Posted on 11/20/2005 10:46:14 PM PST by caryatid
BATON ROUGE — The House of Representatives derailed an ambitious proposal to consolidate several New Orleans area levee boards with a vote Sunday evening to deny the bill a committee hearing today, effectively killing the measure for the current special session.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Two weeks ago, a delegation from the Business Council met with Gov. Kathleen Blanco to express their concerns about the special legislative session that ends this Tuesday, Nov. 22. The group specifically pressed her for a single state board to oversee levees and flood protection for all of southeast Louisiana.
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The group wrote a letter to Blanco warning that many companies already have left after Katrina with no intention of returning -- and that more may leave -- unless significant improvements in regional flood protection don't come soon. The letter demanded that Blanco "clean house at the Orleans Parish Levee Board and replace its current membership with highly qualified, apolitical experts in engineering and project management. We also ask you to urge the Attorney General to aggressively investigate the prior activities of the Levee Board."
Those "prior activities" could include recent shenanigans by former Levee Board President Jim Huey -- who paid himself $91,000 in disputed "back pay" and awarded no-bid contracts to his wife's relatives shortly after Katrina without even consulting fellow board members -- as well as contracts over the years for design and construction of levees that failed during Katrina.
The Council's letter also minced no words about Blanco's legislative proposal: "In this legislative session, you have proposed legislation to create an oversight board to monitor the levee boards. This additional bureaucracy will only compound the problem." The letter was signed by three-dozen local CEOs -- an A-list of the area's business sector -- and it was published in newspaper advertisements across the state last Thursday. That same day, Boasso's bill came up for final consideration by the state Senate.
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* Louisiana PING *
Keep your hands off my rice bowl.
Business as usual ...
Business as usual in NO I see.
Somehow, I'm sure it's all Bush's fault...maybe FEMA's....
I heard a rumor that Michael Brown is down in New Orleans running interference doing the following: 1) putting mail in the wrong mail boxes 2) misdirecting phone calls 3) replacing Microsoft Word's auto correction, default English dictionary with Creole 4) cutting power lines 5) directing contractors to rebuild highways so people drive on the Left side of the road
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