Let me start off by saying two things.

First, that during the time after Katrina and Rita, a huge percentage of the assistance and mobilization on behalf of our city and the Gulf Coast refugees everywhere was performed by church groups of all denominations. I am immensely thankful for all that they have done for us. I want no mistake about that.

Secondly, while I do not embrace religion myself I do have a great respect for the beliefs of others as long as it is not forced upon me.

Now that you have an idea of my starting point lets talk about the intersection of community and the Catholic Archdiocese here in New Orleans in the post-deluge era. You see the Catholic Church has been consolidating its resources across the country. What this translates into is the simple fact that churches are closing everywhere. Here in New Orleans, a majority Catholic city, the news of church closures has not been taken well.

In response, parishioners at two local churches have occupied the buildings in a set of 24/7 vigils as they protest the consolidation. While similar vigils have been taking place in Boston and New York, there is a somewhat different tenor to proceedings here in the Crescent City. You see, no matter what your views on religion may be, it is a source of community and of solace during hard times. As our population continues to deal with wreckage, post-traumatic stress disorder, constant allegations of corruption, and the various other vagaries of the post-Katrina landscape this move by the Archdiocese is viewed as an affront by many.

Yesterday things came to head. Police were brought in to remove the parishioners holding vigil at St. Henry’s and Our Lady of Good Counsel churches. Living not far from Our Lady of Good Counsel, the church I grew up across the street from, I headed over when a fellow blogger notified me of the situation. By the time I arrived two people had been arrested–local photographer Harold Baquet and author Poppy Z. Brite. The officers had to break down a 100-year-old door in order to get in.

Via the New York Times:

One of the protesters, Harold Baquet, a photographer, dismissed the priest-shortage argument, saying that Our Lady of Good Counsel had been making good use of retired priests. Mr. Baquet, who was not arrested, decried both the closing of his church and the forced entry on Tuesday.

“We turned that community into something ethnically, racially and culturally diverse,” Mr. Baquet said.

He added, “Breaking down the old cypress door was abominable, anti-Christian, anti-justice, anti-peace. It’s a drastic overreaction. We weren’t trying to hurt anybody. We were just trying to maintain a Christian community.”

Whatever the right and wrong of the matter may be, and there is plenty of disputation on that topic, this is emblematic of the feelings of our community. So many failures followed in the wake of Katrina that we are all burned out emotionally. The parishioners of these churches feel that they are being deserted or failed by their Archdiocese, much as we have al been failed by FEMA and the other governmental agencies that are supposed to provide aid or support in times of need.

When every day brings news of another murder, when you are surrounded by the still-damaged remains of your home three years later, when every promise of aid seems to disappear in a cloud of red tape and perceived corruption, things like this can be profoundly demoralizing.

As it has been for the past three years, community is what sustains us. Unfortunately the feeling is that community is also what is constantly under fire.

I remember meeting Karen Gadbois shortly after the first post-Katrina Jazz Fest. From the day we first met I was impressed with both her fire and her sincerity. In the years since then I have watched her efforts continually escalate as she has become one of the true paladins of our fair city.

Do blogs count? Do they have any real effect? The Gambit thinks so, and have named Karen “New Orleanian of the Year.” I cannot think of a better choice.

From “Home Checker: Karen Gadbois’ crusade to save the city’s architectural heritage brought down a public program riddled with problems,” by David Winkler-Schmit:

For Karen Gadbois, the city’s recovery and her own have become inextricably linked, and she has fought hard for both. On New Year’s Eve 2005, Gadbois finished her final chemo treatment for breast cancer and flew from Austin, Texas, to New Orleans, so she could be here for the last day of the tragic year.

That night she sat on the porch of her raised, side-hall shotgun house in northwest Carrollton with a friend and her husband. Newly installed streetlights illuminated the neighborhood wasteland of flooded homes, and Gadbois’ pile of ruined artwork and other possessions sat on the front curb. Drinking wine, Gadbois began throwing rocks at the bright, invasive lights.

“And I was really happy,” Gadbois says. “I was so happy to be back.”

Gadbois is still happy, but she isn’t content. She has battled against those, including Mayor Ray Nagin and other bureaucrats, who have attempted in the name of progress to destroy and squander our city’s heritage. With little more than a digital camera, a computer, a blog and her green Honda Element, this indefatigable 53-year-old mom has shown that it is the average citizen — not government — that’s leading New Orleans’ recovery.

