Keeping Levees First: The Future of Flood Protection in New Orleans

JIMMY DUNN, FIRST HORIZON BANK

Good morning, everyone. My name is Jimmy Dunn. I serve as New Orleans market president for First Horizon Bank. On behalf of First Horizon, I’m pleased to welcome you to BGR’s final breakfast briefing of the year. Before we begin, a few housekeeping notes. We’re proud to sponsor this series and are grateful to WWNO Public Radio for extending its reach. WWNO will rebroadcast this event on Tuesday, November 10th at 10:00 AM and again at 10:00 PM. A video recording of today’s program will also be available at bgr.org along with recordings of past events. After the program, we’d love your feedback. You’ll find survey forms at your seats, or you can scan the QR code to take the survey on your phone. We’ll display that code on the screen later in the program. Thank you for joining us this morning. We hope you enjoy today’s discussion.

BECKY MOWBRAY, BGR PRESIDENT & CEO

Thank you, Jimmy. We are grateful to First Horizon Bank for sponsoring BGR’s Breakfast Briefing series again this year. Your support from First Horizon Bank allows BGR to keep these events free and available to the public. My name is Becky Mowbray, and I’m the president and CEO of the Bureau of Governmental Research. Before we get into today’s program, I’d like to tell you a little bit about BGR. We exist to help New Orleanians understand how local government is working on their behalf and whether public decisions are truly serving our community long term. Our research points the way towards smarter use of public dollars and a government that performs better for residents.

The best way to support BGR is to become a member. Membership forms are available at your seats, or you can join online at bgr.org/membership. We also invite you to follow us on social media at BGRNOLA. We have a talented panel joining us today to discuss the future of our levees and flood protection. Blair duQuesnay chairs the Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, an organization formed after Katrina to reform the levee boards. State Senator Kirk Talbot represents River Ridge and the lakefront areas of Metairie and Kenner in the legislature and also chairs the Senate Insurance Committee. And Jeff Williams joined the Southeast Flood Protection Authority East in the summer of 2025 and runs its day-to-day operations as the group’s regional director.

Today also happens to be Jeff’s birthday, and we thank him for choosing to spend it with us. Thank you, Jeff. That’s hilarious. After Katrina, we all saw that flooding is an existential threat to life in Southeast Louisiana. Voters approved reforms that replaced politically driven, fragmented levee boards with regional authorities focused on flood protection and guided by professional expertise. BGR supported those changes. Now, the Southeast Flood Protection Authority East has been going through some of its most significant shifts since then. In recent years, the governor has exercised more direct control over the authority’s leadership. There has been turmoil on the board, which often didn’t have enough members together to vote, and there has been a new emphasis on policing.

Critics see a concerning departure from the agency’s original mission and question the agency’s ability to keep East Bank residents safe. Residents who fund and depend on this system deserve to understand what’s happening, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today. At the end of today’s discussion, we’ll take questions from the audience. To submit one, please scan the QR code on the screen or follow the printed instructions, which will take you to the online form at bgr.org/qa. Feel free to include your name if you’d like us to mention it when we read your question. I’d like to note that the views expressed in today’s program are those of our speakers.

Please join me in welcoming Blair, Senator Talbot, and Jeff. Thank you. Now we’ll move over here. Okay. So I’d like to start with some questions for Jeff, just to establish some basic things about flood protection and the work of the authority. So Jeff, remind us here, what flood defenses does the Southeast Flood Protection Authority East manage and where? And what is SLFPA’s role in relation to the Army Corps?

JEFF WILLIAMS, SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA FLOOD PROTECTION AUTHORITY-EAST

Good morning. Thanks for having me. Yeah, that’s a great question. So we are responsible for operating and maintaining the risk reduction system in Orleans, East Jefferson, and St. Bernard Parishes. About 246 levee gates, 192 miles of levees, eight complex structures across navigable waterways, as well as three pump stations at the Outfall Canal. That is what our mission is to do, to operate and maintain those systems on a daily basis. Those that know, the Corps of Engineers designed and built those systems. The CPRA, our partners, was a non-federal sponsor, and then they delegate the operation and maintenance of that system to us. So once the system was built by the Corps of Engineers, it was then turned over to CPRA and then delegated to us to actually do the day-to-day operations.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Terrific. And as the operator of the systems, what are your biggest concerns today about our flood defense system, and how is it standing up to subsidence and rising sea levels?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah. So one of the things I talk about all the time in resiliency, and most of us when we talk about resiliency, we talk about physical resiliency. I don’t have any concerns about the physical resiliency. There’s the also institutional resiliency, and that is making sure we build a bench, having people on the team, processes, and policies in place to make sure that no matter if I’m in seat or whoever’s in seat, the system can live on. But one of the things that we’re talking about every day is the financial resiliency, right? Most people think that this system, a lot of people think it was built, and that’s it.

