During last week's CNN climate forum, Elizabeth Warren hit a home run. Warren was asked about the Trump administration's decision to reverse Obama era efficiency standards for light bulbs.
Her answer brought out a point that Democrats, even the "good Democrats" often fail to make about where the true onus for effective climate action lies.
“Oh, come on, give me a break,” Warren, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said during CNN’s Town Hall forum on climate change. “Look, there are a lot of ways that we try to change our energy consumption and our pollution, and God bless all of those ways. Some of it is with lightbulbs, some of it is on straws, some of it, dang, is on cheeseburgers.”
“That’s what they want us to talk about,” Warren said, before noting that, in her estimation, the fossil fuel industry wanted to cast the climate fight as “your problem.” She continued: “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your lightbulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers, when 70% of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”
The industries Warren mentioned are the oil industry, the electric power industry and the building industry, according to The New York Times.
In other words we aren't going to solve a problem caused by institutional corruption and mismanagement by shaming the individual victims of that mismanagement into submission. We're not going to reduce carbon emissions by drinking out of paper straws. Anyone who tells you differently is not really on your side.
Similarly, in New Orleans, we aren't going to relieve decades worth of decay and negligence visited on our drainage system by shaming people into picking up their trash. But for some reason, LaToya Cantrell can't help but to do just that at every opportunity.
Even, here, where the topic is really more about expanding the Department of Public Works, she can't help but get in a dig.
Officials outlined more on how they plan to spend money from the
"fair share" deal. The money will help the Department of Public Works
hire 42 extra employees and fund more tasks being brought in house.
They'll bring in five more maintenance inspectors and 28 new pieces of
equipment, including vac trucks, pothole patchers, dump trucks,
excavators, pickup trucks and trailers.
"We are owning our
responsibilities and seamlessly working together," Cantrell said. "It's a
shared responsibility. We're not being reactive because we're doing the
work every single day and have been doing it every single day since
I've been in office."
Cantrell ask citizens to do their part by
cleaning up the city and dumping trash appropriately. Someone recently
dumped three boats on Martin Luther King Avenue.
"You can't make it up," Cantrell said. "It's present. It's there."
What does a boat left in the street have to do with causing people to need... boats in the street every time it rains? I really have no idea. But it's obviously evidence that we've done something wrong.
It's notable, also, that Cantrell's hostility toward the citizenry appears here in a story about her so-called "fair share" deal with the hospitality industry. She's very proud of her grand bargain. She's so proud, in fact, that #FairShare has already transcended its original meaning to become a catch-all mantra applicable to whatever the mayor happens to be talking about at the time.
A new gambit at extracting patronage dollars out of the French Market is about “...getting our
fair share, based on what’s coming back to the city, and these are
assets we control.”
A scheme to skim fees off of other governmental agencies for tax collection services is apparently about getting a "fair share." The city
raised the fees it charges to Bayou Boogaloo saying they also need to pay a "fair share." LaToya's
PAC is using it as the title of a fundraising campaign. The
city's and the
mayor's official Twitter feeds frequently tag random messages about
anything and
nothing with #FairShare. It's basically LaToya's #MAGA now. More to the point, Cantrell's muddled, scattershot use of the phrase now indicates she never grasped its value in the first place.
The original context was the structural inequality of the tourism industry in New Orleans. An obscene portion of the wealth generated by tourism accrues to a cohort of owners and oligarchs while the majority of workers who make that wealth possible struggle for low wages, poor benefits and minimal job security. Moreover, the tax revenue collected off the backs of these workers feeds directly back into systems and institutions meant to further line the pockets of the very same oligarchs. A "fair share" of that revenue should be used to support the city's working class. It should build affordable housing. It should fund better schools, better transit, better city services. It should help the city build and maintain the basic infrastructure that makes life possible here without further burdening its poorest and most vulnerable people.
So does Cantrell's "fair share" deal actually do any of that? Not really. The city does receive the temporary windfall of a one-time payment plus a share of one or two new revenue streams (depending on future developments.)
But the new money is grossly insufficient to the need.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s hard-fought “fair share” infrastructure deal
could provide more than $20 million a year for the struggling Sewerage
and Water Board over the next decade. But that doesn’t come close to
meeting the $3 billion in funding required by the Sewerage and Water
Board’s 10-Year Capital Improvement Plan.
