Guest Commentary
By Lance Hill
April 18, 2006
Feel free to reproduce
I am surprised at how many people responding to my column earlier this week thought the early voter system for the New Orleans Mayor's election was successful in helping displaced black voters. They were amazed to hear that only 4% of the black registered voters made it to the eleven polls set up around the state to accommodate voters still in exile. I understand their surprise. The main story on the vote outcome was in the New Orleans Times-Picayune's story on April 16 which reported the total number of votes cast in early voting but not in comparison to the total number of registered voters, especially those displaced. What was reported under the subheading "Large Black Turnout," was Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater's estimate that 70% of the 10,585 people who cast ballots were black, which translates into 7,409 black votes. That sounds like a lot of votes unless you include what the Times-Picayune omitted: that these were 7,409 voters of out a total of 188,166 eligible black registered voters. Put in this context, the real story was that 96% of the eligible black voters did not show up to the satellite polls and will have to vote absentee or in person. ... read more

Speech Text: I propose the creation of Worker Recovery Accounts to help those evacuees who need extra help finding work.
Status: Introduced in October, no action.

Speech Text: I also propose that Congress pass an Urban Homesteading Act.
Status: Introduced in December, no action.

Speech Text: The Army Corps of Engineers will work at their side to make the flood protection system stronger than it has ever been.
Status: The Army Corps of Engineers has completed 16 percent of planned New Orleans repairs before a June 1 hurricane season deadline. The White House and Congress have approved $2.9 billion to restore levees to pre-Katrina designed strength, add floodgates to navigational canals and fortify earthworks with concrete and stone. However, state and local officials want the flood control system improved to withstand the strongest, Category 5 storms, at a cost some estimate may top $30 billion. The Army Corps is conducting a two-year study, with an interim report due before the end of June.

Instead, three separate, overlapping investigations are underway -- the one in the House, one in the Senate and one by the White House.

They are expected to produce three reports about missteps made by government officials -- and offer three sets of recommendations for fixing what went wrong.

And that, said Richard A. Falkenrath, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington, is bad news for the nation.

"The thing that we might lose is an opportunity to get on a better trajectory in terms of preparing this country for catastrophic disasters," said Falkenrath, who served in the Bush administration's Homeland Security Department.

Other congressional observers and outside experts caution that none of the findings may be considered definitive, and could be contradictory.

"We felt strongly and still feel strongly that there should be an independent commission to investigate the poor cooperation and response to Katrina," said Susannah Goodman, senior legislative advocate for the watchdog group Common Cause.

"I think the process is very politicized, and that is extremely unfortunate."

Goodman added: "At the end of the day, what everybody wants is a set of recommendations that will fix the problems, that will tell us how we can be better prepared for the next disaster."

House and Senate members have cooperated before in conducting major inquiries, most recently following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

After public pressure, however, an independent commission also was set up to investigate the attacks.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said today that millions of dollars worth of federal hurricane-relief contracts that were awarded with little or no competition will be rebid to minimize waste and abuse.

"I've never been a fan of no-bid contracts," R. David Paulison, FEMA's acting director, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, one of a half-dozen Senate and House panels holding hearings today on hurricane-recovery issues.

One underlying theme that emerged from the sessions was a sense of alarm over the overall cost of the recovery, acknowledged to be in the many billions of dollars, and how much of that the federal government must pay. Another is the growing potential for deep disagreement between Louisiana's Congressional delegation and their colleagues from other states on how much Washington can afford to do.

[...]

As for no-bid contracts, Mr. Paulison, according to The Associated Press, told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, "Sometimes you have to do them because of the expediency of getting things done. And I can assure you that we are going to look at all of these contracts very carefully."

"All of those no-bid contracts, we are going to go back and rebid," said Mr. Paulison, who succeeded Michael D. Brown after Mr. Brown stepped down amid heavy criticism of FEMA's response to the destruction wrought by winds and floods along the Gulf Coast.

Federal contracting rules allow agencies to approve deals without standard competitive bidding in "urgent and compelling circumstances." But in the weeks since hurricanes and floods devastated the Gulf Coast and uprooted thousands of people, some government officials and auditors have expressed concerns about the potential for favoritism and waste.

Congress has used Katrina as cover for ideas that could never stand on their own and for a remarkably brazen raid on the public treasury and environmental protections.

Take, for example, Richard Pombo, the chairman of the House Resources Committee, who is proposing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, allow states to opt out of a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling, and suspend judicial and administrative reviews of federal decisions to open public lands for oil and gas leasing. This is the same Richard Pombo who proposed last week - joking, he said - to sell off a few lesser-known national parks if money from the Arctic refuge was not forthcoming.

Then there is Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who, ostensibly to increase fuel supplies, rammed a bill through the House energy committee that would ease clean air restrictions on refineries and drive a final nail in the coffin of New Source Review, a useful law the administration has been trying to kill for years. The law requires older industrial facilities to install modern pollution controls, and Mr. Barton's bill would remove not only refineries but hundreds of coal-fired power plants from its reach.

Similar mischief is afoot in the Senate, where James Inhofe, the ferociously anti-regulatory Oklahoma Republican who runs the environment committee, would suspend for up to 18 months any environmental law that in his view stands in the way of post-hurricane reconstruction.

The most egregious example of self-dealing comes from the Louisiana delegation. Not content with the $62.3 billion Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief, the state's representatives have asked for $250 billion more in federal reconstruction funds, equal to more than $50,000 per Louisiana resident.

This seems a bit much, especially since the proposal also calls for suspending important nvironmental reviews and funneling huge sums to the Army Corps of Engineers for projects that seem to have more to do with the delegation's political ambitions than with flood control and the intelligent restoration of the Louisiana Delta."