Famous last words

 Ghassan Korban is talking about his legacy today.  

In May, Korban will leave behind an agency that is still challenged but in better condition than when he found it, he said in a recent interview. Among his accomplishments are two infrastructure projects to supply reliable power to drainage pumps and installation of smart meters he says will eliminate problems with water billing.

You sure about that, bro?  

Can't wait to find out

Getting flushed but remaining flush

A Knights of Chaos float from this year's Carnival depicts Sewerage and Water Board Director Ghassan Korban (along with his salary)

One of several interesting things McBride pointed out today while watching the Sewerage and Water Board meeting was this apparent move to help Ghassan Korban cash out if the state really does manage to take over the utility. 

The Sewerage & Water Board Thursday approved a three percent raise to Executive Director Ghassan Korban’s more than $300,000 salary, even as the Gov. Jeff Landry’s hand-picked task force released a plan to strip much of the local control of the city’s sewer, flooding and water treatment utility.

S&WB watchdog Matthew McBride, who first reported the pay raise vote, noted that “according to the salary published in the 2022 audit, this will increase his salary from $338,365 to $348,515.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2022 the average median household income in New Orleans was $51,116.

They also doubled his available leave time which further indicates a sizeable buyout could be coming soon. The board members are also quoted here making annoying comments in praise of Korban that place him among "the employees of the sewerage and water board" they claim to be very proud of.  But that is a complete distortion. Korban isn't a rank and file employee. He's a highly compensated administrator who, even if he does get canned by Jeff Landry, won't have to worry about where his next meal is coming from for a very long time afterward.  Korban is pretty close to retirement anyway. I'm sure the salary boost will help maximize his pension as well.  

We can't say the same for most of the actual employees of Sewerage and Water Board. Their future is very much up in the air. Stephanie Hilferty has a bill pending that could transfer them all from the city to the state civil service system.  I wonder what that does for their benefits, leave, and retirement plans.  I'm guessing its not the same sort of jackpot their boss just got.

It flows downhill

This new S&WB substation has gone on quite a journey. First, Entergy was going to pay for it outright. We thought that sounded suspicious. And lo and behold, it was. After that fell through, the plan was to pay for it out of the city's American Rescue Plan allocation.  But that also sounded suspicious to us because it was already clear the mayor wanted to spend that money on cops and discretionary nonsense. Those suspicions also turned out to be well founded and now here we are back where we always thought we would be.  

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and the City Council responded in unison last July when Assessor Errol Williams announced that citywide property assessments had jumped by more than 20%.

They said City Hall would not “roll forward” property tax rates under its control, meaning property owners would not face additional liability for a little more than half of all citywide millages.

But the Sewerage & Water Board’s executive director, Ghassan Korban, has different ideas than his elected overseers when it comes to the utility’s tax rates. At the board’s Sept. 20 meeting, he said that he will argue for a roll forward, as the S&WB is in full tree-shaking mode to pay for a critical drainage power upgrade and a citywide meter replacement project.

Eventually the burden finds its way downstream to where the least important people are. And that's who has to bear it.

Throw a tarp on it

RIP Turbine 5.

Regardless of the cause, it's unlikely that the more than half-century-old Turbine 5 will ever be brought back into service, Executive Director Ghassan Korban told the S&WB's board of directors Wednesday.

The announcement marks one of the first concrete steps in what could be a radical shift for the utility, a move away from spending millions to keep its own archaic power system limping along — including extensive repairs to Turbine 5 just two years ago — and toward a greater reliance on power from Entergy New Orleans.

The story also points out that a third party investigation into the cause of the explosion hasn't happened yet and SWB itself has not complied with requests for information about its internal findings.  We are meant to infer here that moving away from in-house power production is a cost saving measure. But given so little information it is difficult for the public to make an informed determination about that.

Meanwhile McBride points out today that SWB approved a pay raise for Director Korban bringing his salary up to $288,000. He also points out that the agency has reinstated its annual awards banquet whicb a previous legislative auditor's report has raised legal questions about. All of this raises doubts about the board's fiscal concerns over the turbine. 

