Judge blasts New Orleans public defender system

An Orleans Parish judge has vowed to make good on his promise to begin releasing alleged criminals from New Orleans jails -- and he also announced that he would no longer appoint the local public defender program to represent such defendants, calling it a "mockery" of what such a program should be.

Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter said that next month he will release 42 poor defendants from custody, and he suggested the public defender program should drop cases because it lacks the staff or money to do its job properly, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

"The Louisiana Legislature has allowed this legal hell to exist, fester and finally boil over," Hunter said Friday, ruling from the bench that the poorest defendants in New Orleans are receiving the worst legal services as they face prison time. "This court must take certain measures to protect the statutory and constitutional rights of indigent defendants. Hurricane Katrina is no longer an excuse, and the state has a budget surplus."

Hunter's ruling won't be final until April 18, when the district attorney's office and public defender program are scheduled to present additional testimony on the matter. The chief of trials for the defender's program said he would need $2.1 million to properly staff his office -- about a third more than it currently has.

The public defender program now has 26 full-time attorneys and a growing caseload that stands at about 2,524 felony cases, according to the Times-Picayune.

The problems with the criminal justice system in Orleans Parish did not begin with Katrina, though the storm certainly did nothing to help matters. A report released last year by Safe Streets/Strong Communities, a grassroots group advocating for criminal justice reform, found that of 102 incarcerated people interviewed six months after the storm, not one had spoken to a public defender. As the group's director, Norris Henderson, said in a Times-Picayune op-ed:

Media reports made it seem as if this was unusual and likely due to the storm. Speaking as a person who spent many years in the state's custody, I can tell you that it is sadly par for the course.

Judge OKs N.O. public housing lawsuit

New Orleans' public housing residents will get their day in court.

Judge Ivan Lemelle yesterday ruled that a lawsuit filed on their behalf deserves to be heard, setting a trial date of Nov. 26, 2007. The Advancement Project, the law firm of Jenner & Block, and New Orleans attorneys Bill Quigley of the Loyola Law Clinic and Tracie Washington of the NAACP Gulf Coast Advocacy Center brought the suit against U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson and the Housing Authority of New Orleans.

Filed last June, the lawsuit seeks the immediate re-opening of the city's habitable public housing units. It claims that HUD and HANO officials violated the U.S. Housing Act of 1937 as well as Louisiana landlord-tenant law by breaching the terms of valid leases, and denied public housing residents their due-process rights.

"It's a mindblowing, emotional experience to watch a city, famed for its food, fun and fabulous cultural significance, get more or less wiped off the face of the Earth," Advancement Project Co-Director Judith Browne-Davis said in a statement. "But then, to make matters worse, we witness a government that openly suggests that New Orleans -- in particular its African-American citizenry -- just weren't and aren't worth saving."

New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina face great difficulty returning home due to a severe housing shortage. Across the metropolitan area, the storm flooded nearly 228,000 homes and apartments, including 39 percent of all owner-occupied units and 56 percent of all rental units, according to Brookings Institution data. The housing shortage has led to a dramatic rise in rents, with the fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the New Orleans area increasing from $661 in fiscal year 2004 to $978 in fiscal year 2007, according to this month's Katrina Index published by Brookings and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

At the same time, more than 5,000 families -- most of them African-American -- were displaced from the city's public housing. But rather than repairing those units, many of which suffered relatively little damage, local and federal authorities have pressed ahead with plans to demolish several public housing complexes and replace them with mixed-income developments.

As a result of the housing crunch, New Orleans is facing a major crisis of homelessness, with a homeless population that's now double what it was before the storm in a city about half the size and lacking shelter capacity, the Christian Science Monitors reports:

"The vast majority of emergency shelters have not been reopened since Katrina," says Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY, a regional collaborative of 60 agencies serving the homeless. "There's an enormous shortage of housing and people are desperate. Do we have the resources to deal with this problem? No."

While New Orleans has long struggled with poverty, the face of homelessness has changed since Katrina, Ms. Kegel and other advocates say. The population now includes the chronically homeless who never left the city or have returned; residents who lost their homes to the flood and have run out of federal assistance -- or may have never received assistance -- and cannot afford higher rents; and thousands of Latino workers who came to rebuild the city, many of whom brought their spouses and children and cannot find a place to live.

The Advancement Project notes that the effort to downsize public housing in New Orleans is not new. In 1996, there were more than 13,000 public housing units across the city. Immediately before Katrina struck, there were only 7,100 units, but almost 2,000 were vacant and slated for demolition. Today, only about 880 families have returned to public housing in the city.

As the lawsuit moves forward, Congress has also begun paying attention to the issue of public housing in New Orleans. As we reported here yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives last week approved a Gulf Coast relief bill that requires the government to have plans for replacing storm-damaged housing projects before tearing them down, grants public housing tenants the right to return, and instructs HANO to identify which residents want to return and to provide public housing or comparable units for them. The measure now goes to the Senate for consideration.

Fair housing wins on Gulf Coast

The U.S. House of Representatives last week approved a bill giving housing relief to people displaced by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The measure frees up building funds for storm-affected homeowners and protects public housing damaged by the storm. It also extends Federal Emergency Management Agency rental assistance through the end of the year -- one of the major recommendations of the Institute for Southern Studies' recent report, "A New Agenda for the Gulf Coast."

Sponsored by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act requires the government to have plans for replacing housing projects damaged by Hurricane Katrina before tearing them down, grants public housing tenants the right to return, and requires the Housing Authority of New Orleans to identify which residents want to return and to provide public housing or comparable units to those who do. The measure passed by a vote of 302-125 and now goes to the Senate for consideration.

"Today the House of Representatives took a big step in removing many of the obstacles to the recovery faced by Hurricane Katrina victims by passing a bill that will expedite housing opportunities, return residents to public housing, and make permanent rental assistance for all of those people on temporary rental assistance for so long," Waters said in a press statement.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and HANO had approved plans to raze the city's four largest public-housing complexes as well as other smaller sites. The demolitions would have cleared the way for an estimated $681 million worth of mixed-income housing but left many poor and working-class families homeless.

The measure did not pass without some controversy, however, as House Republicans successfully attached an amendment that bars some convicted criminals and gang members from receiving housing assistance. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) and passed by a vote of 249-176.

The motion requires HANO or any manager of replacement units to deny the return of individuals convicted of crimes involving sex, dealing drugs or domestic violence, or who pose a direct threat to public safety such as gang members. It will provide right-of-return priority to any individual or household who is in compliance with existing public housing resident requirements, including community service and work requirements, or for the purpose of family reunification.

