Becky Houtman

To everyone who doesn’t think repopulation is an issue; to everyone satisfied with a half-size New Orleans, who think it’s for the best economically, socially, and risk-wise; your fondest wish is about to come true – if you live anywhere on the East Bank, you too could be a participant in the grand “house swap” proposals promoted by the “clustering” crowd. Get ready to trade your Uptown townhouse, your Warehouse District loft, your Marigny Creole Cottage – whatever you call home right now – for whatever’s available wherever they’ll have you on the West Bank, because the White House is recommending that as much as $978 million be moved from East Bank Orleans Parish flood wall improvement, levee raising, and breach repair budgets to West Bank flood control projects, with no commitment to when, how or whether they’ll restore those funds. (Perhaps even worse, the Corps says that’s OK, because they weren’t going to be able to spend that money by the end of their fiscal year – September 30 – anyway. “They say they need more time to finish designing.” I beg your pardon? You can’t find any levee repairs projects to spend money on? Clearly they’ve assigned their best designers the job.)

Now, this isn’t to say the West Bank doesn’t have legitimate, urgent even, flood control needs. But as even Senator Vitter noted, this is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Read between the lines: “Why pay to protect the bulk of the city that’s basically empty, or horror of horrors, encourage people to come back to it?” In a classic example of the recency effect logical fallacy, funding will go to the areas that are “safe” because they weren’t utterly devastated all that lately. But also because they’re presently populated.

No repopulation effort, no more East Bank New Orleans. And Peter hasn’t got much more to steal, for Paul’s sake or anyone else’s.

The eldest went first into the room where the slipper was, and wanted to try it on, and the mother stood by. But her great toe could not go into it, and the shoe was altogether much too small for her. Then the mother gave her a knife, and said, ‘Never mind, cut it off; when you are queen you will not care about toes; you will not want to walk.’ So the silly girl cut off her great toe, and thus squeezed on the shoe, and went to the king’s son. – Ashputtel (Cinderella), Grimm’s Fairy Tales

The F-word is in the air again. Or rather, it’s conspicuously not in the air, since the BNOB taught everyone what a dirty word footprint could be. Now, the buzz is about unrestrained rebuilding in “risky” areas, thanks in particular to the Washington Post’s New Orleans Repeats Mistakes as it Rebuilds article yesterday. The blogosphere is once again awash in “why are we letting those idiots spend our to rebuild below sea level?” rants (note, though, mominem’s lonely voice of dissent ranked on the first page of Google’s blogsearch). Oddly enough, the Post’s previous day’s story on Sacramento’s potentially catastrophic flood risk, observing that (surprise) it’s levees are substandard, didn’t warrant much blogland comment that I’ve been able to find.

I wouldn’t give the footprint topic the time of day if it were confined to knee-jerk New Orleans haters who think that our massive losses are costing them somehow, as if some enormous Save New Orleans tax were being levied on them personally. But I’ve heard the variations on the “you have to shrink the footprint” line from too many friends and relatives out of town – people who sincerely love New Orleans, visit here, visit more than just the French Quarter and Jazz Fest Fairgrounds, and want the city to survive almost as desperately as we residents do – to brush it off.

After all, it does seem eminently logical both to consolidate the population for the sake of providing services, and to run like hell from the worst-flooded areas. It’s true that we can’t expect to come back to pre-Katrina population density any time soon, if ever (and no one here wants their neighborhood to suffer the jack-o-lantern fate, or be surrounded by blight and vacant lots), and it’s completely fair to ask why one should rebuild in the deepest flood-risk zones. The trouble is, I’ve never seen the inevitable, costly consequences of a smaller footprint adequately addressed, even if race and class inequities could be somehow swept aside. And it does cost. It’s not an abstracted matter of so many puzzle pieces to be shuffled around, or cars in a valet parking lot. It’s a question of where real people can live, and how we can afford to make decent housing available in a timely manner.

Even the UNOP’s Community Congress II acknowledged that one of the “cons” of the scenario of requiring people to resettle in ill-defined “clusters” was the greater cost than letting people rebuild where they lived before. If you think the Road Home program is falling short now, just imagine when homeowners are forced to take the buyout offer rather than renovate/rebuild, and the real costs of relocation come to the fore. I’m a little surprised that the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act hasn’t been invoked yet, given that it’s a federal project that deprived the majority of New Orleans of their homes, but you can be sure that if or when people are denied the option to rebuild, the meaning and value of “comparable replacement dwelling” in the post-Katrina real estate market will be a magma-hot flashpoint.