By the time Gadbois first heard about the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership (NOAH) program in early 2008, the Boston, Mass., native had been taking on City Hall to save homes from demolition for more than two years. Nevertheless, she initially was optimistic about the program because she thought the city finally was making a gesture to help people get back into their homes by creating a program that was supposed to gut and board houses for poor and elderly homeowners.

“A number of people were questioning why we were spending millions of dollars gutting and boarding homes when there were volunteer groups,” Gadbois says. “It didn’t make sense in terms of using government, but it could be used to leverage volunteer work to get people back in homes.”

And thus began the complicated trail of conflicting information that led to federal involvement, with many exciting stops along the way. You see blogging can be really effective when you couple it with sheer ability to dig up info. Anybody can rant, but solid research and presentation of the facts trumps just about everything else in the long run.

One thing leads to another and the press (TV) gets involved. Then Mayor Nagin accuses Karen of “hurting the recovery,” and the culmination?

Besides listing houses on blocks that don’t exist in the city, and charging the city for work done by volunteer groups, NOAH had used a list of contractors that included Cedric Smith, the mayor’s brother-in-law, and Trellis Smith, a business partner of former NOAH director Stacey Jackson. More allegations came forward — Jackson had business relationships with other NOAH contractors — the City Council held hearings, NOAH closed its offices and a federal investigation was launched. And it was Gadbois who had first spotted NOAH’s leaky ship, but all Nagin would say at the time was, “I love that we have professional investigators involved now.”

What he didn’t know, or refused to believe, was that he had been dealing with a professional investigator all along.

With her cancer in remission in 2006, Gadbois became involved with her neighborhood organization, Northwest Carrollton Civic Association (NWCCA). The group argued that a proposed Walgreens drugstore at the intersection of Claiborne Avenue and Carrollton Avenue broke zoning laws. Refusing to budge, NWCCA pushed City Councilwoman Shelley Midura to broker a plan for the new Walgreens that conformed to zoning regulations and included space for a much-needed supermarket.

She was getting the Northwest Carrollton blog up and running when we first met. I think we got along well from the outset due to the passion of our views about the city, and I have been thrilled to see her act as a spotlight, shining light into the dark recesses of government and commerce. Transparency is important.

Get on over to The Gambit and read the article. This is why we blog.

There is a huge and disturbing article by A.C. Thompson in The Nation. It concerns an incident you may have heard of, the treatment of African Americans after Katrina, specifically in a New Orleans suburb called Algiers Point. His description of The Point is pretty accurate; I know people who live there:

The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It’s a “white enclave” whose residents have “a kind of siege mentality,” says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians “think of themselves as an oppressed minority.”

In this seven-page piece Thompson is one of the first in the media to approach a story that locals have been aware of for some time. I was in exile after the storm, having run the day before when I saw footage of the Cajuns leaving (a sure sign to get out for any local), but I know people in The Point and I know someone who stayed. Their stories agree with a lot of what Thompson has to say. They all tell stories of Caucasians with guns hunting down African Americans. This quote from Wayne Janak, a 60-year-old carpenter and contractor speaks volumes:

He’s equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, “I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings.” A white woman standing next to him adds, “He understands the N-word now.” In this neighborhood, she continues, “we take care of our own.”

Janak, who says he’d been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When “looters” showed up in the neighborhood, “they left full of buckshot,” he brags, adding, “You know what? Algiers Point is not a p**sy community.”[profanity redacted -Loki]

This is the sort of thing that inspired my earlier post about race in the city. While Janak is a transplant to the New Orleans area, his neighbors and community are not. The support from the local community that these “hunting parties” seemed to enjoy is profoundly disturbing. Decorum prevents any personal comment here….

People in other parts of the country ask me how I feel about all the negative headlines about racism and corruption that have come out of my area since the storm. I usually reply that I’m glad to see a spotlight thrown on these matters. The more aware the public is the better chance we have of stamping this sort of primitive behavior out. In that vein I am incredibly pleased to see this story starting to take off.

