Sunday, March 16, 2025

Holding Their Feet to the Fire

What do you do when a participant on “the honor system” proves to be dishonorable, over and over again? When it’s ExxonMobil, and you’re the citizen coalition known as Together Baton Rouge, you make a public example of the “world’s largest publicly-traded international oil and gas company”.

The issue this time is property tax valuation, which Together Baton Rouge says is $408-million below what it should be for Exxon’s four facilities in East Baton Rouge Parish. They’ve sent a letter to Assessor Brian Wilson requesting that he adjust the corporation’s 2018 tax bill accordingly.

And the group, which draws its membership from a broad array of faith-based congregations, community groups, and the two largest teachers’ unions, is pointing to a section of state law that lets them hold the assessor’s feet to the fire to get this done.

Specifically, LA R.S. 47:1957.F states: “If any tax assessor intentionally or knowingly or through negligence omits any taxable property from the assessment…he shall be liable on his official bond for the full amount of the taxes due on the property.”

Those taxes would total – by their calculation – $5.9-million.

Where does Exxon’s liability come into play, you may ask? An earlier section of the law, LA R.S. 1953, require the corporation to furnish “a sworn statement of the value of their property,” and “false swearing” is a criminal offense. Additionally, later sections of the law, LA R.S. 47:2329 and 3308, say a property owner that “intentionally” commits such an act foregoes any legal right to “question or contest” a revised valuation.

The case made by Together Baton Rouge is quite compelling, especially since they use ExxonMobil’s own publicity to show the current assessment of $1.39-billion for the four Baton Rouge facilities undervalues Exxon’s worth.

For 2017, Exxon’s refinery, chemical plant, plastics plant and polyolefins plant were listed as having a combined value of $1.45 billion. But last year the corporation also made combined capital improvements worth more than $335-million, and they submitted advance notice of intent to seek industrial tax exemptions for those projects, which included $209-million in refinery improvements, $98-million for the chemical plant, $22-million at the plastics facility, and $6.9-million at the polyolefins plant.

Since Together Louisiana and its local chapter Together Baton Rouge had been waging a multi-year campaign to limit the formerly automatic giveaways of property tax revenue through the state Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP), with Exxon at the top of their list as a habitual recipient of state subsidies for industry, also known as “corporate welfare”, Exxon embarked on a publicity campaign to try and counteract the criticism.

(In its report, “Giving Away the Farm”, Together Baton Rouge documented that from 1998 to 2017 Exxon had received 203 ITEPs totaling more than $589-million, while shedding 2037 jobs from its payroll over the same period.)

Among Exxon’s efforts to sway the larger ITEP conversation in their favor was a May 21, 2017, half-page ad in The Advocate, touting completion of the $200-million refinery project. That same month they also released a piece called “Baton Rouge Economic Impact Report 2017”, lauding themselves for the same “economic investment”.

And the company issued a press release just after Thanksgiving last November, extolling completion of the capital improvement projects at all of its Baton Rouge facilities, saying these “competitive upgrades totaled approximately $340 million” – a number which closely coincides with their ITEP application, give-or-take five million dollars.

It should be noted that this batch of property tax exemptions has yet to be approved, so under state law, the value of the improvements should have been included in Exxon’s current-year assessment.

Exxon claims the assessor’s office told them not to include those capital improvements in its sworn valuation statement, an assertion Assessor Brian Wilson has confirmed. In an interview with The Advocate’s reporter Sam Karlin, Wilson said “If Exxon ultimately receives the ITEP award, the company would run the risk of not being able to receive the property tax dollars back.” And, he added, the directive on how to handle this came from the state Department of Economic Development.

And while Exxon’s application for this particular batch of exemptions is currently being considered by local governing bodies, including the school board, Together Baton Rouge executive director Broderick Bagert says, “You don’t give your kid his allowance the day after you discovered him stealing money from your wallet.”

Leaving aside the issue of the yet-to-be granted exemptions for the 2017 improvements, Together Baton Rouge states in its complaint to the assessor that other contributing factors to the current $1.39-billion valuation of Exxon properties don’t add up. For example, there are old ITEPs that expired at the start of 2018, which should add another $60.7-million (allowing for standard depreciation of those 10-year-old improvements) to the value of Exxon’s property. And overall depreciation, based on a 20-year useful life, as Exxon has told the federal Securities and Exchange Commission is its practice, comes up to approximately $48-million for the corporation’s four Baton Rouge facilities.