The Corps of Engineers, the federal government spent $14.7 billion on the system. Great. Let’s walk away. But as you say, we have subsidence, sea level rise, and that calls for additional levee lifts in order to maintain it at a 100-year level of protection, right? So the Corps of Engineers did their study, the General Reevaluation Report, the GRR, that tells us when those levee lifts are to happen in expressed capabilities. Most of those levee lifts are going to occur first in East Jefferson. So it’s the long-term financial viability of the system, I wouldn’t say concern, but something that we’re paying attention to, which is why under the leadership of President Pete Vicari and our board, they have authorized a 50-year financial model, which we intend to have the end of this year or early next year, that really lays out what it is that we’re planning on seeing over the next 50 years.

BECKY MOWBRAY

And when will we start seeing some of that work on levee lifts and things like that?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, I can tell you that the Corps of Engineers has started their preliminary designs, planning, engineering, and design on some of those systems. I think they have expressed capabilities of FY 2028 to start those lifts. Again, we are the partner in that, and we provide 35% of the funding for that. But ultimately, the scheduling of the project is that of the Corps of Engineers. Yeah.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Got it. And as you’re creating this 50-year plan, that’s an astonishing-

JEFF WILLIAMS

Model …

BECKY MOWBRAY

model. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you. What funding challenges do you anticipate with your capital needs and plan?

JEFF WILLIAMS

So one of the things, and I know people don’t quite understand this, as you said earlier, we have three levee districts. Those three levee districts are funded by millages For each particular, Lake Borgne, Orleans, and East Jefferson. Historically, we do not co-mingle funds. Orleans funds are spent on Orleans assets, East Jefferson funds are spent on and so forth. However, we know that the funding needs of each one of those districts don’t happen at the same time. So one of the biggest challenges that we’re grappling with in the future, potentially, and the model will tell us what exactly the issues are, is how different parishes or different levee districts have the funding they need to do the work in their particular districts.

It’s a regional system. It doesn’t matter if one piece of the system is not able to certify, the entire system can’t be certified. What does that mean? We can’t participate in a national flood program. So it’s one system, but it’s funded fragmentarily by districts. So I have this term that I coin, water doesn’t have GPS, but taxpayers and districts do. So we’re really trying to understand and look at that.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

JEFF WILLIAMS

You’re welcome.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you very much. So Blair, why don’t we turn to you? Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans played a major role in reforming our flood protection system after Katrina. Tell us about what the core principles were of those reforms, and how do you feel that we’re doing by abiding by them 20 years later?

BLAIR DUQUESNAY, CITIZENS FOR 1 GREATER NEW ORLEANS

Yeah. So none of us have to imagine what happens if our flood protection system fails. We had it happen. And afterwards, when citizens were returning and figuring out how to rebuild the city, our founder, Ruthie Frierson, looked at an issue that was studied by the Business Council around the governance of the levee boards. And while there was a defect in the system that was built by the Corps, it is our local levee boards that are responsible for operating and maintaining and identifying potential errors or things that need to be fixed. And what we found was a fragmented system of levee governance. These were separated entities.

East Jefferson had a levee district, Orleans had a levee district, Lake Borgne. The people who were serving on the boards of those districts were all picks of the governor, a very political system. In Orleans, you had what we call the non-flood assets today. The Orleans Levee Board was also managing the lakefront airport, the marinas, the lakefront properties, the parks. And a lot of the people that served on those boards didn’t understand this engineered system. They didn’t have the qualifications to know really what they were looking at. And so while we can’t prove a negative, we can’t prove that a properly staffed board with the right governance structure would have discovered the defect that led to the breaches in the walls.

We know that we didn’t have the system set up properly, and so along with several hundred citizens who gathered in her dining room in those early days, Citizens for 1 began to advocate for changes to the legislation that would reform the levee boards. And what we did was really a once in a lifetime type governmental reform, in a state with a very, very strong governor. We secured an independent nominating committee process. We legislated that a certain number of the member of the boards have to have engineering credentials, whether it’s in hydrology, civil engineering, and the nominating committee would vet the people who were going to apply to serve on the board and send candidates up to the governor to appoint.

And that really removed politics from the business of governing the levee boards. And that system was working for about 20 years until the recent governor came in, and a law was passed that allowed the governor to hand select the presidents of every board and commission across the state. It’s a law that probably should not have been passed. I know that if any of you have dealt with boards and commissions across the state, many are dealing with the impacts of this sort of top-down rule from the governor’s office. And we’ve seen the unraveling of the structure of those reforms and the reintroduction of politics, which is really a shame.

It’s a shame that our memories are so short. Many of you experienced the loss of property, the time away from the city, the rebuilding, but there were several thousand families that also lost the loss of life, and it’s really a shame that we’re basically reverting back essentially to the system that we had before Katrina.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Mm-hmm. Thank you. So can you elaborate a little bit about your concerns about the current state of flood protection? You just referenced the nominating process and the governance of our flood protection authorities. What else is on your mind these days about flood protection?

