Costs of Levee Repair Jump

In the file I'm going to shortly name "Disheartening New Orleans News of the Week", it was revealed that Bush administration officials made a slight error of calculation in estimating how much it would cost to fix the levees that protect New Orleans:

The Bush administration said yesterday that the cost of rebuilding New Orleans's levees to federal standards has nearly tripled to $10 billion and that there may not be enough money to fully protect the entire
region.

The change followed a surprise announcement from the Army Corps of Engineers that the levee reconstruction project, most recently estimated at $3.5 billion, would now cost $9.5 billion if insurance-certified levees were extended throughout the region.

The problem appears to lie in the difference in cost between levees that would prevent flooding the likes of which we saw after Katrina, and those that would prevent most if not all flooding such that home owners living in areas protected by the levees would be elegible for flood insurance.

Whether the levees meet the flood insurance standards is considered a key piece of the rebuilding puzzle, however. In areas where the levees do not meet the standards, buildings may have to be constructed up to 20 to 35 feet above ground, a Powell aide acknowledged. Also, in a city where there is a desperate need for housing investors, areas with less-than-optimal levees could scare off flood-wary developers.

In other words, unless the levees are re-built strong enough, even people who want to move back to or invest in some areas of New Orleans will find it impossible to do so as they won't be able to obtain flood insurance. No flood insurance in an area for which there is a small be reasonable chance of another flood means no reconstruction.

As you can probably imagine, Congress is at best a little...reluctant...to come up with yet more billions for levee repair. This is a problem for Bush, who promised to rebuild New Orleans bigger and better than it was before:

President Bush’s earlier commitment to rebuilding south Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina has put him in a precarious political position as the cost of levee repairs soars. That’s the take of several members of Congress and political analysts, who Friday noted Bush did not step up and say the federal government will pay up to $6 billion more needed to restore Louisiana levees.

Bush faces resistance from some members of Congress, particularly House conservatives who have grown weary of sending more money to the region. With the current spending bill before Congress, the administration will have requested more than $100 billion for the recovery.

Earlier this month, the House rejected an amendment to add $465 million more for levee restoration after the money was cut out of a Bush proposal. “He can’t have big, humiliating public defeats,” said Ed Renwick, a political scientist professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. “You have to be careful. You don’t want to get pushed over a cliff.”

Yet even Bush’s strongest supporters in the Louisiana delegation say the president must come up with the new levee money to remain true to the pledge he made in Jackson Square in New Orleans to do everything in his power to heal the region.

But Charlie Cook believes political factors weigh heavily against Louisiana. The Shreveport native and publisher of the Cook Political Report in Washington notes that Louisiana’s political seniority is at a low point: three freshman legislators and no one in a leadership slot.

If you want my opinion, they won't get that money because Congress won't grant it and Bush won't make public appeals for it. While he did make that pledge, he did it as most things get done in his administration-half-ass and without much forethought-and as a result he now has to choose between his relatively major pledge to get the budget trimmed and his very major pledge of rebuilding New Orleans. And as much as I hate to say it, without anyone other than the poor abused residents and politicians of New Orleans and Louisiana to hold his feet to the fire, and with much of the Republican Congress opposed, it'll be easier for him to abandon the latter to save the former.

The fact is rebuilding New Olreans could be a significant achievement for President Bush if he embraced it. Pretty much everyone but those firmly entrenched on the right would applaud his administration for doing so. But for one, there's no telling if Bush even values such an undertaking himself; his post-Katrina pledges appeared largely to have been made in an desperate attempt to dampen some of the political damage caused by his administration's outright incompetence in handling the disaster, and whether he ever had any sincere motivation to fix the city is unknown to us. But secondly, he's opposed by those in Congress who are perfectly content to let New Orleans whither away, either because they have a different vision for the city (see my last post on this topic) or their budge priorities come before a city that was once filled largely with poor African-Americans. So as dismal as it sounds, I pretty much imagine New Orleans will get the typical Bush treatment; bold proclamations followed by retreats from those promises as public attention shifts away, and incompetance, mis-management, and cronyism in the rebuilding process. I could be wrong, but don't count on it.