So, starting with a 2017 value of $1.45 billion, and adding just the roll-on of expiring ITEPs at $61-million, then subtracting the $48-million in depreciation from the whole, means the property should be valued at $1.463 -billion, rather than $1.39 billion. If you add the 2017 improvements that have yet to be exempted from property tax, Together Baton Rouge says Exxon should be paying property taxes on a total assessed value of $1.8-billion.

“We want real numbers,” says Together Baton Rouge organizer Edgar Cage. “They have to report their value. They know their value – no matter what the assessor says.”

It’s curious, in a way, that the presumption of “everybody cheats on their taxes” made it into the state’s laws on property assessment, with criminal penalties for making a false declaration being included. But one also has to ask, despite the legal fiction of “corporate personhood”, how the penalty of “up to one year imprisonment” would be exacted against an entity like Exxon? And that also leads to the question whether such a penalty is, indeed, any kind of deterrent for business and industry?

Certainly, the strictures placed on assessors, holding them personally and financially responsible for errors and omissions, are far more punitive. And while it may be necessary for ensuring public trust in elected officials, why don’t we hold the corporations that operate within the state to similar standards of behavior?

Instead, Louisiana continues with “the honor system.”

When it comes to hazardous chemical releases into the air, water, or soil, Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality allows “self-reporting” by the industries, and unquestioningly accepts reports that say, essentially, “Something bad got away from us, but it stopped at our chainlink fence.”

A sampling of recent reports from Exxon’s chemical plant in Baton Rouge illustrate this.

On August 24, 2018, there was a hydrogen chloride release from the same plant. (A colorless gas, hydrogen chloride forms white fumes of hydrochloric acid upon contact with atmospheric water vapor. The humidity was 52% that day.) Exxon’s statement was that the release “didn’t leave the fenceline.”

The previous day, August 23, there was a “small” fire at the chemical plant. Exxon states it was “contained to the unit where it occurred.”

And on June 11, 2018, a sulfuric acid release burned three workers, sending two to the hospital. Exxon’s official statement said, “None of the liquid sulfuric acid released escaped off the plant site.”

This “honor system” remains in place, despite Exxon’s 2014 settlement with the EPA over chemical releases and spills at the four Baton Rouge facilities. More recently, on Oct. 31, 2017, Exxon settled another EPA suit over more than 16-thousand illegal emissions since 2005.

There’s also the “honor system” within the ITEP program, and, as previously reported here, Exxon is not loath to take advantage of it. For while the ITEP rules say “environmentally required capital upgrades shall not qualify” for the long-term property tax exemption, the improvements to ten gas flares at Exxon’s Baton Rouge facilities – as required under the 2017 EPA settlement – were included in the company’s December 2016 ITEP request.

The Industrial Tax Exemption Program has no rules analogous to “trust, but verify”; no requirements for the Department of Economic Development to check with other state and/or federal agencies regarding the status of litigation or judgments involving businesses applying for the property tax breaks. And beyond the statement that “upgrades required by any state or federal governmental agency in order to avoid fines, closures or other penalty shall not qualify”, the only repercussion for getting caught cheating this system is losing that particular tax exemption. No civil litigation, no criminal charges, no fines – not even a requirement for the company to document that all its other ITEPs are legitimate and valid. And, obviously, there’s no penalty like losing all the other property tax exemptions or being prohibited from asking for any new ones for a time.

Remember, Exxon waged a $30-million campaign to promote public skepticism about climate change, even as the company spent additional millions researching it, starting in the late 1970s. The revelations of their double-dealing led to a federal SEC probe and a shareholder rebellion that ousted ExxonMobil management in May 2017.

Now the company’s official stance is that “The risk of climate change is clear, and there is a broad scientific and policy consensus that action must be taken.”

Isn’t it time Louisiana discharges its reliance on honor systems, since there is so much proof that corporations – like Exxon – persist in acting dishonorably?

A troubling home opener leaves the Saints with their fifth straight week 1 loss

The New Orleans Saints went into week 1 as a 9.5-point favorite, at home against Tampa Bay, facing backup quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. Behind the ever-efficient offense led by Hall of Famer Drew Brees, and a defense which brought in new talent last year that helped it surge into one of the best in the league, the Saints expected to be even better than last year.

Instead, for the fifth straight season, the team started 0-1; again with personnel being unprepared, misused, or confused; again with the team seemingly not having figured out who its best players are or how to use them, a particularly strange phenomenon this time around given that relatively few new players are on the team this year.

The 48-40 loss was rather troubling for a number of reasons. Though the score may make it look like the defense was the clear culprit here, the offense showed some worrisome components as well. Let’s start there.

The absence of Mark Ingram might be a bigger blow than initially thought.

