Thursday, October 20, 2005

Get rid of the Orleans Levee Board.

In the past few years, as the board focused on casinos, marinas, bridges, police forces, fancy new administrative buildings, private detectives while the mundane work of levee maintenance never received top billing. Now, after the casino and other Levee Board projects were ruined by Katrina, all anyone wants to focus on is the construction of world class levees.
If and when the levees are constructed to Category 5 protection, the levee board should not be the agency supervising the work or maintaining the levees. We need a formal investigation into what happened in the years leading up to Katrina and whether there was any criminal negligence involved.
Governor Blanco should immediately fire Huey and disband the Orleans Parish Levee Board. Legislation in this special session should be introduced to combine all local levee boards into one state board, with statewide oversight. This would remove the politics and the multiple fiefdoms around the state.

Hear, hear!

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