Ground Zero and New Orleans suffer government's dead hand

Worldstage

By Harry Mount in New York

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/23/do2304.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/08/23/ixopinion.html

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I went to the Beau Rivage Casino in Biloxi, 70 miles farther east along the coast. New Orleans was merely flooded; Biloxi, in the eye of the hurricane, was obliterated by 140mph winds, and its casinos took the brunt of them. Mississippi casinos have to dip their toes in running water to obey laws that date back to the old gambling riverboats, so they're ranged along the seashore.

The winds flung casino barges 150 yards inland and tore a 100ft gash in the hull of the pirate-themed galleon casino 10 yards out to sea.

Cash registers were scattered along the shoreline, spitting quarters as they rolled along the spongy earth. The floodwaters sucked children's coffins from their mausoleums, and dead alligators, washed out of the bayous, were tossed into seaside Baptist churches. Next Tuesday, on the first anniversary of Katrina flattening the Gulf Coast, the Beau Rivage will reopen. The same goes for all the major private businesses along that coast - Harrah's Casino by the Mississippi in New Orleans has been open for months. The local Wal-Mart - the New Orleans outlet of the much maligned hypermarket chain - opened within weeks of the hurricane.

But while private business has flourished, public works have failed miserably. Schools are only just opening. University departments have been closed for good. Courtrooms don't have enough judges to deal with the renaissance of America's murder capital.

The city's narrow "shotgun" houses - their rooms open into each other in a long line from the front door, so that the winds off the Mississippi, and bullets, can pass through unimpeded - remain ripped from their moorings, squashed alongside or on top of each other. Their innards - sofas, photo albums, prom dresses - rot away on the kerb. The scent of mildew is overpowering.

This mismatch between private and public has nothing to do with shortage of public money; after Katrina, President Bush promised £58 billion in federal aid for the victims. New Orleans and its crooked ways are partly to blame. Only this weekend, a pair of Bobcat excavators worth £50,000 were stolen from the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest-hit areas of the city, where they were being used to build a memorial to the victims of Katrina.

But the chief culprit is a federal government clogged with bureaucracy and indecision, incapable of spending money even when it's got tons of the stuff.

The American government can just about arrange an orgy in a brothel - fraudulent applications for Katrina aid were spent on champagne and prostitutes - but it is hopeless when it comes to large-scale federal construction projects.

The same mismatch can be seen at the World Trade Centre. In the five years since September 11, one building, 7 World Trade Centre, the third and least-known skyscraper to collapse that day, is the only one to have been rebuilt.

At 7 WTC, the site's leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, worked unencumbered by the attentions of government. As a result, the £350 million, 52-storey tower went up this May without a hitch.

A couple of hundred yards from 7 WTC, Ground Zero is still a great big empty concrete tub.

Mr Silverstein owns the lease to the Ground Zero pit and the rights to rebuild all the space lost within it. But, while 7 World Trade Centre is outside the pit and entirely under his control, construction inside the pit is run by government, principally George Pataki, the outgoing governor of New York State.

Mr Pataki is keen to run for president in 2008 and the new World Trade Centre was supposed to be his calling card. It should be his knell.

Inside the pit, building has been subject to a lethal combination of government bureaucracy and rows between designers.

The first plan for the Freedom Tower, the replacement for the Twin Towers, was discarded because government security advisers thought that it was not robust enough.

Then Mr Pataki and several other politicians got into a long, unappetising row with Mr Silverstein over the building's financial terms, which delayed construction for several months.

At the same time, the plans for the ultra-simple memorial to the dead of Ground Zero spiralled to an unfeasible £500 million. And that was only after another row over the arts centre on the site, which some thought might show anti-American works.

All the while, the biggest bronze bas-relief in America was erected to the 343 firemen who died that day, at the nearest fire station to the World Trade Centre.

No fuss and no committees were needed to create the stirring sculpture of firemen heading into the burning towers. It cost only £275,000 to build. And who paid for it? The 1,200 lawyers of a nearby law firm, Holland & Knight. One of the firm's partners, Glenn Winuk, was a volunteer fireman who died that day.

If lawyers can spend money sparingly, and to beautiful effect, it's a shame the government can't emulate them.