Port of N.O. must focus on sensible solutions

It’s been almost a year and a half now since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, triggering the city’s flooding. Memories fade about the event and the infrastructure that shaped it, and perhaps that’s the thinking why again we’re hearing from the Port of New Orleans as it tries to grab more taxpayer money for no good reason.

For many years, an ongoing project to replace the lock at the Industrial Canal (officially the “Inner Harbor Navigation Canal”) has continued. The Port supports this, even as studies have shown the $748 million device could be replaced far more cheaply, especially as the canal has continued to see a decrease in use with the wider Mississippi River being more accommodating to deep-draft ocean-going vessels and barge traffic going elsewhere.

It also has lost traffic as it connects to the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, itself in declining use for large vessels. MR-GO is widely blamed for increasing the impact of the hurricane. It looks all but certain that MR-GO will be closed for reasons of cost effectiveness and flood protection, which even though its use was on the decline, concerns the Port because there will be some loss of business.

Landrieu spending plan shows no comprehension of reality

Does Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu think Louisianans are stupid? Or is it he’s just a mental lightweight? Because nobody with any sense is going to buy his argument that the state needs a $125 million advertising blitz to cure its ailing tourism industry.

Landrieu bases this absurd idea on two equally absurd presumptions, that national media are conveying the impression that New Orleans still is filled with water, and that for every buck spent on tourism publicity, $16 comes back. Let’s review these claims.

Do an Internet search of both video and print stories about New Orleans and guess what you find? Stories about rampant crime committed by both criminals and law enforcement, along with news about the Saints, dominate the non-Louisiana media since the beginning of the year. Looking specifically at video over the past 30 days there are stories extolling it being “party time” in New Orleans and recommencing a small portion of the streetcar line, but nothing about high water.

Which makes one wonder if Landrieu somehow hasn’t gotten confused about his VCR and he keeps watching old news feeds over and over again (perhaps in an attempt to wipe out the memory of his mayoral election loss?) In any event, you can bet those in the tourism industry are watching current news and they know two things, that the water is long gone from New Orleans, and so is any semblance of law and order, now including shootings on Bourbon Street when the place is packed. And that’s why tourists and conventioneers are staying away.

As laughable as Landrieu’s assertion is on this subject, it gets more warped when he talks about spending taxpayers’ money to make it. Let’s see, if there’s a multiplier of 16 here that means the $125 million will turn into $2 billion in the tourist trade. Well, why stop there, how about spending $1 billion? Glory be, that will pump $16 billion into the state and we’ll be better off than ever before!

Landrieu doesn’t see the idiocy of his thinking because he never has believed that it is people and the private sector, not government, that create economic growth. If he had any sense at all, he’d want to steer that $125 million into the state treasury to pay for tax cuts for New Orleans small businesses to keep them afloat while the longer term problems get solved. Or, if he’d rather tackle the latter, devote that money to policing the city.

But that’s not what a lieutenant governor has the power to do, and Landrieu knows nothing more about being a political leader than taxing and spending, so that’s all that he’s capable of providing as he tries to revive his fading political career. Which goes to show New Orleans voters left themselves really bad choices after last year’s delayed primary election.

Performance-based college measuring must be done correctly

Having been on the front lines of educating at what is essentially an open-enrollment university in Louisiana for the past 15 years, I have great sympathy for goals outlined in the upcoming review of higher education in Louisiana. The fact is, as verified during my year of teaching in Illinois in 2000-01, the skills of the students attending and the quality of education provided at our state universities lag the rest of the country’s. However, one suggestion made to change this well could make matters worse rather than better.

Performance funding, or granting money to universities on the basis of some criteria that presumably captures their performance, in general is a good idea, but policy-makers must be careful when it comes to its actual measurement. With the new plan, campuses will be rewarded for how students perform in the classroom, based on graduation and retention rates, and how they do on exams for certification after they graduate.