We should point out also that mayor Cantrell has repeatedly advocated for higher Entergy rates in exchange for one or another deal she seems to be negotiating on behalf of SWB. Could that also be related to the decision described to us today? It's a pretty good bet.

Fool me once, shame on me Fool me six times in two years....

Well then I guess it might be time to rethink things.

NEW ORLEANS — Citywide flooding events like what happened Monday afternoon are "extreme" and require a "thorough investigation," a Sewerage & Water Board spokesperson said.

As much as 5 inches of rain fell across the metro New Orleans area between about 1:30 p.m. and 4:10 p.m. Monday, creating widespread flooding that affected many parts of New Orleans as cars stalled, gridlock formed, businesses flooded and residents dealt with all-too-familiar frustration.

It's at least the sixth time during the past two years that heavy rains inundated different parts of the city following a seemingly routine summer thunderstorm.

S&WB communications director Richard Rainey said the results of Monday's flooding were "extreme," and that the flood events they've witnessed since the notable Aug. 5, 2017, flood are a phenomenon that need to be investigated. 

Was Monday "extreme"?  What does that even mean anymore?  It wasn't quite as bad as the flood we had last month.  But it wasn't nothing. I happened to be headed uptown on St. Charles when it hit. When I saw that Washington was going to be impassable for a while, I pulled over and parked on the sidewalk.  Like a lot of people, I wasn't going anywhere for a while.  Some of these larger vehicles were a little more confident.





I did get out and walk around a bit. The worst of the rain had already cleared up when I took these photos.  It was brief but it dropped enough water to do this.



It also shut down the streetcar which left packs of bewildered tourists to trudge their way up the neutral ground on foot.. provided they stuck to the high ground.  Also it wasn't long until the canoe people started to show up.  Why are there always canoe people when this happens?



I mean I took that picture from the neutral ground just 20 feet away.  My feet weren't even wet.  You didn't need a canoe to get where you were going.  This was strictly a recreational activity.  There was more than one canoe guy too. There's always more than one.  Here you can see a canoe passing in front of the New Orleans and Company offices. Embossed lettering on their building proudly proclaims it the "Headquarters of New Orleans Tourism."



Speaking of which, just across the street in front of the Avenue Plaza, I overheard someone saying, "Back in Atlanta we don't have this shit." That's right.  #OnlyInNOLA, baby.



But, okay, probably just the fact that we're talking about seeing the canoes every time this happens means something is wrong.  How often should this be happening?  Six major street floods in the space of two years is a lot.  And it's not just the frequency of the flooding that is unusual. It's also the locations.  This stretch of St. Charles is relatively high ground. The river side tends to pool up a little bit from time to time but I can't recall seeing the whole street inundated like that until very recently.  Same goes for this stretch of Carondelet which was flooded Monday.



This one is from the July flood. It's Third and Carondelet. I've lived nearby for almost 20 years and I've never seen it do this.



Something is definitely different. But what?  Here is one theory.

The S&WB is studying the effects of the massive culverts built in recent years under several Uptown avenues as part of the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, known as SELA. A report on the impact SELA has had on drainage in the area could be complete as early as next month, Korban said.

My goodness. Imagine if after all these years, all the money spent, all the neighborhoods and business disrupted by the construction, all the expensive property damage incurred that SELA actually would have ended up making things worse. Delightful!

Anyway, it's not just SELA they're looking at. Korban says they also want to look at the pipes under the CBD. 

To try to figure out what’s wrong, the S&WB plans to investigate the long length of box canals that run from Julia Street up to Drainage Pump Station 2 on North Broad Street, which is responsible for keeping the area dry. Just blocks away from that station, the S&WB is still working to clean a massive pile of debris, that included at least one car, from the canal that carries water away from the station on its way to the lake.

It's strange that it has taken them so long to admit this, But it turns out that even when the pumps are working at (near) full capacity, they can't pump the water out of the city if it's not even draining down to where they are.  So now we're gonna go down in the culverts.  We learned last week that practically anything could be down there. It's probably not going to be pretty.