"We must work to keep drugs and violence out of our public housing system, and to ensure that the residents of our public housing are put in a position to succeed," Jindal said in a statement. "To repeat the same mistakes that led to the problems of the past would be irresponsible and unacceptable. Many of our public housing residents are hardworking people, and their families should not be forced to have drug dealers or gang members as neighbors."

Some Democrats -- including committee chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts -- complained that Katrina victims were being held to a higher legal standard than other recipients of low-income housing across the nation, the Washington Times reports.

* * *

In another positive development on the post-Katrina housing front, a coalition of groups advocating for tenants' rights in New Orleans won an important victory earlier this month by getting city council members to drop a proposal that would have blocked construction of any new housing in certain districts except for single-family and two-family homes.

Led by the People's Hurricane Relief Fund's Tenants Rights Working Group, the coalition collected some 10,000 signatures on a petition supporting renters' rights and against price gouging. The coalition also held demonstrations outside the home of New Orleans City Council member Stacy Head and inundated councilors with phone calls and e-mails.

The protest movement was sparked March 1, when council members Cynthia Willard-Lewis and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell proposed a new moratorium on multi-family housing in their eastern New Orleans districts. At-large Councilor Arnie Fielkow agreed to co-sponsor the proposal.

PHRF blasted the plan as an effort to exclude working-class blacks -- especially those who rely on Section 8 rent subsidy vouchers -- from those communities. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and New Orleans Legal Assistance also opposed the moratorium.

"Everyone displaced by the storm has the right to come home. Housing is a human right," public housing resident and TRW member Stephanie Mingo said in a statement (Word document). "That includes housing for working people, particularly people on Section 8. City Council don't have no right to tell people who want to come home where they can and can't live. They’re acting like racist segregationists against poor, working Black people. But, we defeated racial segregation in this country, now we’ll fight against class segregation and beat it too."

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported:

...Willard-Lewis said her real target was what she considered an unfair concentration in her district of large low-income apartment complexes that often became blighted and threatened property values and the quality of life in nearby single-family neighborhoods.

Instead of the moratorium, Willard-Lewis proposed two alternative measures. One, approved unanimously by the council, calls on the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency to give council members an opportunity to provide input into the agency's decisions in order to ensure that tax-credit projects are fit residents' desires on rebuilding. The other, expected to be voted on next week, says the council won't support issuing low-income tax credits for any development with 100 or more units "without public input from the (affected) neighborhood," according to the Times-Picayune. Residents from more than 15 eastern New Orleans neighborhood associations recently created a commission to give such input, the paper reported.

According to a PHRF statement, the coalition's protest at the March 15 council meeting

"...marked the first occasion since the Hurricane and Great Flood where renters and tenants spoke and acted on their own behalf and were directly included in the decision making processes of the government determining the course of the city’s reconstruction. To this point the reconstruction process has been totally dominated by developers, property owners, and designers. Another critical development was the organic connections and identifications made by private and public market renters as "tenants". This emerging consciousness is critical for the development of the TRW, which seeks to unite public and private market renters into one powerful organization or block to win Affordable Housing and the Right of Return.

The coalition plans to continue pressing for an ordinance that would ban price gouging and implement rent control.

Nagin denies racial plot comments

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin held a press conference earlier this week to set the record straight on remarks first reported by the Washington Post -- and repeated here on Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch -- that the bungled rebuilding is part of a plan to change the racial makeup and political leadership of his and other cities.

The specific comment the Post attributed to Nagin was: "Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere. They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community."

Nagin said the Post story unfairly took his comments -- made last week at a meeting of the black press' National Newspaper Publishers Association -- out of context, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

"I've been in enough hot water for things I have said," Nagin said. "And this is what makes me mad. Because I didn't say it, and now I'm almost in hot water, so this is just not right."

Though Nagin didn't deny making the comment, he accused Post reporter Hamil Harris of distorting its meaning:

"My take on it is that it was some young reporter in the back of the room, looking for some way to get a nice story out," Nagin said. "He jumbled everything I said up, and brought some things in the middle of the talk to the front, and painted this picture that was just not what I intended to do, nor would I say."

The Post said it stands by its story. It even ran an editorial this week criticizing Nagin for the reported remarks:

Maybe Mr. Nagin lashed out in frustration. No question, there's plenty of blame to go around as city, state and federal officials continue to bicker and point fingers over decisions large and small. But his latest racial ramble distracts from the real issues facing his hobbled city. The slow pace of recovery, the fleeing professional class and crime are a few of them. Mr. Nagin's considered opinion on those weighty matters would be most welcome.

At Monday's press conference, Nagin denied saying anything racial, according to the Times-Picayune:

He added, however, as he has said previously, that he believes if Katrina had occurred in a locale with higher incomes, such as Orange County, California, "it would have been a different response."

Because of race?

Not exactly. "I thought it was more of a class issue than a race issue," he said Monday, adding: "Now, racial aspects are obviously in everything we do."

We invite readers to make up their own mind about what Nagin said and meant by reading the transcript of the speech, which has been posted to the Times-Picayune's Web site here.

Of course, for those of us who have been living through or closely following the disastrous rebuilding effort in New Orleans, it's difficult not to suspect that both racism and classism have been factors. And as we pointed out in our earlier post about Nagin's remarks, the mayor himself has furthered these nefarious causes by promoting policies that have benefited the propertied classes and investors while largely ignoring or even being outright hostile to the needs of his city's poor, who are overwhelmingly black.

At Monday's press conference, Nagin also complained that the Post mistakenly assumed he was referring to Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, his recent mayoral runoff opponent, when he made reference to a "golden boy" supported by his detractors. Without naming anyone, Nagin implied that he was referring to Audubon Institute CEO Ron Forman, who led the candidates in fundraising heading into the primary, in which he finished third. This point was also made in response to a post on Nagin's remarks at the Institute for Southern Studies' Facing South blog by commenter jeffrey:

Nagin was referring there to Ron Forman who was, in fact, seized upon in the early part of the race by the "Uptown conspirators" looking to install a true white plutocrat in the mayor's office. In a sense, Nagin's characterization of this maneuver is correct. What he doesn't tell you is that in order to back Forman, the white Uptown conservatives backstabbed and abandoned Nagin who they had installed as their puppet in 2002. In order to overcome this, Nagin reinvented his political persona as a racial panderer. Once Forman was eliminated in the primary, the conservatives "came home" to Nagin backing him against the more liberal (but white) Landrieu. So Nagin's new formula is: Kowtow to capitalists and Republicans while pandering to the black community by demagoguing against a mysterious "they".