Plenty of pundits (including Recovery Chief Ed Blakely, cited in the Post article) have proposed some vague sort of “lot swap” between badly flooded homeowners who want to return and scarcely flooded homeowners who have left, but would someone please show me these high-ground lots ready and waiting to be swapped? I know there are lots of people with high-ground properties who have relocated to other cities due to work or disgust, but which are the ones who aren’t seeking their newly boosted market value? What do we honestly have to offer people who are willing to sacrifice their immediate sense of home: their house or apartment, for their general sense of home: New Orleans? (Incidentally, the Post article notes that “Officials in St. Bernard Parish … rejected closing off a particularly hard-hit 36-block section of Chalmette because they could not afford to buy out property owners.” That doesn’t influence their conclusion that we’re Repeating Mistakes as We Rebuild, though.)

Another glaring omission from the footprint argument is the acknowledgement that ours was an unnatural disaster, and that that fact figures significantly into both what risk property owners and dwellers thought they were assuming before Katrina, and what risk we’re facing after. The Post does acknowledges that “the levees … proved catastrophically fallible,” but doesn’t factor in what every local now knows – that our degree of risk has far less to do with elevation than with the x-factor of where the next breaches might occur. Given that so far, the levees have been repaired mainly where they breached, and that miles of levees are still as substandard as before, everywhere but the repaired breaches will be under the same strain as before should a Katrina-like event happen again, with no telling which spots might give way first. And heaven forbid that the next threat should come via the river rather than canals to the lake, because then the highest, “safest” ground will be obliterated. We just can’t evaluate true flood risk while it’s more contingent on man-made negligence than natural vulnerability.

And encompassing both the population-consolidation issue and the flood-risk issue is the self-fulfilling prophecy dilemma. Repopulation is a matter of both just compensation to those who lost their homes and everything in them, and prevention of becoming a theme-park rather than a city. People weren’t stupid or foolhardy to choose to live and work in New Orleans, any more than people are stupid or foolhardy to live in Sacramento, San Francisco, or any coast, riverside, lakeside, barrier island, earthquake zone, tornado-swept prairie, blizzard, or avalanche territory. Offering and encouraging the option of return to the people who were flooded out is a moral imperative as well as an imperative to preserve the viability – not just of neighborhoods – but of the city. We need our population to back our deserved political clout at the state and federal level, and to remain a diverse city – racially, industrially, and economically. To retreat to the Sliver by the River is to cement our past history of inequality into an even more go-nowhere status as a low-wage, low-opportunity tourism town; a barely-get-by-ism that we will deserve to lose to another hurricane if we’re the ones who let it happen.

There’s no Fairy Godmother to tell us how to deal with flood risk and population shrinkage, but more importantly, there’s no Prince Charming who will take care of everything if we only make ourselves fit someone’s idea of what size slipper we should wear. We have excruciating decisions to make, but no one is in a position to tell us which toes can do without, any more than the knee-jerk New Orleans haters can say that the nation can do without us – our neighborhoods are no more socio-economic islands than we are as a city or a region. Nor can anyone tell us that sacrificing the 9th Ward, Lakeview, Hollygrove, Gert Town, or any of the flooded neighborhoods will make us a Queen who won’t need or want to walk. We’ll be crying “let them eat bread pudding” all the way to the guillotine if it ever comes to that.

I just got back from the District 2 Needs & Goals kick-off meeting with H3 Studio. A few quick thoughts:

Their slide presentation suggested that they’ve already compiled a lot of information about the district, its neighborhood groups (besides the “official” eight city-defined neighborhoods they’ve identified 28 actual functioning groups), and plans for particular areas that are already in existence, both pre- and post-Katrina. H3 principal John Hoal indicated several times that this information would be on “the website,” which, when I asked about it later, proved to be the UNOP site. No luck with that yet, unless it’s squirreled away somewhere pretty clever. The too predictable Deliverables & Support Documents page is still “coming soon” as of this post. Too bad, because it really does look like they’ve been doing they’re homework, including walking every foot of sidewalk and driving every street in the district. The maps they produced for their slideshow, of the varying conditions of streets, sidewalks, housing, etc would be great resources. H3′s own website was, sadly, one of those Flash affairs (I had to download an upgrade just to see it at all) that amounts to nothing more than a set of incredibly fancy lists. There are some teasers of maps and renderings that show up when you hover over the lists, but no links to close-ups, at least not in Firefox. It’s also completely unsearchable. It’s frustrating to see such an incredible potential information source so overdesigned and – I was going to say underutilized – but it’s really flat-out unutilized.