Most observers expected Alvin Kamara to do just fine stepping into this lead back role during Ingram’s suspension, with his combination of efficient running and receiving skills. While Kamara did in fact do well–  — the Saints can’t rely on him for 30 touches a game, and neither Jonathan Williams nor Mike Gillislee was particularly inspiring in their snaps. (Gillislee, indeed, fumbled a ball that led to a Tampa Bay defensive touchdown.)

This problem extended beyond the running game, though: Kamara and Michael Thomas proved the only reliable receiving targets for the Saints, a strange occurrence given the talent they brought in this offseason. (Cameron Meredith was inactive for the game; it was not immediately clear why, but it did not appear to be related to injury.) Tre’Quan Smith not yet being a factor was understandable; besides the steep learning curve for rookies at wide receiver, he’d barely gotten any action with Drew Brees in the preseason, and they’ll probably want to wait until he and Brees get their timing down to use him.

But one strength of the Saints’ offense in the Brees-Payton era has been its distribution of offense– multiple running backs, multiple passing targets– and as it stands, right now, this is the Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara show, with some assistance from Ted Ginn and Ben Watson. Thomas and Kamara took up 29 of the team’s 45 targets; Kamara played 51 of 64 offensive snaps, while Gillislee and Williams combined for 10 total. Thomas in particular was a beast, turning 17 targets into 16 receptions for 180 yards and a touchdown. (His one failed target was a drop. They literally can’t guard Mike.)

This can work, in part because Thomas and Kamara are superstars, but it certainly wasn’t the intent of the Saints’ braintrust to lean so heavily on those two players. It suggests that the team just needs some time for Ingram to return and Meredith and Smith to get on the same page as Brees (the optimistic view), or that the Saints goofed yet again with their personnel moves (the pessimistic view). I’m choosing to remain optimistic, though I’ll feel better when Meredith starts playing, Andrus Peat gets back, and someone besides Kamara takes effective carries.

All that said, the Saints did score 40 points Sunday– even if 16 of them were in an almost-certainly-futile garbage-time rally (never say never, though, right?)– so any complaints about the offense might seem nitpicking. And that’s fair, because the real issue was on the other side of the ball.

The defense played like it had regressed to 2016 levels– or worse.

In an apparent attempt to make everyone forget Delvin Breaux’s “lost in the lights” moment from 2015, the Saints surrendered multiple long touchdowns where coverages were completely broken, burnt, or badly conceived to begin with.

First, we have Marcus Williams possibly expecting deep help (or just looking at the wrong receiver) against DeSean Jackson running free:

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Then we have Marshon Lattimore just get beaten by Mike Evans, a great receiver but also a guy Lattimore completely shut down last season:

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Last, we have Ken Crawley one-on-one with DeSean Jackson, which should not ever happen, and Jackson demonstrates why with one move:

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For a unit that added multiple players at every level, has everyone healthy this year, and only lost one significant player in Kenny Vaccaro, the Saints defense played less like the extraordinary unit it was for most of last season and more like the units from years past that have provided multiple “worst ___ in history” records. Why, though? This team was supposed to be upgraded at every position: Demario Davis at linebacker, Patrick Robinson and Kurt Coleman in the secondary, Marcus Davenport along the defensive line. Plus the team was healthier by far than it had been in 2017, plus the young players should have taken a step forward, plus the team was no longer insisting obvious liabilities like De’Vante Harris were viable NFL players. What happened?

It seems one culprit is the gameplan, the schematics the defensive staff run. Take a closer look at that Jackson touchdown: Ken Crawley is being put in one-on-one coverage with a guy who’s stuck around the league for over a decade because of his speed and swiftness. Despite the cushion Crawley gives Jackson, it only takes one feint outside by Jackson to completely turn Crawley around and lead to an easy touchdown. Ken Crawley is a fine cornerback, but he shouldn’t be put in that situation. The defensive gameplanning did not seem very suited to the actual game at hand.

To be fair on the other end, Bucs offensive coordinator Todd Monken, new to play calling duties for Tampa this year, called an excellent game: He consistently schemed to find yards and create open receivers, he exploited the Saints’ weaknesses, and all in all, made Ryan Fitzpatrick look more like Steve Young than a guy on his seventh team who’s been more famous for attending Harvard than anything else.

The Saints also didn’t record a single sack; indeed, they rather struggled to contain Ryan Fitzpatrick– Ryan Fitzpatrick!– who not only ran for a touchdown, but secured the game for Tampa Bay with a scramble on 3rd-and-11. The second level of the defense didn’t seem any better off to start 2018 than it was in 2017.