But we should point out also that there is more than one reason they're looking at those downtown pipes.  They've actually been planning to go down there for some time; prior to this flood, and before even the much discussed extraction of a Mazda 626 from below Jeff Davis Parkway. In the story about that episode, we read about these negotiations. 

Similar inspections of pipes in the Central Business District are being pitched to the Downtown Development District to encourage it to agree to a new, $3 million tax that was negotiated as part of the Cantrell administration's infrastructure funding deal this year with the hospitality industry, Green said. 

It's not just.. or perhaps even primarily... concern about downtown drainage issues that is motivating the inspections. It's the pursuit of political leverage with a taxing authority that, really, shouldn't even exist in the first place. That doesn't mean going down to look at the pipes is a bad idea. It's just that we should be aware of why they're looking at those pipes in particular.

And to be clear, it's not just support for the new tax, the mayor is asking from DDD. She also wants them to roll their millage forward to maximize windfall from the recent property assessments.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration is asking the DDD to increase its millage by $2.5 million and dedicate that money toward drainage and infrastructure issues in the area. The district had planned to roll back its tax rate in 2020 because of higher property assessments; the additional tax would keep the rate about the same for the area.

An effort to actually identify and begin fixing the drainage problems could help convince the district’s board that such a move is needed, Weigle said.

On Monday morning, the very same day the streets flooded,  Together New Orleans presented a report to City Council about the devastating effects the skyrocketing assessments and potential property tax hikes are likely to have on the city's already severely cost-burdened homeowners and renters.  

Together New Orleans estimated that almost 2,000 households will see their taxes go up by more than $1,000 next year. And because of a recent state constitutional amendment that phases in the higher taxes on assessments that increase a property’s value by more than 50%, nearly 5,200 will have a total increase of more than $1,000 in the next four years due to this year's citywide reassessment.

Some neighborhoods will see tax increases that represent more than 4% of the average median income of the residents living there, Together New Orleans said.

“When you add all that together, there’s no way folks can continue to live here even if they make a decent wage,” the Rev. Joe Connelly, a member of the group, told the council.

Councilmembers were apoplectic. But also they seemed to be at a loss for solutions.  At one point, Helena Moreno even wondered out loud if we could just ignore the assessment and decide to collect this year's property taxes assuming the previous values. That's not likely to happen.  But it's also clear that rolling forward isn't going to be a popular option with Councilmembers either.

But City Council isn't the only body who will be making decisions about millage rates. In fact Council actually only controls something like half of them. The others are spread out among several taxing authorities including the Sheriff's office, Audubon, the Convention Center, and, yes, the Downtown Development District where it looks like the mayor, via Sewerage and Water Board has found some leverage.  It almost makes you wonder whether or not LaToya might want to think about shoving a few cars down the storm drain herself just to provide a little extra motivation.

Resilience

That's what they call it when you invest a lot of money in preparing for the most extreme conditions, "hardening" your infrastructure against any reasonable threat, right? It's a very popular concept. We read about it all the time. Not sure where balmy autumn weather falls on the risk scale there.

Aside from Entergy power, the 60-hertz pumps – two of which were operating early Saturday before trouble struck – can run on electricity generated from the utility’s Turbine No. 6, an estimated $31 million piece of equipment built in 2014. Asked why that turbine was not used after the Entergy pole was hit, Korban said it was taken offline about a week ago because it cannot operate in temperatures at 45 degrees or lower.

“It was designed to function during the hurricane season, the warmer season,” Korban said, “and it did not have the safeguards or the specifications to allow it to function all year round.

Don't pay your water bill for at least six more months

That's the soonest they think it might be accurate.

Ghassan Korban, the Sewerage & Water Board's executive director, said Monday that the utility has hired the Baton Rouge-based consulting firm Utiliworks to evaluate the billing system and provide recommendations for what to do going forward. As for when the utility might be able to assure the public that its billing system is entirely fixed, Korban said he expects to be in that position within the next six months.

"We will finally have the timely and accurate billing system that our customers deserve," said Korban, who started on the job last month

The drainage blank slate

Our new S&WB Director Ghassan Korban is a man who, much like our new CFO and our new CAO, is brand new to New Orleans and yet finds himself in a position to make very big decisions with far reaching consequences for the city where he probably will not actually spend more than 5 to 10 years at maximum.