It was good to see key members of the planning team in attendence and leading the proceedings, including John Hoal, Derek Hoeferlin and Laura Lyon. Besides the slide presentation on the course of the UNOP meetings to come and on the research H3 et al have done to date, the rest of the session was devoted to small groups reviewing the Needs, Vision and Goals already collected by H3, and then selecting their top three concerns from those listed or their own devising. There was a lot of consensus when the small groups reported back – I guess we’re not a very contentious lot around here, fortunately. Crime, schools, decent affordable housing in historically appropriate styles (rehabilitated historic homes wherever possible), community health care, and closing the above/below St. Charles divide were big hits, but the applause-winning show-stopper was actual enforcement of existing zoning. All valid and interesting enough, but a bit on the woolly side – who’s pro-crime or anti-education? The devil is in the details, after all (hence, I think, the support for enforcing zoning), and we’re still a long way from knowing how and when those will be developed and implemented.

It’s nice to see that someone professional is taking legal issue with Entergy Corp’s stance that they’re not responsible for any of Entergy New Orleans’ (and its ratepayers’) troubles right now. According to Jim Chen at the Jurisdynamics blog,

Much of the problem arises from Entergy’s understanding of public utility law, one evidently shared by regulators with the authority to carry out this travesty.

Chen holds that Federal Power Commission v. Hope Natural Gas Co, the 1944 Supreme Court case frequently cited as Entergy’s excuse for leaving its subsidiary in the lurch,

emphatically did not dictate that regulators must always permit a utility to earn a rate of return on all of the investments it has historically sunk…Hope and the broader law of economic regulation do entitle Entergy to stay solvent under regulatory ovesight, but no single methodology is binding on ratemakers, let alone one that so odiously transfers wealth in a way as to make Entergy an effective profiteer from the misery wreaked by Hurricane Katrina.

Odious indeed. Ultimately, I’ll have to agree with almost any compromise that prevents a 140% rate increase for us all, including a Community Development Block Grant bailout if that’s all we can do, but I hate to see Entergy’s attitude rewarded without any objection (besides of course the business of human decency, which sadly doesn’t hold much policy weight).

On another note, one of Jurisdynamics’ areas of focus is legal response to natural disasters, so there are some other interesting posts there regarding Katrina-related issues, and it’s worth watching for more.

Let the anniversary media blitz begin: front and center of today’s NY Times home page: When masters of rebuilding are residents. I don’t have time to fully digest this now, but my first impression is one of looking in a funhouse mirror — there’s a reflection there, but you could get city dysmorphic disorder from taking it face value (a little more dry fact checking seems in order as well: e.g. the public meetings did not begin on August 1). I expect we’ll be seeing plenty of alternate New Orleanses over the next month. Maybe at the end we’ll get to vote on which one we’d like to live in.

The release of billions in federal funding for the recovery of New Orleans depends on the acceptance of a single, unified plan, covering everything from individual neighborhoods’ redevelopment to city-wide infrastructure. One feature of a such a unified plan must be meaningful public participation in the process, accommodating the city’s diverse citizenry and interests. Without extensive public representation, it is almost inconceivable that a plan would receive the endorsement necessary to begin disbursement of funds, in fact two prior planning attempts, the Mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission, and the City Council’s Lambert-Danzey plan, failed in part because of inaccessibility to the public.

When the announcement was made that the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF), its fiduciary committee, the New Orleans Community Support Foundation (NOCSF), City Council, the Mayor, and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) had come to an agreement to support the NOCSF’s Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), Governor Blanco responded, “This process will be democratic and inclusive. Folks who live in the neighborhood will be integrally involved.” Mayor Nagin called the plan “democracy in action” in his own press release on the announcement. Democracy in invoked repeatedly in descriptions and discussions of the Unified New Orleans Plan, and the test of its legitimacy rests above all in the consequential inclusion of citizens. To date, there has been minimal opportunity for substantive public involvement–attendees at a July 30 meeting gave their recommendations for redrawing official neighborhood boundaries, and made their requests for the number of planners and project areas they would like their Planning Districts to have, but these decisions were limited to those in attendance. The selection of preferred neighborhood and district Planning Teams will be the first occasion for a public vote in the UNOP process. The integrity of this voting procedure, therefore, reflects on the integrity of the entire UNOP as a democratic entity and on any of its actions to follow.