The second aspect of that, testing, is a good idea and already is done in some areas such as for education degrees. But if left in isolation, the first part, classroom performance and its resulting ideal product graduation with a degree, will produce the opposite effect just as we’ve seen at the secondary level, i.e. dumbing down instruction and/or grade inflation designed more to get students out the door than to ensure they have a quality education.

Grade inflation increasingly is a problem in Louisiana high schools. Here’s just one bit of anecdotal evidence on this account: when my nephew graduated last year from high school, in a class of over 300, the average GPA of the entire class was slightly over a 3.0 (B) and over a dozen students had a 4.0 (perfect straight A). In contrast, when my wife graduated sixteen years earlier from another area high school with a slightly larger class, she and one other guy had a 4.0 – and it had been a couple of years, and would be a couple of years after, than any other student would achieve that.

Grades have gone up because of TOPS, the state’s program of giving free money for college for students meeting certain grade point averages. Simply, many Louisiana high school teachers are afraid of giving grades that realistically assess a student’s ability because they don’t want to have parents complaining to principals that they are cheating their children out of having a college education paid for. (If you want more proof, even as their GPAs seem to show they are well above average, why is it that Louisiana high school students score well below the national average on the ACT?)

If classroom grades and graduation rates become the only metric by which some college programs are rewarded with funding, the same thing is going to happen. In order to ensure maximum funding, university administrators will pressure faculty members to give away high grades like candy at Christmas, compounding a grade inflation problem that already is rampant among universities nationwide and getting worse. This gamesmanship will do nothing to improve the educational quality of Louisiana college attendees. Indeed, it will encourage lowering standards even below where they are now.

Thus, while performance-based funding is a welcome development in Louisiana higher education, picking the wrong way to measure it not only will not improve the quality of higher education in the state, it will make it worse.

Term limits, displacement effects among hot political topics

Most readers were unfortunate enough not to be able to attend the two panels at the Southern Political Science Association meeting in New Orleans dealing specifically with Louisiana politics on Saturday, one of which being the venue at which I presented my paper concerning implications of term limits on legislators and voter displacement on state politics.

So, as a public service, here I will sum up some of the more interesting conclusions drawn based on discussion proceeding from the paper and by other roundtable participants – political science professors Albert Samuels of Southern, Henry Sirgo of McNeese State, Joshua Stockley of Nicholls State, and myself

1. In my study, it must be reemphasized that even if the GOP is much better off as a result of term limits and displacement (which gives the party great advantage in 13 of 16 legislative seats made competitive by terms limits, and removed around 49,000 net potential Democrat voters from the state, respectively), this represents only potential gains where the party has to get the work done in order to realize such gains. Poor campaigning or inferior candidates will not.

2. At the same time, national trends are not likely to affect campaigning for state office because, with Louisiana having elections separate from any federal elections, there won’t be a much tying the two together. Statewide trends, by contrast, may well affect this. For example, if the outcome of the second special session causes blame to be heaped disproportionately on one party, that would drag on electoral competitiveness of all that party’s candidates.

3. Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco is in big trouble and by extension Democrat hopes for winning the state’s top office are as well. The Democrats would be better off with a candidate such as former U.S. House member Chris John but that current Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal would remain the most formidable candidate in the field. Democrat U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon probably would not be interested if Blanco bowed out. If Blanco persists in running, with her and Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell in the field, no other competitive Democrat would likely see any chance of making the general election runoff and thus not run, making Democrat chances of winning very slim.

4. Democrats also should be worried about the displacement of voters for other statewide offices, particularly for the seat held Sen. Mary Landrieu coming up for grabs in 2008. While these elections are almost a year or two away, demographic changes are not favoring the party at the statewide level.