Big Red Cotton, a blogger for NOLA.com, has also caught wind of this story and offers blistering commentary of her own in a piece entitled “White New Orleanian Brags About Shooting Blacks During Katrina; “If it moved, we shot it!” I highly advise reading both the article in The Nation and Big Red’s response from the ground here in the city. She has some interesting theories about how this also ties in to the current plague of death that stalks our streets here in the murder capital of America. [All emphasis in the following quote is hers, not mine. -Loki]

Donnell Herrington was one of the Black men shot that lived to tell about it. You might recall Herrington recounting his experience in Spike Lee’s documentary “When The Levees Broke.” He and his cousins were on their way from their home in Algiers to the ferry where the National Guard set up an evacuation point when he was shot. After recovering from the near fatal shooting, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station whose officers patrol the west bank. He says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story.

And although Herrington’s story, as well as accounts from the militia that Cox News heralded as “the ultimate neighborhood watch,” were reported nationally, The NOPD nonetheless issued a statement in response saying “we absolutely have had no complaints to substantiate any of the claims made in that article.”

There is a eight-minute video version of this story on The Nation’s YouTube Channel here. Go watch it, but make sure you have a strong stomach. The language is not safe for work and the sight of people barbequeing and drinking beer while they cheerfully toss off quotes like the ones above is unsettling to say the least.

Get some insight into things–go check out Thompson’s and Big Red Cotton’s articles. If we are going to step into the future we need to be aware of the prejudices of the past that retard our progress.

Well, I have to start off with my apologies. I’ve been down sick and out of the loop for a bit, got to love flu season! Anyway I’m back now and have a lot of catching up to do.

Let us begin with St Bernard Parish. For those based elsewhere, Louisiana has parishes instead of counties; it’s a holdover from the French era and a sign of the predominantly Catholic culture down here. Some of you may have heard of St. Bernard Parish before, an entire parish that was pretty much devastated, almost two thousand square miles.

In the Wikipedia entry for St Bernard we find the following:

On August 29, 2005, St. Bernard was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The storm damaged virtually every structure in the parish. The eye of Katrina passed over the eastern portion of the parish, pushing a 25-foot storm surge into the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (”MRGO”). This surge destroyed the parish levees. Almost the entire parish was flooded, with most areas left with between 5 and 12 feet of standing water. The water rose suddenly and violently, during a period which witnesses reported as no more than fifteen minutes. In many areas, houses were smashed or washed off their foundations by a storm surge higher than the roofs.

Dry text. Despite the damage done and the snail’s pace of recovery, the above is still just dry text if you have not been there. Fortunately I have been there, and often with a camera in tow, so before we get to the announcement du jour allow me to share a few visuals. After all, a JPG is worth a thousand TXTs.

Here is a house in St. Bernard, one of the ones that got off comparatively easy:

That picture was taken about three months after hurricanes Katrina and Rita rolled through. While the population has begun to return, there are still vast swaths of neighborhood that look like this or worse to this day.

Here is another one I took during that same time period (like many people, I was doing construction work when I returned because at first there was not much else available). The picture quality is poor because I was using a camera-phone, so if you are having trouble identifying it, the image is of a refrigerator in a tree. It’s a minor example of what storm surge can do.

So, despite its location adjoining the Lower 9th Ward, this area has not gotten much play in the national media. An entire parish submerged. Amazing.

Flash forward a little over three years to the present day. According to New Orleans Citi-Business it looks like a point of light has appeared on the horizon:

Ground was broken Tuesday for the redevelopment of the former St. Bernard housing development site, marking the start of construction for the first public housing to be built in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

Dubbed Columbia Citi Residences at Bayou District, the project will include 1,326 rental and homeownership units. A total of 346 units will be public housing.

The process of rebounding from Mother Nature’s blows has been one fraught with problems. Take a look at the work of the OSI Katrina Fellows on this website and you will see. Through it all the lamentable lack of housing has been the specter casting its shadow over the process. People cannot return without a place for them to live, and the shortage of available housing has caused rents to skyrocket.

While the rest of the nation comes to grips with the mortgage crisis and floundering market, we are still fighting the post-hurricane destruction of viable living spaces.

I am very glad to see this getting started. As a city that has been in the grip of poverty for generations, and one that has a decided leaning towards working class or service industry jobs, housing is of paramount importance.

Would you want to be out in the cold for the holiday season?

Photos by George “Loki” Williams.

Holidays are a hard time here. One of the major reasons is something that does not seem to be common knowledge outside the area: the vast number still displaced by Katrina and Rita. During this time of year, a time centered around family and friends, the sheer number of faces not at the table is a painful thing.