Indeed, Nagin's speech to the NNPA did nothing to dispel the notion that he embraces a neoliberal philosophy that favors the capitalist investor classes over the poor. In fact, he urged his listeners to come to New Orleans and invest in cheap property -- that is, property that was once home to the city's dispossessed:

So I'm not going to stand up here and moan and groan about our struggles in New Orleans. I'm telling you, New Orleans is coming back. Y'all come visit us during Essence Fest. You're going to have a good time, and we are going to have some entrepreneurs in New Orleans that will be making big bucks because, guess what, they can't hold this money back much longer because its starting to hurt other folks, and ya'll know what I'm talking about, so they got to let it loose. And in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast they estimate they will spend within 30 and 100 billion over the next five to seven years. If you don't hear nothing else I say tonight, buy some dirt in New Orleans, buy some dirt in New Orleans. Real estate values are going to go out the roof and you need to be a part of that. We have programs where you can buy adjudicated and blighted properties for half their appraised value and you hire your own appraiser.

Hire your own appraiser? Sounds to us like the Post may have ignored the real outrage in Nagin's speech: an invitation to rip-off.

Goodbyes, grants and glaring incompetence: The news from La.

Some big news today from Louisiana on post-Katrina reconstruction:

* First of all, Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D) bowed out of Louisiana's gubernatorial race yesterday, just six weeks from the start of the legislative session. In an address televised from the governor's mansion, the state's first female chief executive said:

After much thought and prayer, I have decided that I will not seek reelection as your governor.

There is nothing more important to Louisiana's future than a strong recovery, free from politics.

I'm announcing my decision early - well before the legislative session. I'm doing this so we can work without interference from election year politics. Every action in my remaining months in office will be to serve Louisiana's best interest.

Blanco also announced her intention to focus in the upcoming session on what she described as a "bold and sweeping" education agenda.

* Second, the Louisiana Recovery Authority has submitted language to the feds that would change Road Home program rules, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. The changes will allow owners of storm-damaged homes to get their grants more quickly by allowing them to receive the money in lump sums rather than installments from mandatory escrow accounts.

The changes were made at the insistence of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which last week notified Louisiana officials that requiring homeowners to request phased disbursement as each stage of construction was completed violated HUD rules on "compensation" programs, which are supposed to have few strings attached, according to the paper. HUD is expected to OK the changes quickly.

The agency's demands shocked Louisiana officials, who say they had gotten HUD's approval for its program design at every step along the way, the Times-Picayune reports. The state was concerned that paying homeowners a lump sum would leave them vulnerable to predatory mortgage companies and contractors, and would remove the incentive to rebuild.

More than 115,000 people have applied for Road Home aid to date, but only about 3,000 have closed their grants.

*And last but certainly not least, an official report by the state of Louisiana into the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina blames the disaster on decades of incompetence by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Times-Picayune reports:

In a sweeping indictment of Corps stewardship, the report alleges that agency supervisors ignored increases in the threat level for their project, knowingly built levees and floodwalls lower than congressionally mandated, failed to detect or ignored glaring errors during the review process, underestimated the impact of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet on the city's defenses, and failed to properly maintain the system.

The report, conducted by Team Louisiana at the request of the Department of Transportation and Development, echoes many points made in other probes last year, including that of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, led by the University of California-Berkeley, and the interim report from the Corps' own Independent Performance and Evaluation Team.

While earlier efforts to pinpoint what went wrong concentrated on technical aspects of the structural failures, the Louisiana State University-based Team Louisiana worked to identify the decisions that caused those failures. They include:

-- The Corps ignored two increases in the severity of the model storm that the system was designed to protect against, thus knowingly failing its 1965 congressional charge to protect the city against "the most severe combination of meteorological conditions reasonably expected."

-- In 1985, the head of the project ordered his staff to ignore an official reduction in the elevation of the land they were building on, resulting in the Corps finishing levees and floodwalls that it knew were as much as 2 feet lower than claimed.

-- The Corps failed to maintain the parts of the system properly and ignored advances in engineering knowledge and technology that could have prevented the flood.

The report calls for the state and Congress to hold "8-29 Commissions" to fully investigate the disaster, passage of a federal "Katrina Recovery Bill" to fund coastal restoration and flood protection, and greater transparency on the part of federal and state authorities when discussing flood protection plans.

Nagin's part of the 'anti-black' conspiracy he decries

Speaking last week to a gathering of newspaper publishers, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin once again played the race card in the ongoing hustle that is the Gulf Coast rebuilding, suggesting that the bungled recovery is part of a plan by unnamed conspirators to revamp the racial composition and political leadership of his and other cities, the Washington Post reports:

"Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere," Nagin said at a dinner sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for newspapers that target black readers. "They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community."

Nagin's comments hearkened back to those he made at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in 2006, when he echoed the funk band Parliament by claiming that New Orleans would once again become a "Chocolate City." At last week's event, Nagin suggested that those comments made him a political target, according to the Post:

"Everybody in America started to wake up and say: 'Wait a minute. What is he doing? What is he saying? We have to make sure that this man doesn't go any further,' " Nagin told a room full of black newspaper publishers and editors at the Capital Hilton.

Referring to [New Orleans mayoral challenger and Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch] Landrieu, who is white, as "the golden boy," Nagin suggested his chance at reelection in the mayoral race had seemed slim because "they dispersed all of our people across 44 states with one-way tickets."

"They thought they were talking about a different kind of New Orleans," Nagin said. "They didn't realize that folks were awake, that they were paying attention."

Indeed, those of us who are awake and have been paying attention to what's been happening in New Orleans since Katrina know that the federal, state and local policies driving reconstruction have had the effect of shutting out of the city many African Americans, who still comprise a majority of New Orleanians but a much smaller one than before the storm. But we also know that Nagin himself has had a hand in promoting these effectively anti-black policies.

