Sitting on the fringe of the French Quarter, Iberville has long attracted interest from developers. Earlier this month, the housing authority issued a request to find interested and qualified developers, a precursor to the competitive bidding that will decide who gets the job.  The deadline for submission is Sept. 13.

The solicitation states that the “successful respondent shall demonstrate the ability and experience to implement a large-scale comprehensive mixed-finance, mixed-income and mixed-use revitalization plan.”

In addition to housing, the plan should include commercial space for retail, offices and community facilities, the request states. Such mixed-income redevelopments are in varying stages of completion at the city’s other large public-housing complexes, known collectively as the “Big Four”: B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard.

The project will be done in line with federal urban housing policy of replacing dense low-income developments of the post-war period with small-scale neighborhoods, which provide fewer units for the very poor mixed with housing for working and middle-class occupants.

In New Orleans, the redevelopment of the Big Four replaced a pre-storm total of 4,500  occupied public housing units with 3,343 public housing units, as well as 900 market-rate rental units and 900 affordable market-rate homes, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The agency does not specify the size of the units.

In April, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking to a crowd of visiting urban planners in New Orleans, cited Iberville as a place ideal for the federal housing agency’s newest mixed-income, mixed-use redevelopment program – Choice Neighborhoods.

About 40 developers showed up for a pre-submission conference held Wednesday at HANO’s Touro Street headquarters, said one of those in attendance, HRI Properties CEO and President Pres Kabacoff.

“I am very interested in this project,” Kabacoff said.

In 2001, the same HANO competitive bidding process won the developer the right to redevelop the St. Thomas development into River Garden, a mixed-income development that includes affordable and market rate single-family homes and apartments, in addition to the highly subsidized units traditional to public housing. River Garden also includes retail, notably a Wal-Mart supercenter. Like Iberville, St. Thomas was located within a short walk of a more affluent neighborhood, the Garden District.

Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Executive Director James Perry said that he did not know of  any public outreach done about the redevelopment.

“I’ve heard nothing outside of (closed) meetings,” he said. “Before HUD and HANO start talking about redeveloping Iberville, they should honor commitments to completing the rebuilding of the Big Four redevelopments they’ve already started.”

City bulldozers demolished Katherine Benson Clinic in the Ninth Ward last year. There are no plans to rebuilt the facility.

See a photo slideshow of other projects not being immediately financed by Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

Maddie Trepagnier can’t remember exactly when she gave up on City Hall.

Maybe it was when no one could explain why the city-owned Digby Park in her eastern New Orleans subdivision wasn’t getting fixed up, even though FEMA had obligated money for it. Or maybe, she said, it was when no one returned calls about a spewing water main flooding her block. Or when she saw rebuilding dollars pay for palm trees in less-affected parts of the city, while the road leading to her neighborhood was barely passable.

Her lack of faith makes sense given her surroundings. It’s difficult to tell five years have passed since Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters pushed down the levees and flooded 80 percent of the city, including Trepagnier’s neighborhood. Looking around, it may as well be just a year or two after the storm.

An abundance of vacant homes give her block a checkerboard look. Construction workers smoke cigarettes outside trailers parked on muddy lawns. And if you start talking about the city’s future, good luck at avoiding jargony post-disaster phrases such as  “shrinking the footprint” and turning a neighborhood into a green dot.

“If often feels like we are being punished for coming back to our homes,” she said on a recent evening, following a civic-association meeting in her freshly repainted living room. Hours earlier, Mayor Mitch Landrieu had announced that the neighborhood’s park would finally be rebuilt with the $122,969 in FEMA money that residents had begged the previous administration to spend.

“It was a victory that should not have been this hard to win,”  Trepagnier said.

The park was among the 100 projects (pdf) on city property that Landrieu recently released and committed his administration to completing. It was welcome news to a city eager for a detailed plan after years of former Mayor Ray Nagin’s vague, bellicose promises and anemic follow through.