For myself, I can honestly say that a full third of the people in my social circle remain scattered from Baton Rouge to Eugene, OR. From conversations with friends I gather this is a common thing. Then you add in the faces that will never return to the table, those who for one reason or anther are no longer with us.

In New Orleans in particular the causes are manifold. Many of the elderly, including my two remaining grandparents, did not manage to survive the storms and their aftermath. The additional strain of living in the recovery zone has cut a swath through the ranks of our elders, a situation whose social ramifications with take a generation to fully assess. Of those still among the living, many have decided not to return due to the additional stress and strain of post-Katrina life. Either way, they are elsewhere.

At the other end of the spectrum are the very young. While children are still fairly plentiful, many parents have gone “somewhere with good schools,” or economic opportunity. Hard arguments to counter in a region known for poverty and below-average education.

Then there are those taken from us by violence. Far too many of them, more each week. The sound of gunshots provide a fatal back-beat to the routines of daily life. Faces known and unknown, all of them somebody’s mother, father, brother or sister. More empty seats at the table.

For many of us this is a time of plenty. Not so much as prior years with the economy in the tank, but still the feasts go on. For others it is a time when the loss of those missing from the table is thrown into sharp relief by their empty chairs.

Things here are still far from fixed.

Despite the ongoing encouragement of those outside the flood zone, we on the Gulf Coast are notorious for refusing to leave our homes. Why?

Is it pure stubbornness in face of the facts? Is it fear of leaving to start afresh somewhere new? Is it pure and simple inertia? Or could it be something more?

Well that is the exact question that Gallup, the polling people, are addressing in a new study called the “Soul of the Community.”

Via WLOX-TV:

The report is the first in a multi-year study of 26 communities where Knight Foundation founders, John S. and James L Knight, owned newspapers. The communities vary in population size, economic levels and how urban or rural they are. Gallup randomly surveyed a representative sample of nearly 14,000 adults from Feb.1 through April 27, 2008, by phone.

The study compared residents’ emotional connection to where they live to the GDP growth in the 26 communities over the past five years. The findings show a significant correlation. Over the coming years, the researchers will analyze the trends to prove whether emotional connection drives economic growth, or the other way around. Within a smaller microcosm, such as a company, Gallup has been able to show that increasing employees’ emotional connection will indeed lead to improved financial performance of the company.

It would seem from the preliminary findings that a socially engaged community is one that will also prosper economically. To me this is a premise that has more than a little merit to it. Happier people work more efficiently and productively. An active array of social options tend to increase the happiness quotient, from my observations anyway.

Now there is one thing that gives me pause as I read through this (emphasis mine):

According to the “Soul of the Community” study, the number one quality that makes the Gulf Coast’s residents love where they live is social offerings (such as entertainment venues for people to meet). Beyond social offerings, residents also find education (kindergarten through college) to be a strength of the Gulf Coast.

While that may well be the truth of the matter I find it hard to believe. Anyone growing up down here knows what a complete joke education is in the Deep South. The National Assessment of Educational Progress state profiles for Mississippi and Louisiana should provide more than enough facts to back up this common-knowledge assertion.

The problems of poverty, race relations, and most other endemic issues faced by the Gulf Coast have their roots in the educational opportunities of the region (and lack thereof). I am truly amazed that the respondents of this study actually ranked it as a strength.

In short, while the overall premise seems a good one, I do have my doubts.

When hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, it did not turn the region into a Third World country… it revealed one. –-Danny Glover

Welcome to the wonderful news of the day: Trouble the Water has been shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary! A total of 15 films are on the shortlist in the Documentary Feature category, out of the 94 qualifying films submitted (a record number of entries by the way).

There will be five nominees selected from this shortlist, with a final announcement of the Oscar nominations forthcoming on January 22, 2009. (The Academy announcement and list of all 15 shortlisted films can be seen here.)

Trouble the Water, along with Spike Lee’s extraordinary four-hour epic When the Levees Broke, remains one of the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New Orleans. –David Denby, The New Yorker, September 22, 2008

Directed and produced by Katrina Media Fellow Tia Lessin, this film has been turning heads since its release. A powerful piece of cinema fueled by footage shot inside a 9th Ward home as it flooded, this is a must-see–take it from a native New Orleanian.