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

Yeah. So we have had a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge and experience at the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East. None of the nine board members who were in place before Governor Landry’s election are there today. Many of them resigned in protest of the top-down approach taking over and taking the focus off of flood protection and onto the police force instead. Many were forced to resign. They were investigated by their own board president and a law firm hired by the AG to do that, and some were forced out in political maneuvers. One was up for reconfirmation in the Senate. The Senate did not reconfirm that individual, and also just rolling off of the board.

So none of the board members are in place. The longest serving board member today has been there just over a year. So there’s complete loss of institutional knowledge at the top. We also have loss of experience and employee turnover. So the regional director was replaced. Almost every director position has turned over in the organization from the chief engineer resigned, the director of engineering retired, director of operations is gone, human resources, finance. So we have very few employees who really have storm-ready experience at the leadership level, and that’s really a shame. This is not a startup. This is not a private business where you can just go in and fix things, and people can learn things on the fly.

This is a heavily engineered system, and really when it was built, it was the best flood protection system in the world. And to lose all of that experience through essentially a political coup d’état is really a shame, and people should be concerned that we are not as safe as we were three years ago.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you. Senator Talbot, thanks again for joining us this morning.

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

Good morning.

BECKY MOWBRAY

So you were very active in last spring’s legislative session on flood protection. I’m wondering if you can also tell us about what are your concerns these days, what’s on your mind about flood protection. And I’d also like to hear about what… I guess let’s just leave it there. Tell us what’s on your mind about flood protection these days.

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

Well, good morning, Becky. Thanks for having me.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you.

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

This is a great organization. I’m glad y’all are doing this. I guess my involvement, well, first let me say I agree with a lot of things Blair said, that we need to keep politics out of the levee board. So when I say that my involvement in this came from what I read in the paper, looking on NOLA.com and seeing board members resign, seeing turmoil, seeing all this, is really how I got involved because I look at my job as a legislator to not get involved in it. That’s something that I have no background in flood protection. I’m not an engineer, so I think legislators kind of look at it like, that was problems in the past.

I didn’t come into the legislature until 2008, so I wasn’t in office post-Katrina, but I certainly remember reading the stories about the dysfunctionality of the levees and the different levee boards and the people that were on there that shouldn’t have been on there, and that was one of the things that got me interested in politics, and then four or five years later, I ended up running for office myself. So that kind of brands people like me and others like, “Hey, we need to back off and let the professionals run the levees.” Then you start seeing things erupting and things in the news and news reports, and that’s what got me involved, like, “What’s going on here?”

I always like to say we have tons of boards in this state It sounds, I don’t mean to say it like this, I don’t care about any of those but this one. This is the one that really matters. There’s a lot of boards, and if there’s things going on, then that’s fine, but we cannot let this thing go south. And that’s how I kind of got involved, and then I kind of took it from there.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Yeah, thank you. So what information has been hardest for legislators to obtain or evaluate, and what unanswered questions do you have as a state lawmaker?

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

That’s a good question. There were some audits done by the state auditor that did some studies on the previous board before there was a lot of changes, which had some problems. I don’t think the previous boards were 100% perfect. No one is. But there were some issues there that raised some concern, and I don’t want to speak for the governor, but I think that’s what initially kind of got him involved in that. As far as information that we’ve gotten, when they were doing this internal investigation and prior board members were on the radio saying, “When this thing comes out, there’s criminal activity and all this thing.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that report. I don’t know if it’s ever been made public or not, if part of it was redacted or whatnot. So that was something that we kept asking for that, and it never came out. But, as far as, there’s really no information that anybody was holding back from us. Again, we had a couple of audits that we could look at and kind of see what was going on. But other than that report, there was really nothing that we were being denied information from.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay, great. Jeff, I wanted to go back to you since Blair brought up turnover at SLFPA-East. You’ve been there for a little over a year, 15, 16 months, and Blair mentioned other turnover. What are you doing as regional director to help people settle into their jobs? Or what does that mean on an operational day-to-day basis, the fact that you’ve got such a new staff?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, absolutely. The first thing that I would like to say, and I say all the time, the confidence that the citizens of these three parishes should have in this system, in this organization, is the men and women, the 303 people that do the work every single day, right? That’s where the continuity resides for the most part. Certainly, understanding leadership change at a high level is concerning to people. But that’s why I talk about institutional resiliency, right? We still have high-level directors of engineering, our planning chief, and Director Ryan Foster has been there for 12 years. He’s probably activated the EOC, I believe, 18 times. He is the guy that’s making the actual when we close decisions.

We always have our partners at the Corps of Engineers, our partners at CPRA. I’m about a nearly 15-year employee of the Corps of Engineers. I was a senior project manager on the West Bank. Similar systems, I know these things. But so there is certainly that knowledge in the building, but what we want to do is make sure that we build that resiliency through training, we build that resiliency through processes and policies. And for people that left, making sure that we had the knowledge in the building. I was very confident in the people who remained in the building with us because the previous boards and other leadership have built the bench of people who are ready to go.

