All things considered, President Joe Biden’s appointment of Louisianan Mitch Landrieu as infrastructure coordinator at the White House is pretty solid.
Conservatives may not like that Landrieu, who served as mayor of New Orleans and as Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, is an old-fashioned liberal, but he is honest and diligent, with significant relevant experience.
As mayor, he was credited with jump-starting what previously had been a terribly bungled effort to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. His record wasn’t perfect, but his approach was ambitious and data-driven, with some significant accomplishments. Granted, he had the advantage of billions of dollars of special federal aid flowing to the Crescent City, but that also meant he had far more to manage than most mayors usually would.
Let’s first consider the flaws in Landrieu’s record. Three predominate. First, the city’s Sewerage and Water Board, whose job overseeing drainage is crucial in a city that literally sits below sea level, had severe mismanagement issues that resulted in near-catastrophic street flooding after a 2017 downpour. Although the city’s mayor typically delegates management of the board to underlings, he is technically the board’s president, and Landrieu was widely accused of being asleep at that particular switch.
Second, while Landrieu merits major credit for overseeing the development of a new airport terminal (about which, more later), the terminal took a year longer than projected to be finished, and easy-entry roads to it still have not been completed four years after he left office. Third, his administration pushed through so many major road-related and drainage-related repairs so quickly, on so many adjacent roads at once, that huge parts of the city long became virtually impassable for vehicular traffic because so many detours doubled back on each other.
Then again, considering the scope of Landrieu’s work on New Orleans’s physical infrastructure, the successes were significant. The airport terminal itself was a desperately needed improvement over an old, unattractive, inefficient monstrosity. When a special selection committee put the work out for bid and it came to light that the original process was marred by insider conflicts of interest, Landrieu wasted no time in correcting the problem and insisting that the project be rebid fairly and transparently. Meanwhile, the new terminal has won plaudits for its design.
As for road blockages, while it may have made more sense to stagger the projects so there wouldn’t be so many adjacent to each other at any one time, it’s also true that even today, some money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency remains unspent because the volume of necessary repairs was so great and the subsidence problem so significant in a city essentially resting on swampland. With the need so large and so widespread, Landrieu can hardly be blamed for trying to act with dispatch.
Regular visitors to New Orleans, meanwhile, know firsthand how much better the whole city looked and worked after Landrieu’s two terms than it looked even before the big storm. And some triumphs were substantial. For example, the huge City Park for decades had been ill-maintained and less than optimally used by the public. With Landrieu prodding the park’s board of commissioners, the revitalized board has made it once again a thriving haven of family activity — well managed and brilliantly attractive.
The city is better lit, roads and bike paths better marked, and pocket parks and thruways better maintained than I’ve seen in half a century.
Landrieu likes to get things done, and at times, he’s not gentle about it. If a nation wants to spend $1.2 trillion rapidly to improve roads, bridges, and electric grids, that lack of gentleness may on balance be a virtue.