I hope that this new-found attention for the film helps to bring the trials of the Gulf Coast back to mind for those outside the region, who are under the impression that things are okay down here. Whereas When the Levees Broke focuses on the epic scale of the disaster, this one is more personal in approach, which I think is vastly important.

For many people the scale of what happened is simply to big to take in. Making it the story of a pair of individuals brings it immediacy that can only be gained through the imparting of a personal narrative. In the years since Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure, I have noted that it is these personal tales that tend to resonate with those who did not experience the events directly. It is, after all, easier to relate to an individual than a region.

That is not all that is important and notable about this piece of celluloid. While working on another contract in New York City last Spetember, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast interview with Michaela Angela Davis about the film in which she presents her thoughts on why this film and the people involved in it are so important as they use art and culture to fight social injustice. [Listen here.]

To see where the film is playing in theaters throughout the country (sorted by state), click here.

It is more than three years since hurricanes Katrina and Rita mercilessly pummeled the Mississippi coast. Unlike New Orleans this area did not sit underwater for weeks; instead the storm surge slammed into the coast and then receded, leaving devastation in its wake.

My own trips along the coast have shown the result: areas swept clean of anything but the concrete slabs that used to support homes, houses and cars tossed inland like Tonka toys, and the now all-too-familiar PTSD that seized the population in the wake of the wind and waters.

Not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Now FEMA is working to close out its emergency housing program, but the problem is that there is no housing for these people to go to.

Via Chris Joynerof the Mississippi Clarion Ledger:

The intractable problem continues to be lack of affordable housing. While many families have housing vouchers from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 program, Brezany said there is nowhere to use them.

Reilly Morse of the Mississippi Center for Justice said the strategy taken by FEMA and HUD toward finding suitable housing for the remaining Katrina families has not been particularly successful because there just is not enough affordable housing.

“No strategy they can come up with addresses that problem. These people are going to stay stuck,” he said.

Like the mythical Hydra, the issue of affordable housing rears its head in multiple places at once. Here in Louisiana, in neighboring Mississippi, along the Alabama coastline. It is a grave matter that directly impacts the lives of thousands.

As we watch the housing meltdown play havoc with our nation, I can only wonder what additional effect that will have on the innumerable families that are simply trying to get into a stable living situation.

The Road Home Program seems to be taking some heat.  A lawsuit has been filed against the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development and the Louisiana Recovery Authority for alleged racial discrimination in the program.

This is a big issue. The Road Home, an often-criticized program set in place to help Louisiana residents return and rebuild, is accused of using fair market value rather than the actual costs of rebuilding when calculating awards. The stated net effect of this being that grants for 20,000 African American home owners were drastically lowballed.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is responsible for recovery funding oversight as well as for ensuring that the funds are used to promote equal housing opportunity.

“HUD has the duty, authority, and ability to make sure Louisiana distributes funds for the Road Home program fairly,” said Shanna L. Smith, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “Instead, HUD allowed a formula that is biased and threatens to undermine the recovery efforts of African-American homeowners. As such, it failed to take into account the legacy of racial discrimination in the housing market, which has resulted in systematically lower values for homes in communities of color.”

The plantiffs in this suit are represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Washington D.C. plaintiff’s law firm, Cohen Milstein, and the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

Housing is still a major issue in New Orleans, and the results of this suit will have far-reaching consequences. I will be following this story as it develops and bringing you details as they are made public.

On November 6, the Orleans Parish School Board approved the School Facilities Master Plan, the controversial proposal that calls for building and renovating dozens of New Orleans public schools while “landbanking” a number of others.

The November 6 vote was notable for a number of reasons.  First, significant concessions were made to the plan only days before the vote, which appear to have satisfied the loudest critics of the plan.  Second, the lone “no” vote was a clear statement of dissent by Heidi Daniels, the Orleans Parish School Board member whose district includes the Lower 9th Ward.  In the Lower 9th Ward no high schools are currently planned to be reopened until the not-yet-funded second phase of the plan.

Finally, the plan is still highly contentious, with opposition coming from the unlikely bedfellows of community leaders in the Lower 9th Ward and two elite policy institutions: the Bureau of Governmental Research and the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives.

The concessions and changes made to the plan were first made public in Sunday’s Times-Picayune, and include allowing Eleanor McMain High School to retain its campus, which will now be renovated and have a gym attached, concessions for the mid-city neighborhood and a new high school in the 9th Ward on the Carver site.