This reality was eloquently stated by University of Pennsylvania political science professor and New Orleans expatriate Adolph Reed Jr., writing last September for The Nation. In an essay titled "New Orleans -- Undone by Neoliberalism," Reed identified former corporate executive Nagin's approach to governance as neoliberal -- that is, one in which "private is always better than public, and ... the main functions of government are to enhance opportunities for the investor class and to suppress wages for everyone else." Of the various proposals that had the effect of excluding poor blacks from the city's reconstruction, Reed wrote:

...[E]ven though the most politically articulate and militant demands stressed the rights of renters, Nagin's main policy concession to the protest against the rebuilding proposals was to extend greater latitude to "homeowners." Thus, in what was supposed to be a victory for popular interests against developers, renters were left out of the equation entirely and established as non-stakeholders. The irony is that blacks were disproportionately renters, and renters were disproportionately black. And roughly 90 percent of rental units destroyed were low-income affordable. Many, no doubt a preponderance, of black homeowners are not affluent, and securing greater civic voice for homeowners democratized the process, if only by slowing down the development juggernaut a bit. Nevertheless, the concession at the same time inscribed property ownership as the condition for entry into the arena of interest groups with effective civic voice.

Treating property ownership as the sine qua non for policy consideration didn't raise any eyebrows locally or nationally, except among the ranks of those who were left out. Neither the black Mayor nor the majority-black City Council has shown initiative in taking into account, much less defending, the interests of poor New Orleanians. The city's evacuation plans notoriously failed to anticipate adequately poor people's circumstances and needs. Landlords began evicting tenants without a hint of due process as soon as water receded and rumors spread of possibilities for extracting exorbitant rents from construction workers. The state officially prohibited evictions before October 25, but that prohibition was academic for the tens of thousands of people dispersed in shelters around the region and nation. And even that minimal right was flagrantly ignored with impunity. New Orleans City Council president Oliver Thomas complained in February that government programs and agencies had "pampered" poor people and proclaimed that they should not be encouraged to return. As he put it, "We don't need soap opera watchers right now." At least one other black councilmember expressed support of his view, as did the New Orleans Housing Authority receiver.

This all attests to the triumph of neoliberalism as both ideology and policy regime, and that triumph is seamlessly compatible with the discourse of racial politics. Black property owners, after all, are stakeholders as well as whites. Demonizing government to cut public spending and regulation, plundering the public treasury through privatization and rationalizing both through the myth of magical market efficiency all underlie what happened to New Orleans.

Until Nagin takes action to protect the right of return for his city's non-propertied classes, his talk of racial conspiracies is nothing more than a rhetorical distraction to deflect attention away from his own role in shutting blacks out of the new New Orleans.

N.O. pump problems renew cronyism concerns

It's become a familiar theme in the ongoing Hurricane Katrina saga: Businesses with close Bush administration ties get key contracts, only to flub the job they were paid handsomely to do.

Yet another example came to light this week, thanks to the Associated Press: Scrambling to meet President Bush's promise to protect New Orleans before the start of last year's hurricane season, the Army Corps of Engineers installed defective flood-control pumps despite warnings from its own engineer that the equipment would likely fail during a storm. And -- surprise, surprise -- the manufacturer who got the $26.6 million contract to install the problem pumps happened to have close ties to the Bush family.

The contractor in this case is Moving Water Inc., a Deerfield Beach, Fla. firm owned by J. David Eller and sons. Eller was a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a company called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps overseas in questionable deals that remain under investigation. In addition, Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians -- mostly Republicans -- over the past decade, according to information the AP obtained from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Corps awarded the competitively bid pump contract to MWI in January 2006. A few months later, a Corps expert raised concerns about the equipment's functionality, the AP reports:

Misgivings about the pumps were chronicled in a May 2006 memo provided to the AP by Matt McBride, a mechanical engineer and flooded-out Katrina victim who, like many in New Orleans, has been closely watching the rebuilding of the city's flood defenses.

The memo was written by Maria Garzino, a Corps mechanical engineer overseeing quality assurance at an MWI test site in Florida. The Corps confirmed the authenticity of the 72-page memo, which details many of the mechanical problems and criticizes the testing procedures used.

About a dozen of the 34 pumps on order were already in place in New Orleans when Garzino wrote her report, according to Bedey.

In her memo, Garzino told corps officials that the equipment being installed was defective. She warned that the pumps would break down "should they be tasked to run, under normal use, as would be required in the event of a hurricane."

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco yesterday blasted the Corps for installing the pumps and demanded a congressional investigation. U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu has also called for an investigation:

That the Corps would knowingly utilize pumps their own experts deemed defective is gravely troubling. The implication that the political connections of the manufacturer may have played a role in the decision is equally troubling.

In designing pumps that are essential to protecting New Orleans and the region, it seems the Corps made one bad decision after another. I will call for a full investigation into whether the Corps installed pumps that either failed during testing or were never tested at all. We must find out if the Corps used taxpayer dollars to buy a product that they knew didn't work and hold the decision-makers accountable.

In the meantime, MWI has fired back by defending the effectiveness of its products, the Miami Herald reports:

On Wednesday, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who represents MWI denied that the pumps were or are defective.

"They were tested last week, and they exceeded the design specifications as far as flow and capacity," said William R. Scherer Jr. "That was exactly the situation in 2006 when they were installed."

However, Scherer acknowledged the pumps had had a vibration problem when first installed in a hurry last year to get in front of the hurricane season.

"It's a big task, and it takes time to get the kinks out," Scherer said. "You can't install it perfectly."

Scherer, it should be noted, is a member of the Bush Rangers, a group of the president's biggest campaign fundraisers; he also led the team of attorneys that helped litigate Bush into the White House following the contested 2000 election, according to WhiteHouseForSale.org.

This isn't the first time that MWI has found itself caught up in controversy: In 1999, a whistleblower lawsuit sparked an FBI investigation into shady taxpayer-backed water pump deals in Nigeria, according to the St. Petersburg Times:

MWI ... in 1992 sold Nigeria $74.3-million-worth of giant water pumps and other equipment in a deal made possible by a loan from Export-Import Bank of the United States. Nigeria is about $23 million behind on its payments, and as the Miami Herald reported last year, many of the pumps were unaccounted for or sitting idle.

From 1989 to 1993, Bush and Eller co-owned a company, Bush-El, that marketed MWI pumps, which are used for flood control and irrigation. Bush traveled to Nigeria to help push the pump sales, and as son of the president, received red-carpet treatment.

...

Former MWI pilot Greg Johnson, who was interviewed by the FBI, said it appeared the investigation focused on how the U.S. loan money was spent.

