Editorial: New Orleans Is Under Microscope Again

So much of what we see and want to believe these days is created by the use of schemes that function much like theatrical scrim. When seen in different light, the validity of the image (scheme) changes. New Orleans is like that. Many of us see what miscreants want us to see. Reality, however, can be dismaying.

Last week we learned that Karen Gadbois and her friend Sarah Lewis, who were not fooled by the “scrim,” drove throughout New Orleans to inspect renovation progress. They checked several hundred homes said to have been “remediated” and found few had been. Disgruntled by what she saw, Gadbois went home and blogged it. As a result, the FBI raided the agency running the federally financed program to gut and repair homes of the poor and elderly—homes that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina—a program on which the city of New Orleans has spent $1.8 million. A New York Times report says the program has been “exposed as—partly at least—a sham.”

As we said, scrim used in theaters is strategically lit so that the scenes appear one way when the lighting is in front of it, and another when the lights are behind it. Now the lights are directly on the scrim—or is it scam?

Mayor Ray Nagin, who ignored hundreds of available school buses, while thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims were scurrying to evacuate, was hauled (“grudgingly” is the way the Times put it) before City Council, where he finally acknowledged that there were “documentation issues” and “discrepancies” in the remediation program, which is run by the New Orleans Affordable Housing Corporation, known as NOAH.

The Times reports that investigations by other media that followed Gadbois’s lead “have documented business connections between the program’s former director Stacey Jackson and some of its contractors, one of whom was the mayor’s brother–in–law.” The Times wrote, “The problems appear to surpass the mayor’s descriptions….”

We have heard reports of investigative findings of WWL–TV and The Times Picayune, revealing that contractors bill the city for house–gutting work that was actually done by church volunteers, and “remediated” houses that were then demolished. The New Times reported that among the poor and elderly were those mystified when their names showed up on a list of those supposedly helped. Some of the homes on the list did not belong to the poor and elderly at all, but were actually owned by businessmen or landlords.

This, of course, is just another “stay tuned” report, but it is a mandate for us (and the federal government) to keep our eyes on the New Orleans stage. Many of the specific problems in the wake of Katrina resulted from a badly mismanaged levee–system program whose finances were frequently redirected to other projects.

The Waterways Journal encourages letters to the editor.
Have something on your mind?
Send letters to: jshoulberg@waterwaysjournal.net.
(Please indicate whether or not your letter is intended for publication.)