Smoke, Mirrors and BS

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Governor Haley "Smug" Barbour's speech at the Delta Regional Authority's Third Annual Meeting in which he extolled the virtues of Gulf Coast residents in his state, in contrast to what he saw as demeaning neediness on the part of Louisiana residents (particularly in New Orleans) in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

Well, Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis, editors of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, a project of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, N.C., recently published an article in Salon magazine which peels the veneer off Barbour's myth of the Mississippi Gulf Coast's self-made recovery and reveals a much starker picture of life there today. (You'll have to watch a brief ad or pay their premium to go to the Salon story).

Here are a few nuggets:

Today, Hancock County and the rest of coastal Mississippi are 21 months into a recovery that has garnered Gov. Haley Barbour lavish praise. Governing magazine named Barbour its 2006 Public Official of the Year largely due to his supposed post-Katrina leadership and savvy, including his skill in convincing federal lawmakers to channel billions of relief dollars to the Magnolia State. As Billy Hewes III, a Republican official from Gulfport, said: "He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11." Outsiders might be surprised to learn then, that despite the plaudits, and despite the fact that Barbour's GOP connections seem to have won him a disproportionate share of relief money from Washington, post-Katrina recovery in some of the hardest-hit areas of the Mississippi coast is moving as fast as molasses in winter.

In Hancock County, Rocky Pullman paints a bleak picture. The recovery is proceeding so slowly that, almost two years after the storm, most of his neighbors still can't get mail. Before Katrina, the majority of Pearlington residents used post-office boxes; but since no post offices -- or any other major city, county or school buildings in Hancock County -- have been rebuilt, they have to drive an hour round-trip to Bay St. Louis to pick up a letter.

Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee with close ties to the Bush administration, has definitely proved more successful than his maligned Louisiana counterpart, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, in one respect: lobbying Washington for cash. In fact, Barbour's ability to steer a lopsided share of Katrina money to Mississippi has touched off a firestorm of outrage in Louisiana, which suffered considerably more destruction from the storm.

Consider the Gulf Coast housing crisis, one of the key issues that has kept nearly half the population of New Orleans from returning to the city since Katrina. More than 75 percent of the housing damage from the storm was in Louisiana, but Mississippi has received 70 percent of the funds through FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Of the $388 million available, FEMA gave a Mississippi program offering upgraded trailers more than $275 million. Meanwhile, the agency awarded Louisiana's "Katrina Cottage" program, which features more permanent modular homes for storm victims, a mere $75 million.

It's not just housing. Mississippi is also slated to get 38 percent of federal hospital recovery funds, even though it lost just 79 beds compared to 2,600 lost in southern Louisiana, which will get 45 percent of the funds. Mississippi and Louisiana both received $95 million to offset losses in higher education, even though Louisiana was home to 75 percent of displaced students. The states also received $100 million each for K-12 students affected by the storms, despite the fact that 69 percent resided in Louisiana.

The disparity between the states' needs and the funding they received from Washington has been so glaring that even disgraced former FEMA director Michael Brown recently charged that politics played a role. "Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it," Brown told students at Metropolitan College of New York in January.

You know it's bad when even a cronyism legacy like "Brownie" grasps the partisan nature of the recovery 'effort.'

Think about this for a minute in the context of what we've learned in recent weeks about the Bush administration's efforts to politicize the operation of the General Services Administration, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, FEMA — well, suffice it to say that the list goes on. Given that context, it should come as no surprise that the recovery process has been politicized, as well,and that Louisiana (and Governor Blanco) have paid a high price for that.

As anyone living in New Orleans will tell you, while this blatant partisanship has been the hallmark of the federal effort, Republicans in Louisiana have been quick to proclaim their commitment to a non-partisan recovery (at least until the statewide election season opened Bobby "The Opportunist" Jindal decided to make the Road Home Program funding his issue).

So, back to Mississippi Governor Smug:

For the residents of Hancock County, Barbour and Mississippi's ability to capture the lion's share of Katrina relief dollars makes the slow progress in their area all the more demoralizing. The county's 911 system still operates out of a trailer. Damaged wastewater and drainage systems frustrate hopes of a return to normalcy; earlier this month in Waveland, 16 miles east of Pearlington, a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator was found swimming in a drainage ditch next to a bus stop at 8 o'clock in the morning. Mayor Tommy Longo says the creatures freely roam throughout devastated residential areas.

Indeed, Hancock County was one of three Gulf Coast areas recently singled out as having "severe problems" by the Rockefeller Institute on Government and the Louisiana Public Affairs Council, with the towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis flat-out "struggling to survive."

Most important, Hancock leaders say, Mississippi leaders and their federal allies have failed to use their clout to tackle some of the most obvious barriers to rebuilding.

One of those barriers was the Stafford Act requirement that local governments put up a 25 percent match for disaster relief money. Governor Blanco and Senator Landrieu made getting Louisiana communities exempted from the Act their top personal priority. They succeeded. Mississippi communities will now benefit from their efforts. No doubt, Barbour will claim the credit.

Barbour continues to ignore the plight of struggling communities, while taking credit (at least in the speech he gave to the DRA) for the state government surplus and the economic surge that is taking place in other communities in the state:

Parts of Mississippi are doing much better than Hancock County. The Rockefeller Institute report found that recovery "is well underway" in Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula, and that there's actually been a post-Katrina economic boom in Jackson, Hattiesburg and Laurel.

And thanks to the economic boost in certain areas, Mississippi is now looking at a windfall in tax revenues. For the first six months of the 2007 budget year, general fund revenues were up 12.7 percent, and the Mississippi Legislative Budget Committee and the governor recently increased the estimate for the 2007 budget from $4.5 billion to nearly $4.7 billion, which means the state has an extra $192.7 million thanks to higher-than-expected tax collections largely from Katrina spending.

But under Barbour's leadership, the state has been unwilling to use its good fortune to help debt-ridden towns -- and some are at risk of going under.

Yep. Communities in Mississippi are at risk of going under. Listening to Barbour talk, you'd have thought that this kind of thing could only happen in Louisiana.

That's his story and he's sticking to it. Just like Republicans in Louisiana are claiming that the problems with the recovery in the Katrina and Rita affected areas are Blanco's fault.

Nothing like folks who won't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.