In an interview, Johnson contended that the pump prices were highly inflated and many of them could never be used because of infrastructure problems in Nigeria. "It was the biggest scam I've ever seen in my life," Johnson said.

"I think the investigation is about misappropriated funds. They (the U.S. government) financed a pig in a poke, and I think they're interested in knowing where the money went and who made the commissions. . . . The only scenario where I could see Jeb Bush involved is if they call him in and ask him where the value of his $648,000 comes from and what did he do for that money."

Bush reported making $648,000 from MWI, about $452,000 selling his stake in the company back to Eller in 1993 and the rest from sales commissions from countries other than Nigeria. He has not provided details about those other sales.

Nigeria has been MWI's key customer since the 1980s, thanks in large part to the Ex-Im bank. Before Bush joined Eller's team in 1989, MWI received nearly $90-million in Ex-Im backing for pump sales to Nigeria.

The country's problems paying back those loans prompted Ex-Im to tighten its loan policies for Nigeria. But by 1990, MWI was working on persuading Ex-Im officials to back more pumps sales to Nigeria. They approved eight separate loans to Nigeria totaling $74.3-million.

In 2002, the U.S. Justice Department amended its suit against Eller, alleging that he twice flew suitcases of cash to offshore tax havens to hide his assets, the St. Petersburg Times reported. The DOJ also claimed that MWI improperly used more than a third of a $74.3-million U.S. loan to pay a Nigerian agent for the company. In turn, that agent and other company officials paid Nigerian government officials involved in buying MWI's pumps, the lawsuit alleges. MWI denies the charges.

According to the paper:

Between 1985 and 1993, the government says, Eller flew on his company plane to the Bahamas and to Grand Cayman, once with a "large suitcase filled with currency" and once with a "large duffel bag or suitcase filled with currency." At both places, a chauffeured limousine whisked him and the money away. Eller told his pilot he was "moving his assets out of the United States," the lawsuit contends, calling it an effort to shield the money from creditors.

Eller's lawyer, William Scherer, said the flights never occurred and neither Eller nor MWI has accounts in either country.

The lawsuit by the George W. Bush Justice Department suggests no wrongdoing by Jeb Bush, who from 1988 to 1994 worked with Eller marketing MWI pumps to foreign countries, including Nigeria.

Indeed, the amended complaint omits allegations of influence-peddling by MWI -- including Eller's bringing Jeb Bush into the pump business -- leveled in the whistle-blower's recently unsealed lawsuit. That lawsuit prompted the federal investigation.

This begs a couple of questions: Why was a company under DOJ investigation for such serious charges given a major federal contract for New Orleans reconstruction in the first place? And why is the DOJ suit against MWI still unresolved after so many years?

Shipyard strike rocks Mississippi coast

For most people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, federal relief aid came in a slow trickle. But not for defense contractor Northrup Grumman: just over two months after the storm, Grumman received over $2.7 billion from the Navy and FEMA to rebuild Naval shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

But shipyard workers at Northrup say little of that has trickled down to them, which is why they are in their seventh day of a strike. Workers saw their homes destroyed and costs go up -- but despite the massive federal bailout, Grumman responded with cuts, as reported in Labor Notes:

Striker Shane Buckhalter, a pipe welder at the shipyard for the past two and a half years, said that Katrina "wiped several towns along the coastline completely off the map." As a result, said Buckhalter, "Insurance has gone up, housing has gone up."

Nick Mariakas, an electrician at the shipyard, agreed with Buckhalter. "Since Katrina," said Mariakas, "you can’t get housing. People raised the rents up so high—they pretty much price gouged. There’s just not a lot of houses left down here."

Mariakas noted that some Grumman workers "are still in FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) trailers—and FEMA’s fixing to take those trailers away. We can’t live off what they’re trying to pay us."

What the company tried to give the workers, according to Mariakas, was a four-year contract with no pay increases and increased health care costs for workers. The workers voted down this contract by 90 percent in late February.

Shipyard work is dangerous; numerous workers reported heat strokes in the summer and welders not receiving proper equipment working in toxic smoke. The company is calling the workers greedy in asking for raises and better benefits, but Nick Mariakas puts it in perspective:

"[The company] acts like we’re greedy. If we’re greedy, why is Grumman asking for so much money after they landed $2.7 billion? We do work for the government, but we don’t make government pay."

Slavery still a problem for the South

Mexican and Indian immigrants who allege they were brought to the Gulf Coast and held captive by companies yesterday called on the U.S. Labor Department to investigate possible civil and criminal violations by employers they describe as slaveholders.

The workers were brought to Louisiana and Mississippi under the federal H-2B visa program, which allows employers to bring foreign workers to the United States to perform temporary nonagricultural work.

According to the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, Louisiana Labor LLC brought 130 Mexican workers to the United States to work for the company, which is owned by Sulphur, La.-based realtor Matt Redd. Redd recruited the workers in Mexico, charged them airfare to the States, then had them driven to Westlake, La.

Redd allegedly stole the workers' passports to prevent their free movement, an act that constitutes a federal crime. He then reportedly leased them to area businesses including car washes, garbage companies and casinos, and promised others work with the prominent construction services company, The Shaw Group.

The Indian visa holders worked for Signal International, a major marine and fabrication company with shipyards in Mississippi and Texas. More than 500 Indian workers were recruited over three years, paying between $14,000 and $20,000 to come to the United States. The workers thought they were acquiring green cards and permanent residency but instead got only six-month visas.

"We drowned our families into debt," said worker Kuldeep Singh, whose father sold his farm to send his son to the United States. "How can I go back empty handed?"

When Signal workers tried to organize, the company allegedly pulled four workers out of bed in a pre-dawn raid and imprisoned them on company property for hours. The other workers then went on strike, forcing the company to release the men.

"This guest worker program is corporate driven, state-sponsored exploitation," charges the center's Saket Soni. "Companies profit from it. And the Department of Labor signs off on it."

Slave-like conditions for foreign workers are not a problem only with Gulf-based companies. Last month, Legal Aid of North Carolina's Farmworker Unit filed two lawsuits against North Carolina employers and Asian labor brokers, charging that the employers and brokers lied to the workers and the U.S. government.

The Raleigh News & Observer reports:

Lawyers with Legal Aid of North Carolina ... say they know of at least 115 workers whom contractors brought to North Carolina from the Far East between 2004 and 2006.

"There's a desire for a work force that's not going to speak up," said Kate Woomer-Deters, a lawyer with Legal Aid. "Any time you can get people who are more vulnerable than Hispanic workers, unfortunately, that's an attractive work force."

