My co-workers

When I started this blog I fully intended to make fun of my colleagues mercilessly. As I asked in one of my first blogs, who can take three months off with no notice? I predicted new graduates, weirdoes that can not hold down a job, and the twice blessed. Despite my best intentions, I have been foiled. The members of the team are professional, intelligent and committed. What’s worse is that the office is free of negative political jockeying or gossip! While I am excited to be working with such great people in such a positive setting, I am a little disappointed that my blog is suffering.

There are 15-20 people that work in Jefferson Davis County on Long Term Recovery. There are a number of people we can call on who are shared between different county teams.

The breakdown goes something like this
1 team lead
1 admin. assistant / office manager
4 engineers
2 planners
1 outreach person
2 HUD staffers
1 Wetlands person
1 USDA rural development person
1 Louisiana National Guard liaison
1 HUD community change specialist
1 Economic development person that is joining the team shortly

The answer to who can take three months off are:
1) Local hires who lost there jobs due to the hurricane
2) Retired people that now do temp jobs like this
3) Federal government staff people that are temporarily stationed here
4) Me (Ironically I am the only one that fit any (or all) of the categories I laid out.

One other note, almost everyone on our team is middle aged with a family. ( I, at 30, am the youngest staff member). It is hard on them, considering we work 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Government records

Some would think it is common sense that government records should not be stored on the ground floor in areas prone to flooding. In case it is too complicated, the feds have a brochure that says something like
Ten Steps for Local Governments in Areas at Risk for Flooding
1) Don't store any vital papers on the first floor.
2)....

Well, here are some photos from the municipal office building in Jefferson Davis County.
P.D.

A Note About Comments

I believe you don't need to sign in to make comments. Simply click on the make comment icon and choose annonymous.
Then write your comment and click "log in and publish". It will publish it automatically and will not ask you to log in. (This does not make sense, but I believe this is what happens).
At least this is what I think will happen. Email me or post a comment if I am not right.
P.D.

Away till Tuesday

All,
I am away on "rotation" visiting my grandparents for a few days. I will try to catch up on some old topics, like Boss Hogg, while I am here, but if not I will be back to writing early next week.
P.D.

Night From Hell

Night from Hell

The people from my company called. They said I was in big trouble for not retuning the rental car (which they provided at the government tab). They told me I was only allowed to keep it for two months and then I had to check back in with Hertz. I told them I had only had it a month and a half. They said it did not matter, Hertz thought it was stolen and I had to return it to Biloxi, where I initially picked it up, almost two hours away!

Feeling very clever, I came up with a solution. Call and tell them that it was not stolen! This was not possible, I was told, because Hertz needed the mileage. The brilliant problem solver that I am, I came up with a new solution, I would tell them the mileage! Again, the answer was no. Maybe I could return the car in Gulfport, where I am based? Nope, it had to be Biloxi. They wanted me to exchange the car for a new one and to do that in Gulfport, two hours away, would cost $3,300!

After much arguing, I agreed to return the car the next day. Then came the kicker. They did not have any additional cars for me to rent. I would have to return it and then go to a new rental car company to get a new car. This seemed like a lame excuse because they did not know what day my car was being returned, so why couldn’t I just rerent it?

So, after work I drove up to Biloxi and turned in my car and picked up the new car. I met some friends for a bite to eat and headed back to Gulfport. It was almost 1 am and I was finally almost home, maybe 10 minutes away. I started thinking about my apartment and thought, where are my keys. I started to panic, patting down my pockets, etc.

I then realized I had left them on the key chain when I returned the old rental car! Turning around and going back to the rental place would put me home at 5 am and besides the rental place would probably be closed. I decided to call the rental place and make sure they did not rerent the car before removing my keys.

I tried to turn on the internal light in the car, so I could dial my phone, but being a stupid new car, I could not find the light. And then I saw the bad flashing lights behind me.

In the process of looking for my keys and the light I did not stay in my lane, and a cop saw me.

So the cop pulled me over and told me I was swerving. I apologized and explained that I had switched cars and my apartment keys were on the old chain.

Having none of it, he asked if I had been drinking. I told him I had one glass of wine three hours ago and honestly the reason I did not stay in my lane was because I was looking for my keys and the light. He made me get out of the car and do the DUI walk and a couple of other tests. Of course I passed and he let me go (concluding that it was tiredness that made me drive so poorly). (I felt like asking him if he was dumb and reminding him that I had already explained twice what the problem was). I did not say anything and drove away.