However those who remain displeased with the plan showed up in significant numbers at the Thursday meeting.  Most prominent were community leaders from the Lower 9th Ward. For those not familiar with New Orleans geography, the Lower 9th ward is separated from the neighborhood commonly known as the 9th Ward by an industrial canal. These leaders and advocates, who included Patricia Jones of the Lower 9th Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association (NENA), Linda Jackson, the president of the Lower 9th Ward Homeowners Association and Bill Pepper, the director of Common Ground Relief, denounced the plan for providing no high school for the neighborhood until after 2013, at the earliest.

More than three years after floods ravaged the neighborhood in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, most residents have not been able to return to the Lower 9th Ward, and despite the efforts of a host of nonprofits, most of the neighborhood today resembles the “green space” both the Urban Land Institute and Mayor Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission recommended.  If implemented, the Master Plan could help make this a permanent reality, by keeping away parents with high-school aged children or condemning them to busing their children outside the neighborhood.

State Superintendent Paul Pastorek repeatedly excused the plan by stating that “demographics drive this process.”  However there was no admission of the reality that has become very familiar for residents of New Orleans: that basing rebuilding decisions on where residents have already has returned has the inevitable effect of “shrinking the footprint” and dooming certain neighborhoods.

Those in the Lower 9th Ward found few allies at the meeting, most notably Orleans Parish School Board Member Daniels, but also Angela Daliet of the nonprofit Save Our Schools New Orleans, who described the concessions as “band-aid measures.”  “We fear this plan will further exacerbate the inequities within this system,” stated Ms. Daliet.

Which brings us to another question: where were those who had so forcefully denounced the plan in earlier public comment sessions?  In New Orleans politics, solidarity outside of self-interest is appallingly rare, and schools exemplify this trend.  Neighborhoods are often fiercely proud of their schools, but this concern for their schools clearly, particularly in this case, does not extend outside these neighborhood boundaries.

In between the angry pleas by Lower 9th Ward leaders were repeated thanks by staff, alumni, and students of McMain, Carver, and other schools for being spared the wrath of the plan.  The most charitable explanation is that many saw existing concessions as adequate.  The less charitable explanation is that the squeakiest wheels were greased, and narrow self-interest won the day.

However two prominent organizations, the Cowen Institute and the Bureau of Governmental Research, have remained aloof to the Master Plan by refusing to be part of a newly proposed “Master Plan Advisory Committee.”  The Bureau of Governmental Research, issued a release [pdf] in late September that strongly criticizes the Master Plan for a significant oversight: adequate funding sources have not been identified beyond the first phase of this plan.  BGR’s Janet Howard remained critical of the plan at the Thursday meeting, stating that cost concerns “need to be considered before this plan is adopted, not after.”

The refusal of the Cowen Institute for Educational Initiatives to be part of this process is more surprising, given a number of cozy personal and professional relationships.  The Cowen Institute donates office space to the nonprofit New Schools For New Orleans, a practice that both I and United Teachers of New Orleans Vice-President Jim Randels have criticized as interfering with their stated mission of objective policy analysis.  But this is far from the only questionable relationship.

Sarah Usdin, president of New Schools For New Orleans, is the sister-in-law of Steven Bingler of Concordia, the firm hired to produce the community input portion of the Master Plan. To make things even cozier, Sarah’s brother, Michael Usdin, has represented Concordia as legal counsel.

A Cowen Institute official that I spoke to at the meeting denies that this move is a protest of the Master Plan, however earlier statements indicated that the Cowen Institute shares the BGR’s concerns.

Responses by State Superintendent Pastorek to funding concerns seemed to rely more on hope than any concrete plan, and gave little assurances to those wondering if this plan will crash when the money runs out after phase I.  “Phase II is much more likely to happen… I do think we are going to see more money coming from FEMA,” stated Pastorek cryptically during the meeting.

It is unknown what lies in the future for the School Facilities Master Plan when adopted, or for schools being “landbanked.”  Superintendent Pastorek and others repeatedly assured the audience that this plan is only a blueprint and that demographics and other factors will be regularly revisited.  However, neighborhood reaction from the Lower 9th Ward was clear.  “We see what you are doing with our money,” stated Patricia Jones of Lower 9th Ward NENA, “We will be fighting this.”