Bacon's Rebellion

Bush says authorities doing ‘best they can’ after Katrina

Tuesday, September 6, 2005 at 07:38 JST
NEW ORLEANS — While thousands of returning suburban residents jammed roads to check on their homes evacuated a week ago, President George W Bush made his second tour of the devastation Monday and said authorities were doing the “best they can” to cope.

from Japan Today

We have all had about enough of government bashing concerning Katrina. However, there are lessons from the past two weeks concerning governance. A good place to start is to consider the issues raised on the Bacons Rebellion Blog.

Barnie D. is right that the feds have a lot for which to answer. Jim B. is right that there is plenty of apparent blame at the state and municipal levels too but that it is too early to have all the facts. Most of those pointing fingers and most of those arguing that “it” was someone else’s fault are partisans from the Elephant Tribe or Donkey Tribe trying to spin, score points or do damage control because of the prospect of an election looming in November. Today the headlines suggest many are jumping on the “bureaucracy-is-the-problem” band wagon.

James Atticus Bowden opened an important line of inquiry in a 3 September 2005 post with the heading “Bacon’s Rebellion” and subtitle “When Disasters Have Names.” Bowden clarified in a comment that this was a reprint of his September 2003 op ed concerning the impact of Hurricane Isabel on Poquoson, VA. Poquoson City is a village-scale municipality on the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the James River north of Hampton and east of Newport News.

Bowden highlighted the role and importance of cluster-scale, neighborhood-scale, village-scale and community-scale agencies and institutions. As we point out in “What You Can Do About Katrina” a fundamental problem is there is not effective governance structure at any of these levels. In the case of Poquoson there is a village scale municipality and a geography context (a peninsula on a peninsula) that reinforces the focus of both agencies and institutions.

“South of the James/Conaway” posted important points about the current condition of urban society and the roles of both agencies and institutions. Bowden, to his credit, graciously agreed. Conaway at first glance seems to undermine Bowden’s positions on cluster-scale through community-scale enterprises, agencies and institutions but in fact does not.

“Subparte” enters to suggest if the “government” is to take up the slack it will be hugely expensive. He is absolutely right if we rely on the current municipal / state / federal levels of government. If the current bureaucracy (“Subparte’s term) is any indication, it will not function regardless of cost.

“Conaway” reenters and says in para one that he does not think cost must go up. (See above note about cost.) but then in para two hits the nail on the head: Governance has not evolved to match society. He cites good examples. Also see “Where is Northern Virginia” 18 Aug 2003 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com and the note on levels of governance in the post “What You Can Do About Katrina” from 3 September cite above.

A fundamental failure regarding Katrina was one of the governance structure that did not YET exist, not just failure of the governments that do exist.

The core issue is more than semantics but it starts with a failure of vocabulary. “Sub-urban” means less than urban. Humans cannot build and sustain an urban society with “sub-urban” settlement patterns. That is what the English thought when the word was coined in the 16th century. That is what we document in The Shape of the Future.

Just as important humans cannot build and sustain a civilization with a governance structure that does not match the settlement pattern. Mr. Bowden and Poquoson happen to be better off than most in this regard. The City of New Orleans and the adjacent Parishes are about as bad as it gets in the Untied States based on my experience there as noted in this weeks column “Down Memory Lane with Katrina” 6 Sept 2005 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com Perhaps some sections of northern New Jersey are on a par. Those with experience in Greater Buffalo and Greater Detroit suggest there are other candidates. Our own work in Cleveland suggest they may be right.

Before someone reaches for the “Manhattan” red herring we must repeat that densities that range from 10 persons per acre to 100 persons to the acre at the Alpha (Balanced) Community scale are not “Manhattan.” “Manhattan” is not the alternative to “sub-urban,” Balanced Communities in a sustainable New Urban Region are the alternative. See our column of 23 Aug 2005 on that topic at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

As long as the default setting of contemporary civilization is economic competition, the pattern and density will depend on the operation of the Third Law of Human Settlement Patterns: The “U” shaped cost of services (and goods) curve. The application varies by scale of the settlement pattern component and the nature of the good or service. With a fair allocation of all location variable costs there are many alternatives but none of them are “sub-urban.”