Then I realized the bozo had forgotten to return my drivers license. Here I was with no way to get in to my apartment, scheduled to catch a flight in 12 hours and no ID!

Luckily, I had only driven 50 feet and he was still in his car doing whatever it is cops do after they let someone. I got out of the car and pointed out that he still had my drivers license, which he then returned.

So, I tried to check in to several different hotels, but because of the storms everyone was booked to capacity. I eventually broke in to the club house at my apartment / condo complex (using a credit card) and spent four and a half hours sleeping fitfully before heading in to work, wearing the t-shirt and jeans that I wore on my drive.

(The next morning the rental agent gave me a new set of keys and life was returned to normal)

Names

In a lighter note…
Everyone in the county is known by a nickname. A conversation might go something like this
“Hi Doc, good to see you. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing well. How are you Judge?”
“Great. Chief and I went out fishing yesterday.”
Everyone who does not have a title has a name like
Gidge or Rusty.

Avoiding meltdown

I should go back and write about this meeting with the Citizens Recovery Committee and government officials. We were laying out the reality that two thirds of residents are not coming home to Jefferson Davis county and it is not possible to provide services to the whole county with one third the tax revenues. The question we wanted them to grapple with was, what do you do in this situation. If you recall, I predicted disaster.

Well, things went pretty well. There was lots of discussion and lots of chaos, but almost everyone at the meeting realized that it just does not make sense to rebuild every neighborhood. There was only one person, a politician who represents one of the worst hit areas, who disagreed, but he did so respectfully.

I think the meeting was not a disaster because
1) the biggest hot head, Boss Hogg, was not there (I will write more about Boss Hogg soon
2) The meeting was so chaotic, that everyone expressed an opinion in small groups and we never tried to reach any agreement
3) Most people were on board with the idea of not building in areas that are prone to flooding

The interesting thing is that politicians are totally out of touch with their constituents because so few people have returned to the county. Politicians are guessing what their constituents want, but have no real way to truth their hunches.

This was illustrated a few days later. There was an informal follow up discussion at another public meeting we held last Saturday. “Judge” and Tim, the politician got into a big debate. The Judge was making his case that the county should give up on some neighborhoods and Tim was countering it. A lady who I never met before said, “I live in that neighborhood you are pointing to (i.e. and proposing not be built).” This instantly silenced the crowd. “My sister, and brother and mother, all live there too.” (Ah, Mississippi!). “And I agree with that man,” she said pointing to the judge.

We will see. I suspect politicians will change their stripes if enough people speak up like that brave woman.

Racist punks

I am going to bad mouth the good people of Jefferson Davis County now.

Sometimes I want to shoot them...

The county is full of racist punks. They all moved out of the big city to escape people of color.

The county is 10 percent black, but EVERYBODY I talk to tells me it is 98 percent white. They simply refuse to see that black people are there neighbors.

In a recent meeting, a resident was railing against the evils of multifamily dwellings. He warned, they bring us, "crime, drugs and interracial marriage."

Oh well.

No accounting for accountability

Up until now no one signed my time sheet. I just entered my hours and mailed it to the bookkeeper and got paid. Obviously it was a system that could be abused.

In the interest of accountability, now they are requiring my boss to sign all the time sheets of all the employees. Logical enough. Stupidly, they are making him collect them Wednesday morning. The time sheets go to Friday. So we have to estimate our hours for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. He signs off on our estimates and away they get sent to the bookkeeper.

Sure am glad they solved that problem.

Soul

I have worked in many ugly places, and Jefferson Davis County tops them all. The houses are squat brick warts that grow incessantly off a never ending maze of non-descript streets. The commercial districts are forgettable automobile-oriented spines that snake down the long and narrow county. Rusting refineries, belching all colors of smoke, abut neighborhoods and mar the horizon. The river, in the few areas where it is not swallowed by factories, is hidden by over-sized levees. As if any one neighborhood like this is not bad enough, the scene plays out over and over again for forty miles. An endless stream of cheap brick facades and quicky-marts. The residents, however, are something else.