5. By contrast, it would be a mistake to impute that difficulties Democrats are having statewide will translate into lower-level offices. For example, while much attention has been given to big Democrat displacement from Orleans Parish, proportionally as much Republican voter displacement has occurred in St. Bernard Parish. As another indicator, my study showed that while the GOP could pick up 10 House seats from term limits, by contrast as many Republican districts as Democrat ones, two each, are endangered by term limits in the Senate – both GOP-held seats being in the strongest Democrat area outside of the state, Melancon’s stronghold of Acadiana to the Delta.

6. Redistricting in 2011 as a result of the national census almost certainly will cost Louisiana a seat in the House. Whether it will be a majority-black seat preserved around New Orleans because of the nascent remaining legislative strength in the area and reluctance not to have one majority-black district in the state, or because of the historical antipathy of southeastern-most Louisiana to Orleans that will preserve something akin to Melancon’s Third District instead, it looks likely that the Democrats will be the losers as all Republican seats will be preserved – but much depends upon the results of the 2007 state elections in this regard.

That’s our best guesses for four-plus years out. We’ll just have to see what happens.

Tax cuts needed to preserve New Orleans small businesses

I attended the Southern Political Science Association annual meeting this past weekend in New Orleans, my first visit to the place since Hurricane Katrina, where I lived two decades ago. My anecdotal evidence confirms the thought that the city is in trouble and bold policy action is required to keep an implosion from occurring.

I didn’t go to gawk at the wasteland of New Orleans East, nor the struggling Lakeview, not even checking out the condition of my mighty alma mater the University of New Orleans and the area near it. Instead, I did quite a bit of walking (because the mass transit system, to my view, was far below in provision where it used to be) in the areas of town which were relatively undamaged by the flooding – Uptown, the CBD, and my old neighborhood the Vieux Carré. Economic activity in these areas is supposed to reflect the main forces driving the city forward. Besides a paucity of mass transit, I observed the following:

Noticeably reduced foot traffic around Canal Street and into the Quarter
Hotels significantly less busy that I ever have seen
More Louisiana State Police vehicles than New Orleans Police Department cars, and more private security vehicles, even cruising the main drags like St. Charles, the either of these
Vacant storefronts in places I never had seen before, along with the odd Dumpster beside a building or house

Two interrelated conclusions can be drawn from these observations, combined with the facts that many businesses are on the record as struggling, the city’s population is not even half of what it was prior to Katrina, its dependence on tourism has caused its economy disproportionately to suffer because of memories of the storm and rampant crime and suffering immediately in its aftermath that shies away tourists/conventioneers, and that a continued bad crime rate keeps the bad publicity rolling on in.

As such, plans to “market” the city with an initiative costing tens of millions of dollars will not have much return until the negative image of crime and, to a lesser degree, political ineptitude are reduced. No positive campaign can turn these around much less in in the short run, only political will can.

Since this will take time, the public policy problem becomes one of keeping the economy afloat with only about half of the people and half of the business available as before, until these factors are mitigated to enable support a business infrastructure at the previous level. While there’s nothing government can do that effectively stimulates demand for what New Orleans businesses have to offer, there’s much it can do to reduce businesses’ costs that can keep them profitable and running at this lower level – cut their taxes.

Instead of spending $20 million on ads, throw it back into the treasury and declare that any Louisiana-owned, small business (it’s risky, but I’ll let the Legislature define these terms) in New Orleans does not have to pay any state taxes of any kind. In fact, if the numbers show it wouldn’t be too big of a hit on state tax revenues, throw in as well those located in St, Bernard, Plaquemines, and even certain parts of Jefferson Parish as beneficiaries.

Sure, this may cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, but only last month politicians across the state were debating what to do with a budgetary surplus estimated beyond $2 billion. This seems to be a much better long term investment with a portion of that money than a number of things suggested for spending these funds.

But this, along with measures to encourage more writing of insurance policies and to get Road Home rebuilding funds distributed faster, has to happen much sooner rather than later. Given the two most important people involved in this task would be Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, that’s a lot of wishful thinking for the kind of incisive and decisive leadership that this idea calls for. Nevertheless, it’s in the state’s best interest if it does.