But the list of Nagin-era projects that Landrieu did not immediately commit to starting, let alone finishing, is just as revealing for a city still on the mend. Along with a list of finished or nearly finished projects frequently touted by the city, and a state-generated status update of FEMA-financed projects worth more than $55,000, The Lens has put together one of the most complete accountings of the city’s efforts to revitalize its own properties and improve the lives of residents, employees and visitors.

The records illustrate the winding, red-tape-ridden road New Orleans has traveled over the past five years and see more clearly the priorities of the previous administration.

OF CLIPBOARDS AND RESPIRATORS

The streetlights were still out when FEMA field workers arrived in New Orleans to assess hundreds of damaged or destroyed city-owned facilities. Wearing respirators, these federal employees or contractors treaded through molding buildings and sodden parks with engineers and city employees or contractors. Their job was to make sense of what Katrina’s wind and the subsequent flooding had done to these facilities so they could document the cost of repair, or wholesale replacement, in worksheets assigned to each project.

The 655 project worksheets (pdf) that came out of those chaotic early days and the hectic months that followed would be the foundation for all damage claims payable by the federal agency to the city. But as virtually anyone who was working with the city at that time recalls, the worksheets set a relatively low basis for reimbursement. In short, the city was low balled.

“Someone underestimated,” said John Marini, chief operating officer for a disaster recovery consulting company, Adjusters International, that was hired by the city in the immediate aftermath to expedite negotiations with FEMA. “They didn’t take into account latent damage. They didn’t realize how old the buildings were and how that would add millions to the cost of renovating.”

The process ended with the city establishing project worksheets for 655 projects. (pdf)

Even before Landrieu marked his first 100 days in office by releasing the sure-thing100 projects, 70 of them non-road projects, he warned residents that it was time to scale back expectations to fit government’s modest post-recession, post-Nagin checkbook.

Landrieu’s practical approach — the term compassionate pragmatism comes to mind — received widespread approval across most of the city.

“It’s better now to know, for real,” said Councilwoman-at-large Jackie Clarkson at a press conference announcing the mayor’s 100-project plan, “to say this is what you will have, and this will be what you won’t have.”

His point man on the city projects did his best to bring people back to earth.

“It was clear off the bat that everything everybody imagined wasn’t going to get done. I want to inject a sense of reality about this. There’s a lot of dreaming going on here,” Deputy Mayor for Infrastructure Cedric Grant told The Times-Picayune earlier this month. “I don’t see a boatload of money coming. We’re at the point where this is what we get.”

Grant told The Times-Picayune that 273 projects of the 655 recovery projects tracked by the city are completed or are nearly completed at a total cost of $367 million.

When a list of these projects was requested by The Lens, the city provided a summary of 270 projects (Excel) ranging from minor jobs such as a repair of an elevator in Criminal District Court, or the repair of sidewalks in the French Quarter, to large projects, such as the renovation of Mahalia Jackson Theatre for the Performing Arts. No project costs were included on the list supplied by the city.

The handful of larger projects correlate to the state list of FEMA-financed projects, though that list shows that only seven reconstruction projects have satisfied state requirements for being considered complete.

The mayor’s to-do list reflects a commitment to building the city back with a more concentrated urban grid in mind, as well as an awareness of needs in lower-density sections of the city. For instance, Landrieu chose to build back all major public facilities in the Lower Ninth Ward, as well as many projects in the east, including Trepagnier’s Digby Park.

But instead of scattering resources between various human service facilities in Hollygrove and Carrollton, a large $1.8 million senior center with a health clinic and a community facility is planned to rise. Similarly, a pre-storm health clinic in the Desire/Florida section of the Ninth Ward will be replaced by a larger $12 million multi-service center.

Even with these big ideas evident behind the modest plan, the vision is best described as a compromise.

“We are all going to have to make sacrifices,” Kristin Palmer, City Councilwoman for District C, said.

Analysis shows that the council district that includes the Lower Ninth Ward and eastern New Orleans, City Council District E, is on tap to receive the largest allocation of FEMA money — $47 million. Bringing up the rear is District D, which includes Gentilly as well as parts of the east, the Upper Ninth Ward and the Seventh Ward, with $13 million for rebuilding facilities. Pre-storm realities determined the flow of resources – as the post-storm refrain went, FEMA cannot build better; it can only build back.