Balanced Community “costs” include the cost of time and energy which we hope will be the subject of our next column. We will get to the issue of the “U” shaped curve in a future column.

We have noted often that no one ever said that creating functional human settlement pattern would be cheap. In fact the cost of functional governance of functional human settlement patterns will be less for just the reasons that Bowden suggests.

Citizens cannot afford dysfunctional settlement patterns. Compare the cost of the strategies RBA suggested in 1973 with the cost of “recovery” in 2005.

EMR

Virginians aren’t just talking about helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina, or blaming others for not doing enough, they’re taking matters into their own hands. Dozens of Virginia companies and not-for-profit organizations have surged into action to help repair the damage that the hurricane unleashed along the Gulf Coast. In publishing today’s edition of VA Newswire, I compiled a list of companies that have responded to the humanitarian call. This list is by no means complete, it is only what I could pull together from press releases and websites in a couple of hours yesterday. The omissions, I’m sure, would make a much longer list.

The Commonwealth of Virginia
The Salvation Army
MCI
Sprint/Nextel
Defense Logistics Agency
Charlottesville Fire Department
Freddie Mac
Sallie Mae
Smithfield Foods
Albemarle Corporation
LMI
Volunteers of America
Project Hope
US Airways
RCN Corporation
The Public Entity Risk Institute
International Bottled Water Association
Global Learning Semesters
CALIBRE

For details about these groups’ contributions, click here, and scroll down to “Hurricane Katrina: Relief.”

For a variety of reasons, large and small, I have decided that I need to step away from this blog and my e-zine column. Jim Bacon has graciously allowed me to call it a “sabbatical,” leaving open the option for me to return at a time of my choosing.

I resolve to read more and think more during my absence, in addition to the proverbial “spend more time with my family.”

The most gratifying thing about blogging for me has always been the commenters who add new information, fresh insight, and differing perspectives–those who enrich the dialog. Fortunately, even on sabbatical, I’ll be able enjoy that positive side of this powerful medium.

Consider these lines from a ‘what if’ piece in the National Geographic of October, 2004:

“As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

“The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

“Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.”

That was written a year ago. You see, we did know. We’ve known it was coming for years.

The Big Easy is being buried now under a blanket of lies.

Consider this from a Sept. 4, 2005 Chicago Tribune piece:

“While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to Gulf Coast communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, a massive naval goodwill station has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the effort.

“The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.

“The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.

“But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven’t been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.”

Or this from an Associated Press piece this morning:

“The top U.S. disaster official waited hours after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast before he proposed to his boss sending at least 1,000 Homeland Security workers into the region to support rescuers, internal documents show.”

We did the best we could? That’s a lie. We did not do the best we could. The federal response to this disaster was a tragedy of incompetence.

This administration failed us—and thousands of Americans died as a result of that failure.

Sure, there will be hearings and inquiries. There will be commissions of one sort or another. We had those after 9/11, remember? What was that conclusion?

“Across the government there were failures of imagination, policies, capabilities, and management. The most important failure was one of imagination.”

Thousands of Americans died as a result of those failures, too. Was there any accountability? Were there any firings? Any charges filed?

No.

Instead we got Homeland Security, a new federal agency with 180,000 employees and a $40 billion budget, an agency that waited five days to respond to Katrina–five days during which Americans died for lack of a bottle of water.

National Public Radion reported this morning that a FEMA plane carrying Katrina injured to Charleston, South Carolina yesterday, where emergency medical personnel waited on the tarmac, landed–in Charleston, West Virginia.

Ha! Wishful thinking and whistling past the graveyard at the Virginian-Pilot today.

The September 5, 2005, edition of the Bacon’s Rebellion e-Zine is now online. Click here to read it.

While Bacon’s Rebellion bloggers argue over whether President Bush should be held accountable for the horrendous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, whether he’s being unfairly blamed for the failures of state/local authorities in Louisiana, or whether it’s simply too early to make an informed judgment, there’s one thing that we can all agree upon (I hope): Gov. Mark Warner has done a fine job handling Virginia’s response to the hurricane.

To keep track of the news coming out of the Governor’s office, click here.