When you are in such a position. When you aren't from here, don't have any personal ties, don't give a shit who was here before you or who can live here after you're gone it becomes very easy to just treat the whole thing like a "blank slate" that can be written over on a whim. For example, it becomes very easy to just commit everyone to a massive overhaul of the drainage system.

Three weeks into his job, the new S&WB executive director is laying the groundwork for a bold plan that would go beyond the short-term fixes and emergency repairs that have dominated the agency since well before last summer’s floods in New Orleans.

His eye is on a multiple-decade master plan that would see brand-new systems for drainage, water and sewerage — a process that would mean at least tens of millions of dollars a year in new money from residents.

“We’re at the point where replacement is the only option,” he said.

Mitch Landrieu, on his own way out the door and on to horizons well beyond the city, made the same recommendation.  He reckoned such an endeavor would run about $60 billion.   He also was not exactly shy about saying that $60 billion would come largely from regular old New Orleanians with little or no help from state or federal sources. It's lunacy to believe such a cost is bearable by the local population. The state boasts the nation's 2nd highest poverty rate and its 4th lowest median income.  The City of New Orleans is among the worst in the entire world in terms of income inequality and  is already looking at a potential $37 million budget shortfall for next year.

Simply put, there isn't enough money available to support and maintain $60 billion worth of new infrastructure.  Not unless we're willing to make a drastic shift in where our tax burden falls.  We could do a bit more if we decided to actually tax rather than subsidize the hoteliers, real estate moguls, non-profit scammers, and oil and gas polluters who draw off and hoard whatever wealth the desperate toil of Louisiana workers produces for them.  But the Mitch Landrieus and LaToya Cantrells of the world will do no such thing.  All they know how to do is squeeze the "bad actors" among the proles for every last dime they are worth only to blame their "culture of permissiveness" when the turnip fails to produce enough blood.

None of this is to say Korban and Mitch are wrong in the abstract.  A top to bottom overhaul of the city's water management system is a fine idea. In an ideal world where we don't penalize people for being poor, it would be just the thing to set to work on right about now.  But in the absence of fair and adequate funding for infrastructure, we're probably better served to keep muddling through for the time being.  Otherwise, we're stuck trying to raise the money on the Trump Administration's terms. And, as we've tried to point out previously, that is a direct path to privatization.  Maybe Korban is fine with that.  Cantrell hasn't really taken a position on it in a while.  Someone should probably ask, though. It's going to come up sooner or later. 

Are they going to try and privatize it?

Matt McBride has never been the most optimistic analyst. But, then, when it comes to flood water, a half full city is bad enough however you choose to look at it.  Anyway when you hire McBride to tell you how your system is doing, odds are he's going to say it's worse than you thought it was.

The Sewerage & Water Board's power system came "dangerously close to complete collapse" months before flooding last Aug. 5 revealed severe problems in the utility's power and drainage facilities, according to an engineer the city hired to assess those facilities. He also found water pressure dropped twice to "dangerously low levels ... without anyone noticing."

After reviewing activity logs from the Sewerage & Water Board's power station, engineer Matt McBride discovered all four of the utility's 25-cycle power turbines either failed or were already down during the five-day period last year from March 7-11. He emailed his assessment to a former top  city official on Sept. 29, 2017, amid emergency repair efforts by the utility to patch the aged power turbines.

McBride's findings, reported exclusively by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, offers startling new insight into the state of the Sewerage & Water Board's power generation system shortly before two summer deluges flooded the city in July and August.

"The events from March 7th forward are far worse than what has been publicly revealed," McBride emailed.

So that makes for fun reading on a Friday afternoon.  Toward the end there is a status report on the turbines. It says Number 1 is down currently and the long troubled Turbine Number 4 is being tested to see if it is suitable for "emergency use."  There are rumors that testing hasn't gone well but that isn't in the story so we'll wait to hear more.