In one of the cases, Thai workers allege that a Mount Olive, N.C.-based corporation called Million Express Manpower and a Thai company by the same name violated federal anti-racketeering laws by committing visa fraud and also violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act by confiscating their passports and forcing them to work without pay in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

Million Express Manpower in Thailand allegedly promised the workers three-year H-2A visas for agricultural jobs. In return, the workers had to pay their transportation costs and "recruitment fees" of about $11,250 each. But the farm work was sporadic and ended a few months after their arrival. The company eventually moved them from motel housing inspected by the N.C. Department of Labor into crowded outbuildings behind its president's home. Armed guards prevented the men from escaping.

Some of the Thai workers were taken to New Orleans to clean a hotel damaged by Katrina -- work they say they were never paid for. There the men were housed in a condemned hotel and, short of food, were reduced to catching and eating pigeons.

The other Legal Aid suit pits three Indonesian workers against GTN Employment Services of North Carolina, two Indonesian labor recruiters and two North Carolina growers. The three workers each paid over $6,000 in recruitment fees and transportation costs to the labor brokers.

When the men arrived in North Carolina, GTN confiscated their passports, visas and return plane tickets. GTN never offered any farm work to two of the workers and only minimal work to the other. Eventually, all three workers were housed at a GTN warehouse in Charlotte where they had to share a bare mattress on the floor. When the workers asked to leave, GTN demanded more money to retrieve their passports and plane tickets. The workers eventually escaped on foot, leaving their belongings behind.

"The two cases reflect an emerging pattern," says Legal Aid Attorney Mary Lee Hall. "Labor brokers in Asia, with ties to N.C. employers, falsely promise three years of work. Since the contracts are approved by the U.S. government, workers believe the promises to be legitimate and pay the huge recruitment fees demanded by the labor brokers.

"However, the actual work may last only a few months, and workers earn a mere fraction of what they paid to come to the United States. Also, the visa is limited to one employer. It’s a situation ripe for exploitation and a subversion of the program, which allows for these visas in case of a true labor shortage."

It's also a situation that could grow worse, as President Bush and many in Congress are pressing to expand guest worker programs as a solution to the nation's immigration woes.

With debate on the programs' expansion about to get underway, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center this week released a report titled "Close to Slavery: Guest Worker Programs in the United States" that documents the systematic abuse of workers under the H-2 visa system.

"Guestworkers are usually poor people who are lured here by the promise of decent jobs," says report author and SPLC Immigrant Justice Project Director Mary Bauer. "But all too often, their dreams are based on lies, their hopes shattered by the reality of a system that treats them as commodities. They're the disposable workers of the global economy."

Time is running out for Louisiana's vanishing coast

Humans have no more than a decade left to act before the ongoing loss of Louisiana's coastline becomes irreversible.

So conclude the experts in the first installment of a multipart series on coastal land loss that the New Orleans Times-Picayune began running yesterday:

Unless, within 10 years, the state begins creating more wetlands than it is losing -- a task that will require billions of dollars in complex and politically sensitive projects -- scientists said a series of catastrophes could begin to unfold over the next decade.

These catastrophes would include Gulf waves breaking over suburban lawns, the forced abandonment of many outlying communities, the intensified battering of the nation's energy infrastructure, complete inundation of levees built to withstand only brief storm surges, and south-approaching tropical storms slamming into the city of New Orleans as though it were beachfront property.

The impact would hardly be limited to Louisiana, the paper warns:

The entire nation would reel from the losses. The state's coastal wetlands, the largest in the continental United States, nourish huge industries that serve all Americans, not just residents of southeastern Louisiana. Twenty-seven percent of America's oil and 30 percent of its gas travels through the state's coast, serving half of the nation's refinery capacity, an infrastructure that few other states would welcome and that would take years to relocate. Ports along the Mississippi River, including the giant Port of New Orleans and the Port of South Louisiana in LaPlace, handle 56 percent of the nation's grain shipments. And the estuaries now rapidly turning to open water produce half of the nation's wild shrimp crop and about a third of its oysters and blue claw crabs. Studies show destruction of the wetlands protecting the infrastructure serving those industries would put $103 billion in assets at risk.

Unfortunately, while various coastal restoration initiatives have been launched during the past 20 years, no project capable of reversing the loss is currently in line for approval, the paper reports.

As we noted in our report titled "A New Agenda for the Gulf" released last week for the 18-month anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (a storm whose effects underscored the urgency of Louisiana's land-loss problem), a lack of federal leadership has impeded Gulf Coast reconstruction efforts. Inadequate action on Washington's part is also hampering coastal restoration, the Times-Picayune notes:

Congress provided a note of hope last year, voting the state a permanent 37.5 percent slice of offshore oil revenues for coastal restoration work. But full financing -- some $650 million annually -- won't kick in until 2017. During the critical next decade, the state will be receiving only about $20 million a year, a pittance in the face of a problem that will require tens of billions of dollars to solve.

If there's anything positive to be found in all this worrisome news, perhaps it's that Louisiana's coastal land-loss problem is finally getting the attention it deserves. Besides the Times-Picayune's series, Yahoo's Assignment Earth recently posted a piece about the problem, which it documented with the help of the folks at the Gulf Restoration Network.

But ultimately, reporting the problem is not going to fix it. Let's hope that these much-needed efforts to detail the land-loss crisis spark some decisive action before it's too late.

Gingrich: Ninth Ward destroyed by "failure of citizenship"

Most of the controversy from last week's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference has centered around Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot" (although many news accounts failed to mention it -- I guess gay-bashing isn't news?).

But just as shocking was the closing speech delivered by presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who a CPAC leader called "the intellectual cornerstone of our modern conservative movement." On the week of the 18-month anniversary of Katrina, as families across the Gulf remembered the tragedy and how it devastated their lives, Gingrich claimed that those killed or displaced from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans had it coming because they were, in short, bad citizens and stupid.

Here's what he said (listen to the audio here):

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.