Don’t forget, tonight …

Ready, Set, Go: Republican Gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore BLOGS LIVE in the dog pound, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Rules will be posted on Blue Dog blog.

More to come: State Senator Russ Potts will BLOG LIVE! with the Blue Dog membership in the coming weeks. The campaign agreed last week and is working the Blue Dog blog session into their schedule.

~ the blue dog

All afternoon I have been trying to figure out what that O’Tool “give-them-a-free-car” post (“Lack of Autonomobility …”)was about. I have narrowed it down to two:

Someone is trying to trash O’Tool’s rep by posting something not just “outside the box” but outside the realm rational thought.

If you want a quick view of how silly the “buy-them-a-car” approach to urban mobility is, the following is what I recall of the scenario run in the late 60s by opponents of METRO. Everyone projected to ride METRO by 1985 could get a free VW with the then projected cost of METRO. However, by 2005 the cost of the roadways to provide level of service D for all the drivers would be more than the cost of METRO. So you would have twice the total outlay, no METRO system and lots of 20 year old VWs.

You can confirm the validity of this result by consulting the TAMU data on urban mobility if METRO went away today.

Bottom line: Large urban agglomerations do not work without shared-vehicle systems. Large urban agglomerations are necessary for contemporary civilization. Even Houston and Dallas have come to this conclusion.

The second theory behind the post is that Randal O’T is preparing us for his real proposal. Give every household without a car $40,000 a year so they can afford a car, gasoline, insurance and a place to park it 70 miles from where they work.

Think of all the people who make money from this scheme! Think of all the land owners who could cash in on their “right” to have their land developed for urban land uses.

Bottom Line: Unless there are Fundamental Changes in human settlement pattern we would have to give $125,000 to every household so they could live close to where they work. Defensable urban settlement patterns along the lines of the strategies we out line in tomorrow’s column would cost a lot less. No one ever said quality urban environments were cheap, however.

Think PROPERTY DYNAMICS.

EMR

With a Homeland Security department of 180,000 employees and a $40 billion budget, the five day delay in the federal response to Katrina, during which Americans died for lack of a 90-cent bottle of water , was, is, and remains near-criminal.

Randall O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute, in his Vanishing Automobile Update #55, raises some intriguing questions about the disaster in New Orleans. Here are some excerpts:

Those who fervently wish for car-free cities should take a closer look at New Orleans. The tragedy of New Orleans isn’t primarily due to racism or government incompetence, though both played a role. The real cause is automobility — or more precisely to the lack of it. …

What made New Orleans more vulnerable to catastrophe than most U.S. cities is its low rate of auto ownership. According to the 2000 Census, nearly a third of New Orleans households do not own an automobile. This compares to less than 10 percent nationwide. …

About 26,000 low-income families in New Orleans don’t own a car. If all the money spent on New Orleans streetcars from 1985 to the present had been spent instead on helping autoless low-income families achieve mobility, the city would have had more than $6,000 for each such family, enough to buy good used cars for all of them. Add the money the city wanted to spend on the Desire Street streetcar and you have enough to buy a brand-new car for every single autoless low-income family — not a Lexus or BMW, certainly, but a functional source of transportation that would have allowed them to escape the current disaster. …

While I don’t think that buying low-income families brand-new cars is the best use of our limited transportation resources, it would produce far greater benefits than building rail transit. Studies have found that unskilled workers who have a car are much more likely to have a job and will earn far more than workers who must depend on transit. That is why numerous social service agencies have begun programs aimed at helping low-income families acquire their first car or maintain an existing one. …

Some thought provoking, out-of-the-box thinking commentary.

In response to Saturday’s post, “The Case of the Missing Threads” and in the comments section of the post “Hurricane Katrina: Open Post,” comes a resolution of the mystery from the missing posts’ author, Barnie Day:

Will, and others: I deleted the two Katrina posts I had authored, disgusted no end by the tone and temper of the discussion that ensued, but little thinking, or realizing, that in so doing I was also removing the comment work of others. I believe I have every right of ownership to delete my own work. I wanted to be no part, in name or participation, to what was developing. And, please, it is not thin-skinnedness on my part. I have rhino hide. It was an inner sense of dismay.