That was revealed by Cantrell
administration officials on Monday at the first meeting of the City
Council’s Ad Valorem and Special Dedicated Revenue Committee. The
committee aims to take a bird’s eye view of the city’s finances and
release a public report in early 2020.
“Oh wow, so every year, you’re
hundreds of millions of dollars short leading up to 2028?” Councilwoman
Helena Moreno asked at the meeting.
Sure, $3 billion over 10 years is a tall order. In a better world, every city in America would have ample support from a federally funded and guided
Green New Deal initiative to repair crumbling infrastructure and stem the tide against the threat of climate change. But until we get there we have to depend on our local leadership to do the best they can. The #FairShare isn't the best we can do in New Orleans.
In fact, it was never intended to be. The closest description of what it actually was intended to do came from
Stephanie Grace all the way back in June. Her key observation at that time was that all of the recurring revenues generated by the deal do not come from the tourism industry giving up any of its accustomed share. Instead they come from new taxes
on the "man behind the tree."
The latest evidence that it always helps to have some metaphorical man
behind some imagined tree is the deal to send more money to New Orleans
to help rebuild its aging infrastructure, which has apparently cleared
all remaining hurdles in the state Legislature. Despite a period of
tense, on-again, off-again negotiations among New Orleans Mayor LaToya
Cantrell, Gov. John Bel Edwards, legislative leaders and representatives
of the tourism industry, all sides emerged with much of what they
wanted.
"All sides" got what they wanted. True! But that requires some
explanation of which "sides" wanted what. Let's look at how the spoils are divided.
Number one on the list was the Convention Center wanted to build their publicly funded but privately profitable hotel.
Check. Walt Leger got that for them.
House Bill 617,
passed by the Senate on a 33-0 vote on Sunday, authorizes the
Convention Center to build and own the $550 million, 1,200-room hotel
proposed for the upriver end of the giant exhibition hall. The bill also
clears the way for the Convention Center to develop other vacant land
it owns next to the site.
Number two was the tourism cabal wanted less public scrutiny over the marketing and convention brokering agencies they control.
Check. The technically public New Orleans Tourism Marking Corp will be folded into the technically private (but publicly funded) New Orleans and Company. The city's "infrastructure fund" gets a cut NOTMC's corpse. But the lion's #FairShare of that still goes to the NO and Co.
About $5.5 million of the Marketing Corp.’s budget, which comes from a
nightly fee charged on hotel rooms, would be redirected to the city’s
infrastructure fund as part of the overall deal. Other money the group
receives, including $2 million a year from Harrah’s Casino and its hotel
and $7.8 million from a self-assessment by hotels in the city, would go
to New Orleans and Co.
The key difference, though, is that these operations will be more fully privatized under the new regime. The city had a direct oversight role with NOTMC.
The new entity says it will "invite" them to sit in on the back bench at some of their meetings.
Oversight of the combined organizations is another detail being worked
out. In an internal company email sent Wednesday and shared with NOLA.com
| The Times-Picayune, Perry said New Orleans and Co. intends to invite
the two City Council district members and a rotating at-large member to
serve on an “ex-office” basis with New Orleans & Co. Perry later
clarified that his group is still working out the details for a formal
City Council presence on the board, but his plan is to invite council
members to serve on a leisure marketing committee run by Romig.
Number three was the city wanted to pull in more recurring revenue from local hotel/motel taxes. This, more than anything, was the core of the "fair share" argument. And they did sort of get what they wanted. But the trick is in how they got it. What the city is getting is
a completely new tax based on a revival of a so-called "lost penny" that hadn't been collected since 1966. In other words, the tourism agencies aren't "sharing" their previous take at all. The "man behind the tree" is.
Number four was various parties for various reasons wanted a new tax on Short Term Rentals. The hotel industry wanted it in order to equalize the tax paid on STRs with that applied to hotel rooms. The STR industry, while not happy about being taxed, is happier on balance with becoming a critical revenue generating industry the city will be reluctant to crack down on in the future. The city, again, just wants to get paid. And they will. Maybe. The new tax still has to be approved by voters on the November ballot this year. Also
the city is having difficulty projecting just how much revenue it's going to actually see from it. One thing we do know is whatever amount the tax does eventually produce, we still have to "fair share" 25 percent of it back to NO and Co. So, congratulations on that as well.
