Posts In 2/2011
By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
The City of New Orleans could pay millions of dollars in coming months to buy new recycling carts for residents, judging from a bid request issued by the city as part of a deal with the city's trash haulers to add that service by May 2.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration did not answer a host of question on the matter, including why this expense was not disclosed sooner or a ballpark expectation for the cost. Late Monday, the administration said it will tap the city’s capital budget to pay for the carts.…
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By Mark Moseley, The Lens opinion writer |
When The National Oil Spill Commission's Final Report was released last month, Commission Co-Chair William Reilly summarized the findings, saying:
Our investigation shows that a series of specific and preventable human and engineering failures were the immediate causes of the Deepwater Horizon fire. But, in fact, this disaster was almost the inevitable result of years of industry and government complacency and lack of attention to safety.
That said, this month the commission released an addendum document called Chief Counsel's Report. It contends that the Macondo blowout and spill were “not inevitable” at all.…
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By C.W. Cannon, The Lens contributing opinion writer |
As we trudge into the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Confederacy, we can take heart that commemorations of the four-year fight to preserve slavery are paltry—especially when compared with the centennial in 1961. The cult-like adoration of all things Confederate seems to have dwindled to “a niche issue.” So notes Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Fausset in coverage of preparations for Montgomery, Alabama's recent salute to Confederate President Jeff Davis. Even Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has distanced himself from pressure to issue a license plate honoring the founder of the Ku Klux…
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By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
Jonas Johnson has a vision for Gert Town's Zion City neighborhood.
Seeking city permission to continue using a vacant lot as a helicopter pad, Johnson on Thursday said he would like to reinvigorate the area by creating an “aviation school” for underserved children. That would mean expanding operations from the vacant lot, in the 4200 block of Clio Street, to a nearby warehouse, a run-down building Johnson hopes to convert to classrooms.
A joint report Wednesday by The Lens in partnership with FOX8 News disclosed that use of the property as a…
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By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |
The accidents unfold with eerie similarity: an unexpected explosion, a stubborn blaze, workers coughing and rubbing damaged eyes, a thick, ash-colored cloud of toxins racing away from the burning refinery.
On July 19, 2009, when a refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, lit up, a worker was critically hurt and the fire burned for two days. On Nov. 24, 1987, an explosion at an ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, Calif., shot a fireball 1,500 feet into the air, blasted the windows out of nearby houses and generated allegations of broken eardrums, back pain and…
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Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
David Johnson's reaction to a helicopter landing in his neighborhood was a mixture of profanity and incredulity.
“My first reaction was, get the h…, get outta here! … Unbelievable!”
A Gert Town resident his whole life, Johnson dwells next door to an increasingly
A wind sock marks the site of a helicopter landing pad in a Gert Town block that is zoned for residential use.
vacant lot that takes up the 4200 block of Clio Street almost in its entirety. Houses once stood there, but over the years the properties had been bought…
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By Matt Davis, The Lens staff writer |
Operations of the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Department have long been shrouded in secrecy. For decades, even City Council members were rebuffed in efforts to pry line-by-line financial information from former Sheriff Charles Foti.
Now in response to a public records request filed six months ago by The Lens, Sheriff Marlin Gusman has provided the most detailed disclosure yet about the department's revenues and expenditures – from pension liabilities to bulk purchases of mattresses and hamburger patties.
Gusman discusses his 2011 budget with the City Council
The accounting also reveals amounts paid to…
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By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
City officials this week delayed for a month a decision on whether Rock ‘n' Bowl's owner can demolish two nearby homes he recently bought.
The Neighborhood Conservation District Committee told owner John Blancher to spend the time talking to the area's neighborhood organization.
Jenel Hazlett, president of Northwest Carrollton Civic Association, expressed concerns at the meeting about losing historic housing stock, and over the number of vacant residential lots Blancher has purchased adjacent to the site. Hazlett is asking for a “comprehensive plan.”