The second-half defensive meltdown, where the Saints started racking up penalty after personal-foul penalty, was also unacceptable. Some of those weren’t necessarily fair, thanks to the NFL once again adding a byzantine, confusing wrinkle to when players are allowed to hit the quarterback (Marcus Davenport should not have been flagged for 15 yards, as he made a concerted effort not to land on Fitzpatrick in the fashion David Onyemata had been flagged the previous play for doing), but someone on the defense, or the coaching staff, needs to show some leadership when the team starts melting down like that.

It seems to happen every year lately with Payton’s Saints: They come into the season with a plan for what they want to do, only they realize they’re not actually good at that, so they take September to adjust until they get it right. But September is a full one-fourth of your season; there’s no excuse to waste that time figuring things out, especially when you’re starting from the place the Saints defense ended last season.

New Orleans will be nine-point favorites as they host the Cleveland Browns on Sunday. They had a great opportunity to start 2-0 with two matches they were substantial favorites in; if they blow this and start 0-2 for the fifth straight season, they may not get the opportunity to recover they had last season. Losing to Minnesota and New England last year was one thing; the schedule’s not getting easier than the Buccaneers and Browns at home.

Rep. Clay Higgins Recently Attended Two Conferences, One Hosted By A Hate Group And The Other By Climate Science Deniers

On Aug. 9th, U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins (R- LA-03) showed up at the America First Energy (AFE) conference, which was organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation and which was almost entirely focused on promoting the petrochemical industry and denying the realities of climate change, something understood and accepted by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.

Higgins represents one of the most environmentally vulnerable districts in the nation, largely due to the negligence of the petrochemical industry, which dominates the local economy. The industry has previously acknowledged liability for more than 30% of the damages inflicted in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a consequence of decades of illegal dredging and a cavalier approach to the state’s permitting process. 

Attendees of the conference were told, among other things, that increased carbon dioxide emissions would make the Earth a “greener planet.”

That may be true, according to Pep Canadell, Scientist and Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation of Australia (CSIRO) and CSIRO research scientist Yingping Wang, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

“But don’t get your hopes up,” their report cautions. “We don’t know how far into the future the greening trend will continue as the CO₂ concentration ultimately peaks while delayed global warming continues for decades after. Regardless, it is clear that the benefits of a greening Earth fall well short compared to the estimated negative impacts of extreme weather events (such as droughts, heat waves, and floods), sea level rise, and ocean acidification.

“Humans have shown their capacity to (inadvertently) affect the word’s entire biosphere, it is now time to (advertently) use this knowledge to mitigate climate change and ameliorate its impacts,” they concluded. 

Rep. Higgins never heard these remarks. Instead, he received a self-published book, Dumb Industry: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy, which is available for less than $5 on Amazon.    

A reader named A. Leahy was pithy and brutal in their review of the book: “I’ve been seeing excerpts from this all over the internet,” he wrote, “and I assumed it was a joke. This guy doesn’t have the faintest idea how solar or wind power work and just plain ignores oil subsidies. Is he serious?”

Apparently, yes.



Higgins also received this “alternative facts” sheet in the conference, which, among other things, falsely asserts that global temperatures have not risen in the past 20 years, which isn’t true. He also asserted that “Antarctic ice is increasing far more than Arctic ice is melting.”

There’s one major problem: The same controversial study’s “lead author, NASA Goddard’s chief cryospheric scientist Jay Zwally…  predicted that melting would outpace increased snowfall in a decade or two” (emphasis added).


Higgins, for his part, was convinced of the pseudo-science. 

“Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) also said at the conference that the ‘deep state is real’ and that they’re ‘they’re certainly anti–fossil fuel,'” according to The Hill‘s Aris Folley.

“The Louisiana Republican also joked about wind and solar energy and said there are probably people speaking at a conference somewhere in the country about ‘how the future of the world’s engine will be provided by rainbow dust and unicorn milk,’” according to Folley. 


Last week in the nation’s Capitol, Rep. Higgins attended a conference hosted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, better known as FAIR, a recognized hate group of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

According to the advocacy group America’s Voices (emphasis added):

FAIR is an anti-immigrant hate group that was founded by white nationalist John Tanton, who helped create a network of anti-immigrant organizations — many of which are also hate groups. For this year’s “Hold Their Feet to the Fire”, an annual event, FAIR brought in anti-immigrant activists and far-right talk radio hosts from across the country to amplify their anti-immigrant messages. The conference also attracted a number of elected and appointed officials.


One of them was Ronald Vitiello, the acting director of ICE, who came to speake with far-right talk radio host Tom Roten. On the show, Vitiello defended the policy of separating families at the border and racistly characterized immigrants as the bearers of crime and disease.