Source: Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness

MANY PROJECTS NEED TO BE UPDATED

Yet as residents grow used to continuing life in a city that is neither quite the New Urbanist Xanadu envisioned in the many lofty planning meetings right after the storm, nor a refurbished version of the old New Orleans, a look at state records raises new questions about how many of these projects could’ve come back to life if the city had negotiated more effectively with FEMA earlier on.

Landrieu holds out hope that he can still bargain with the feds.

In the five years since the failure of federal levees sent 8 feet of water surging into Trepagnier’s neighborhood, FEMA has committed about $600 million to New Orleans for rebuilding public facilities and infrastructure — roads and bridges, pumping stations, parks, community centers, courts, libraries, health clinics, police stations and fire houses. About a third of that, $232 million, has been set aside to pay for buildings and parks, while the remainder will pay for roads, bridges, pumping stations, drainage facilities and emergency protective measures and debris removal, an analysis of city records shows. Before negotiations on infrastructure and facilities are complete, another $300 million is expected to flow down, said Mark DeBosier, disaster recovery chief for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. All FEMA money passes through the state to reach New Orleans. DeBosier handles that transaction.

Even with this money, the city has not managed to complete more than a handful of projects.

Only seven of the city’s 333 FEMA-funded major reconstruction projects – including roads, bridges, pumping facilities and drainage but excluding emergency protective measures and debris removal – are complete, records from the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness show. The list includes a new Emergency Operation Center for the city, fueling stations for city vehicles, the Orleans Parish Criminal Courts Building and other public safety infrastructure as well as work on pet projects of former Mayor Ray Nagin: Louis Armstrong Park and the Mahalia Jackson Theatre.

The longer list of 270 complete or nearly complete projects provided by the Landrieu administration includes road repairs and smaller facility repairs.

“Those are things like a roof on a small building or an air-conditioner or elevator,” DeBosier said. “From a recovery standpoint, they are almost non-issues.”

None of the rebuilt major facilities lie within the sections of the city most devastated by Katrina.

The state lists the projects somewhat differently, with some combination of city projects and breakout of others. So while the city is tracking 655 projects, the state figure is 491.

Five years later, a majority of the city’s 491 total project worksheets (Excel) have never been fully updated, state documents obtained by The Lens show. This means that FEMA has not revised early damage assessments to reflect years of inflation, or even the fully vetted cost of repairing old facilities that in many cases were more damaged than initially realized.

The documents show that 14 percent of the city’s 491 FEMA-funded projects are still being funded according to the initial assessment done immediately after the storm. Another 43 percent are in line for funding based on a first or second revision.

Source: Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness

In stark contrast, the worksheet for the City Hall building, a priority for the last administration, was revised eight times, the NOPD building was revised nine times, and Orleans Parish Prison was revised 10 times.

Left unremedied, the failure to update more assessments could cost the city the hundreds of millions of dollars – and the option of paying for all 655 recovery projects, rather than restricting rebuilding to the 100 priority projects in the pipeline and the 270 complete and nearly complete, said Nagin’s former Capital Projects Administrator Bill Chrisman.

“You can say the projects are under budgeted, but that is because the worksheets are based on numbers from 2005,” Chrisman said.

CITY SEEKS TO FOLLOW SCHOOL DISTRICT’S LEAD

Chrisman said he left City Hall after a series of disputes with other members of the Nagin administration about how much money the city was spending on consulting contracts. One 2009 consulting contract that Chrisman approved of, however, went to a firm hired to work with FEMA on those project revisions.  Chrisman estimates that the work earned the city $250 million in revised assessments, with another $100 million in the pipeline, before the consultants’ contracts ended when Mitch Landrieu became mayor.

He estimates that the original project worksheets, before any revisions – or “reversionings” in FEMA-speak — are done, cover about 30 percent of 2010 costs.

“What the city got from FEMA in the first three or four years after the storm was essentially chump change,” he said. “It was in the reversioning that the real dollars came in.”