So we don’t want to ever be a single point of failure, just like you don’t want to be a single point of failure in the physical resiliency. There’s no single point of failure in the institutional resiliency as well. So that’s where my focus has been, to make sure that we have that resiliency in the building, and we continue that resiliency in the people.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you. So Jeff, staying with you for a moment. A lot of the news coverage about SLFPA-East in the past year has been about the flood protection authority’s spending and priorities on levee police. Why the recent emphasis on policing?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, look, I understand the question. There’s been a lot of reporting on that, and I understand it. But I think if you focus only on the top line of the police spending, then you miss some of the details. Your organization is data-driven, right? That’s what you guys do. So, but when you look at the entire budget, I went back when all of this was starting to happen over the last few months. Let’s really go look at the numbers and what do they really tell? Over the last nine years, the police spending has been historically around 16% of our operation and maintenance budget, anywhere low of 14% to a high of 18%.

Last year, actual spending for FY 2026 was 16%, right at about that average. I can tell you that in operations, pumps, those other areas that we deem critical flood protection, they historically are about 37%. Those are departments spending what, 40%. So our entire budget has increased over the last nine years, especially post-COVID. Why? Labor costs went up significantly. The state civil service recognized twice that we needed to compete, not just us, all the state employees, with private industry. What did they do? Well, they raised the entry level to the midpoint of the hiring range. What did they recently do last year? Now that’s at the third quartile, right?

So the cost across the board in itself has gone up. And then when you look at back in 2024, the police spending went down. I think it just kind of got back up to normal. If you normalize it, it’s probably right in line with about the 15% to 16% range. We understand the coverage, but I think when you only look at the top line and not the denominator in those equations, so to speak, you don’t get the full context. So look, that said, every single thing that we evaluate in this agency is about that resiliency that I talk about. Not just police, but engineering, operations, maintenance.

We are in starting budget prep right now for next year. What do you need? How does it contribute to the mission? And is it sustainable over the long term, especially those 50 years? And I want to be perfectly clear, our police department’s main mission is to protect the physical assets, that $7.5 billion of assets that we have. That is their main mission first. I like to talk about our FPA Lens dashboard. If you go to that dashboard, you will see that only about 10% of what we would call traditional policing work and patrolling and that sort of thing, that only accounts for about 10% of what they actually do as far as escorting, checking assets that we own, the parks that we own, all of those things. It just so happened that in some of the neighborhoods, some of the secondary benefits is they get presence from the police department because they’re within our area of responsibility.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay. That’s interesting. So you’re saying that from a numbers perspective, there hasn’t been an increase on-

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yes. Did it increase? Yes, the top line. What I’m saying is from a percentage of our O&M budget, historically since 2018 to 2026, it’s been about 16%. It’s 16% for FY 2026, and that’s actual spending, not budgeting, because oftentimes we don’t spend what we budget.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you. Blair, what’s your reaction to that?

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

That’s pretty shocking to me because when I met with Chief Picone last week, and he did a great job of explaining to me the work that the police force do, he didn’t mention that protecting the levees was the majority of what they do. It sounded to me like what they’re doing is they are patrolling the lakefront in both Orleans and Jefferson. They are patrolling the riverfront levee in both Orleans and Jefferson, and they are essentially Public protection against nuisances and against potential vandalism. And one of the biggest concerns that they have right now is that people are riding their e-bikes too fast when people are walking with their young children on the top of the river levee.

I think the bigger question, and we know that the police budget was increased by 60% over the last three years, the bigger question is that why has the police been a drain on our flood protection resources from the very beginning? And if you study the history of the Orleans Levee Board, several decades ago, the lakefront property was actually reclaimed from Lake Pontchartrain. They built those neighborhoods and the parks and the marinas that are there, and part of that was that the old Orleans Levee Board was managing those assets and selling the lots to the people who bought property and built their homes in the lakefront neighborhoods, and they promised them services, including police protection.

When we reformed the levee boards after Hurricane Katrina, originally the idea was to remove all non-flood assets from the business of flood protection. The airport, the marinas, the lake, the parks are all into a new organization called the Lakefront Management Authority. The police was a sticking point. I don’t know exactly why, but it became a really political sticking point, and they did not move out of the flood authority. We think that that should’ve been done. We think that still should be done. We do not think that public protection police force for the lakefront and for the river levees should be a drain on the business of operations and maintenance of our flood protection system.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay. Thank you. Senator Talbot, any thoughts on the role of police in our flood protection system and the levees? Do the levees actually need police?

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

I think there’s a role for them. Obviously we have to patrol the levees. We have people walking there. We have safety issues. I believe that the chief told me that all the deputies are certified levee inspectors, so they’re there all the time. When I walk on the levee, I see the police driving all the time. If they’re a certified levee inspector, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t know if I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say we should have none, but something that Senator Connick and I are exploring are do we extrapolate the police force and have them maybe under the state police or under another law enforcement agency?

