Opinion > November 8, 2007

By Walker Saik | Guest columnist

New Orleanians have a different reason to celebrate Halloween: It’s the last day of hurricane season.

But every party has its hangover, and this one hit a day late on Nov. 2 when news came that President George W. Bush vetoed the $23 billion Water Resources Development Act.

The WRDA contained $3.6 billion directed to Louisiana, mainly for levee rebuilding and coastal restoration and it also included an unbudgeted amount for the Federal Corps of Engineers to develop citywide protection against a 100-year storm.

The president claims the bill had too much pork, and while fiscal conservatism is typically a good thing, New Orleans really needs that money. The good news is that the Senate and House claim they can override the veto, but that act remains to be seen.

The bigger issue, though, appears to be a continued misunderstanding of the New Orleans recovery. Bush appears to believe that his hands-off approach is working, but many issues have proven to be well beyond the core-competencies of state and local officials, leading to delays that have been devastating to individuals and small businesses.

After many painstaking months of feet-dragging, the city is finally showing bright spots in areas such as housing, healthcare, education, insurance and the economy in general, but the federal government has generally refused to break down bureaucratic barriers to ease the recovery. This veto is just another step that Louisiana will have to tackle before getting the help it needs.

To put it simply, the city’s rebuilding has been an interdisciplinary nightmare, but perhaps the biggest problem – and this is where the WRDA comes in – happens to be the one that people have generally ignored: the risk of a repeat disaster.

But don’t blame this risk on any modern-day “super storm.” In fact, the problem is purely man-made and is two-fold: poor levees and coastal erosion.

As advertised for weeks on CNN in 2005, the levees that border the city failed in several areas after Katrina passed the city, and the Corps – which was responsible for building those levees – has since admitted the protection was “in name only.” The Corps is currently trying to solve the problem, but work cannot proceed unless the cash is allocated from bills like the WRDA.

Secondly, southeastern Louisiana has been suffering from the nation’s most severe case of coastal erosion for the better part of the last century. The state loses a football field of land every 45 minutes, and, without these wetlands, a significant part of the city’s storm protection is washed away.

This shrinking coastline is not natural, though. It is in part the result of federal levees built around the Mississippi River after the 1927 flood to protect the entire Mississippi River Valley from future floods.

The river had previously deposited its sediment throughout its delta in southeast Louisiana, producing some of the richest ecosystems in the United States. Now, its sediment is forced off the Continental Shelf, deep into the Gulf of Mexico.

To complicate the issue, oil companies have dug miles of canals through the Louisiana wetlands to help oil drilling, unknowingly allowing the Gulf’s saltwater to eat away at freshwater marsh grass. Therefore, the wetlands have not only lost their source of nutritious sediment, but they have also been exposed to the Gulf’s deadly saltwater.

About $1.9 billion from the WRDA bill was to aid in coastal restoration, and while this amount will only chip away at the total estimated needs of $14 billion to restore the wetlands, Louisiana badly needs a lump sum to slow the damage.

Overall, New Orleans has come a long way since Aug. 29, 2005, but it desperately needs to eliminate any risk of future disasters.

Currently, around 1.2 million people have returned to the area with investment dollars and strong-willed determination, but how many more have refused to return because of that “1 percent” risk?

Quantifying the exact value of the risk is obviously difficult, but rational businesses will not continue to develop the city if they do not think the government will protect their investments. And this government has shown severe complacency towards protecting this major American city.

In fact, the government appears to have removed the recovery in general from its top priorities. The White House does not appear to be doing “whatever it takes,” as Bush promised in his speech at Jackson Square in New Orleans. Instead, the White House has left Louisiana legislators continually begging for more, and the WRDA bill is just one more example.

For some reason or another, the New Orleans recovery has been given second-tier status. While every Iraq mega-bill gets passed as necessary, the needs of southeast Louisiana have to be put on hold until there’s another bill on which they can sneak through.

It’s making things difficult down in the bayou. Hopefully, the president will one day understand the urgency involved in the New Orleans recovery; otherwise, the lame duck period can’t end soon enough for New Orleans.

Walker Saik is a graduate student in accountancy residing in Winston-Salem.