Dear Clients and Friends:

            To rebuild New Orleans.  The debate continues.  Why do it if New Orleans will be flooded again?  Why do it if there’s so little left?  Why do it if it will take billions to do so?    
            I spent four days in the Crescent City recently with some 60 people brought together by the Minnesota-based Public Strategies Group…people who specialize in working with government at the city, state and federal level…people who wrote the book on reinventing government and help governments at all levels implement change.
            The charge was to write a plan to resurrect the city…to be presented to Mayor Ray Nagin.
             I went asking the same questions...a skeptic. 
            After all…New Orleans was a city rife with problems before the storm.  Some examples: The grinding poverty. The broken schools.  The bankrupt public housing. The perennial government scandals. 
            Then Hurricane Katrina hit.  The storm wiped out whole neighborhoods.  War zone is not too strong a description for the lower Ninth Ward where every single house block after block was totally destroyed.  In the Lakeview neighborhood perhaps one house in a block is now occupied or residents live in a FEMA trailer parked out front.
            Review the sequence of events surrounding the flood wall breaks and flooding at www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/flashflood.swf.   
            And still nearly a year later the rebuilding is just beginning in much of the city.  Yes, the French Quarter is up and running at night, but hundreds of thousands of people who used to live in the neighborhoods are gone.  A city that once had 600,000 residents now has under 200,000.  And thousands more are in the midst of deciding whether to stay or leave for good.

             Despite it all, I came away convinced New Orleans must be rebuilt.  Now.  Aggressively.  With help from all quarters…public, private, foundations, not-for-profits.   
             The city matters to us all.  It’s quite simply a national treasure…a crucible where jazz was born, Creole cuisine was invented, distinctive architecture was built, a unique, American culture established.  All under the most adverse circumstances.  New Orleans is about the triumph of spirit…over these circumstances.
             The Port of New Orleans is the busiest in the world. So say Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and author John Barry in a column they wrote.  20% of all U.S. exports and 60% of U.S. grain exports pass through the port.
             New Orleans is an energy hub serving rigs off-shore in the Gulf.  Off-shore Louisiana wells supply 20% of domestic oil production and 25% of natural gas.  11% of energy imports come through New Orleans.
             U.S. strategic petroleum reserves are nearby.
             So there’s a real argument the national interest requires restoration.

             New Orleans is no more unsuitable a place to live than other U.S. locales.
We don’t tell Texans they can’t live in Tornado Alley, Californians they can’t live on unstable ocean side bluffs or North Dakotans they can’t live where they’ll freeze to death, says Curt Johnson, of Citistates Group, and Rick Heydinger of the Public Strategies Group, in a recent newspaper column.

              New Orleans officials, politics did NOT create the problem.
              The federal government did…specifically the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 
The corps admitted many deficiencies in design and construction of the flood protection system in an exhaustive study.  It confirms what independent studies by other engineers have found.  It’s the federal government’s responsibility to build levees and flood prevention systems that work.
              New Orleans can be made safe…so residents are comfortable returning. 
              Yes, the city is below sea level.  But the technology is available to guard against a 10,000-year event.  That’s the standard in The Netherlands.  Not the 100-year standard the New Orleans flood protection system was designed for.  (Design and construction flaws meant the New Orleans system couldn’t even stand a 100-year event.) The Dutch dikes keep 60% of the country from being swamped.  Go to Amsterdam and you’ll see huge gates at the entrance to canals which close in the event of a storm.
              Redirecting river sediment to restore the Louisiana coast would be the most important part of a revised flood protection system. 
              The cost for category 5 protection for the region:  About $40 billion over several years.  Much less than what the U.S. is spending overseas in a year.  
              The money is available.  The federal government took in $5.7 billion from oil and gas production in the Gulf in 2005.  Louisiana received $32 million of the total.

              In our meeting, we divided into six small groups to better focus on the different aspects of bringing New Orleans back to full strength.  My group focused on housing and community development.  Others focused on issues ranging from budget and finance and human resources to procurement and addressing the diaspora.  The process was Public Strategies’ design lab, a collaborative, creative approach to problem-solving.
             Neighborhoods are key, my group decided.  Fully revitalized, functioning neighborhoods will attract people back to the city, convince people contemplating leaving to stay.  They will lead to housing solutions.  They will nurture the city’s culture.
            Congress will help rebuild the neighborhoods with $4.2 billion in community development money.  Resources ought to go to these areas:
            Create neighborhood infrastructure.  Link residents, businesses via the web.  Open neighborhood centers for people to congregate, acquire city services, get technical assistance.  Beautify neighborhoods with clean-ups, community gardens.  Disseminate the success stories…family by family, business by business.  Develop leaders and put a plan in place to spawn neighborhood involvement.
            Spur housing.  Stimulate creative housing designs.  Focus the energy on one or two neighborhoods at a time.  Think creatively to attract developers, gather land, use pre-fab housing.  Stimulate demand through incentive programs for artists, musicians. Make insurance and mortgage financing available.
            Make capital available. Put in place development banks, credit enhancements, loan guarantees.  Make the insurance market work with faster dispute resolution, a claims court, mediation.  And strengthen state oversight of the insurance industry.

             New Orleans offers opportunity…for innovators, community builders, those with ambition and civic spirit and a yearning to make money.  The City of New Orleans and the Louisiana Gulf Coast deserve our attention and resources.
             If not in New Orleans now, then in what city after a future disaster?   

   

 

Yours very truly,

Principal, Conbrio

 

For more about our processes, tools and practices – including our visual tools – visit our website
at www.conbrioamericas.com, e-mail me at bbancroft@conbrioamericas.com or call me
at 214-941-8199.

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