Will Democrats show true selves in McCrery dispute?

The dispute concerning the qualification of U.S. Rep. Jim McCrery to take his seat in the House finally has reached its proper venue. How it gets resolved will test how much national Democrats would like to obscure their true agenda.

Republican McCrery’s Democrat opponents claim he is not a resident of Louisiana, and thereby not entitled to be seated in the House even if duly elected. He did take the oath of office but the House can unseat him (or any member on these grounds, by a majority vote now held by Democrats) at any time.

His case will test the Democrat assertion, already being contradicted by their pushing through their legislative agenda without any discussion (in contrast to the Republicans’ 1995 Contract with America package that was fully debated), that they mean to be more transparent and bipartisan than the Republican majority they replaced. If they really meant this, McCrery’s case will be dismissed in short order, for his residency practices in this case are no different than many other members.’

But congressional Democrats often have shown they inhabit a world out of touch with real life and the American public. Many refuse to acknowledge the reality that they grabbed more seats in 2006 not because people supported their liberal agenda, but because they rejected the Republicans’ moderate direction, as indicated by the content of the agenda they will try to ram through in the next couple of weeks.

And, they have shown a past willingness to force their preferences onto the very electorates they claim to represent. In 1984, the Democrat-controlled House literally stole an election for themselves in Indiana’s Eight District. In all their hubris and disconnection to the American people, they may think they can do it again in the case of McCrery.

Any protracted disposition of this case, much less a usurpation of power by unseating him and calling for a new election, will help to uncloak the false veneer of the Democrats and reaffirm to a public partly fooled by their electioneering that they do not promote the best interests of Americans.

Study shows pay raises would hardly improve education

Another report about education, another opportunity to demonstrate the poor level at which education is being performed in Louisiana. But the press accounts gloss over the important details that tell us why the state, by their metrics, is doing so poorly, and what to do or not to do about it.

Sure, Louisiana overall finishes next-to-last in the Education Week and its partners study. But unless one probes the inner details of the report, you wouldn’t know that in one area of indicators, Louisiana ranks very highly. The Education Counts study has two sets of indicators, empirical ones measuring student performance, and political ones reflecting the presence or absence of policies the study’s authors believe make for successful education.

On the empirical measurements, the state does poorly, even shockingly. For example, on proficiency measure the state ranks at about two-thirds the average of other states. But on the policy measures, the state does well. It ranks in the middle of an index to measure alignment of education policy to outcomes, and in terms student standards, assessments, and school accountability, Louisiana ranks the highest of all the states. But by contrast, on the index presumably measuring “chance-for-success” (essentially, economic indicators), the state is almost last.

In other words, Louisiana has the correct policies in place to produce superior performance, but something is interfering with its actual achievement. The success indicators point out why – if properly understood. One common error made by rafts of politicians and pundits in this analysis is the simplistic belief that poverty somehow causes lower educational achievement. This represents a mistake in understanding causation, because poverty is only associated with low achievement, but does not cause it: in other words, the two are related to the same causal agent but not theoretically related themselves.

That similar causal agent is attitudes about efforts to succeed and achieve. Simply, poverty is not defined by the lack of resources, it is defined by the lack of will to want to achieve more resources (as the dismal failure of throwing money at the problem that lay behind the “War on Poverty” has shown). Bad luck and the like certainly hold people back in moving out of poverty, but the influence of these pales in comparison in general to that played by the role that attitudes that are not conducive to gaining wealth; for example, preferring spending in the present rather than saving and investing for the future, unwillingness to work hard, unwillingness to start menially and working one’s way up the economic ladder, etc.