Landrieu seems to understand this process. At a press conference announcing his 100 priority projects, the mayor explained that he is only going forward with projects that have “been through the mill with FEMA.”

If a project is not on the list “it could mean still in a discussion phase with FEMA, still in version phase,” he said, adding that his administration will continue to negotiate “so we can make sure that we get every dollar the federal government owes us.”

Although Landrieu said he is up for the challenges of negotiating with FEMA, it remains to be seen how much human capital he is willing, and able, to put into what is sure to be a massively laborious burden for a cash-strapped city with a workforce already compromised by furloughs and mandatory paycuts.

This summer, the Landrieu administration requested that FEMA reassess only one project worksheet, FEMA records show.

The Recovery School District, by way of comparison, requested seven reassessments.

A federal official suggests that the city, not the school board is the aberration. In response to a question from The Lens about the city’s success with the reversioning process, Rep. Joseph Cao’s spokesman, Taylor Henry, wrote in an email:  ”Re-versioning, in many of the applicants in the region, were very successful and continue to advance the obligations and recovery.” He went onto add that “the city of New Orleans continues to move the re-versioning process forward, but in the current administration, a new pair of eyes and team members may be what will make the difference as they communicate the level of expectation and pace needed for the city to recover.”

“Within the framework of two administrations encompassing a transition from Mayor Nagin to Mayor Landrieu, the level of engagement has increased dramatically,” Taylor wrote.

Recovery School District Budget Director Ramsey Green said that the district “spent 2008 and half of 2009 versioning all the project worksheets” before settling with FEMA on a lump sum payment of $1.8 billion covering all the damages laid out in the revised project worksheets.

“You want to make sure you get your dollars up before you agree on a settlement,” Green said.

Neither FEMA nor the city responded to public records requests for correspondence between each other and neither entity responded to questions about the reassessment of project worksheets.

What is known is that the city is pushing FEMA for a single settlement, like the one won by the school district and paid out this week.

“The lump-sum settlement could help us move faster on projects,” Landrieu spokesman Ryan Berni said.

FEMA declined to comment on the ongoing discussions.

In the meantime, budget woes have motivated Landrieu to cut down on contracts with outside consultants such as those handling FEMA revisions for the Nagin administration. Adding to the complications is the unfortunate fact that FEMA requires stringent documentation of all project spending – something that, from all indicators, City Hall, does not have.

Lower Ninth Ward organizer Vanessa Gueringer released a small, tight smile when asked if she is pleased that big projects in the Lower Ninth Ward – the C.J. Pete Sanchez Center and the neighborhood’s long-neglected playgrounds are on the mayor’s 100-project priority list.

“Finally,” she said. “And if they weren’t on that list,” Gueringer adds, “they would be hearing from me.”

Even so, there are other infrastructure repairs she continues to wait on, things like a stretch of Poland Avenue between Galvez Street and Claiborne Avenue where she said the street lamps don’t work.

In February, Gueringer filed a complaint with New Orleans Inspector General Edouard Quatrevaux asking his office to investigate the whereabouts of recovery dollars for the Lower Ninth Ward. The investigation never progressed but the question is still out there, and with it, a fiery challenge to the city’s new leadership.

“We were the poster child of this disaster for FEMA, for everyone,” she said last week, speaking to a reporter over a plate of meatloaf at the Lower Ninth Ward’s lone restaurant, Holmes One Stop.  “We see now that the money we got from putting our faces out there is being spent elsewhere and that is not something we plan to plan to stop fighting no matter how many anniversaries go by.”

City officials hope the new plan will reduce conflict over development in neighborhoods and help attract new investment by setting clear and consistent rules for building.

“It tells investors that they can come back, that the rules won’t change in the middle of the game,” City Councilwoman-at-large Jackie Clarkson said.

But even as the council unanimously approved the legally binding land-use plan, questions remain about how the city will pay for implementing the reforms it lays out. The effort already has cost the city thousands of hours in manpower and millions of dollars in consulting fees.