That my work was inextricably, and fatally, linked to that of others is regrettable. I regret the collateral damage. I would have made this response in a separate post, but I am in a hotel in Williamsburg and something about the “cookies” arrangement here will not permit it. BKD

The comments section of this post is declared a “free speech zone” with the hope that commenters will avoid personal attacks, disagree without being disagreeable, and attempt to be constructive.

I occasionally write about state government issues, trying to make the point that state government could be more efficient and, in many cases, could do more with less. I do not make my suggestions from some philosophical redoubt far removed from the day-to-day churning of the bureacracy. I am a state employee and I try every day to practice what I preach.

Today’s Gail Kelley column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch business section reports on the latest improved service offering from the little organization I’m proud to say I founded, the Virginia Business Information Center of the Department of Business Assistance. An article about the center previously appeared in the Virginian-Pilot.

The Virginia Business Information Center is a place Virginians who want to start a business or who have questions about their existing business can go to get a real person offering straight answers and information. The center can be reached by toll-free phone, email, and now live chat from its website. The center actually answers upwards of 70% of its phone calls live and returns calls the same business day almost 100% of the time. The center does it without any special appropriation from the General Assembly; it just uses authorized employees of the agency in a way that improves their accessibility to taxpayers.

Somewhere back in 1999 or so, the Department of Business Assistance paid a consultant around $30,000 to study the idea of a Virginia Business Information Center. The consultant demonstrated a need and projected that it would take over $1 million dollars, a group of new employees, a certain amount of square footage, etc. As Virginia’s economy began to tighten, that kind of appropriation became untenable and the project was shelved.

Fast forward to 2002. Governor Warner came into office with his “One Virginia” vision, but budget cuts, too. What I had been doing was essentially eliminated, but I still had a job. I asked agency management if I could start a Virginia Business Information Center. I knew in my heart it was needed and that I could make it sucessful. All I requested was a toll-free number and an email address. I believed strongly that a toll-free number was needed to equalize the access between someone from the West End of Richmond making a local call and someone in Grundy dropping quarters into a pay phone. Somewhat reluctantly, in late 2002, they gave in, gave me what I asked for, and I became the Virginia Business Information Center.

In my first month of operation, January 2003, I got 130 calls and a handful of emails. Now, the center gets well over a thousand calls a month and several hundred emails. The average monthly bill for the toll-free number is $55. Contrast that expense with the old model (still used, too often in my estimation), of sending one or more state employees in a state car to a meeting where the topic is the agency’s services–chief among them the Virginia Business Information Center! By October 2003 the center was busy enough that another state employee was moved to work in the center and by mid-2004 two other employees began to spend 20% of their time answering center inquiries.

The center has harnessed the power of the internet to reduce the costs of providing services; indeed, it has expanded the services offered at no additional costs. If the center didn’t exist, I have no doubt that I’d still be driving around the state, going to Chamber of Commerce meetings, and totally ignoring the huge customer base of people starting a business and those strugggling to improve their existing business. Since I started the center, I have spent two nights in motel on state business. I used to stay overnight at least once every two weeks.

There’s so much more to be done, though. Every Virginia agency that interacts with business could make their web-based information more user-friendly and could design their information to answer the real questions people ask, not the ones the agency makes up to answer. Agencies could be much more responsive to business, or they could save by letting the Virginia Business Information Center take their questions.

Last week I physically spoke with or answered the chat or email questions of almost 200 individuals. That’s a typical week for me. Yet I’ve never been asked by one of these “business” commissions or ad hoc business study groups to describe what entrepreneurs and small businesses tell me they need. I’ve never been asked to rate the customer service levels of the myriad of agencies that serve businesses, even though those who call me give me tons of feedback.

I think the kind of approach that I took with the Virginia Business Information Center could work with other agencies. Focusing on the customer–the taxpayer–is very clarifying. It’s a great way of deciding how to cut out expenses and improve efficiency. I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing, no matter how little impact it has beyond the lady at the other end of the phone who just wants to know how to start a home-based business and be “legal.”

Now, the next time I rant and rave about taxes and state government, I hope you’ll understand my perspective and at least give me credit for being willing to work under the terms of the policies I recommend.