Month: December 2008

It’s a Whole New Year

2009 will not be easy, we know, but embedded within the new year’s challenges are opportunities for renewal and a whole new sense of national purpose and possibility. Seeds of change. It is a time for hope, optimism, for dreaming big new dreams and for working hard to make them real. With a new (and very different) administration and many new elected officials coming to Washington and to state and local governments across the nation, it’s a time for collaboration and cooperation for the common good.

George W. Bush Takes the Long View

Part of the history that Mr. Bush won’t be reading can be found in a transcript of his speech from Jackson Square on Sept. 15, 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Rather, historians can note the great gulf between the promises made in that speech (examples below) and the inaction that followed. More than fifteen visits to New Orleans and vicinity, which the President repeatedly referred to as “that part of the world,” were not accompanied by a concerted federal effort to rebuild the city and region, its schools and hospitals and housing, its infrastructure, or its storm protection systems whose funding had been repeatedly whittled down by Bush administration budgets before the storm.

Mark Davis: “We don’t really have a coastal restoration program . . .”

Our name is Levees but we dig wetlands too because Louisiana needs a Multiple Lines of Defense Strategy. That’s why we urge everyone to read Mark Davis’s Times-Picayune op-ed, “Rebuilding Coast Requires Hard Choices” (full text after the jump). Davis, founding director of Tulane’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and former director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, is responding to some bad news reported by Mark Schleifstein: A federal-state task force has “voted to close the West Bay diversion on the Mississippi River—the most effective existing sediment diversion in fighting coastal erosion—unless an alternative source of money is found to pay for dredging sediment from anchorages [essentially parking spots for boats].”

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