Number five on the wish list was the Convention Center
wanted to ret-con its legally questionable collection of a tax originally intended to pay for its Phase IV construction. Over the years, that money has become a kind of slush fund the city's elite have used to pass money around among themselves for
their own pet projects and
those of their cronies. So, yeah, in exchange for a paltry $50 million one time payment, they get to keep doing that now.
Already, they've got big plans.
New Orleans tourism officials' plans for a massive entertainment
district on empty land upriver from the Ernest N. Morial Convention
Center are back on the table.
The Convention Center's board, which
finally won approval in June to build a 1,200-room hotel on part of the
land after lengthy political wrangling, has asked interested firms to
submit ideas by Oct. 4 for how to develop the 20 acres adjacent to the
hotel site.
In its request for new master plan proposals, the
Convention Center said it "expects the development to be reflective of
the unique culture and history of New Orleans and include elements not
commonly found in other parts of the nation."
They're putting out for bids on a shiny new entertainment district to go with their hotel. It will be built on some of the highest ground in the city convenient to downtown. Ideal for building affordable housing, maybe. But that would only happen if the city were serious about giving its workers a "fair share" of the benefit their labor actually produces. LaToya Cantrell's fair sham deal was never really supposed to do that.
The mayor herself even admitted the fair sham isn't going to be enough last week when city officials laid out their plans for some of the money they know they will have on hand. The deal left far too much money and power in the hands of the tourism cabal. So, naturally,
she is asking you to make up the difference.
But she said it will take far more than the "fair share" deal’s
millions to fix all the roads, canals and pipes that have crumbled
during years of deferred maintenance and that are being further battered
by the effects of climate change. She said that’s precisely why voters should pull the lever for a trio of infrastructure funding initiatives on Nov. 16.
Part of what voters will consider is tied in with the fair share
deal: a tax on short-term rentals whose proceeds will help to fund city
infrastructure. The other initiatives include a 3-mill tax to pay
for repairs and maintenance of infrastructure, a $500 million package
of infrastructure bonds and another $10 million in bonds for maintenance
work.
When they do get down to fixing the canals and pipes, however they pay for it, let's hope they get it right this time. The last big drainage project only just recently wrapped up. And
already people are raising questions about that one.
The SELA improvements all stem from widespread flooding on May 8,
1995. The resulting $3.1 billion in insurance claims set a record at the
time for an unnamed storm event, and the federal flood insurance
program had to foot the bill for repairs.
So, Congress responded
by authorizing $1.5 billion in drainage improvements over the next 20
years, with the idea that improving the infrastructure would prevent
rising flood-repair costs in the future. The Uptown culverts were among
the last pieces of that puzzle.
But after this summer’s floods,
there are questions about whether those improvements have had unintended
consequences for New Orleans’ antiquated drainage system.
When the Corps completed the SELA culverts, they were turned over to the
Sewerage & Water Board. The board’s executive director, Ghassan
Korban, doesn’t believe the increased capacity in the SELA culverts
would have any negative impact on surrounding drainage, but he said he’s
hired an outside engineering firm to analyze the flow and determine if
it’s causing any bottlenecks.
A couple of independent engineers quoted in that story think maybe the SELA work is making the flooding worse. Sewerage and Water Board is skeptical but they say they'll check it out. Last year we read in The Lens that the new culverts are "
large enough to accommodate three city buses side-by-side."At the time that seemed like a colorful description but, really, who knows
what might be down there.
Whatever they find, though, it's important to understand, the mayor is not going to ask the city's ruling classes to pay to dig it out. According to her version of events, they are paying their fair share. So, obviously, we must be the problem now.
Joey Wagner, the Corps’ senior project manager for the SELA projects,
bristled when WWL-TV asked what he would tell Bossier and others who
think the construction has contributed to recent flooding.
“Like the mayor says, move your cars to the neutral ground," he said.
"We all know there are certain areas of the city that are going to
flood. And it’s going to continue to flood until the system is totally
overhauled.”
And Mayor LaToya Cantrell backed up Wagner at a news
conference last week: “Until the city, until we start dealing with our
local issues relative to infrastructure, then we will not see the system
working as intended.”
She focused her ire on the large amounts of
debris New Orleanians regularly dump into the drainage system, and then
blamed the intensifying rainfall.
To quote Senator Warren again, come on, give me a break.