In 2007, the city spent $2 million in recovery money to pay the Boston urban design company Goody Clancy to rewrite the city’s notoriously dysfunctional zoning law, redraft zoning maps and complete a master plan that promotes resident involvement in planning decisions and place-based development. While that upfront expense has already been swallowed, City Planning Director Yolanda Rodriguez told council members Thursday that she would be returning to the body with a request for money to carry out the demands made in the plan and “act more proactively and progressively” on neighborhood issues.

Rodriguez made her comment in response to council members who said they wanted each planning district to have its own planner to oversee development. The city’s planning director estimates an added expense of $900,000 on top of the existing $1.3 million annual budget to bulk up the department for increased demand for neighborhood planning. For context, the city’s 2010 spending plan totals $455 million, with officials estimating the year will end with the city $67 million in the red. Mayor Mitch Landrieu has dedicated much time throughout his first 100 days in office discussing the hard choices residents will have to make as the city makes needed cuts.

“This is a city of many needs but right now,” Rodriguez said. “But City Planning’s budget is less than 2 percent of the city’s spending.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the department operated with 30 planners on staff, she said.

“Now we have 14. It’s time to build back capacity.”

The cost of beefing up City Planning will come in addition to another new expense: creating a citizen participation plan. Both the increased planning staff and the creation of a system for resident involvement in neighborhood planning issues were unanimously celebrated Thursday. Yet no one has stepped up with answers for how to pay for the reforms, and Thursday’s council meeting ended with no substantive conversation of the impending financial burden. In the past, planners have discussed using an existing tax dedicated to neighborhood improvement to fund the $2 million annual expense of a citizen participation system.

“We are all excited,” said Gentilly Civic Improvement Association Vice-President Dalton Savwoir. “The citizen participation plan will help bring power to the people, it’ll help people. The hard part will be asking them to pay for it.”

The vote is largely symbolic because of an amendment to the City Charter approved by voters in 2008 that legally enshrined the plan even before consultants completed it in January.

The plan, subject to public input through a series of public meetings that occurred last spring, knits together neighborhood priorities expressed through post-Katrina planning processes into a single cohesive document that establishes new rules for land use.  It also lays the foundation for a rewriting of the city’s zoning code and mandates the city create a new system for public participation into zoning decisions. The new mechanism, which is outlined in only vague terms in the master plan, will remake the current informal process – instead of residents making their voices heard solely through testimony before the City Council, they will have the option of participating through a system of recognized neighborhood group committees that will advise the council on land use decisions in their districts.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the City Council have expressed support for the civic engagement tool, yet neither have come up with a surefire strategy for paying its estimated $2 million a year tab. And while the master plan mandates the creation of the new engagement tool, it does not provide any hints of how to pay for it.

Advocates of the reform say it should not be funded through the city’s general operating fund because doing that would make the program too vulnerable to budget cuts. “We need to have a dedicated funding source, something that wouldn’t let the council just kill it with one slash to the budget,” Committee for a Better New Orleans President Keith Twitchell said.

Planners believe that a millage passed years ago for neighborhood revitalization may be able to be used to support the new neighborhood offices, Twitchell said. If not, it is possible voters could pass a new millage or fee, he said. He estimates the cost per-family of the program is $70 annually, based on a 300,000-household population. “Will people want to put money towards more bureaucracy? No,” he said. “But will they be willing to put a modest sum towards more citizen participation? I think so.”

Legislation determining the structure of the participation system is expected to move through the City Planning Commission and City Council in the fall.

Designed by the staff of former recovery czar Ed Blakely and financed out of a $411 million pot of federal Disaster Community Development Block Grants given to the city, these programs generally have been on hold for the past several months. At a public budget meeting last week in the Lower Ninth Ward, Landrieu told the crowd that two of them – a $7 million program that provides financial assistance to businesses that sell fresh food and produce in low-income neighborhoods, and a $23 million program that provides assistance for commercial reinvestment – would be moving forward in the near future.  A spokesman for the mayor said Tuesday that “announcements” related to these programs, or others that are also funded by the disaster grants, would be made Friday.