In asking for the demolitions, Blancher said that the…
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By Brad Vogel, The Lens contributing opinion writer |
Even if New Orleans wanted to destroy so rich an architectural heritage, it could not bulldoze all the blighted buildings within city limits. We simply don't have the money, as Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center made clear at a recent BlightStat meeting.
A city whose population has shrunk from 627,525 in 1960 to today's 343,829 has a staggering surplus of properties, and roughly one in four residential addresses is blighted or vacant. Some characterize this as a problem of excessive supply. But any hope for a solution…
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By Mark Moseley, The Lens opinion writer |
True odds are often misstated. Proctologists understand this fact well, since so many of their patients, at least on Seinfeld, explain their unfortunate predicaments in the same way: “It was a million to one shot, Doc. Million to one.”
So, if a “million to one” means little in a proctologist's examination room, would it be inappropriate to wonder how much “hundred to one” means in New Orleans? After all, that's what the city is receiving after the Federal Flood: levees and floodwalls certified to resist a so-called “hundred-year storm event,” which is…
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By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
To paraphrase the golden oldie: “Rock ‘n Bowl is Here to Stay” – the trendy bowling alley and live music venue, that is.
Not only has Rock ‘n Bowl survived its 2009 move to the corner of Carrollton and Earhart, it seems to be taking over the neighborhood, residents say.
Club owner John Blanchard has applied to demolish this house at 8125-27 Fig St., and a similar one next door.
On Monday, the Neighborhood Conservation District Committee will meet to discuss club owner John Blancher's ambition to tear down two of four…
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See related story from our partners at Fox8 News.
By Matt Davis, The Lens staff writer |
With a pricetag now in excess of $80 million, Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman has gone 50 percent over budget to build a kitchen, warehouse and power plant for his new jail complex, a facility with a capacity to feed four times as many inmates as can be housed in the pared down jail Gusman is being permitted to construct.
Gusman is on the hook for $17.8 million in optional extras, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency is refusing to pay because the…
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By Naomi Martin, The Lens contributing writer |
Louisiana politicians could use their control over the upcoming congressional redistricting process to keep themselves—and their parties—in power for the next decade, according to a new report by the Public Affairs Research Council, an independent non-profit based in Baton Rouge.
In the study, PAR repeats its 2009 recommendation that lawmakers establish an independent commission charged with redrawing district boundaries, rather than do it themselves. That avoids the “potential for conflicts of interest and political manipulation,” the study says. With the 2010 redistricting process already under way, the report urges citizen vigilance over…
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By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
The New Orleans landscape is dotted with signs boasting about “our recovery in progress,” an effort by former Mayor Ray Nagin's administration to tout his successes.
His successor is taking that idea even further, seeking proposals to spend tax dollars to photograph and videotape the recovery so the word can be spread far and wide.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration posted an advertisement yesterday for the work, which the specifications say should focus on the “100 committed projects, playgrounds, places of worship, healthcare facilities, new economic development projects, blight remediation and infrastructure improvements.”…
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Eli Ackerman & Alan Williams, The Lens contributing opinion writers |
The census numbers are in and they're troubling, but they suggest New Orleans' only strategy for full post-Katrina revitalization. We need to grow the city's population enormously and strategically.
New Orleans is now home to 343,829 of us, meaning that close to 100,000 people have not come back—whether by choice or constraint. No doubt tens of thousands of our former neighbors fall into each category, or some combination of the two.
The official numbers, long awaited, are an important marker in on-going public deliberation over our future. In the…
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By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |
In the nine months since Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration took over City Hall, long-delayed capital projects have made steady, if slow, progress. Even so, don't expect to see too many cranes in the sky just yet. More than half of 210 planned projects remain in pre-construction phases.
A breakdown of progress presented last week to the City Council by Landrieu's facility chief, Cedric Grant, shows 88 projects, or 42 percent, of the year's capital projects still in design or planning phases. Another 19, or 9 percent of the total, are in pre-construction…
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By Mark Moseley, The Lens opinion writer |
Recent events have only confirmed the fears I expressed in my first “Waiting for Superman” post. I warned about the dangers of linking educational reform efforts to the so-called “Superman” character, but nobody listened.