Despite less than a weeks’ notice, hundreds managed to attend the two public meetings and neighborhood groups and individuals all over the city are earnestly studying the 15 planning groups and what they have to offer. Many of the hardest-hit neighborhoods have already been working with planners for months — some with the Lambert-Danzey team and some with firms they hired themselves in the hope that when funding did come, they would be reimbursed. The Louisiana Recovery Authority will be administering the federal funds earmarked for New Orleans. With its endorsement of the UNOP and the requirement that UNOP planning teams submit neighborhood/district plans, many fear that months of work will go unfunded and come undone. Having a vote in their teams’ selection process is taken in deadly earnest by thousands of New Orleanians.

No time right now, but two quick notes:

Schroeder’s res ipsa loquitur echoes my own impressions of yesterday’s meeting beautifully. I think they’re pretty widely held sentiments.

The Times Picayune folks, however, seem to have attended a different event altogether…

Overview

Following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the attendant flooding and other related destruction, many parties have deemed a unified, city-wide planning process essential to the recovery of New Orleans. The release of billions of dollars in federal recovery funds, as well as some private grants, depend on the formation of a master plan covering everything from city-wide infrastructure issues to neighborhood-specific projects. Eleven months from Katrina’s landfall, a “Unified New Orleans Plan” is just now beginning to coalesce. In a July 5, 2006 press release, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, the New Orleans City Council and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) announced their agreement to adopt a common plan, to be overseen by the Greater New Orleans Foundation‘s (GNOF) New Orleans Community Support Foundation (NOCSF).

Previous to endorsing the NOCSF’s plan, both the Mayor’s Office and City Council had embarked on comprehensive planning efforts of their own. While the achievements of those efforts to date will not be discarded, to what extent they continue to be funded under the LRA and NOCSF remains to be seen.

In October of 2005, Mayor Nagin established the Bring Back New Orleans Commission (BNOB). BNOB engaged the Philadelphia-based firm Wallace, Roberts & Todd, LLC to develop its action plan. The BNOB plan failed to get the FEMA funding it expected, however. The LRA initially assured its support of BNOB, but subsequently endorsed the NOCSF’s plan. Wallace, Roberts & Todd is not on the NOCSF’s list of their officially endorsed Neighborhood and City-Wide Infrastructure planning teams. According to Architectural Record News, sources close to the LRA say that it’s likely that some elements of the Wallace plan will be retained in whatever the Unified New Orleans Plan proposes.

When FEMA support of BNOB fell through, City Council launched its own enterprise, the New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilding Plan (NOLANRP). The Council appointed Paul Lambert (Lambert Advisory, of Miami) and Sheila Danzey (SHEDO, of New Orleans) to manage the recovery strategies of 49 neighborhoods that sustained two or more feet of flooding.

The GNOF was established in 1983 as “a community foundation [...] that derives its funds from gifts provided by its citizens” (About the Foundation). On September 8, 2005, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a grant which would eventually total $3.5 million to the GNOF. The GNOF also contributed $1 million of its own and formed the NOCSF to serve in a fiduciary capacity, overseeing the $4.5 million and the Community Support Organization (CSO) which will administer it. The CSO board will be composed of nine members, whose identities have not been announced at the time of this writing. Of the nine members, one each will be selected by the Mayor’s Office, City Council, the GNOF and the City Planning Commission, and the remaining five are to be selected from each of the City Council districts (the open call for nominees for the district seats has been closed, and candidates are being reviewed).

The GNOF retained the New Orleans-based firm Concordia LLC to create a master plan and to oversee the selection of planning teams that will assist the individual neighborhoods, the wider districts and the city-wide infrastructure efforts. Among other things, the Concordia plan calls for each of New Orleans’ 73 neighborhoods to select from a pre-approved list of professional architects, urban planners and other professionals to assist in their efforts and/or endorse projects already in progress, spearheaded by the BNOB, the Lambert-Danzey group, and by the neighborhood groups themselves over the many months that no other resources were available.

