Suspended in Gaffa

I’ve started to peruse the massive heap of PDF’s of the newly released draft of the new Master Plan as mandated by the October Charter change. I encourage you all to look over any aspect of it that grabs your attention. This is really more than one person can tackle.

The early draft of the new Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (CZO) maps are particularly interesting. A comparison of the existing maps with the new is pretty interesting. The redefinition of several old and new classification such as “Neighborhood Commercial” and both a low and high density “Multi-family” categories is encouraging. The first full draft of this portion is due in June, for public review. Until then a solid assessment can’t really be made.

The bottom line, so far, is that there is a lot of very sound thinking in the plan, swimming in a sea of touchy feely BS and extremely annoying copy. But exactly what value a “Master Plan” has outside of the legal outlet of a Zoning Ordinance remains to be seen.

To recap what this is all about:

The current city charter requires, in general terms, that the City Planning Commission must prepare a citywide master plan and that land use actions should be consistent with the Master Plan. Among other changes, the proposed amendment specifies the legal relationship between the Master Plan, the CZO, and the city capital plan and budget...MP

Now, that “city capital plan and budget” is an interesting bit. It says that capital improvement projects (infrastructure, city owned facilities, etc.) should conform to the plan. It has a lot of suggestions for how that might be accomplished, but at the end of the day, there isn’t really any mechanism besides good faith to see that anything conforms. At least nothing that wouldn’t make the issue of garbage contracts look like a walk through the petunias.

Besides the various creative writing exercises that are proposed for city agencies and private developers to show how their proposals “conforms” to the plan, all of it involves a whole lot of new legislation. This would include the wholesale restructuring of relationships between agencies and of the agencies themselves. Some, such as City Planning would (and do) need large funding increases and would require a huge increase in their power and reach. How comfortable some would be with that or any of the proposals is certainly a real question.

This looks to be the next series of big political football games, albeit ones with significant repercussion to the city and its future. Expect the first to be about delaying any approval until after the next City Council and Mayoral elections.

I’ll have more on this.

9 Volt

Oyster keep promising us some kind of Dr. Manhattan moment or at least some kind of earthshaking atomic blog post.

Sorry, but Blogs are closer to 9 volt batteries than atomic piles. Nothing released on a blog is ever really earthshaking. If it was it wouldn’t be released on a blog. While it might power a warning light for a stuck-open valve, what happens next is a function of if the big boys recognize the situation for what it is.

Hemming and hawing over the antics of Veronica White (who is black) and Head (who is white) and the shifting statements of C Ray on the deletion of his own emails may be entertaining, but what’s atomic in this is what is (or was) in those emails. And I’m not talking about the Stacey Head’s next Netflix rental or a certain blogger's complaints about the street lights or where C Ray charged lunch. I believe that’s what Oyster is hinting about, and it seems the big boys agree:

A top aide to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that a federal investigation is under way into the administration's controversial release of thousands of unfiltered City Council e-mails to activist lawyer Tracie Washington. TP

People smarter than myself, such as Clancey DuBois are trying to interpret and tease out hints from the threads of information available on the email fluffle.

Our undead friend who claim some kind of special knowledge has been laying the weft and sketching in a great tapestry on crime cameras, with, as of yet very little of the warp to speak of.

That yellow fellow avoids the theorizing all together and puts together a useful summation of the Mayors deflection strategy to everything that is going on, which, come to think of it, pretty well describes the Mayors entire tenure in office.

All this latest development does is give us a glimpse at another thread, which could very well be the same thread we've been looking at all along. There really is little chance at this point of getting any kind of handle on what “this” is all about, let alone what “this” actually is, or even if the “this” we think is there isn’t just a pattern we’ve ginned up out of too little information and an overactive imagination and given a name.

It’s as if our introduction to American football was listening to a game on the radio with painfully self absorbed announcers who somehow feel terrible that one of the teams is going to loose, and give the impression cheerleaders and morons waving signs in the crowd are part of the game. Even those who know the game are pretty much in the dark as to what is really going on. The rest of us seem to be either complaining about the play calling or the officiating.

Clancy DuBois a week or so ago likened the whole mess to Watergate. This is a pretty apt comparison in several key areas, but it misses in one way. These things are scarcely what you think they are about, particularly in the beginning. But it looks as if the big boys are moving and this could be getting a lot more interesting, that is, if it doesn't just disappear.

Let’s Get It On

While Schroder pines for the second coming of Jim Leten, and Oyster awaits the rapture of the “corrupt”, there are other things afoot around town. And one of the purposes may be to defang and derail just such events.

Recent events seem to indicate the first onslaught in the 2010 election, otherwise to be known as the great patriot war to preserve the status quo. And if you think what’s been going on has been bad, what’s coming will make that look like a chorus of Kumbaya.

Here we have the Nagin Administration openly passing out the ammunition. No need for a Watergate style break in to get the goods nowadays, not with technology and the utter and complete violation of any regulations, legal or ethical standards.

At the same time New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's administration was citing storage problems as its reason for erasing all but about a dozen of the mayor's e-mail messages from 2008, another administration official was providing an activist lawyer [Tracie Washington] with thousands of electronic messages written by or sent to at least four City Council members and their staffers during the past three years. TP

You know something is up when Veronica White took time out of her busy schedule obfuscating to actually do something.

So where is this going?

Tracie Washington in a WDSU interview (you can watch the complete unedited video) claims her Public Records Request was done through the City Attorneys Office and everything from her end was proper.

When asked why they only requested the emails of white councilpersons, she was quite clear in her response that “those were the emails she wanted”. Now, in this age of transparency this might constitute a clear answer, but she goes on to give us a pretty good idea of why, “…and if there is incriminating stuff in there, as there must be…” and then catching herself adds, “…well I don’t know.”

The e-mail also could include personal messages between the council members or their staff and their spouses, children, friends, doctors or attorneys, all of which might be considered privileged under law. TP

While that has everyone is all atwitter over the details of the “procedure” Arnie Fielkow was supposedly undergoing and the prospect of Stacey Head going down for some secret email detailing …what exactly I don’t know, but I’m told it’s terrible.*

But there is more to this.

First we get the wonderful comparison about how when “whites” ask for information and are repeatedly denied, or given incomplete records about specific activities of “black” officials it is somehow the same as a backdoor deal to dump years worth of privileged, unredacted, or screened information on “white” officials.

And now we get to watch as the “white” Council has been successfully manipulated into seeking to prevent the release of information. That it shouldn’t have been released in the first place is of little consequence. The picture has been drawn.

But there is more to this, and it may be aimed at forcing bigger (and “whiter”?) hands. I should come as no surprise that many City Council people know of, and in some cases have some level of participation in many of the investigation of the US Attorney’s office, FBI and others.

Washington said she was not sure how many e-mail files she received. But she said she plans to post the messages soon on a Web site being created for her organization, the Louisiana Justice Institute.

She said the site, www.nolapublicrecords.org, will have all the public records she has obtained during the past several years, including documents related to the closing of Charity Hospital and the names of charter school board members. TP

Go to nolapublicrecords.com and you’ll find a placeholder where “Coming soon...” blinks on an ironically gray background. I know there are some bigger fish out there who are going to try to keep it that way, but those emails are certainly being parsed as we speak.

* For the record, I really don’t think anyone of any race on the current City Council is “corrupt” in the criminal sense, or in the kind of ways we’ve grown accustom to seeing in the past. And regardless of race I actually think the make-up of the council is one of the better we’ve seen. But pursing anyone’s personal correspondence will make them out to be total psychopath.