I'm sure Gingrich knew that nothing would get the crowd excited like blaming the victims -- although Gingrich ended up coming in fourth in the event's presidential straw poll -- but this is over the top even for him. Instead of bizarre platitudes about "citizenship," let's review why New Orleans residents "couldn't get out of the way" of Katrina's devastation:

(1) It wasn't wind and rain from Katrina that destroyed New Orleans, it was flooding, which effected 80% of the city (why does Gingrich focus only on the poorest and blackest part of town?). And why did New Orleans flood? Because of ineffective federally-built and maintained levees, which the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers insisted would hold. That's why groups like levees.org are calling for a federal investigation. As Harry Shearer notes at Huffington Post:

[T]he folks in the Ninth Ward weren't caught by a hurricane. They were surprised at 5:30 Monday morning (according to [LSU Hurricane Center co-founder Ivor] Van Heerden's timeline) by an eighteen-foot-high wall of water as their federally built flood protection structure catastrophically failed.

Who's the uneducated one?

Of course, that's not the only damage from Katrina one can link back to Washington leadership. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet ("Mr. Go"), a money-losing shipping lane that Congress should have closed years ago, intensified Katrina's storm surge. For years the EPA and other federal agencies let energy companies and other interests decimate Louisiana's coastal wetlands, the best buffers against hurricanes.

In other words, Gingrich is right to say the destruction of New Orleans was due to a failure of citizenship -- but the failure happened in Congress and the White House, not the Ninth Ward.

(2) Those who were left behind weren't "uneducated" and "unprepared" -- they were the low-paid workers that kept the New Orleans tourism industry humming for wealthier visitors like Gingrich. New Orleans had one of the lowest wage rates in the country going into the storm, and as this piece in the Washington Post showed, the divide between rich and poor determined who could escape and who couldn't:

To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission.

"Me and my wife, we were living paycheck to paycheck, like most everybody else in New Orleans," Eric Dunbar, 54, said Saturday [...]

He offered a mini-tutorial in the economic reality of his life.

"I don't own a car. Me and my wife, we travel by bus, public transportation. The most money I ever have on me is $400. And that goes to pay the rent. And that $400 is between me and my wife." Her name is Dorth Dunbar; she was trying to get some rest after days of peril.

Dunbar estimated his annual income to be about $20,000, which comes from doing graphic design work when he can get it. Before the storm, when he and his wife estimated how much money they needed to flee the city, he was saddened by the reality that he could not come up with anywhere near the several thousand dollars he might need for a rental car and airfare."

But during his years in Congress, Gingrich voted down every attempt to increase the federal minimum wage.

(3) After the storm hit, who was to blame for people not "getting out of the way" of harm?

Maybe it had to do with Landstar Express America, the Bush-connected company that was given a $278 million contract to deliver evacuation buses, which didn't arrive until a week after Katrina hit, directly leading to the deaths of 34 people including children from dehydration?

Or what about the dozens of families that tried to flee over the Gretna Bridge -- only to be turned away by white cops who "were concerned about life and property" in their mostly-white suburb, as opposed to the lives of those escaping the floods?

Or perhaps we could look at FEMA chief Michael Brown, distracted with his wardrobe and job future while thousands were stranded in New Orleans?

(4) Most importantly, when Gingrich talks about Katrina, why does he stop at August 2005? The Gulf Coast is still in crisis today -- and who's to blame for that? As we showed in our report last week, A New Agenda for the Gulf Coast (pdf), the failed post-Katrina recovery goes straight back to Washington. As we wrote in a piece for The Hill last Friday:

Now, a year and half after Katrina, a failed policy at the highest levels of government is the major reason for the “second tragedy” of Katrina: a stalled recovery that keeps thousands of Gulf residents in limbo, and has left neighborhoods from the Lower Ninth Ward to East Biloxi looking like the storm hit yesterday. And only bold leadership from Congress and the President can turn the situation around.

In our report, we detail over 30 things national leaders can do (pdf) -- right now -- to turn around the situation in the Gulf.

But trying to score cheap political points with bogus claims that dishonor those who lost their lives in a great tragedy -- largely due to federal negligence and incompetence -- isn't one of them.

Our message to Congress

As we show in our new report, A New Agenda for the Gulf (pdf), the single biggest issue holding back the post-Katrina recovery is lack of bold leadership in Washington. Given the scope of the problem, only thoughtful and effective action by Congress and the White House can turn things around.

Here's a piece we wrote that appears today on The Hill, the online magazine for Congress:

Katrina, 18 Months Later
March 2nd, 2007
Institute for Southern Studies

President Bush made a quick tour of Gulf Coast yesterday to check on the status of the region’s recovery, eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina struck shores. He probably needed the refresher: the president hadn’t set foot in the still-hobbled region in six months, and didn’t even mention the Gulf in his January State of the Union address.

But if anyone should be paying attention to the Gulf Coast, it’s the White House and Capitol Hill leadership. Gulf residents know that officials at all levels of government must share blame, but there’s a strong sense that Washington is most responsible for the crisis facing the region today.

It was the collapse of ramshackle levees — built and overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers — that flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, wiping out thousands of homes, hospitals and schools. It was the botched emergency response, “coordinated” by now-departed FEMA officials in DC, that contributed to the deaths of hundreds trying to flee the storm.

Now, a year and half after Katrina, a failed policy at the highest levels of government is the major reason for the “second tragedy” of Katrina: a stalled recovery that keeps thousands of Gulf residents in limbo, and has left neighborhoods from the Lower Ninth Ward to East Biloxi looking like the storm hit yesterday.

And only bold leadership from Congress and the President can turn the situation around.

When Bush came to New Orleans, locals were remembering the pledge he delivered two weeks after the storm from Jackson Square: “Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives,” he said. “And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.”

But much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast haven’t come back. Indeed, for thousands of people, the Katrina disaster never ended.

More than 100,000 displaced Gulf residents still live in FEMA trailers or receive “temporary” housing aid. Bush chose a thriving charter school for his New Orleans photo op, but 44 percent of public schools remain closed – in January, children were put on waiting lists. Hospitals and clinics across the coast are still shuttered.

City officials tried to be upbeat during Mardi Gras last week, but Bill Quigley, a public-interest lawyer in New Orleans, said the reality was visible to anyone who wandered out of the French Quarter: “Visitors to New Orleans can still stay in fine hotels and dine at great restaurants,” he said. “But less than a five-minute drive away lie miles of devastated neighborhoods that shock visitors. Locals call it ‘the Grand Canyon effect’–you know about it, you have seen it on TV, but when you see it in person it can take your breath away.”

There’s no question that the Katrina crisis demands national action – right now. But Washington’s failures to date have shattered many people’s faith that the federal government can get it right. Congress and the President must prove they can and will help those in need.