I have also worked in a lot of communities with amazing people. Places with visionary leaders and remarkable citizens. And I’ll tell you what, Jefferson Davis County has them all beat. I have never seen a place with as deep a soul as this county. It is a county of little leagues and Kiwanis. A county where people are born, grown up, grow old and die with no thought of moving. A county of coups de mains where the men gather to help each other build a deck, put up siding or replace windows, and the women cook the best Crawfish Etoufee and Seafood Jambalaya I have ever tasted.

While the world’s eyes were on New Orleans and its scenes of desperation, the story of Jefferson Davis was just as compelling, but completely different. Jefferson Davis rescued itself one house, one family at a time. It is the type of place where two neighbors might have feuded for thirty years, but would do anything to be living on the same block again.

It has been four months since the water receded and the county looks like more similar to images from disasters in the developing then from our own country. Every building, literally every building, in the parish was damaged, many beyond repair.

Amid this, every Saturday a group gathers at the gutted county office building and throws their names in a hat. They draw a name and everybody helps gut the lucky person’s house. They have a strength and faith that I do not pretend to understand, but I know I respect.

What scares me is that the Citizens Recovery Committee (CRC), a group of good hearted bankers, lawyers, doctors and judges who are charged with spearheading the redevelopment effort, have a vision with little room for low income residents. Pre-Katrina, Jefferson Davis was a blue-collar community, 88 percent of houses sold for under $125,000. If the CRC has its way this will not be true in the future. They want to double the lot size of any areas that will have widespread demolitions so the new buildings are more expensive. Along a similar vein, the county government is requiring individual hearings for any multi-family rental building owner who wants to rebuild.

They have seen pictures of shiny new communities with beautiful houses and fancy shopping districts, and this is what they think they want. They are forgetting is what makes Jefferson Davis special, what gives it soul.

A 30 foot wall of water may have crashed through the county, but so far it not do any lasting damage. If the county chooses to rebuild in such a way as to exclude most of the residents, then Katrina has won and maybe it is time to let the marshes reclaim their ancestral home.

The Vision Thing

I learned in graduate school that planning starts with a vision statement. Before you can talk about how to improve your community, you need to agree about what you want your community to be like. That seems obvious. It would be stupid to do lots of work to change your community in a certain way, and then realize, oh, we really didn’t want our community to be like that anyway.

So I have brought up several times that we need a vision statement. Not only is it good planning, but the Mississippi Recovery Authority requires it. My opinion is, get it created now and have it out of the way. However, every time I bring it up, people act like I am crazy.

Up until now I have been told that there is a vision statement somewhere. When pressed no one can seem to find it. Also, when asked if the vision statement reads something like, “In the year 2025, Jeffereson Davis County will be a community where blah blah blah…” The answer is, “Not in so many words.” Well, every vision statement I have ever seen says something to that effect. I was rather concerned.

Well, I finally tracked down the vision statement and there is no vision in the statement. It is a mission statement about the work of the Citizens Recovery Committee.
There are about ten different subcommittees and each has a mission statement. Here is the Coast Protection Subcommittee, “To seek and acquire public comment on the issue of coastal protection for St. Bernard Parish. Our committee will evaluate coastal projects on their ability to provide short and long term hurricane protection for the community.”

Others are about principals of rebuilding, but not about the vision, “To apply private and public resources to rebuild St. Bernard with the commitment to accountability, transparency, and financial stewardship with the primary objective to maximize the return on investment to all stakeholders.”

I pointed out that these are not vision statements. Sarah, our exiting planner who was in a pissy mood because her football team lost, said, “Yes they are.” I said, no they are mission statements. Sarah said they are vision statements of a sort. I said, “Lets turn them into real vision statements, feed them back to the committee and have a working vision statement. Sarah said everyone was tired of touchy-feely things like vision statements and that is where it ended.

I am never bringing up the issue of a vision statement again. Every time I bring it up people treat me like I am an alien. That’s fine, but even alien’s would start their planning process with a vision statement.

The Big Day

Tomorrow is a big day. We are having a four hour meeting with the Citizens Recovery Committee and the County Government and the Planning Board to discuss how to repopulate the county.

You see, there was once 68,000 people and 25,000 homes. Now there are 5,000 people, 100 homes and 2000 trailers. Many of the 63,000 people that have not come home will never come home. I suspect the population in the next five years will be in the 20,000s.