That’s something that Senator Connick is looking at, and we’re going to take a look at that. But I know it seemed like the budget for it went up. I was told some of those were one-time expenses. I know they had to increase gear, and we want them to have all the resources that any other law enforcement person has. But, I think it’s something that we need to keep an eye on, and I think it’s something that we need to have a continued discussion about on the role is to protect levees. The role is to have– We want to protect us. Do we want to have civil engineers on boards having anything to do with law enforcement? I’m not qualified to do that. They’re probably not either. So that’s something that’s kind of a work in progress to see how we want to pursue that.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay, thanks. Jeff, you mentioned that police officers handle inspections of levees and things. Can you tell us more about what happens when an inspection identifies a deficiency? What’s the path for finding that deficiency to resolving it, and is there a way for the public to track those sorts of things?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Right. So for us, they are certified levee inspectors. The police themselves don’t go on to say, “I’m doing a levee inspection.” So that’s not what we’re saying. When they are patrolling their levees, their eyes, they see certain things. If they identify anything that they think may be a deficiency in the system, they then report that to our engineering department, and then the technical expertise actually comes in. But they’re the only department that is deployed 24/7, 365 days a year. That’s important. So even when they see things that others do not, they see the levee system more than anybody else in the organization. So while they’re not the technical expertise, when they go through the CPRA training to be certified levee inspection, they at least have a keen eye, and then they report it to engineering.

Engineering sends their inspectors out, the team out, if there’s anything to do. How do we look at some of those things? I talked about it at FPA Lens. I’m a data person. Your organization is data. We’re super proud of the work. That was something when people started talking about money and budgeting, where we spending, again, this board, most of the folks on this board led by President Peter Vicari, they authorized that standup of the FPA Lens, and it wasn’t a budgeted item because they realized the importance of being transparent in showing the numbers. We were recognized by the National Flood & Stormwater organization for the Lens, calling it the model of transparency for public government agencies.

You want to go to the Lens, you can see those budgets that I’m talking about, budget versus actual. I think the City of New Orleans just started their budget versus actual a few months after we started. We did that. So if you want to see the work, you can see how good we’re doing with turf maintenance, how good are we with our staffing. You can see those police numbers. You can see our safety numbers. Anything and everything that you want to see and understand and know about, you can go to that Lens. And we encourage people to say, “Hey, I would like to know about this. Can we add that?”

So it’s an evergreen system. It’s super important to this board, to our organization, and not only to report the news, so to speak, but we use it as a management tool, right? When something is red and something is consistently red or orange or amber, what are we doing about it? Do we need to deploy more resources because we are consistently red? We’re cutting this reach. So it’s not just us as a reporting. We use those KPIs in order to actually make management decisions.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you. Blair and Senator Talbot, we’ve talked a little bit about governance issues this morning, also about police, and just general about levees and that there will be future needs related to subsidence and sea level rise, things like that. What are things that you see that would fix some of the concerns that you may have about our flood protection system?

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

Yeah. I often refer to this as a slow-moving emergency, and it is an emergency. We have a cancer in the brain, right? We have a political board, we have a political overtaking of our flood protection, and we need to stop now because we won’t see the impact of this potentially for several years. You can use the Sewerage and Water Board as a good example. Delays in maintenance, employee morale. That I understand maybe even started as many as 40 years ago, and today we have the pipes blowing up in the streets and the impact of that. We want to avoid that. We need to act as soon as possible to stop this decay and to get back to the core principles of the post-Katrina reform.

So Citizens for 1 has convened a flood protection coalition. This is a group of organizations, like-minded civic groups, that are joining together to speak with one voice of the things that we believe need to be done to re-right the ship and return to the proper governance structures that we had after Katrina. One of that is holding the line on maintaining highly qualified, independent governance of the flood authority, and that means holding the line on the nominating committee process and the professional credentials that are required for certain members on the board. The governor filed a bill two sessions ago wanting to do away with the nominating committee process altogether and just complete return to political appointments.

We were successful in holding the line there. Part of that also is returning the power of the board to autonomously select their own president and not having somebody handpicked by the governor and dropped in as soon as they join the board, with no experience on the board. That is crucial. That, unfortunately, is not something that is being worked on right now by legislators. We ask them every time we have conversations, is this possible? Right now, I understand the political climate is that it is not so. We have a governor who will take … actions, line-item vetoes against legislators of his own party if they move against him.

We need to change the tides there. The second part of that is that we want the Flood Authority to be focused solely on its flood protection mission, and that the budget and the resources and the staffing would be aligned as such. And part of that would be figuring out where to house what I do believe is a very important public safety function in the police, but under a different place. And so there is a draft bill that we’re looking at, that would look at whether the police could be reporting to a different law enforcement agency. That’s still in its early forms and probably needs a lot of work.

