Signs of a Turning Tide

Wow. Reading today's paper was something akin to unwrapping an awesome Christmas present, getting handed a coconut at Zulu, watching Entergy hook up the juice for your FEMA trailer, waking up to a team of roofers lugging composite up a ladder, or some other sort of karmic pat on the back.

Three stories gave me hope, and of course all of them were tied into New Orleans rebuilding.

1. Bush requests more help for Louisiana. Not just help, but cold hard cash. Nearly $20b in a new request to Congress. This includes $4.2b in community development block grants, to bring the state's cdbg total to just over $10b. This should buy a lot of houses - getting homeowners out of mortgages and letting them walk away with equity to plunk down on a more intact or higher-elevation home. Of course the devil's in the details, and many remain to be worked out. Also in that spending request was a key component of our "Flood Washington" campaign - $$ for coastal restoration. While a far smaller allocation than the money for block grants, this request includes $300m for the restoration of wetlands around New Orleans. Given that every 2 miles of intact wetlands will decrease storm surge by a foot or so, this is one of the most affordable ways to reduce the danger that NOLA and other populated areas in S. Louisiana face as the Gulf shifts into a 25 year cycle of increased storm activity, coupled with warmer Gulf water due to global warming, feeding more monster, killer storms. The Louisiana group that will be deciding on spending plans for the cdbg $ and other resources is the Louisiana Recovery Authority, so we'll be keeping an eye on them. And of course all this $$ has to get appropriated by congress, so keep the pressure on.
2. Louisiana house OKs levee board bills: A pleasant surprise, as I had written off our lege, convinced they didn't have the sense to realize that without fundamental levee board reform our chances of securing necessary fed relief (see above) were about as solid as the 17th St. Canal levee. While the bill the lege passed wasn't as strong as reformers would have liked, it's a huge departure from the business-as-usual, patronage and payback levee boards that led to death and destruction in Katrina's wake. Let's hope the Senate doesn't screw it up.
   
3. Army corps feels heat from critical senators: This was the surprise red rider in the corner. Sens McCain and Feingold introduced legislation requiring independent review of Corps projects w/price tags over $25m and creates an independant water board to send priority projects to the Corps - this is so big, IF this legislation ever gets the business end of the President's pen, we could cut boondoggle projects out of the budget; removing environmentally damaging make-work projects and saving taxpayers a big bag of cash. Of course, Corps projects are part of the earmarks & district pork that Congress uses to buy off the critical attention of their constituents, so I can't see many members of that big domed building responding with any more enthusiasm for this law than for this famous pair's last reform offering, which took a handful of years to pass in a watered-down form. But I'm still celebrating - this bill should fire up the grassroots and guarantee some serious discussion about increasing oversight of the corps and their big money projects.

Watch our website, as we'll be tweaking our "Flood Washington" effort soon to demand an immediate closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (Mister Go). If the McCain/Feingold Corps legislation had been law 40 years ago, Mr.Go would never have been built. This hurricane highway has been bad news for St. Bernard Parish and coastal wetlands since it was first built and now is a critical time to shut 'er down.

Aaron Viles is the GRN's Campaign Director