Meanwhile, almost a full year after the bulk of its leadership was swept away in the wake of a flood, the Sewerage and Water Board has settled on a new director.

The board voted unanimously to hire Ghassan Korban over his fellow finalist, former New Orleans city attorney Avis Marie Russell, after an hour-long closed session.

Korban, 56, has been commissioner of the Milwaukee agency since 2011, a job that includes oversight of the Wisconsin city's water department. He has held various executive roles within that office over the past 31 years, a résumé that impressed city officials.

“What it boiled down to was the overall experience that Mr. Korban brings, but also, what our needs are right now in the city of New Orleans,” said Mayor LaToya Cantrell shortly after the board’s vote.

That's right. She said, "boiled down to."  It's fine. For a while the interim director was a guy named Rainwater.  We live in a very bad TV show. Everybody knows this.  Anyway, apparently, Korban is a people person.

Duplessis, the utility president pro-tempore, added that not only did Korban's experience in utility services set him apart, but he also scored high marks in the "people portion" of the selection committee's criteria.

"...He had a sincere dedication to connecting with the people," Duplessis said, "not only looking inward in terms of our organization, making sure that we do right by employees and put them first, but also being that public face and talking to our citizens and making them very much a part of the process."

It's important that the new S&WB "do right by employees" given that they seem to have so much difficulty retaining them.

Amid calls for more staff, utility officials have acknowledged hiring managers have been taxed with daily and emergency responsibilities on top of scheduling interviews with job candidates and recommending who to hire. The July 13 hiring day should help managers plug many vacancies at once.

"This agency's greatest asset is our team and in order to work at our full capacity we need hardworking individuals to answer the call to serve their city," Jade Brown-Russell, the utility's acting executive director, said in a statement.

As of May 31, the Sewerage & Water Board's human resources department reported the utility had 534 total vacancies. Much of the staffing shortfall is traced to 463 newly budgeted positions added over the past two years, as well as the retirements, resignations or terminations of 395 employees since June 2016, according to the utility's news release. In all, the utility says 574 new employees were hired between June 2016 and April 2018.

It might help if the leadership over there wasn't so quick to blame their "greatest asset" when things go wrong. But contempt for workers is such a long standing tradition in New Orleans, the reflex is almost involuntary. When a botched cutover to a new software system threw the entire city's water bills into chaos, S&WB accused employees of laziness and incompetence saying they "never took to" the new system.  Employees told the  Times-Picayune  that S&WB management regularly belittled and intimidated staff rather than listen to their concerns. 

Amid calls for more follow-up training, former and current utility officials have declared the system itself, provided by Canadian firm Cogsdale Corp., is not the problem. They argue the problem rather traces to under-supported, short-staffed meter readers and billing personnel, some of whom they claim stayed loyal to the old billing system.

But two Sewerage & Water Board employees with direct knowledge of the utility's billing department and new billing system insist the software still has technical problems, particularly in how it estimates monthly water bills.

These employees agree follow-up training has been sorely lacking, but also say the initial training did not match up with real-world scenarios once the system launched in late 2016.

"It makes us seem like we're illiterate and don't know anything," one employee said. "That's not the case."

The classism embedded in the work culture of New Orleans is born of a deep and abiding racism. Every tossed off comment about incompetence or laziness resonates with echoes of vestigial racial hierarchies.  On the first day of my first job out of college, one of the first things my boss said to me was, "The problem with New Orleans is people here don't want to work." This wasn't an accusation directed at me, exactly. It was meant as more of a just-between-us-white-guys helpful hint. "Those kinds of people" of which there are a lot in New Orleans, need to be kept in line.  It's the deep internalization of these social presumptions that have made New Orleans a company town through and through. Only the boss is assumed to have any rights. Everyone else is probably trying to get away with something.

Hostility and suspicion directed at workers permeates everything. We confront it even when may not recognize it for what it is. It manifested itself last year in the scorn Saints fans displayed for the players' anthem protests. It also drove the obscene displays of reverence for their boss that came pouring out from every corner of the political and media establishment during his funeral. It is why "tourism leaders" and university presidents sit on every local municipal board and make decisions affecting the use of millions of dollars in public funds with little or no input from the workers whose exploitation produces that wealth.