The ideal situation, unfortunately, what we have is the police are funded by property tax millages, and so there’s a funding issue there. But ideally, the board of the Flood Authority wouldn’t be also running a police force. And the third is a commitment to financial and operational transparency and stability. I don’t give them an F on this grade. I think that they are moving towards that, but the most important thing is we have an amazing system. The day you build a levee, it starts to subside. And so we want to see the use of technology, the use of resources. The 50-year plan, we think, is a wonderful step forward to understanding because we have to share in the cost of those core projects to do that.

And I want to make one key comment about the relationship of the levee board to the Corps. The Corps is, of course, the federal sponsor that builds and does the majority of the major projects. We need our flood authority to stand up to the Corps when they think that they are wrong or when the Corps is unable to advocate on our behalf to push these projects forward. That is what was missing in Katrina. The board was not pushing the Corps to look and find those deficiencies or upkeep the levees. That’s why we had the walls break. That’s what we’re trying to stop. That’s the essence of everything that that reform was about, and it is very important to have our flood authority be independent of the Corps.

Of course, they have to work with them, but they also have to be that voice that will stand up and say, “This needs to move forward.” So that’s what the Flood Coalition of Greater New Orleans is working on, and if any of you are in organizations that might be interested in joining it, I would love to speak to you afterwards because we are growing our membership every day, and we are hoping to go to Baton Rouge next session with a very large and strong undeniable voice in return to the governance that we had post-Katrina.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you. Senator Talbot, what role can the legislature play? What can state lawmakers do to ensure that the residents of the East Bank and Saint Bernard have the flood protection that they need?

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

Well, obviously, we can file legislation. The first thing I did when this whole thing started blowing up and I started reading things in the paper, I called the Corps of Engineers and said, “Hey, I’m state senator, represent District 10. I’m reading these things in the paper. Are we compliant? Are these levees being inspected right? Are they passing inspection and all that?” And they assured me they were. And that was the first thing I wanted to make sure was that the things that are important to everybody, flood protection, was being taken care of, and the Corps assured me that it was. As far as the cancers that have caused these problems, I think a lot of those tumors have been removed.

We may not be perfect where we need to be yet, but some of those people that were on the board and the chief is gone. We have a new chief I think is doing a great job. And we have some really good board members. I sat on some meetings in Senate Governmental. I don’t sit on that committee, but I kind of injected myself in it. When we were doing confirmation hearings, I looked at the resumes of, I think it was three gentlemen that are on the board now that were very qualified. So I felt good about that. To give an example of when you say what can legislators do, when the previous chief was there and wanted to combine the role of compliance officer and chief of police, I amended a bill to say the compliance officer has to be a certified compliance officer, and that has to be a separate job, and I think I put in there that it has to be a civil service job.

So that is something where we stepped in and said, “Look, this needs to be done.” You cannot have a compliance officer having compliance over themself. That has to be separated. We asked for an audit last fall from the state auditor to kind of like, “Look at this thing. Tell us what’s going on.” I believe that’s still being done now. We haven’t gotten the results of that yet. So, we kind of have to balance the role of I don’t want to inject ourselves too much because that’s how it got political in the first place. So, we kind of walk a fine line there. But those are some of the things.

And obviously, we can file a bill. You know the old saying, if you get 53 votes in the House and 20 votes in the Senate, you can do whatever you want. And that’s a good thing and a bad thing. We don’t want to come in there with a hammer and overcompensate. And again, we want to let the professionals run the board. And with security as well, we want the professionals to do that. So, that’s kind of our role and-

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you …

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

Pat Connick and I didn’t wake up one day and say, “I’m going to go inject myself in the business of the levee board.” It just kind of worked out that way, and I think-

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you …

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

we’re on a good path. I think it’s better than it was, and I think it’s like I’ve told the new chairman, “Look, we’re watching, and the legislature is very concerned about this.” And we’ve had a great channel of communication. I still need to come take a tour. I’ve been to the headquarters. I’ve toured SLFPA-West. I need to come tour SLFPA-East with my colleagues. So, that’s kind of where we are right now.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Thank you. It’s now time to switch to your questions. We’ve had a number of them come in online. Please continue to submit them. You can submit them through the QR code, or you can write them down and hand them to one of the BGR team members in the room. So let’s start with one about this board selection process. And I’ll have this to anybody. What can be done to depoliticize the board selection process?

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

We did it.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Good.

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

So, I said before Katrina, it was all the governor would pick who would serve on the levee board. And the way that it works today is that when there’s an opening on the levee board, an individual who is interested in serving will submit their resume and an application to serve. That application and resume goes before a nominating committee. The independent nominating committee is staffed with members of university engineering departments, professional engineering organizations, good governance groups, and CPRA. Those individuals review all of the applications and nominate either two or three qualified individuals to serve on the board. Those names go to the governor. The governor selects from that short list.