Both the Fresh Foods Retail Initiative and the Neighborhood Commercial Investment Program were delayed in February when U.S. Housing and Urban Development officials, who are providing the money for the programs, balked at the bidding process the city was using to pick vendors to manage the programs. The state’s Office of Community Development approved the recovery programs in July, allowing the city to get started with a new bidding process. That approval came 13 months after the state approved the city’s recovery plan and opened the tap on the $411 million federal fund.

This was the clearest takeaway of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s two public budget meetings this week, with spending priorities taking a back seat to more overarching concerns about transparency and the way budget decisions are typically decided.

“It is absurd that we have to sit here and beg for dollars that were allocated for our park, our library, our streetscape,” eastern New Orleans resident Joan Heisser said at the mayor’s first forum on Monday.  “We read, we are educated, we pay taxes, and we deserve to know where the dollars are being spent.”

The concern bubbled up repeatedly that night and throughout Wednesday’s forum   at Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School in the Lower Ninth Ward. Multiple residents of these blight-filled, predominantly black neighborhoods asked for a transparent accounting of the billions of dollars in taxpayer money that has come to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina and the levee breach five years ago.  This desire was expressed in shouts for “the budget to be released” and earnest appeals for an online breakdown of spending so that residents could find why neighborhoods look the way they do, and how they can expect that to change

“It would be nice if I could go online and find out what’s happening, so I won’t be stressed out when nothing is happening out here in New Orleans East,” resident Johnny Bridges implored.

It’s a point we at The Lens understand all too well.  Since the site’s launch in January, we have worked to understand how money that came to New Orleans has been used,tracking allocations of the $411 million of Disaster Community Block Development Grants set aside for recovery projects, examining the city’s use of its $200 million revolver fund, and attempting to make sense of why damage reimbursements obligated by FEMA  remain unspent five years after the storm. This last inquiry began in the end of June with emails to FEMA and the city. The Lens is still waiting on a comprehensive list of projects with damage assessments that remain undecided and are thus, unable to move forward.

Thankfully, Mayor Landrieu responded to the crowd this week with a few solid answers. He explained the city was still reviewing project records left in disarray by his predecessor, Ray Nagin. He said that once the administration completed new assessments of the 655 public facility projects that have funding coming from FEMA, the city would post up-to-date status reports for each on the city’s website. He also pointed out that the project information published by the last administration bore little relationship to reality. “When the city was putting together its recovery plan, they promised people everything and didn’t put a pencil to anything,” he said. Or as Landrieu’s Chief Administrative Officer and First Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin put it Wednesday; “Lots of people want to know how this money was spent, where it went and so do we.”

But while the frankness of the Landrieu administration comes as a comfort after the defensive posture of Ray Nagin and company, it is plainly not enough to sooth the harried nerves of those residents who continue to wait for answers on why the park or fire station or school in their neighborhood remains shuttered.  The mayor recognizes this and for that reason, this week he announced that in less than two week, on his 100^th day in office, he will present the city with transparent, concrete and, most importantly, reality-based timelines for 100 projects. That means that the city, in 100 days, will know when and how it will build and pay for projects that we’ve heard touted in the abstract for the last several years.  Landrieu also said that in the next 60 days he expects to come to an agreement with FEMA about changing the funding process so the city can collect on its damage claims in a lump sum instead of collecting the cash one check at a time, each check coming with a different project in the subject line. This will allow the city to move money between projects more freely and make it easier agencies to proceed with building before all reimbursement amounts are decided.

He said he is actively negotiating with FEMA. “I talked to the FEMA man today,” he said.

All this is promising but it doesn’t change the problem at the root of all the tension—a deep-seated distrust. And that won’t change unless the mayor is not only able to make charming public proclamations about the process, but also able to open it up. And so, Mayor Landrieu what about that July 14 public records request for all your correspondence with Mr. FEMA?

So yes, BP’s pipe has finally stopped gushing oil into the Gulf Coast’s waterways, but that doesn’t mean the economic bloodletting is done. With only 1.3 percent of the $20 billion BP set aside for damages—$266 million— put towards these claims so far, we wonder how much more will go to those whose livelihoods have been disrupted, or even destroyed. We want to understand why people are not being repaid, and why those who are seeing claims processed continue to wait for payment.

