Now, nearly 19 years since New Orleans’ catastrophic levee breaches, there is no controversy over where the blame for those breaches lies. According to all final investigations, it belongs squarely on the federal Army Corps of Engineers, not on local levee officials.

Nonetheless, in the immediate post-flood chaos, lawmakers made effective changes to local levee governance. The Orleans Parish Levee Board was consolidated with the Lake Borgne and East Jefferson boards, creating the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East. It acts as one of two Orleans-area levee boards, along with Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority West.

Most importantly, the governor no longer controls who is appointed to serve on the new authority. That was taken out of the hands of the governor and given to a blue ribbon 11-member nominating committee with staggered term limits.

After Hurricane Katrina, Jay Lapeyre, then chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, helped to spearhead efforts to reconfigure the state’s six levee boards and staff them with independent professionals well-suited to make decisions about flood protection. 

The boards needed a different level of expertise, Lapeyre believed. So, 17 years ago, two nominating committees were set up by state law requiring that the nominating committee create a board that includes specific expertise, including civil engineering, hydrology and construction engineering. The process was intended to remove potential conflicts from the selection process. 

“We separated it from politics as best we knew how,” Lapeyre said at an East Flood Authority meeting last month, as he described the legislation passed 17 years ago. he said. “We created an independent nominating committee with a level of commitment and diligence that would assess each of the board’s candidates.” 

The committees include engineering, science and business experts from universities and civic groups. They vet all nominees and forward one or two names for each board opening (one name for some openings and two names for others) to the governor. 

“That process has worked; the mechanics of what we’ve done have worked,” said Lapeyre, who has served on the nominating committees since they were formed. 

For most of those 17 years, he has acted as chair for the committees. So Lapeyre knows this process and its history well. But now, he is raising alarms, because it seems that Gov. Jeff Landry is acting against the intent of this post-Katrina legislation.

“We have a governor who doesn’t really have an interest in the history of the system and the processes,” Lapeyre said, as he described how, recently, for a Jefferson Parish vacancy on the board, Landry opted not to move forward the committee’s nomination of an “immensely well-qualified candidate,” Dr. Norma Jean Mattei, a University of New Orleans civil-engineering professor who also has served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. 

We think Lapeyre is right: the governor is acting against the intent of the law.

Because that’s not how the law was designed. The post-Katrina legislation states that the Governor “shall” appoint the nominee vetted and selected by the nominating committee. 

Once the nominating committee recommends nominees, the governor simply forwards the name, or names, to the Senate. The governor’s role is to forward that name to the Senate. 

The governor’s recent refusal needlessly re-injects politics into a well-operated nominations process. There can be no question about the committee’s nominations to date and certainly no doubt about this candidate’s credentials. Few people are more qualified than Dr. Mattei. 

Lapeyre reached out to the governor’s office for guidance, to better understand what had happened. But he has heard nothing. “We don’t know what to do at this point,” he said. “Essentially, what I think it does is negate the function of the nominating committee.”

There is no evidence that commissioners selected by governors prior to Katrina had any role in the flood catastrophe of August 2005. But we would prefer that the blue-ribbon committee select our future flood-protection leaders. Not the governor.

After all, the very survival of our region hinges on flood protection. 

Sandy Rosenthal is founder and president of Levees.org. H.J. Bosworth, Jr., P.E., is lead researcher for Levees.org.