There are hard choices that need to be made. You can repopulate the entire parish and have occupied houses surrounded by multiple empty lots. Of course, there will be a big problem when it comes to providing services because it is very expensive to have so much extra infrastructure. Also, it is not a livable urban environment to have empty lots everywhere.

The next possibility is to give up on some areas, let them return to marsh, and concentrate the population on the highest, safest ground.

We will lead all the participants through an exercise to help them figure out what they they want to do and and where they want to rebuild.

I predict a disaster second only to Katrina.

There are several reasons I am concerned.
1) The elected officials have never asked us to help them decide this question
2) Our activities for helping them decide are not structured enough. I think the activities are too free form and will allow too much getting sidetracked.

We will see how it goes.

Government speak

My email had been down since they day I arrived. I was told that my account was created on one system and migrated to another. It took a month for it to find its way home. Well, there were over 100 emails waiting for me when I logged on, many marked urgent. At least a dozen were directed to someone who had a similar name. After making my way though all the ones marked urgent I arrived at the sea of memos.
Some had as many accronyms as words
"Cory is our POC for GIS in AFO . "

Others I had to look in the dictionary to see if they applied to me:
"Would you send this out as an “All Hands” for 1603 and 1607.
Annuitants should complete Part A of the form and return to Admin at the JFO for further processing. Please note the 12/28/05 date. Thank you. "

And others that were backwards speak remonicent of Meals Ready to Eat...
"The attached memo please see that ALL STAFF working on FEMA-1603 & 1607-DRs receive a copy of."

The good old government.

New Kids on the Block

New people keep showing up at our door and announcing that they are part of the team. None of us, including the boss, gets any advanced notice. We do not know who the new employees are or where they came from until they explain themselves. The boss never even gets to see their resumes. For all we know they could be crazy people, like the guy in New York City that always claims to be a subway employee because he is obsessed with trains. But, they have badges that say FEMA so we just give them a chair and a desk and tell them to get to get to work.

Well today a well spoken young man appeared and said he was a Community Change Agent sent from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Good god, we need Community Put Back Together Agents, not Community Change agents. But who am I to be so picky.

The other guy that showed up today, Mark, is a Senior Planner. He is here to replace Sarah, our current Senior Planner, who is going home after completing her three month deployment. The only problem is that Mark has been retired for a dozen years and the last job he had was doing urban renewal. If there was a more flawed program than urban renewal, I am not sure what it was. I guess they could have sent us the guy that was responsible for Japanese Interment camps in World War II. (Incidentally, Mark met the professor who has not worked on a project in 15 years and they bonded about the jobs they used to do in the 60s).

My only concern is that we are running out of places to put all the new employees. The next person to show up goes in the lobby (or entranceway). Then it is the supply room. Then, the bathroom I guess.

More staff

We are supposed to get another outreach staff person. Outreach staff are supposed to lead the public participation component of the effort. They interact with the public, plan and lead meetings, write newsletters, etc.

We have two to chose from:
Candidate A lists her previous experience as a kindergarden teacher
Candidate B lists his experience as an assistant to an electic official.

Which should we choose?

Liaisons

The Mississippi Recovery Authority knew it needed to do a better job of coordinating with FEMA. FEMA is taking the lead with long term recovery planning, but really, the MRA should be an active partner. After all, they are the arm of the state that is supposed to be calling the shots. So, they assigned a national guard person from each county as a liaison to FEMA. The liaisons are great. Good, committed people, they go to all the meetings and are a pleasure to work with.

The only problem is a missing link in the liaison relationship. They never report back up the chain. They have no contact at the MRA mothership. This is a fundamental fact of liaisoning: there has to be two parties to liaisonize. The defintion of the word is, "An instance or a means of communication between different groups or units of an organization." Notice how groups is plural. That is avery important point.

Our local guy, Tom, said he used to email questions to his contact, but he never got responses so he stopped. It has been a month that poor Tom has been out in the field all by himself, trying his darndest to liason but never being able to connect with the second group. In fact, he started asking me if I was concerned about a looming deadline. Well, weeks ago, the MRA had pushed the back but no one told him.

All hope is not lost. Tom says a new guy is Colonel is coming on that all the liasons will report to and maybe, just maybe, the Colonel will be able to get through to the mothership.

Free lunch

There are all these places you can eat free in disaster zones. There are Red Cross mobile kitchens, tent cities and cruise ships that the government has chartered and even a giant tent rumored to be run by the Rainbow People. Most of them provide free meals to anyone who walks up.