These questions can’t be answered by a single reporter’s network, nor even that of a single newsroom. For this reason, we are asking you, our readers, to help us shine a light on the processes that BP is using to make Gulf Coast communities whole again.

If you’ve filed a claim with BP, please share details of your experience with reporters from The Lens, and with our partners at American Public Media and ProPublica,using this form. (This post is also available in Spanish and Vietnamese on ProPublica’s website.) A reporter may follow up with you by phone, and we’ll make it easy for you to share documents and records with our newsrooms.

If you haven’t filed a claim, you can help The Lens find claimants by doing your own outreach – tweet this, post it to Facebook, and/or send it out to local listserves.

Our reporting has already shed light on problems like translation difficulties between BP representatives and Vietnamese fishers put out of work by the company’s actions. Other news reports have exposed the difficulties facing Louisiana fishers who earn their incomes in cash and don’t have the documentation BP wants to see before paying out.

We see the trail of these problems every day in southern Louisiana, whether on the face of a child whose parent who is out of work, or in the empty shucking station of our favorite oyster bar. Yet it is difficult to understand how serious these problems are without expanding our network to reach more than the handful of those whom we already know are affected.  Our goal is to cast a wide net, hear as many experiences as we can, and try to figure out which parts of the claims system are working and which ones aren’t, so we can add some accountability to the process. Please help us.

In the race to secure these federal stimulus dollars, Baton Rouge received millions more than New Orleans, while Louisiana as a whole lagged behind other states.

The state’s haul amounts to $1,130 per resident, ranking the state 32 out of 50 according to per-capita takeaway. While Louisiana lagged most states, it did better than Georgia, Alabama and Florida, which came in dead last with Floridians receiving $915 per person. Yet in spite of Louisiana’s middling performance, East Baton Rouge Parish, which encompasses the whole capital city, despite its name, managed to take in $2.4 billion, much of it in grants to government agencies or Louisiana State University. The money breaks down to $5,698 per Red Stick resident, compared to New Orleans’ $404 million, or $1,295 per resident.

Data for this story was compiled by the independent journalism nonprofit ProPublica, whose complete stimulus coverage can be found here.

A direct comparison between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is mitigated by the fact that Baton Rouge receives money that filters through statewide systems such as the universities and various government agencies. Yet even so, there are some instances in which federal grants for things like public transit, biotech research and law enforcement training were simply larger for Baton Rouge.

Also beating out New Orleans were two parishes that received more money only relative to their smaller populations— St. Helena Parish with $71 million or $6,798 per resident and Plaquemines, which received $73 million, equaling out to $3,435 per resident.

About $6.5 million in federal contracting money has gone to Louisiana since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the state’s coast three months ago, according to the federal procurement database. The number represents about 12 percent of the $53.3 million that’s been reported by federal agencies such as Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Fish and Wildlife Service, Coast Guard and Minerals Management Services. Though it is the most comprehensive information to date, there is no way of knowing how complete it is because it relies on agencies to enter their own contracts onto the federal database.

According to the data, Pennsylvania is seeing the largest government-fueled economic impact, with nearly $14 million in contracts from the EPA, Coast Guard and other government offices going to businesses headquartered there. Other states that received a large share of contracts were Massachusetts with $7.7 million in projects and Colorado and Virginia, both of which received about $6.6 million in work. Most of the contracted work was for engineering and consulting. In Louisiana, businesses also provided boots-on-the-ground services such as motel rooms, helicopters and security, according to the database.

About a third of the reported contracts — 66 out of 201— were not competitively bid because of the urgency of the situation or the “unique” nature of the service or supply needed, according to the database.

While the (oily) Pelican State lost big contracts to East Coast states with more developed engineering sectors, it still fared better than Gulf Coast neighbors with Alabama trailing a distant second with $1 million, and Mississippi coming in last with about $254,000 in contracts.

In the middle range were Florida and Texas, with $602,000 and $486,000 going to the respective states.

