A few weeks ago, we queried a lot of people in town. We wanted to know who–or what group of people–was the brainchild behind the famous One Levee Board campaign. We knew that “Citizens for 1” led the campaign to get statewide support for the new levee board legislation, but who was the creator or creators? No one could answer our question.
We had a hunch, but today Clancy Dubos confirmed it in his blog post.
According to Clancy, the Greater New Orleans Business Council was the driver, and perhaps the brainchild, of the One Levee Board campaign. We checked the Business Council’s website. It says it “played a key role in the reorganization of levee board governance by championing the creation of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority“
We’re interested in this because the One Levee Board campaign took place long before the investigative studies were complete. It took place long before anyone fully understood why the Greater New Orleans flooded so badly. The campaign pulled attention away from the true culprits–the engineers and commanders at the Army Corps of Engineers–and focused attention on the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board which, to this day, has not been found guilty of wrong doing pertaining to the Flood.
But at the time, in 2006, we thought, well, this new paradigm of levee board governance “couldn’t hurt” and we supported it fully.
Now Clancy Dubos’s post appears to say the “reformers” were not truly interested in reform, but rather, that they were interested in controlling who served on the shiny new Levee Authorities.
You can see the whole post here.
Sandy,
At the time I too supported that reform. Though ‘taking the politics out of it and replacing the board with experts’ sounded all warm and fuzzy at the time, I came to realize that this replaced accountable officials (either elected or employed) with appointees who cannot be fired or voted out for poor performance. This turned out to be a very serious mistake. It has been said that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” It couldn’t apply any more than here. These appointees were accountable to no one. This power in their hands has led to all sorts of misdeeds by this board’s leadership and there is nothing that anyone could do to stop them. They have operated outside and above the law yet they can’t be fired and they cannot be voted out. It is concerning that the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board is yet another local board that is going down this dangerous path of replacing accountable people with appointees who are accountable to no one.