This image comes from When The Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina:

The New York Times published Public Pension Plans Face Billions in Shortages, the first in a series articles “that will examine actions of state and local governments that have left taxpayers with large unpaid bills for public employee pensions:”

Across the nation, a number of states, counties and municipalities have engaged in many of the same maneuvers with their pension funds that San Diego did, but without the crippling scandal — at least not yet.

It is hard to know the extent of the problems, because there is no central regulator to gather data on public plans. Nor is the accounting for government pension plans uniform, so comparing one with another can be unreliable.

But by one estimate, state and local governments owe their current and future retirees roughly $375 billion more than they have committed to their pension funds.

Some estimates have the funding gap at $500 billion or more. How could this occur?

Still, the lack of a national response to what would seem to be a nationwide problem underscores a peculiarity of the public pension world: like banks and insurance companies, the pension plans are large and complex financial institutions, but they face no comparable systems of checks and balances.

“There’s no oversight; there’s no requirements; there’s no enforcement,” said Lance Weiss, an actuary with Deloitte Consulting in Chicago who advised Illinois on its pension problems. “You’re kind of working off the good will of these public entities.”

Experts do not think that is good enough.

It’s another case of a complicated, technical problem (government pensions) caught somewhere between the experts (staff, bankers, lawyers) and the politicians who can’t be held accountable until calamity strikes. It took a whistle-blower in San Diego. Hurricane Katrina and failed levees in New Orleans.

What’s happening in your neck of the woods?

In Bureaucracy = Death, Seth Godin talks about bureaucracy related to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and presents a nice, but unworkable, idea to bust bureacuracy.

Seth’s Analysis: “Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk.”

Seth’s Idea: “Appoint a CNO—chief no officer. No longer can someone say no to an idea and leave it at that. If you want to turn something down, you’ve got to pass it on to your boss. Then either he says yes or gives it to his boss. For a ‘no’ to be official, it’s got to be approved by the chief no officer and countersigned by every manager along the way.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to bust bureaucracy with more, umm, bureaucracy. Better to empower people with ideas to “just do it!” Encourage them. Back them up. Eliminate approvals. Create many Chief Yes Officers!

Groundhog Day: “What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership…” More of David Roger’s analysis:

“That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the result of too many years of too much neglect of the value of public service. For too many years, for too many people, public service has become just a means of advancing oneself in the private sector. People with something to gain, people with a profit motive, selfish, cynical people, have blurred the ideas of authority, responsibility, and accountability. All toward the end of abusing their authority to promote themselves while neglecting or ignoring their responsibilities, oblivious to the shared faith that has become the tattered and fraying social fabric that binds us together.

“That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the product of a political system that has embraced the ways and the methods of the marketplace to manipulate people, to command their attention or distract it. To craft clever, meaningless messages intended to obscure more than to illuminate. To appeal to fear rather than courage. To value appearance over substance. A marketplace in which honesty and integrity are often perceived as impediments to a healthy bottom line.

“That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was a result of each of us failing to keep faith with each other. Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said that people usually get the kind of government they deserve. I guess that’s true, even if it is essentially blaming the victim; it often seems like most of our wounds, individual and collective, are self-inflicted. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

...

But even more, somewhere out of all this hot air must come a discussion, an argument, (not a ‘conversation’) about the value of public service, the role of leadership, an examination of authority, responsibility, and accountability. We need to take a close look at that ‘social fabric’ that supposedly binds us as a nation. Is it nothing more than a blind faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace? How can what is presumably ‘the best of us,’ so grievously fail ‘the least of us?’ What do we expect from our leaders in the way of leadership, at all levels of government? And don’t look to our so-called ‘leaders’ to lead this discussion.”

Dan Gillmor thinks Speaker Hastert made a good point when he questioned the wisdom of rebuilding an-under-sea-level New Orleans: “Too bad he’s being pilloried for it.”

There’s a time and place for everything, but this wasn’t the time for the Speaker to suggest bulldozing New Orleans. It would have been a good time to question the federal rescue effort. You know, focus on first things first.

But Dan’s point is a good one, especially when he puts it in the context of rebuilding the San Francisco Bay Area following the big one. Whether and how to rebuild should—and, of course, will—be on the table. But even there, the focus should be on learning the lessons of New Orleans so we can put in place the planning and resources so we can recover. For example, is the Bay Area vulnerable to the kind of emergency response we are witnessing in New Orleans?

After we save as many lives as possible, after we provide food, shelter and medical attention to those in need, after we restore water and sewer service, then would be a more appropriate time to talk about rebuilding. And when we do, recognize that it is as much a political as financial question.

Politics? Hastert is Speaker of the House, a person who just helped dole out $Billions of transportation pork. Or was that energy pork?

Frankly I prefer President Bush’s answer about rebuilding New Orleans: Let’s listen to some experts first.

And let’s make sure the execution is better.

My heart goes out to all those suffering the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s stunning radio interview provides a compelling, emotional window into the situation. Compare his comments with those of FEMA director and other officials and it’s clear that local, state and federal government officials are not on the same page.

As shown by the links below, the effects caused by this hurricane have been predicted for years. So you have to wonder how and why we have arrived at the monumental failure that is ongoing in New Orleans.

The Big Easy On the Brink: If it doesn’t act fast, the city could become the next Atlantis (Time, July 2000):

“A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving.”

The foretelling of a deadly disaster in New Orleans: FEMA ranked hurricane scenario highly likely in ‘01 (Houston Chronicle, December 2001):

”...earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.”

Big Blow in the Big Easy (US News & World Report, July 2005):

”’If a hurricane comes next month,’ says Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University’s Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, ‘New Orleans could no longer exist.’”

Also see: Hurricane preparedness for New Orleans.