And once that individual is appointed by the governor, then there is a final check where there is confirmation in the Senate. I think that’s a pretty bulletproof process. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, because even with the best process in place, a governor who wants to assert control will do so by passing legislation to say that the governor can select the president of every board in the state and putting that person, that chosen board in with a mandate to make big changes at the organization, and then unfortunately result in causing other board members to resign in protest of what they were doing. So, what can we do? We can ask the governor to stop asserting this type of control over our flood protection.

We’ve been doing that for the last two sessions in Baton Rouge. We need more voices. We need more people to help. And unfortunately, Louisiana state law is such that the governor is a very powerful individual, so potentially maybe we need to vote differently next time.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Um, here’s another question. There’s been a lot of reporting about Shane Guidry exercising a high level of control over the levee authority. Jeff, maybe this one might be for you. What is his role, whether official or unofficial?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, obviously he has no unofficial role. He does not participate in the day-to-day operation of our… I’ve never had a conversation with Mr. Guidry about flood protection operations or maintenance or 50-year models or any of that stuff.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay.

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

He does give interviews to the paper stating that we this, we that, as if he’s part of the organization. Just want to put that on the record.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay, thank you. What are the professional requirements of the board, and especially the chair? Anybody.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah. So the board, I believe the nominating committee is prescribed by law. I believe you have to have at least one civil engineer, two other engineers, hydraulics, certain engineers. They have three appointees from Orleans, two from Jefferson, one from St. Bernard, and then three other discipline. So it’s a good mix. I believe right now we have a total of four professional engineers on the board of the nine. Look, I’ve grown to know the ones that’s been there. One of the other board members used to be a Corps of Engineers, a colleague of mine, so I know him, I know his work. So we have a really well-qualified board.

I think the nominating committee has sent up good names, and because of what I see in their work every single day, and they understand the system. While they are new, we have people that actually, on our board, have designed some of these very same assets that we own. So they understand it, even though they wasn’t a part of this board.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Mm-hmm. Great. Another audience question, if anybody is able to take this. What major initiatives of the Coastal Master Plan has the governor or other parties canceled or delayed to date, and why? Anybody?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, that’s not under our area of responsibility. So I can tell you that we have full support from the governor, again, from our board, from an operation and execution standpoint. So we are doing what we need to do to sustain the system. Everything that Blair has talked about is super important to us, but that’s why we have the 50-year model. That’s why we have meetings with senators. We had a meeting yesterday with some senators to talk about finances. I hear what she’s saying when we talk about Sewerage and Water Board. We will not be that because of the work that we’re doing today. That’s why this 50-year financial model is super important to us.

That’s why we, again, put all of our, quote-unquote, “business in the street” on the Lens so we can be transparent. And when we come to the taxpayers or, and policy makers and say, “This is what we need and why,” it’s right there for everybody to see, and so we can make informed decisions.

BLAIR DUQUESNAY

Okay. I’ll try to answer the question. Okay. So I’m not a Coastal Plan expert by any means, but flood protection cannot just be levees and walls. Our coast is our first line of defense, and so coastal protection and flood, coastal restoration and flood governance go hand in hand. It’s not an either/or, it’s a yes/and. But the governor famously canceled the Mid-Barataria river diversion Project that had already been spent $750 million of our BP oil spill money. That is one of the best, most researched options that we have for rebuilding land on our coast to save us from future floods.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay. Thank you. Senator Talbot, will legislators be willing to introduce legislation ensuring that leadership and director level positions are filled based on merit, qualifications, and experience rather than political connections, family relationships, or favoritism toward unqualified friends and associates? Can lawmakers do more on qualifications?

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

I think what Jeff had just referenced, that’s in the statute where it lists these are the board members that can sit on the board, and these are the qualifications of those board members. I guess the question would be relinquishing or filing a bill to take the choosing of the chairman from the governor. And I think that’s something that is worthy of a discussion. When this governor came into office, the motivation behind that bill, there’s a lot of boards and commissions in the state. A lot of boards that frankly were not operating correctly, were not doing what they needed to do, and it’s kind of like when someone comes in and they’re the quarterback, they lead the team.

So the idea was, if we want to move the ball forward, we got to take control of some of these boards, and the buck stops with the governor, and he’s like, “I’ll take the responsibility.” I think this issue here kind of got swept up in that, and maybe we need to take a look at that and see if that was the best thing for this board. It was the best thing for a lot of boards out there, I can promise you that. A lot of these boards, we eliminated. A lot of them were wasting money. A lot of them had issues. I don’t think anybody, when that bill was being debated, if I recall, the Levee Board was never even involved in that discussion.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Mm-hmm.

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

So that is kind of one of these things where, I guess frankly, it was an unintended consequence, and now we look back and think, is that the best thing to do? And I think that’s a discussion that’s kind of ongoing, and we’ll just kind of see how that progresses.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay, great. Let’s see. Question for Jeff. Do you believe the agency is functioning as best it can, and what could it do better?

