obtained by TPMmuckraker. The event, which was held in the main auditorium at HUD, included an overflow crowd of about 1,000 HUD employees, said HUD spokesman Jerry Brown. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was the special guest speaker at the event, Brown said.

Despite the regal appearance of the program, Brown said that the event mainly involved "a slide show and a person who sang the national anthem." It was "pretty much the standard fare when a secretary departs." You can bet that the slide show contained plenty of pictures of Jackson -- and maybe even a painting or two.

You can see the full program here.