These attitudes also color our relationship with public services such as those provided by the Sewerage and Water Board.  Which is why a basic provision like clean water is only understood in terms of its effect on profits.  It's why we're able to be so cruel and dismissive as to shut off service to rate payers victimized by the billing SNAFU. It might even be why Gambit didn't bother to give us an option in this poll for "They should never do that."

How well does LaToya Cantrell understand any of this?  Not very.  Her remarks at recent job fair had her using S&WB employees as kind of a human shield against public criticism.

"No longer will we tolerate disrespect as it relates to the Sewerage & Water Board," Cantrell said. "And I don't care where it comes from, because you all deserve respect every step of the way, and you have a mayor and you have leadership in place within the Sewerage & Water Board, again, to ensure that you succeed."

Cantrell's remarks follow a letter she sent May 24 to New Orleans City Councilman Joe Giarrusso, in response to a letter he had penned that referenced the utility's "terrible customer service, lack of transparency and poor efforts to engage the public." Cantrell, in her letter, chided the "demands and perceived tone" of Giarrusso's letter, calling it discouraging to the utility's staff and leadership morale.

"As we hold them to high standards, we must remember that neither the board members nor the (Sewerage & Water Board) employees are our enemies," Cantrell wrote. "It is incumbent upon us to work with them to benefit the people of our city."

As we've tried to show above, though, the "disrespect as it relates to Sewerage and Water Board" is coming from inside the house. It's management who isn't respecting the rank and file employees. LaToya is flattening the difference between the board and the employees in order to mischaracterize justifiable public criticism of the way the agency is run as an attack on the people with the least power to do anything about that. Leadership can abuse its charges however it wants. But criticism of leadership from outside is not allowed.

This kind of deliberate class blindness is a staple of Cantrell's political style. As she herself put it in her primary night speech last year, "I'm not talking about taking from the rich and giving to the poor and all that kind of crap." Indeed it is often her purpose to protect the rich from the poor by denying the existence of a conflict between the two.  LaToya defines her approach to housing policy, currently our city's hottest flashpoint of wealth inequality, as a search for "balance."  Her land use decisions as a council person frequently favored spot zone requests for short term rentals as well as incorporating the best "incentives" for developers and what she referred to as "the landlord community."

Cantrell supports these class distortions using a rhetoric peppered with Orwellian slogans and soft bullying phrases calculated to elicit fear and conformity.  #CityOfYes is, of course, the most famous of these but there is more. She's not using "It's got to be we" so much anymore but the spirit of that is still alive in her take on S&WB criticism. It ran throughout a chilling letter she sent to city employees during her first week in office. In that letter LaToya asked the employees not to think of her as a boss but as the head of a family.

First and foremost, I want you to know that you matter to me. We public servants have to stick together, and I think of each and every one of you as my family, because I care about each of you individually and I want you to know that you are seen, you are important, and you are recognized for your work serving our city.

Claudius:

And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son

Or even Mitch Landrieu's "One City One Voice" provides a more immediate comparison. Mitch was an egomaniacal bully too but it's LaToya's penchant for framing professional functions in terms of personal familial relationships that is most disturbing. It is an authoritarian tendency; less a genuine expression of affection than a demand for deference. 

And so the condescension drips from every pipe. Got a problem with your water bill?  Better watch your tone there, buddy.  Trying to figure out what's going on with all the road work? Here's a goddamn garden gnome to explain it to you like you are some kind of child. Which is why we're starting to get a little tired of asking questions at all. Like why is that just as the city has (finally) secured $2 billion from FEMA for infrastructure work that S&WB is "pressing pause" on a $114 million bond issue  that would get some of that work started? Maybe that's a stupid question. If it is, though, it would be nice to think we could get a straightforward answer instead of a huffy brush back or some sort of puppet show.

But, okay, at the risk of all of that, what do we suppose is going on here? 

