Earlier this month, Governor Bobby Jindal announced his first appointments to the governing board of the proposed $1.2 billion LSU Hospital slated for Lower Mid-City. In two separate press accounts of his announcement, there seemed to be a slightly veiled indication that the financing for the proposed hospital was in trouble and plans might be scaled back.

Here, from WWLTV, is Jindal himself:

"We want to board to officially review the business plan, we want the board to make the decision on the revenue bonds that needs to be issued. The state is in for $300 million dollars, the federal government's now in for $475 million dollars. There will still be up to approximately $300 million up to $400 million, depending on the size and the scope of the actual hospital," Jindal said. "The board will have to get that through revenue bonds, so the board has to make sure they're fine with the business plans, and then they've got to be able to go to the market to get those revenue bonds sold."

And here, the Times-Picayune notes Tulane University President Scott Cowen's remarks:

Cowen said he is ready to make his nomination whenever the governor's office asks. Cowen was emphatic that the board should "the sooner, the better," take over planning decisions for the new hospital, including approving a business plan and presenting that to investors on the bond market to round out a construction budget. The state has $775 million on hand for what is projected to be a $1.2 billion, 424-bed complex.

Cowen said the board's role would extend to examining the size and scope of the hospital as well, suggesting he believes the board could deviate from the proposal now on the drawing board.

We've been saying that LSU is far from ready to move forward with their proposed medical complex for awhile.

State Treasurer John Kennedy has bluntly pointed out flaws in the business plan proposed for the complex on a consistant basis.

But this may be the first time we've seen  proponents of the complex finally admit it that their plan is too expensive as conceived.

This is one of the main reasons we have consistently advocated for the FHL/RMJM Hillier plan that calls for a new hospital to be built using the facade of historic Charity Hospital.

That LSU is moving forward with the expropriation of property in a residential neighborhood on behalf of the VA while the land they've already earmarked for themselves sits still for untold months or years is tragic. LSU should go back into the historic medical district, the VA should get LSU's land near I-10 and Lower Mid-City should be allowed to rebuild just like every other New Orleans neighborhood.

Basically,  Treasurer Kennedy has argued that:

1) LSU's model was built before the financial collapse in 2008 and its reliance on borrowing would not fly during the recession.

2. LSU's model was built before healthcare reform - and changes to federal reimbursements for hospitals - becamse likely. 

LSU may only now be fully awake and cognizant that it must deal with both of those realities and the tea leaves above may soon be translated into plain English as state legislators return to session and start to wonder whatever came of the hospital for which they allocated $300 million way back in 2007.

The following is a critical letter from Jack Davis and Bill Borah of Smart Growth for Louisiana:

Next Wednesday’s District B public hearing on the proposed Master Plan is particularly important because the district includes the area where Louisiana State University and the Department of Veterans Affairs propose to build their two new hospitals.  The location and design of these important hospitals were excluded from the Master Plan planning process. So was the possible reuse of the old Charity Hospital building as the site of a state-of-the art teaching hospital.

The Master Plan’s land-use map includes the LSU/VA hospitals just where LSU, the VA and Mayor Ray Nagin wanted them – without any challenge, question or better idea from any citizen. If the hospitals are built as planned, streets will be closed, superblocks formed, traditional street grid patterns extinguished, a 70-acre neighborhood occupying 25 city blocks will be wiped clean for construction, more than 160 historic buildings will be demolished or moved, a National Register Historic District will be devastated, and our city’s struggling Central Business District will be abandoned by the two hospitals.

Because the LSU/VA hospitals represent the most significant health/economic decision that New Orleans will make in the next decade, the exclusion on the hospitals from the Master Plan process calls into question the validity, if not the legal justification for the plan. How can citizens be expected to follow a plan to direct the development of their city when they have been excluded from the process of selecting the site as well as the design of these two badly needed hospitals?

Citizens outraged by the exclusion of the LSU and VA hospitals from the Master Plan process should attend and express their views at the District B public hearing. In the post-Katrina era, with all the hope that so many citizens have of reforming the city’s discredited planning process, we ask: Has New Orleans really changed its dysfunctional planning habits, or do we remain the victim of arbitrary, closed-door, top-down planning of the kind that has produced the objectionable LSU/VA hospital  proposal.

The hearing is one of a series to be held by the New Orleans City Council in each council district to help the council decide whether to approve the Master Plan and give it the force of law. This hearing for District B, represented by Councilperson Stacy Head, will be held at the campus of the Academy of the Sacred Heart, in the building at 4301 St. Charles Avenue, just below Napoleon, on Wednesday, March 24th, at 6 pm.

Earlier this week, Governor Bobby Jindal appointed four board members to govern the LSU half of the tragic LSU/VA boondoggle, even though the facility doesn't yet exist and construction remains a hypothetical prospect given a financial shortfall of over $400 million.

Almost a year ago, LSU and Tulane Universities battled in public and behind the scenes on a power sharing agreement that would govern their proposed replacement of Charity Hospital. Then, it seemed ridiculous to have such a nasty fight over a hypothetical hospital and it is just as silly now.

But even when conditional political patronage is at stake, nothing else seems to matter.

Let's look to the Times-Picayune to see who Jindal selected to govern the Taj Mahospital:

Tim Barfield, who recently left the Jindal administration for an executive post at Amedisys, a home health care and hospice provider. Barfield, who holds bachelor's and law degrees from LSU, previously served in several executive posts at The Shaw Group.