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, certainly, I don’t think an agency can ever be functioning best as we can because there’s room for improvement every single day. Do I think we have a highly functional organization from an execution and operation standpoint? Yes. I 100% do because I have confidence in the people. I can tell you, if a storm was to brew in the Gulf and we were to be, to say we need to exercise gates, close gates, and operate pumps, we’ll be ready to go on a moment’s notice. That, keeping the main thing the main thing, we do that very well. It is some of those other resiliency issues that I talked about, financial resiliency, building modernization into what we do to make sure that technological advances are introduced to our work processes so we can be more efficient.

Why is that important? Because we’re talking about funding, so we always want to do more with less. So when we can be more efficient and we save money, that means I now can save to do this work that we’re talking about over the next 50 years. So it all goes hand in hand, ultimately leading back to the mission of building that physical, financial, and institutional resiliency so we can deliver for over the next 50 years. One thing I tell the team all the time, we cannot rely on just us today. We got to build an organization and system that lasts way beyond us, so our grandkids and great-grandkids can benefit from it.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay. Jeff, we have another question coming in for you. What are the top unfunded master plan projects, and do you anticipate a need to increase either the Orleans levee taxes or the East Jefferson levee taxes to pay for them?

JEFF WILLIAMS

That’s a good one. So, the question, again, master plan, our projects and our area of responsibility is not in the master plan. There are some things that are in the master plan that CPRA delegates to us, i.e., certain mitigation projects, monitoring. I know that’s in their master plan. Our board is going to take on that vote next month so we can continue the monitoring for the mitigation work that had to occur for us even building these systems. Now, as far as the second question, I don’t anticipate any tax increases in Orleans Parish. Look, we had a meeting yesterday. I can tell you right now, the model, we’re getting a sneak peek We’ve seen some convergence about 12 or so years down the line where there may be some issues.

We will know that for sure in December and in January, around that time period. What I do know is Orleans is in a great position because somebody about 45 years ago had the wherewithal to say, “You know, the regular constitutional tax is not going to be enough.” So Orleans Parish has the SLIP tax, the Special Levee Improvement Tax, which is a second tax. The other two districts do not have that. So if you look at our reserves, Orleans Parish has plenty. Unfortunately, that’s not where the first levee lifts need to happen. As I spoke earlier, they’re going to happen in Jefferson Parish, where the soils are a little bit worse than they are in Orleans, so they’re subsiding or settling faster than the Orleans levee.

But like I said, we have a fragmented financial model, but we have a regional system, right? So we’re in talks with state legislators. We plan on meeting with council folks from Jefferson, Orleans-

BECKY MOWBRAY

Yeah …

JEFF WILLIAMS

to let them know this is what we potentially see. Again, down the line, we don’t want this to be an emergency because when you have to decide between one and three years, that’s an emergency. When I have 12, 15, 20 years, we can then provide the information to the policymakers to, “Here’s a problem, if there is one. Help us craft up a solution,” whether that’s taxes or getting funding from other places. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to be, but we want to share that responsibility with the policymakers and stakeholders, which is the citizens of those two parishes.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Okay, thank you. We have several other questions about governance. One is, are commissioners protected by liability insurance? And another is, are the levee board members paid positions? And regardless of board makeup, is there a check or a balance on their decision-making? If so, who or what is that group? Does anybody want to take that?

SEN. KIRK TALBOT

I would think they are protected from liability. I do know when I was reading the statutes about the qualifications, I thought it was interesting. I thought it was a good thing that there are things in there where they cannot be politically active. They can’t donate to campaigns. They can’t be involved in political campaigns. They can’t be involved in any kind of party position. I thought that was something that was good that was done years ago, but I would think that they are protected from any liability, like most board members, like the aviation board and things like that. So I would think they would be. They’re volunteers.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Yeah, they are protected, and it’s not a paid position. They get a stipend and reimbursement for that sort of thing, but it’s very minimal there. They’re essentially working for free. And as far as the checks and balances, like any board, it is the board themselves. It’s self-governed. It is the nine members of the board. So that’s where the balance is, is amongst themselves.

BECKY MOWBRAY

Yeah, okay. It is 9:00 AM. I’m afraid that’s all the time we have for questions. Please join me in thanking our panelists. And thank you again to First Horizon Bank for its generous sponsorship. We’d appreciate it if all of you in the audience would fill out your survey. It helps us improve our breakfast briefings continuously. I want to mention a recording of today’s breakfast briefing will be available soon on our website, bgr.org. It will also air on WWNO New Orleans Public Radio on Tuesday, November 10th at 10:00 AM and 10:00 PM. If you are not already a member, please consider joining BGR. You can scan the QR code on the screen. Your membership fuels our research and makes events like this possible. Thank you for joining us, and we hope you all have a great day. Thank you.