Most relevant to Louisiana’s case is a voluntary dependency, or an attitude that one need not take responsibility for his own station in life but, rather, let somebody else or the government do it for them. The scourge of populism that has plagued Louisiana is a direct indicator of this attitude, and has created a bloated government that looks more towards the redistribution of wealth than empowering people to create it. In turn, this saps efforts to achieve and creates an attitude of dependency. So we must understand that poverty does not create poor education, but that common inferior attitudes about achievement and individual responsibility (perpetuated by government policy outside of education in Louisiana’s case) create, separately, both poverty and poor achievement.

Further, one policy change that would make little difference is giving pay raises to teachers. Understand the nature of the disconnection here revealed in the report: the policies are good, the performance is bad. Thus, it is the mechanism that performs the education that is at faulty – schools generally, but teachers in particular. The solution to this is not pay raises – that theory ridiculously argues that, overnight with more money in hand, suddenly every teacher becomes better – but in ensuring knowledgeable, capable teachers are in the classroom.

Interestingly, the report did not judge states on the basis of whether they had a crucial mechanism in ensuring this condition – regular assessment of teachers’ knowledge of the subject areas they teach. This goes way beyond the false prophylactic of “certification:” it means the regular testing of teachers. More and more states are adopting this commonsense regulation despite resistance from teachers’ unions bent on getting more money for with less effort put out by their members.

Even more interestingly, a comparison of Louisiana with the report’s top state, Virginia, shows why pay alone is meaningless in determining quality. In their region, Louisiana ranks fifth from the bottom while Virginia is only fourth from the top in terms of pay. In fact, Virginia is a good $3,000 below the national average in pay. Further, adjusting for cost of living in each state’s metropolitan areas (where the majority of education occurs), the cost of living in Virginia is 12 percent higher, meaning, when salaries are thereby adjusted, Louisiana teachers’ salaries on average are only about $1,000 below those in Virginia. Clearly, the narrow pay differential has little to do with the gulf in quality.

This is why, when the issue inevitably resurfaces in the regular session of the Louisiana Legislature this year, teacher pay raises without any corresponding demand for increased accountability of them is asinine. Any raise must be tied into accountability; for example, administering a test of subject area knowledge, combining this with student achievement results, and basing future raises on performance measured this way. Such a regime won’t solve all problems, but it will put the state in the right direction, dealing with the real issue behind why Louisiana educational achievement lags.

Intriguing redistricting options appear on LA's horizon

As if the stakes needed any more raising for this year’s elections, U.S. Census Bureau estimates released late last month confirm that the next governor and state legislature will fight a tremendous redistricting battle – making the outcome of those elections even more crucial.

Almost a year and a half ago a Cabinet member predicted that by the 2010 census New Orleans would contain perhaps 375,000 people. The latest figures suggest that might even be a hard target to reach. With a state population loss of almost 220,000 (net migration actually 241,000), compared to the most recent estimates that the four most affected parishes of Hurricane Katrina have lost about 254,000 people, considering some have relocated elsewhere in the state it’s hard to see Orleans Parish having more than 200,000 people (close to the estimate of late last year) as of now.

The trend of 18 months ago now seems confirmed, meaning the state will lose as congressional seat. As I have pointed out before, given electoral geography and judicial rulings on the subject, Louisiana well may lose its only black-majority district, the Second. The only way to keep one would be to draw a crazy-looking district primarily on the basis of race the concept of which has been invalidated by the courts.

Enthusiasm to tempt the courts may be tempered by who wins the 2007 elections. This is because 2010 results will be released about the time the 2011 regular session kicks off, allowing redistricting to proceed. Chances are not good the state would force the issue if Republicans manage to win both majoritarian branches. But all it really would take would be a Republican governor to veto a Democrat Legislature’s choice, or the threatened use of a veto, to produce a GOP tilt to the process.

The political situation becomes even more convoluted when considering the 2011 session also would determine the districting for state offices. Just as the Second District may disappear as a result of the demographic changes, so may several Orleans-area legislative districts, disproportionately lowering black and even Democrat representation in the Legislature. Republicans can maximize this if they control the chambers.