On June 5, 2006, the NOCSF issued a Request for Qualifications for parties interested in participating in their recovery process. A panel composed of one representative of the City Planning Commission and four “nationally recognized planning experts sifted through the 65 applicants to establish the official list endorsed for the Unified New Orleans Plan. Concordia coordinated the selection process, but was not involved as a voting member. The final list was recommended to the board on July 21, 2006:

District or Neighborhood Planning:

• H3 Studio, of St. Louis, MO
• Goody Clancy, of Boston, MA
• ACORN Housing‘s New Orleans, LA branch
• Frederick Schwartz Architects of New York, NY
• EDSA of Columbia, MD

Neighborhood Only Planning:

• EDAW‘s Atlanta, GA branch
• E. Eean McNaughton Architects of New Orleans, LA
• Burk-Kleinpeter of New Orleans, LA
• Williams Architects of New Orleans, LA
• HDR of Omaha, NE and HOK of Tampa, FL
• Duany Plater-Zyberk of Miami, FL
• KL&M of New Orleans, LA and CH Planning of Philadelphia, PA
• NOW, a joint venture between Eskew+Dumez+Ripple of New Orleans, LA, Chan Krieger Sieniewicz of Cambridge, MA and William Morrish of Charlottesville, VA
• Davis Brody Bond of New York, NY
• Torres Design Consortium of New Orleans, LA

City-Wide Infrastructure:

• Villavaso and Associates and Henry Consulting of New Orleans, LA

On July 24, 2006, a meeting open to the public was announced by the NOCSF on BayouBuzz.com and on the Unified New Orleans Plan website (but not in the Times-Picayune or other local print, internet or broadcast media), scheduled for July 30,2006. The time and location of 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM at The Pavilion of Two Sisters at City Park were posted at a later date. The agenda for the July 30 meeting is to “begin the process for community members to be involved in the selection of the technical assistance teams of professionals to support them in neighborhood, district and city-wide planning.” Although all 73 neighborhoods are to be involved, the city will be divided into 13 planning districts whose boundaries are to be determined at this meeting. In addition, the criteria for working with the planning teams to be selected are to be established. On August 1, 2006 community members will have the opportunity to view presentations by the NOCSF’s teams in preparation for each districts’ vote on their top three preferred teams. Votes will be accepted until 5:00 PM on Monday, August 7. After the votes are tabulated, the CSO will begin defining scopes and fees for neighborhood projects and assign planning teams to the 13 districts based on the districts’ preferences as well as “capacity and cost,” although what relative weight each of these concerns will be given is not stated.

Controversy

Controversy has been a constant virtually from the moment Katrina made landfall. Even before in some cases, since issues of land development in economically depressed neighborhoods have invoked impassioned debate for years). What to do about this city’s rampant poverty, and whether the proposed solutions help alleviate its ravages or simply remove the poor have become all the more pressing matters in a post-Katrina landscape.

John McIlwain of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) which was formerly included in the BNOB Commission but whose recommendations were largely rejected, has recently savaged the state of the city’s planning efforts in the Times-Picayune. McIlwain and others from ULI leveled numerous criticisms of the city’s progress in general and the mayor in particular for lack of leadership. ULI’s recommendations to the BNOB Commission had called for drastically reducing the city’s footprint in flooded areas, thus-intentionally or not-eliminating dozens of traditionally low-income neighborhoods. Tom Murphy, also of ULI, expressed frustration that the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority has not used eminent domain aggressively enough to seize privately owned blighted properties to resell. In response to the ULI accusations, City Council President Oliver Thomas observed that ULI made “incorrect assumptions about New Orleans from the outset,” including proposing the elimination of neighborhoods that were not even below sea level. As far back as November 2005, Council member Cynthia Willard complained that the ULI report did not take into account the people who live in New Orleans East.

The City Council has come under some criticism for appointing the Lambert-Danzey without a competitive selection process, as required by the City Charter and the Council’s own bylaws. (Lambert won a contract with the Council in 2004 to review public housing redevelopment plans, having previously advised the Council on Tax Increment Financing options for the HOPE VI Wal-Mart/St. Thomas redevelopment. The Council and the Lambert Group consider Lambert’s role in the post-Katrina effort an extension of the 2004 contract.) The Bureau of Government Research (BGR), which has been the most public critic of the Council’s move, has been singled out itself for lack of impartiality: having been founded originally in opposition to Huey Long, the extent to which it exists to expose corruption as opposed to progressive populism has been questioned.

In a city whose social circles were described as a “small town” long before “small town” became much truer demographically, business relationships, including political and recovery business, have a heavily personal element. The people behind the titles and acronyms are often vested with far more meaning than their organizations’ mission statements, and the nature of many of those players’ interests and alliances is still being teased out.

