Environmental Task Force for the LRA
What's that?

Yesterday was the inaugural meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure and Environmental Joint Task Force of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Try saying that three times quickly...

Originally these were two separate task forces, but in an attempt to cut down on the number of meetings everyone had to attend they have become one. I was there mainly to figure out the focus of the Environmental Task Force and how the process will work.

The Environmental Task Forces plans to focus on these general areas: rebuilding of wastewater treatment facilities; debris management; disposal of hazardous waste; energy conservation; habitat and wildlife protection; and rebuilding fishing infrastructure.

This is the good part. These are definitely areas that need to be addressed and are necessary for rebuilding a better, cleaner Louisiana. And there even some discussions about trying to make things better than before. For example, many of the wastewater treatment facillities that were damaged or destroyed had been out of EPA compliance for quite awhile. And now we have the chance to rebuild them so that they will be able to handle our wastewater without discharging untreated sewage or runoff into our waterways.

The bad part is that the work is just starting and right now it appears that only the state agencies are involved. Unfortunately, if our state agencies had the resources and will to do all these great things before, we wouldn't need to be doing it now. The other problem is that the system that is set up to create Louisiana's grand rebuilding plan requires ideas to move up through two levels of committees before they reach the LRA board (see below for an explanation of this process).

And, while there were many discussions about ensuring that these task forces don't get caught up in parochial issues and keep their eyes on the big picture, the one vote that was taken was in support of a pilot project that one particular task force member wanted to do.

The task force agreed to adopt a resolution that would encourage expeditious state and federal permitting and encourge funding when needed to allow for the experimental use of hurricane generated natural waste in coastal restoration and protection projects.

Never mind that no one seemed to know if there were permits needed for this and that no one knew if there was science supporting the experimental project, they voted on it because a task force member wanted them to. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for using as much clean debris (i.e. marsh grass or trees) as possible for restoration projects, but expediting permits has never served us well. If we don't take the time to figure out what the impacts both intended and unintended will be and how we might minimize them, we end up causing more problems than we solve. And, now they have one random resolution that has nothing to do with the problems they were created to solve.

Let's hope that they get serious during their next meeting, tentatively scheduled for Januray 10, 2006, and start creating plans to deal with the problems they are supposed to solve.

Here's the crash course in how this process is supposed to work:

The Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) was created by the Governor to develop the plans for rebuilding Louisiana post-Katrina and Rita, to bring that vision to the federal gov't to get funding and to direct funds sent to Louisiana for our rebuilding. The Governor appointed all 26 members of this board.

Because there are a million different issues that need to be addressed and more work than the 26 board members (who all have other paying jobs to do, houses to rebuild and businesses to reopen) can do, they created different Task Forces to develop the proposals for the specific issues that need to be addressed.

And since the Task Forces have been given giant areas to cover, they are creating Action Teams which include the necessary state agencies involved with the particular issues, stakeholders, experts and anyone else that the leader thinks should be involved. And, it appears that this is the level where the real work will be done. Right now the action teams that do exist seem to be assessing the damage, finding out what people want done, trying to come up with a plan to fix the problems and figuring out how much money is needed.

Briana Kerstein is the GRN's Director of Organizational Development