Many in the newly elected Congress have promised to right the wrongs in the Gulf, but people in the Gulf are skeptical. Rep. Nancy Pelosi waited until six months after one of the country’s biggest disasters to visit the region. Gulf residents notice that Katrina hasn’t been a big policy issue in Congress so far, but they hope that will change.

“For our future to be strong, all of our communities must be strong,” Pelosi said in a January 19 speech at the National Press Club. “It says in the Bible, ‘when there is injustice in the world, the poorest people, those with the least power, are injured the most.’ That was certainly true for the people of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster compounded by a man-made disaster. It is now eighteen months past time to get our response right.”

There is plenty the new Congress and the President can do to help revive the Gulf Coast. In a report released this week, “A New Agenda for the Gulf Coast,” the Institute for Southern Studies Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch offers dozens of practical proposals–put forward by Gulf leaders and policy experts–that Washington can act on now to put the region back on the road to recovery. For example:

• Lack of affordable housing is one of the biggest barriers. Washington can help Gulf residents get back into homes by speeding up compensation to homeowners, extending aid to renters, cracking down on insurance companies that deny coverage and reversing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s decision to raze 5,000 barely damaged public housing units in New Orleans.

• Plans to repair Louisiana’s broken healthcare system through a Medicaid waiver and Medicare pilot project have been delayed. Washington can help by reviving these efforts, by linking displaced patients with care and injecting resources into community-based clinics.

• The region’s economy is still hobbling and good jobs are scarce, yet efforts like the Bush Administration’s “Gulf Opportunity Zones” have been scattershot and ineffective. Attaching accountability standards to federal subsidies–as well as launching a Gulf Civic Works Program to hire 100,000 displaced people to rebuild their own communities–could transform the region.

• The 2007 hurricane season is less than four months away, but the Gulf’s storm defenses are still inadequate. Watchdogs are calling for prompt building of levees that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane, and for Congress to create a commission to investigate levee failures and cancel wasteful projects like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which helped magnify Katrina’s intensity.

The solutions are there, and it’s not too late. All that’s required is for Congress and the President to live up to their promises and responsibility to build a brighter future for the Gulf Coast.

Post-Katrina dumping threatens Louisiana communities

Neighborhoods around New Orleans and elsewhere across Louisiana -- many in predominantly minority communities -- are facing toxic threats from dumpsites that have cropped up or expanded in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Environmental advocates detailed the growing problem in a hearing held earlier this week by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works titled "Moving Forward After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita."

The problem of construction and demolition ("C&D") debris disposal is enormous in storm-affected areas. In testimony before the committee, Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Mike McDaniel reported that Katrina and Rita generated more than 62 million cubic yards of debris -- enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome more than 10 times. And more is on the way: While 12,000 storm-damaged homes have been demolished to date, about 30,000 additional homes are slated for dismantling.

In order to accommodate all that waste and make its disposal easier, LDEQ expanded the definition of C&D debris after the storms to include previously-excluded substances such as asphalt, sheet rock, furniture, carpeting and even asbestos-contaminated materials. Reclassified, these materials were no longer confined to more protective municipal waste landfills, which must have liners and leachate collection systems. Wilma Subra, president of an independent environmental consulting firm and a leader of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, testified about the problem this change presents:

Allowing disposal of C&D waste in unlined landfills has been based on the theory that this waste would not produce toxic leachate or gas emissions. This theory ... has proven to be incorrect even with respect to ordinary C&D waste. It is certainly not true with respect to mixed hurricane waste.

And at the same time LDEQ was allowing more toxic waste to be mixed in with construction waste, the agency rushed to permit new C&D landfills, raising the ire of some nearby residents.

They included Rev. Vein The Nguyen with the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Roman Catholic Church and an activist with Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East, a coalition of local faith-based, community and environmental organizations that successfully fought for the closure last year of the nearby Chef Menteur Highway landfill, a mixed C&D site opened after the storm. Located near a predominantly Vietnamese community, the facility threatened to contaminate a canal that runs through the community and is used to water traditional vegetable gardens. Nguyen said in his testimony before the committee:

During our struggle against the Chef Menteur Highway landfill, the community has learned populations throughout the region are dealing with the same issues with Hurricane Katrina debris. ... Furthermore, landfills have usually been created near minority communities which neither have the organization, the voice, nor the resources to fight for their rights to an equal, healthy environment. The Industrial Pipe Landfill in Oakville, Louisiana is a blatant example of this environmental injustice. The waste pile at this landfill is only fifty feet away from the edge of an historic African American community. Flocks of seagulls constantly hover over the waste pile and fire has broken out more than once even though it supposedly only contains inert matters. The forty-foot waste pile has occasionally collapsed and fallen into Oakville residents' backyards. The community has been fighting against this landfill for seventeen years to no avail. After Katrina, the Industrial Pipe Landfill took in storm debris which included rotten freezers and refrigerators. Now a horrible stench fills the air. Industrial Pipe's latest violation documents a fish kill of 5,000 by an illegal discharge of water. LDEQ has given no opportunity for a public hearing on the settlement of this issue.

Unpermitted landfills are another major problem. LDEQ has documented over 200 illegal dumpsites throughout the state. In addition to three major legal landfills in New Orleans East, there are 23 illegal dumpsites and 13 illegal automobile junkyards in the area -- all of them in environmentally vulnerable wetlands. One illegal dumpsite -- an old composting facility -- has been on fire for more than a year, said Nguyen, who faulted government agencies for shoddy oversight and undemocratic processes:

Before and after Katrina, the lack of enforcement by state agencies, local entities and the lack of a comprehensive solid waste management policy which strongly focuses on recycling, reusing, and reducing before dumping into landfills; and the absence of meaningful venues for community participation have all contributed to the grave environmental problems Louisiana has been facing and that hurricanes Katrina and Rita brought to the surface today.

Nguyen offered a number of recommendations to improve post-disaster waste handling in the future and protect the environmental health of Louisiana residents. They include establishing a multi-stakeholder committee to advise federal officials on disaster debris issues and create an environmentally sound waste-management plan, asking the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers' Inspector General investigate debris removal and siting policies and whether any federal laws were violated by Corps contractors, and getting federal support to help state agencies investigate illegal dumpsites and prosecute those responsible. Concluded Nguyen:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were natural catastrophes which wreaked a lot of unavoidable havocs. They become tragedies when people create additional avoidable harms to their communities and their environment. We believe that the U.S. Congress ... can assist in reversing some of the avoidable harm caused."