Even more intriguingly, the resolution of this may come through a rupture on racial lines to the detriment of the Democrats. Again, especially if a Republican occupies then governor’s office, he could bargain between white and black Democrats in what still means the loss of a Democrat seat. Given existing numbers, to the white legislators, he could offer carving up the Second District and move black Democrats into the Third (strengthening the narrow electoral majority Democrats currently hold in it, the only district with a white Democrat elected to the U.S. House). To the black legislators, he could offer to carve up the Third in an attempt to create a district that may not be majority black but wouldn’t be far off. By separating support for each other for each set of Democrats, the new Louisiana would continue to have six GOP seats but just one Democrat seat regardless of which side prevailed.

And, holding out state legislative district majorities as a bargaining chip gives the governor still more power, particularly since the Legislature will have a relatively close partisan balance. A skilled governor would be able to let the opposition have more of one kind of seat in order to get the other kind for his party. A Democrat gubernatorial win probably would not preserve the loss of a Congressional district by its party, given the post-storm demographic realities, but it could blunt GOP gains in legislative redistricting. A Republican win would just accelerate them. Thus, the stakes in the upcoming governor’s contest go even higher.

LA needs federal prodding to do right health care thing

And another way Louisiana is behind the curve is in its continued resistance to revamping health care in a way that maximizes outcomes for reduced cost. Of course, missing the deadline to institute changes for 2007 in health care delivery is also partly due to the legendary inefficiency in Louisiana’s government getting services provided (such as Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s choice of administrators of the Road Home Progam), but the lion’s share of blame rests with the politics-as-usual emphasis by its politicians.

“Politics-as-usual” in the case of health care delivery in Louisiana means an overemphasis and bias on institutional- rather than community- or individual-based health care solutions. This is why the state’s health care redesign effort continues to try to force feed a questionable “medical home” plan that shovels money first to institutions rather than a “money-follows-the-person” model that shifts it to the individual or his representatives that other states have been adopting.

Two factors explain why Louisiana remains so obstinate. First, there is the inertia of the ultimate institutional model of health care, the charity hospital system that only Louisiana insists on having. Despite generally worse outcomes from it, because of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it and the tens of thousands of jobs tied into it, those that have a finger in this pie and the politicians they have courted to support it continue to defend it and thus resist dismantling it.

LA needs to follow federal lead on cable competition

Once again, Louisiana remains behind the curve as, at the federal level, the Federal Communications Commission partially did what Gov. Kathleen Blanco denied the state only months ago.

The FCC recently relaxed regulations to increase the amount of competition allowed in provision of cable television, the point of HB 699 in the 2006 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature. They will make it easier for non-cable companies to get franchising agreements with local governments, after a study showed areas with those kinds of providers produced lower rates to consumers, as opposed to having satellite providers as the only competition.

Local governments have opposed allowing other communications concerns such as telephone companies to compete for franchising agreements because the present agreements often serve as a stealth way for these governments to squeeze extra revenue out of the pockets of those paying for cable TV by arranging for fees to be passed along. One way to accomplish this was by buildout provisions – forcing new providers to create supply in unprofitable way, rather than let the market determine where supply occurred. The FCC ruling put a lid on differential treatment of existing and potential providers in bailout and in passing along fees by local governments.

The Louisiana law would have gone much further – except that after passage of the Legislature Blanco vetoed it. Unfortunately, author state Rep. Billy Montgomery, despite his nearly two decades in office, didn’t have enough clout to prevent this.

It’s a bill that needs reviving in the 2007 session, perhaps by somebody more capable than Montgomery, especially because Congress can pass laws overriding regulations and now that it is controlled by the party that seeks to empower government and to disempower people, Democrats, they could attempt to do so and hope Pres. George W. Bush doesn’t bother to veto it. Sending it to Blanco a second time, especially during an election year where she’ll need all of the help she can get at the polls, might get her to sign it this time.