Growing up in Madison, WI, I had plenty of early exposure to liberal, progressive and radical politics (not the same things). Becoming “politically active” as early as middle school was a terrific learning experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything, and my bleeding-heart credentials remain intact, but by the time I finished high school, shortly before moving to New Orleans, I was running screaming from anything activist whatsoever. The biggest source of frustration, which can be observed at either end of the spectrum (at any end of the multi-dimensional axes of socio-political movements, actually), was the people who were only in it to hear their own voices – the slogan chanters who lived in such delusional vacuums of absolute ideals that reality (the “fact-based” community – where have we heard that lately) was a personal affront that couldn’t be obliterated soon enough. The people who I came to suspect would be devastated if peace, love and understanding were to break out universally from their very own efforts. But a close second after that frustration was the more than full-time job of staying up to date on politics and policy, constantly reading between the lines – not for the nefarious evildoing that the slogan chanters are always on the lookout for (they don’t actually have to read between the lines, they just write it in themselves) – but to understand what was really going on, what really deserved attention and action. So although, as I said, my bleeding-heart commitment to civil rights, civil liberties, responsible coexistence with the environment, etc. were essentially unchanged, I haven’t had much to do with civic involvement in years. Even after Katrina, I’ve tried to follow the news responsibly, but I’m ashamed to say I just haven’t participated very much at all.

Attempting to compile an overview lately of the nacent Unified New Orleans Plan and all the committees, commissions and conspirators who have played a role going back to last September has brought back all of that old frustration and more, but has had the possibly paradoxical effect of making me want to be more involved, not less. Still, it becomes more and more confusing and appalling at every turn, and each time I think I have a grasp on just one strand I’m more tangled than before moments later. I don’t think I’ve ever had more browser windows and tabs open at one time, and there’s always another post or pdf.

I’m going to bed now, after I check out one more thing (or 10 or 20).

I’ve lived in New Orleans long enough now that “Will Work for Food” has become all too true. Not that attempting to understanding the byzantine rebuilding process isn’t a worthy end in itself, but now that there are brownies on the line… (no offence to Byzantium – we should be so lucky)

Having a go at Maitri’s City Rebuilding Essay Contest, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly who CityWorks is/are. I’ve never attended one of their meetings, and the content on their website is a little too generalized for me to get a grasp on them. Can anyone give me a little background or point me to a better source?

Alas, the brownies may never be mine, but there’s nothing like invoking chocolate and my latent competitive streak to force me into a Learning Experience…

It’s come to my attention that last Friday, the New Orleans Community Support Foundation selected its contenders for the technical help teams that neighborhood and planning district groups will be able to choose from. Since the NOCSF was set up to administer use of a $3.5 million Rockefeller Foundation planning grant and direct the use of the recovery funds Congress has approved, this is hardly a small matter. This meeting also established the schedule and procedure for community members to get involved – a meeting on Sunday, July 30, 2:00-6:00PM was announced (location To Be Determined) at which residents can meet the prospective planners, settle on criteria for working with them, and determine their neighborhoods’ and/or districts’ official boundaries. A second meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday, August 1, at which attendees can pick their top three choices for their groups’ assintance teams. Again, not trivial things. But where was this announcement made? As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only local media to publish the date and details was BayouBuzz. The Times-Picayune did cover last Friday’s panel meeting, but nothing further about meeting times or agendas, despite generalizations about the “strong voice” neighborhoods will have in their own planning processes. As for other local media, I’ve poked around a bit, but haven’t turned anything up as of yet. There doesn’t seem to be much extra room in the “Local News” segments these days when Dr. Anna Pou is on the loose. To their credit, the NOCSF did post the meeting info on their website, and they say they’ve disseminated the information to untold numbers of community groups – I hope they have. I hope they really are serious about including our numerous community groups in their own rebuilding efforts. I’m pleased to see how many local firms made the list – that’s a step in the right direction. But I’m still a bit concerend – where are the other local media on this? Where is the NOCSF when it comes to leaning on the local media if they won’t pick it up on their own? How much faith can we put in a planning commission whose primary outreach tool is a content-shy website that already needs some of its links retooled (try navigating off the “Contact Us” page, for example)? How far can we rely on an organization that doesn’t even have a location settled for a meeting less than a week away? That gives the community less than a week’s notice for that meeting? Cross your fingers, and register to attend…