My first comment is that contractors, who are being paid upwards of $300 a day, have government provided lodging and get $49 a day for meals (regardless of how much they spend), do not need free meals!

But beyond that...

I was writing the ferry back to my apartment last Sunday and some homeless guy named the "The Brain" walked one with a huge box of MREs. (Incidentally, he volunteered that his real name is the The Brain. His mother was a hippy and his sisters are named Autumn and Summer. In any case...) I asked him where he got them and he said some lady hooks him up. (Back in the early days when the city was just beginning to return to normal the government was giving out MREs left and right.) He offered me one and I accepted.

There are a number of things you should know about MREs (army food rations).
1) The whole concept is pretty cool. Every thing is in little aluminum packets. You take the sealed packets and put them in a heater bag and add a couple of tablespoons of water. The water reacts with a chemical and heats up and warms your food. It works very well.
2) The food is decent. Not great, but all things considered, pretty good.
3) There are tons of calories in those things. They pack them with calories because soldiers burn so much energy, but any normal person that ate them regularly would end up rotund. I am not sure if the availability of MREs fully explains the girth of people in Mississippi, or if there are other explanations.

But back to eating free. There is some debate about whether or not people still need places to eat or if they should cook. FEMA wanted to close one of the kitchens on the theory that residents now have trailers with kitchens and refrigerators so they can cook for themselves. One recent exchange went like this:
FEMA representative: We gave you trailers with kitchens. Why can't you cook for yourself like you used to.
Citizen: Before the hurricane, we used to have cars, which have been flooded and washed away, to drive to the grocery store, which is now closed, to buy food with money we used to have because we used to have jobs and when we got home we would put the food in the refrigerator, which in our old kitchens was large enough that we did not have to choose between keeping our beer or our food cold.

While I was impressed with the wit and passion of the citizen, the facts are more ambiguous.
1) There were two food stores in county. One has reopened, so it is not that far to go to get food.
2) Most citizens here today have cars
3) There is tons of work here doing recovery. Many people lost their jobs and are still out of work and are so busy dealing with life and gutting their house and their children that they don't have time for work, but many others are working.
4) There is a free food place across the street (run by hippies) that serves thousands of meals a day.

Wouldn't it be so easy to be a pundit and choose one side? Ah, the subtleties of life.

Damage Survey

Damage Survey
This story requires some background.
Back when I was in purgatory, waiting for my security clearance, I talked to one the staffers at the brain trust or central office, the group of people, in theory, who provide the master plan about what we are supposed to be doing. I explained that I was interested in helping with outreach to displaced residents. This was greeted with enthusiasm. No one was taking the lead with that type of outreach and any initiative I showed would be appreciated. I was given the name of some consultants that were supposed to be involved. There were plans to conduct a survey, I was told, but not much else.

I called the consultant working on the survey and we had a great conversation. She sent me version five of the survey, with the warning that it was still rough. Indeed, it was bad. Many of the questions were leading or unclear. I will try to add some examples here in a few days. A bunch of different people wanted different things out of the survey. The feds, the states, consultants, all had different goals, and it showed. Worse than that, it not even get at the most important information for rebuilding – who is coming back.

There was only one question to that end, “Are you planning on returning to your home.” For many people, it was not a yes or no answer. They wanted to come back, but would only do so with better flood protection. They wanted to come back to Mississippi, but not to their county. For it to be meaningful, we had to know how likely they thought it was that they would return and if so to what county.

I worked with the consultant extensively. We had a bunch of phone conversations and lots of email. The goals of the survey stayed the same, but we rewrote a bunch of questions so they would make sense to someone in Mississippi. (After a while I brought in an outreach person who joined me for a bunch of the meetings.)

The consultant kept the brain trust in the loop with regular emails, but I guess they were too busy to read their emails. As we began to narrow in on a version that the outreach person and I thought would fly, we decided to call around and make sure everyone was on board.

Well, the brain trust went ballistic. What were we doing working with the consultant? How did we get his number? Who were we to change the focus of the survey? We tried to mend fences, but the brain trust was not satisfied. The consultant got a call asking the same questions. She explained the same things that we had, but this time it got through. The brain trust was satisfied and piece returned to the world.
We are field testing the survey now.