Political Patronage or Adequate Levees?

Creating a single, professional-minded levee board for all of Greater New Orleans would help protect the entire region. That body would have a narrowly targeted mission: to push for better flood protection for all residents. A unified board would be big enough to maintain more in-house technical expertise and have enough clout to demand a greater role in reviewing and improving plans developed by the corps.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco favors a single levee board with authority over both banks of the Mississippi River. Louisiana needs to push hard to make that happen during the special legislative session in February because lawmakers will face significant pressure to keep at least some parts of the West Bank out of a regional levee agency; giving in to that pressure would be a mistake.

A number of small levee agencies is convenient for elected officials who need a source for patronage contracts and positions for political appointees. But for citizens who want their homes to stay dry -- no matter where those homes are -- anything like the present setup is a bad deal.  

Excerpted from editorial in The Times-Picayune 1/30/2006.