The task force was created in a bill sponsored by Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, a Lakeview Republican. It will be comprised of eight people — a member of the New Orleans City Council, a representative of Mayor LaToya Cantrell, a representative of the Sewerage & Water Board, a representative of the Inspector General, plus engineering, business and tourism leaders — and is charged with examining whether the agency should continue to function.

“Over the last several years, many residents, business owners, and local officials have questioned whether the Sewerage and Water Board is the best entity to manage sewerage, water, and drainage facilities and services in the city of New Orleans,” Hilferty’s bill states. “Suggestions abound regarding the best management options for the city’s sewerage, water, and drainage facilities and services, including but not limited to public-private partnerships, granting control to the city, or allowing the Sewerage and Water Board to retain control.”

Maybe the gnome will weigh in later but this looks an awful lot like a first step toward privatization. If so, it's hardly a bolt from the blue. It's something that has been building for a while and, now, the pieces are in place at the city, state, and federal levels that could make it happen. Take a look at these parting comments from Mitch Landrieu  just before he left office.

While stopping short of endorsing specific plans, Landrieu suggested that the city's aging drainage system is too far gone for mere repairs. He also said incoming Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who takes office May 7, should put the effort at the top of her to-do list.

"This ought to take priority over every other thing we're doing in the city," Landrieu said.

Regardless of the exact form it takes, such an endeavor would be costly and difficult, and Landrieu warned that residents would likely have to foot the bill with little help from the state or federal government. But he cast the changes as essential to the city's survival and said that deciding on and funding such a plan should be of top concern.

Now that McBride's report is public we have a better understanding of what Mitch meant by "too far gone."  That "residents will have to foot the bill," is a little cryptic, though. Let's talk about that. Major infrastructure work, such as replacing an entire municipal drainage and water system, depends on federal support. This is true even when the federal government is in the hands of 19th Century robber barons as it is today.  When Mitch is saying residents will have to foot the bill this time, he means they will have to pay more of the bill than they previously would have been hit with.  He knows this because he's seen Trump's infrastructure plan.

The meagerness of the federal contribution — just $200 billion over ten years, or less than 0.1 percent of GDP over that period — was already clear from the State of the Union. Half of those funds are allocated to an Incentive Program intended to support surface transportation and airports, passenger rail, ports and waterways, flood control, water supply, hydropower, water resources, drinking water facilities, wastewater facilities, storm water facilities, and brownfield and Superfund sites. Just listing everything the President’s plan claims to address for a federal expenditure of just $100 billion makes the inadequacy of the plan obvious. But there’s more.

The Incentive Program requires states and localities to put up 80 percent of the cost of any project in order to get a federal match of 20 percent. This turns the traditional approach to infrastructure investment on its head. The federal government typically provides 80 percent of the funding for such projects. It is wishful thinking to imagine how cash-strapped states and cities — already on the hook for extensive local infrastructure spending — will be able to find new public sources of financing, especially now that the recent Republican-passed tax law has severely limited their ability to raise taxes to pay for such undertakings.

No, we won't be able to afford that on our own.  Which is where the essence of the Trump plan really comes into play. It's all about privatization.

Trump’s plan turns infrastructure investment on its head in another way as well. Traditionally, the selection of projects to be funded by the federal government emphasized benefits to the public. The administration’s plan weighs the ability to attract sources of funding outside the federal government at 70 percent when considering whether to support it; economic and social returns from the project count for just 5 percent. Federal funding will go to projects that are most attractive to private investors, rather than to those, like clean water, that meet the needs of communities.

Profitability of private investment is everything. The social benefit of building the infrastructure in the first place, counts for almost nothing. Public-private grifting is the order of the day. There isn't a lot the city can do about that. But we should at least demand that our elected leaders resist this piracy.  Unfortunately, given the way they talk about public-private partnerships, "balance" inducing tax incentives, and their flat-out dismissal of the role of class in politics, our elected leaders don't seem to be equipped to do that very well at the moment.

None of this is to say they're definitely going to privatize Sewerage and Water Board. The other finalist for Director was actually part of a group who tried that once and she didn't get the job. maybe that counts for something. Still it may take a fair amount of upticking in order to steer us away from this path we're on. Which is to say the "tone" may have to get worse before things get better.