No one seems to care that Superman is, at root, a phony. His real name is Kal-El, and he's an illegal alien from another planet. Instead of assimilating into our culture, he has tried to co-opt and redefine it. Prancing around in his tights and cape, Superman meddles in our earthly affairs, and has to the gall to…
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By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |
Six weeks after eight young people were killed by a fire in the fallow 9th Ward warehouse where they were living, the city has not taken new substantive action to reduce vagrancy or shut down unsafe squats.
“We just don't have the manpower,” the city's newly appointed Director of Neighborhood Services and Facilities Stacy Horn-Koch said in an interview Thursday.
Horn-Koch's admission is a reminder of the steep challenge facing Mayor Mitch Landrieu as he attempts to make good on a promise to get people out of risky and illegal living situations.…
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By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |
Bobbi Rogers and Kevin Krause were deservedly proud of their camelback on Palmyra Street, near Galvez. Part of the influx of young professionals drawn to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the couple bought the place in 2007 and refurbished it in stride with neighbors engaged in one of the city's more vigorous community revivals. Ironically, top-to-bottom restoration of the house was made possible in part by a $45,000 state grant for historic preservation.
Today the house teeters absurdly atop five-foot concrete piers in the 3600 block of Second Street, a couple of…
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The Lens, a photo essay |
Five years after the Orleans Parish School Board shut down dozens of hurricane-damaged public schools, New Orleans residents continue to live alongside the wreckage, with no certainty when the blight will be eradicated. Before Katrina, the school board had 125 campuses with a total capacity of 110,000 students. By the time the storm hit, the number of students attending public school in the city had dwindled to 63,000. Now, the count is 40,000 with another 1,000 students projected to enter the system every year for the next decade, according to a demographic survey completed…
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By C.W. Cannon, The Lens contributing opinion writer|
The post-Katrina era in New Orleans has been marked by an oddly familiar mix of promise and disappointment, of rising above historic obstacles and of continuing an almost masochistic submission to them. The terms of the dialectic are continuity and change, and its fabric is skin color. Reconstruction and the post-Civil Rights Movement era are the two historic parallels.
In the two earlier moments, New Orleans came remarkably close to transcending a troubled history of racial oppression by giving integrated public schools a chance. In both instances, however, the achievement proved to…
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Jessica Williams, The Lens staff writer |
State higher education officials heard an initial report today from the consultant studying the possible merger of Southern University at New Orleans into the University of New Orleans, who took pains to point out the vast differences in the two institutions.
“When you think about SUNO and UNO, we are talking about very different backgrounds both academically and otherwise with the student bodies served,” said Dennis Jones, president of the Colorado-based National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.
Aims McGuinness, senior associate with the consulting group, later said that a “one size fits…
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By Mark Moseley, The Lens opinion writer |
Zachary Kopplin undertook an unusual “science project” for his senior year at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. He's defending science itself, by advocating for the repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act.
Kopplin rightly views the legislation as costumed creationism – ridiculous Trojan horse legislation that lets instructors teach scientific “controversies” where none exist. He understands that when pseudo-scientific “supplemental” materials are used to critique scientific theories (such as evolution or gravity), a false balance results: ungrounded speculations are placed on par with the overwhelming scientific consensus.
This is a profound disservice…
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By Beth Galante, The Lens contributing opinion writer |
New Orleans is working to reduce the energy consumption of our city's households, and city officials want your help to determine how interested homeowners are in a loan program to improve energy and water efficiency.
The Office of Environmental Affairs has received a $220,000 Recovery Act grant from the U.S. Energy Department that will be used in part to sponsor market research to guide the design of new incentive programs. One component of this research effort is the web-based nolaenergysurvey.com.
I strongly encourage all homeowners in New Orleans to take five…
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By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer
Which of these is the newest street name in the 70112 ZIP code?
