09:45 AM CST on Saturday, November 26, 2005

Doug Simpson / Associated Press

BATON ROUGE, La. -- A disagreement rooted in St. Bernard Parish doomed a proposal in the Legislature to get rid of parish levee boards in southeast Louisiana, an idea supported by many of the region's business and political leaders.

Sen. Walter Boasso proposed the plan to dissolve the levee boards, which are local taxing bodies long criticized as full of patronage but devoid of expertise in the work of levee oversight.

Rep. Ken Odinet killed Boasso's bill. Both represent St. Bernard Parish.

Boasso staked much of the special legislative session on his idea to create the Southeast Louisiana Levee Authority, made up of two representatives each from St. Tammany, Jefferson, Plaquemines, Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, plus one appointed by the state transportation department. He argued that Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,000 people in the region because local levee bodies failed to think beyond their parish lines -- political lines that don't stop floodwaters.

"The most important thing we can do in our state, if we want to see our economy revived" would be to coordinate levee planning and prevent future disasters like Katrina, Boasso said on Tuesday, the final day of the special legislative session, after his bill had died.

The idea attracted supporters including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the business leaders Nagin appointed to plan the city's recovery.

Instead of Boasso's bill, the Legislature easily passed a measure supported by Gov. Kathleen Blanco that creates a new statewide levee authority. Its sponsor, Sen. Reggie Dupre, D-Houma, argued that the new state board will help streamline hurricane protection efforts by doing it over the heads of the local boards.

Boasso and other Republicans called it a bureaucratic answer that simply created another layer of government on top of the local boards.

"We created another oversight board," said Rep. Jim Tucker, R-Terrytown. "What most people determined coming into the session was most important was levees, and the Dupre bill does not give people the satisfaction that they're safe."

Boasso's bill didn't conflict with Dupre's and received support from Republicans and Democrats.

But it was gutted in a Senate committee by Sen. Francis Heitmeier, D-New Orleans, who has strong political ties to his city's levee board. Heitmeier changed the bill so that it would prevent the dissolution of that board, a powerful political force: it has a $47 million annual budget and its own police force.

The board also controls an airport on Lake Ponchartrain that caters to corporate jets.

Boasso, R-Arabi, reluctantly accepted the change. The measure, with Heitmeier's amendment, won approval from the full Senate and moved on to the House.

Then it ran into Odinet.

Odinet, D-Arabi, has political connections to his parish's levee board -- and his nephew serves on it. Odinet loudly criticized the Boasso bill, saying it would take too much power away from the locals who are intimately familiar with their parish's levee system.

Boasso's plan would have given St. Bernard two representatives on the proposed regional board, the same number as the other parishes.

Odinet, a member of the House since 1987, killed the Boasso bill not by convincing colleagues to vote against it, but with an obscure parliamentary maneuver on the House floor. Odinet objected to a routine procedure that normally allows a bill to move quickly from the Senate to a House committee.

Odinet got enough fellow House members to agree with his objection, so the bill stalled -- without enough time left in the special legislative session to get committee approval, then full House approval.

Lawmakers from both parties said they were concerned that displaced residents from southeast Louisiana will see the failure of Boasso's plan as a sign that New Orleans and the rest of the region will remain vulnerable and unsafe because of poor levee oversight and hurricane protection.

"I'm very disappointed that we can't make a strong statement that we're going to put political patronage and fiefdoms aside and protect people and their property," said Rep. Karen Carter, D-New Orleans. "We send a bad message, but we also have people making decisions not to come back based on what we do here."

Boasso, a freshman in the Senate, said he would like to bring his proposal back in a future legislative session.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)