Posted on 09/07/2005 3:18:30 PM PDT by angkor
I'm prepared to give New Orleans Mayor Nagin the benefit of the doubt on the school bus unavailability.
In the June 9 2005 Orleans Parish School Board meeting minutes - posted elsewhere on FR in another thread - it's clear that the Board was not providing Nagin with any support whatsoever on making the buses available in an evac (let alone drivers).
And since this very discussion had been ongoing for at least a year (again evidenced in the minutes), I presume they hadn't signed-off on it by Aug 27th either.
In addition, the Orleans Parish Schools had been under management by a New York management restructuring firm (Alvarez & Marsal) since July, due to extensive corruption and payroll padding, and to the Board being $45 million in the hole.
So as of July, the City would have been negotiating use of school buses for evac with the management company Alvarez & Marsal, not the Board, which appears to have been stripped of many authorities.
Due to the terrible financial woes, I would guess that Alvarez & Marsal might have said something like, "Sorry, no money, no bus drivers, no gas. No can do. Can't help you." Again, just a guess.
So I am going to assume that Nagin was caught between a rock and a hard place on this particular issue, and had no viable means to deploy the buses.
The culprit may have been the Board, not Nagin.
New Orleans school system opens in turmoil
Thursday, August 18, 2005; Posted: 11:56 a.m. EDT (15:56 GMT)
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Students return to class Thursday in a school system in such turmoil that no one is sure how many employees it has, the new budget is millions of dollars out of balance, and the buildings are old and deteriorating.
http://www.nops.k12.la.us/index.html
"Since July 2005, Alvarez & Marsal has been working to improve the finances and operations of the New Orleans Public Schools."
http://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/en/
"Alvarez & Marsal's global services include:
Turnaround Management Consulting
Crisis and Interim Management
Performance Improvement"
No wonder he looked like a deer in the headlights Sunday morning when he saw his nightmare bearing down upon him - and knew a lot of people were probably going to die.
He could have acted faster. He could have made better decisions.
But he was dealing with decades of corruption and sloth.
ping to #44 for the latest defense of the mayor
I've been as critical of the mayor as anyone. But just as I'm not going to stand for unjustified bashing of Bush, I'm not going to stand for unjustified bashing of the mayor. It seems that the NOLA government was trying to secure use of those buses during an emergency and the corrupt school district wasn't going to go along with it. I do not know what powers the mayor might have had to comandeer those buses. But I imagine state law needed to be changed, and that didn't happen.
You might be right.
The mayor came from the private sector, not from professional politics. He may be resented and undermined by other Demonrats for that reason alone.
In other words, the entire state was willing to play political games and defend turf at the expense of those needed first to be evacuated and those then needing help afterwards.
But it's all Bush's fault.
The man probably means well, but he is very unsophisticated, has no common sense, and is struggling with a substance abuse problem. Good schmoozer, but no "there there," and he works with a staff that would have no problem with the casting director of the old Amos'n'Andy Show. If dead bodies weren't involved, it would be amusing to outsiders.
But the obscene, unwarranted, and stupid attacks on Bush, the internecine warfare with the idiotic Governatrix, and his failure to deliver, means this fellow should be written off. He ain't no Giuliani. In Chicago, he'd be a minor ward heeler, if that.
Thank you for your question. School buses were not used as all the NOPS transportation employees were also individuals who evacuated the city. Thanks
I read to mean A&M had no plan to keep them there, which also means A&M was not following any evac plan utilizing NOPS buses, which also means the School Board never concluded its June "negotiations" with the City.
I'd like to see those but I'm not having any luck finding them. You have any clues on where I could locate them?
Yep. I posted the NOPS response as its own thread over here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1480370/posts
[PDF] Orleans Parish School Board
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
OPSB Special Meeting Minutes. June 9, 2005.
www.nops.k12.la.us/content/ board/minutes/2005/bmin060905s.pdf
Problem: That server is down.
The management restructuring firm that is now running NOPS has replaced the old content with its content.
However the minutes are still in the Google cache, and I've extracted and posted them verbatim in the FR post above.
If you go to that post, there's also a link to the minutes in the Google cache.
Thanks for the link.
You mean Jabbar Gibson?
I read in a Sept. 7 blog entry (http://www.pennywit.com/drupal/node/3206) that he was later jailed for felony larceny. (Anyone have a later update?)
Yes. I meant Jabbar Gibson. Well if they jailed him for grand larceny i guess that means they're going after all the other looters (NOT!). What those other looters took (TV's, jewelry, entire WalMarts, etc) was not necessary. What Jabbar did was.
Just him, because he was so noticeable, and he made the mayor look like a dang fool.
BTW, don't know if you saw Greta's interview with the kid. But, she did make him into a hero.
I may have done that myself at first. But on thinking on it further, i still think he did the right thing. However, i wasn't so sure about his story about how he happened to match the key to the associated bus. I wondered if maybe he had hotwired it. Don't know if that is possible or not.
At any rate, I wondered if maybe he may have a prior criminal record of any kind. He does look quite nice and innocent. But appearances can be deceiving. I really want to believe he's a good kid.
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