Alost Street
Breedlove Street
Protection Street
Madame Tranchepain Street
Magic Street
Voltaire Street
Magic Street was chosen during a 2006 weeklong planning charrette held in October 2006. The charrette was part of the planning process for rebuilding the Lafitte public housing complex, and the name was chosen by a group of children from the development.
A recently posted sign marks the street, which runs through the redeveloped Lafitte between North Rocheblave and North Galvez streets.
The other names above came…
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By Matt Davis, The Lens staff writer |
The New Orleans City Council voted unanimously this afternoon in support of an ordinance granting permission for Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman to build a 1,438-bed jail.
Gusman will have to demolish most of his other jail facilities as soon as possible once the new facility is built. He'll also have 18 months to demolish a 400-bed temporary facility currently under construction.
Meanwhile a working group convened by Mayor Mitch Landrieu will continue to meet into April to decide how many state prisoners Gusman should house, what kind of re-entry program he…
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This map shows, by ZIP code, how many Section vouchers are in use across the city.
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |
Three months after The Lens reported that Section 8 units managed by the Housing Authority of New Orleans remain primarily clustered in the poor neighborhoods the program intends to deconcentrate, HANO has introduced a new system that officials believe will help solve the problem.
The new Housing Choice Connect system, designed for registered users only, is being touted by the authority as a means of encouraging Section 8 voucher holders to settle in higher-opportunity neighborhoods by…
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By Jed Horne, The Lens contributing opinion writer |
With Louisiana's David Vitter in faithful lockstep, U.S. Senate Republicans made good on their promise to put repeal of “Obamacare” to a vote and just as predictably have been defeated. The party-line vote came amid Democrats' accusations that the GOP had no alternative, no meaningful plan that even begins to address the nation's spiraling health care costs and dysfunctional approach to health insurance.
That doesn't mean the moment lacked opportunities for political theater. In the run-up to the vote, Vitter got a couple of minutes on Fox News with Greta Van…
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Story updated, One week after this story ran, the city cut the vendor a check.
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |
With her worn straw hat and tiny home office, 33-year-old landscape architect Abby Feldman is an unlikely benefactor for the city of New Orleans. Yet she has become essentially that over the past six months, running a program for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority without getting paid.
Feldman and her staff of two run NORA's Growing Home program, a $250,000-a-year initiative that helps New Orleans homeowners buy vacant lots from the agency and transform them into gardens.…
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By Mark Moseley, The Lens opinion writer |
I miss Ashley Morris in all sorts of ways, but oh lord do I miss his responses to outsiders who casually blamed New Orleanians and Gulf Coastal residents for being so… afflicted by calamity. Morris popularized a special term for these nimrods, which immediately came to mind when I read a stunning example of heartlessness at a blog on Slate.
Someone named “No Sympathy” asked “Prudie,” Slate's resident expert on manners and morals, the following question:
I recently caught my Sunday school class off-guard when Hurricane Katrina was brought up, AGAIN! (Sigh)…
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See related story from our partners at Fox8 News.
By Matt Davis, The Lens staff writer
Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman overruled his chief deputy three years ago to award a $23 million construction-management contract for his new jail complex to a company the deputy rated lower – one that did not meet the state requirement of being a licensed contractor when the bid was submitted, records show.
The contractor, Ozanne Construction Co., of Cleveland, Ohio, also became a generous contributor to Gusman's political campaign in the prolonged period between when it was selected and when its contract was eventually…
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By Chris O’Neill, The Lens contributing opinion writer |
Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas is undeniably a busy man. Reorganizing the New Orleans public school system after Katrina and all the years of pre-Katrina neglect is a Herculean task. There's so much to do, it leaves little time to pause and listen to suggestions, to remember to include every stakeholder in decision making, to consider all the creative options that might make the new schools better than the old ones. Yes, it is difficult to do all this, but that's not to say it shouldn't be done.
The RSD's…
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