President Barack Obama has said BP is financially responsible for all costs associated with the government’s response to the spill. As of July 13, the government had billed the British oil giant for $122.3 million to be paid out of a $4 billion trust fund established by the company, according to a statement from the Deepwater Horizon Incident Joint Information Center. A spokesman for the command center said that all bills from all agencies eventually will be submitted for repayment by the oil company. BP does not keep records of its own contracting practices and cannot not say how much business it has done with Louisiana companies, a company spokesman said.

No data is available on where the jobs are being created through these federal contracts. In some instances, companies based in other parts of the country have contracted out locally or routed the work through a local office. One of the largest contract recipients in Pennsylvania, for instance, Weston Solutions Inc., operates an office on Poydras Street.

Mandy Serpas, 28, was living with Special Operations Officer Travis Ward when the accident occurred in February 2009 on the first night of Carnival parades, according to public records recently released by the NOPD in response to a public records request submitted in May.

The Lens reported on the connection between the Serpas family and Ward in May, prior to Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s appointment of the new superintendent, but NOPD officials declined to explain why Ward was suspended.

Ward was driving an NOPD cruiser back to the Venetian Isles home he shared with Mandy Serpas when he lost control of the vehicle at Interstate 10 East and Chef Menteur Highway. Ward ran into a guardrail, spinning the “wrecked, marked police vehicle in the center lane of traffic,” according to an NOPD Public Integrity Bureau investigation into the accident.

He immediately was reassigned from the department’s version of a SWAT team to a desk job tracking crime statistics.

His suspension, which was served at the convenience of the department, began a year later in February 2010, a few months before the new police chief took office with a mandate to transform the culture of the troubled city agency.

In March, 33-year-old Ward was telling friends on Facebook that “suspension ain’t half bad,” describing frequent jaunts to Nashville.

The leave ended on May 12, one week after Serpas moved from Nashville to officially became the officer’s boss. Under his punishment, he must get written approval from the superintendent before using any NOPD vehicle after working hours. His take-home car privileges were also suspended for one year ending on Feb. 4, 2011. Ward is now assigned to a night shift in the Eighth District, based in the French Quarter.

The Public Integrity Bureau investigation shows that Ward met up with a few friends from college at a party on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District after policing a Carnival parade. He drank “a few beers” before getting back in his take-home car, Ward told investigators.

After refusing to take sobriety tests at the crash site, Ward was driven to a NOPD testing facility and given two Breathalyzer tests. He failed both tests, blowing above the legal limit with a .08 percent on the first test and .091 percent on the second test. The criminal charge for drunk driving was dropped in traffic court and the case was closed when Ward pleaded guilty to a lesser violation of failure to maintain control of his car. He paid court costs of $61.

Neither traffic-court officials nor the city attorney’s office, which prosecuted the court case, returned phone calls to explain why the drunk driving charge was dropped or how often it does so.

In his account of the night, “foul weather,” not intoxication, was to blame for the accident. “I have never been accused of alcohol-related accidents in a vehicle and so I would like to make the statement that I am not a bad cop,” Ward said.

The officer also said that his wreck was partially to blame for a second accident that happened later that night when other cars were trying to maneuver around the totaled police car in a “slow manner.” He said that no one was injured in either accident.

Neither the officer nor Mandy Serpas responded to requests for comment, and it’s unclear whether the two remain romantically involved.

The drunk driving accident was not Ward’s first brush with trouble, according to records provided by the Public Integrity Bureau. During his eight years in the NOPD, Ward has been investigated six other times for improper or unethical behavior. None of those charges was sustained.

Ward was one of the NOPD officers who was present when off-duty colleagues allegedly beat a group of city transit workers at the Beach Corner Bar and Grill in Mid-City, an event that is the subject of a FBI civil rights investigation. Ward, who was never a subject of the Beach Corner investigation, told Public Integrity Bureau investigators that he did not witness the Beach Corner fight because he was on the other side of the bar when it happened.

Superintendent Serpas has said in the past that he will not give any special treatment to Ward, regardless of the officer’s relationship with his daughter.

“You are accountable for the actions you take no matter who you are,” Serpas said.