 

Donald "Boysie" Bollinger, president and chief executive officer of Bollinger Shipyards Inc. A generous donor to Republican political campaigns, Bollinger also has served as a member of the Louisiana Board of Regents, the University of Louisiana System board and the Louisiana Recovery Authority board.

Dr. Christopher J. Rich, managing partner of Mid-State Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Center in Alexandria. Rich serves on the governing boards for the Central Louisiana Ambulatory Surgery Center and Red River Bank, where Blake Chatelain, chairman of the LSU System Board of Supervisors, serves as president and chief executive officer. Rich also is chairman of orthopedics at Huey P. Long Medical Center, an LSU hospital in Pineville. Jindal spokesman Kyle Plotkin said Rich is relinquishing that title.

David Voelker, president of Frantzen-Voelker-Conway Investments LLC. Voelker has occupied several public appointments in recent years, including Jindal's Postsecondary Education Review Commission. He still serves as chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority board. 

That's a plum little post for three huge GOP political donors and just one doctor.

Of course, we have always advocated the FHL/RMJM alternative plan to gut and rebuild Charity Hospital and accelerate the construction of a new VA Hospital on the land held in limbo due to LSU's inability to produce a plan capable of closing its funding gap. The alternative plan would prevent the needless expropriation and demolition of a residential neighborhood and yield two brand new medical facilities in less time and for hundreds of millions of dollars less than the proposal favored by Jindal.

Perhaps if our state and local politicians pursued the restoration of emergency healthcare services to New Orleans residents and regional veterans with the same urgency with which they seek to solidify patronage appointments, we could have adopted the alternative plan years ago.

Yesterday, several big business organizations, some of which stand to make money off of the destruction of Lower Mid-City and the construction of an expensive but still unfunded LSU/VA medical center, called for the withdrawal of a lawsuit filed on behalf of residents fighting to save their homes and community. The website of New Orleans City Business, whose publisher has consistently failed to disclose his own conflict of interest as a board member on the LSU Health Sciences Center Foundation, reported on the big business press release.

Those calling for an end to the litigation include the Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region, Black Economic Development Council, Greater New Orleans Inc., Greater New Orleans Biosciences Economic Development District, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana, Jefferson Business Council, New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, Northshore Business Council, Plaquemines Association of Business and Industry, St. Bernard Chamber of Commerce, Urban League of Greater New Orleans and New Orleans Regional Black Chamber of Commerce.

It's a veritable who's who of the region's rich and powerful, all calling for residents whose homes are about to be taken out from under them by the government to simply ignore the pattern of rule-breaking that has put their community at risk. These groups think it is the residents trying to keep their property who are stalling the development deal from which many of them stand to profit. Yet throughout this excruciating four year process none of these groups have ever confronted the flawed processes - the piecemeal and incomplete studies of risks and costs, the refusal to offer a single alternative site to the VA, the flaunting of municipal and federal law - that have actually caused the delays.

It is indeed quite interesting to have this big business consortium suddenly so concerned with the city's healthcare needs. They are over four years late to the party. They were on the other side of the fence when healthcare advocates demanded the immediate rebuilding of Charity Hospital, when healthcare advocates demanded the consideration alternative plans like that from FHL/RMJM, which would have resulted in the faster construction and completion of two new hospitals. How nice of them to show up now that their poorly planned, under-financed, and procedurally bankrupt chickens are coming home to roost.

Even if all of the lawsuits were to magically disappear and all of the steamrolling of citizens were to be willfully ignored, there would be no groundbreaking in Lower Mid-City and there would be no synergistic medical center complex. LSU remains half a billion dollars short of what they need to begin construction. The VA would still have to face neighborhood residents that want to stay in their homes. The city would still have to discover millions of dollars to facilitate property demolition, residential relocation, sidewalk and street deconstruction, and private utility relocation. Or worse still, the state would force residents from their homes, demolish their neighborhood, and give the land to the VA for construction while the LSU portion of the project, near to downtown and closer to being construction-ready, sits abandoned for years.

If Big Business really wanted to see construction, they would urge the adoption of the less expensive, less time consuming, and less destructive alternative proposal urged by SaveCharityHospital.com. Or, they would ask LSU to stop holding the Department of Veterans Affairs hostage, since LSU is no where near ready to begin construction, and swap their superior downtown site for the problematic one to which they've relegated the VA. Or, at the very least, they could call for everyone to be brought in for the negotiations and hearings that were supposed to have occurred in the first place.

Instead, these monopoly men would rather flaunt the law and intimidate working class Lower Mid-City residents. Their professed devotion to transparency apparently doesn't mean anything.

Their true one-and-only is greed.

Yesterday, in what was correctly expected to be a rubber-stamp decision, the City Planning Commission voted to close public streets in the Lower Mid-City neighborhood surrendered for the LSU/VA. Though the CPC staff has stipulated that no roads can be closed while residents remain in their homes, access to individual street will be cut off as soon as those living on a specific block are kicked off of their properties. Residents who fight for their neighborhood, while permitted access to their own homes, would be slowly choked off from what was once their community. City Council will need to pass an ordinance to officially enact the recommendations adopted yesterday by the City Planning Commission. The move is reminiscent of the building moratorium imposed on the neighborhood by City Council in 2007. Lower Mid-City has been the only community in New Orleans officially barred from rebuilding.

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