Higgins was one of only ten elected official in attendance. 

For our other report on Rep. Higgins’ associations with militia groups, click here. 

 

Who’s In Charge?

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring the past two months, as a part of our ongoing investigative series “F#*ck This,” The Bayou Brief has exclusively reported on an officially declared but publicly undisclosed environmental emergency in DeSoto Parish, the heart of the Haynesville Shale. 

The Haynesville Shale is one of the country’s most profitable and productive natural gas formations. According to a report issued last week by the Energy Information Administration, the Haynesville Shale currently generates “8.5% of total U.S. dry gas production.”

“The initial productivity rate in the Haynesville region… has nearly doubled from 2010 to 2017,” the report states.

But the surge in production has resulted in a series of environmental catastrophes, which have been concealed from both the general public and, more troublingly, DeSoto Parish residents and property owners.

DeSoto Parish may not be the only area affected; there is evidence of increased gas pressure in the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, a major source of water for 60 counties in Texas and a large swath of northwest Louisiana.
   



[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast week, we posed the question, “Why hasn’t the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) put a temporary moratorium on drilling and fracking new wells in the sections of the Haynesville Shale directly adjacent to those where there’s documented evidence of bubbling and blowouts of water wells?”

The obvious answer is they don’t want to. Less obvious is why. 

When I met with DNR officials on August 23rd, one of my final questions concerned their investigation plan for the whole “DeSoto Parish matter,” and the wording which oh-so-politely asks the area well operators to voluntarily check for leaks or other problematic signs at their wells.

“Since this is classified as an ‘emergency,’ why don’t you demand they check every well in the area, as soon as possible.?” I asked.

“And if we don’t find the source, pathway, or multiple…,” Office of Conservation Environmental Division director Gary Snellgrove began. 

“We’re a team. And we here at DNR are open to suggestions from the oil and gas well operators as to how we can collectively work to find the best path forward. We’re open to discussion, as we are having with you.”

“Then what?” I prompted.

“We’ll look outside the nine-section area, and keep looking until we find the source,” Snellgrove finished.

But the problem clearly extends beyond the “nine-section area,” as documented in this series’ prior article, “Bubble, Bubble: This Gas Means Trouble.”

And that concept of “we’re a team” – meaning DNR’s Office of Conservation and the oil and gas industry collectively — was the subject of a scathing performance audit by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor in May of 2014.

The primary purpose of that audit was to answer the question: Has the Office of Conservation effectively regulated oil and gas wells?

The answer was a resounding “no.”

The audit notes, in its introduction, “Effective regulation is important for ensuring that oil and gas wells are operating in compliance with regulations and that environmental and public safety risks, such as contamination of ground and surface water, are identified and addressed.” (Italics mine.)

“Overall, we found that OC (the Office of Conservation) has not always effectively regulated oil and gas wells to ensure operators comply with regulations. OC does not sufficiently monitor wells to determine if they are in compliance with regulations, and does not always take enforcement action when it identifies noncompliance.”

Sound familiar?

The audit found 53% (26,828) of all wells in the state (50,960 total at the time) were not being routinely inspected once every three years as required. It also found 25% (12,702) of all wells hadn’t been inspected even once during the six years of records that were examined.

Specifically looking at the enforcement steps available to DNR’s Office of Conservation and how consistently and effectively they’d been utilized, the audit states “OC has not developed an effective enforcement process that consistently addresses noncompliance and deters operators from committing subsequent violations.”

When routine inspections were done and the operator failed, 15% were not served with compliance orders to correct the violation. OC’s response at the time was “Some of the violations were not major, and so a compliance order wasn’t warranted.”

For those that did warrant compliance orders, the Legislative Auditor found 16% were not reinspected to ensure the violations were corrected.

And for those that failed a re-inspection, an astonishing 55% received no penalty. The standard operating procedure was to just issue an extension instead. Of the operators failing at least one inspection, 63% failed multiple inspections, with ten operators having between 97 and 255 failed inspections during the six years of records reviewed.

DNR’s Office of Conservation gave a list of reasons for not living up to their inspection responsibilities, including budget cuts, loss of staff and hiring freezes, hurricanes, the Haynesville Shale boom, and the BP oil spill. Of course, the district with the highest percentage of wells not timely inspected (72%) or not inspected at all (40%) was Shreveport, which – you guessed it – covers all the Haynesville Shale activity, including DeSoto Parish.

Additionally, the audit spells out the course of action available to the Commissioner of Conservation when oil and/or gas well operators don’t comply with regulations, and thereby put the environment and public at risk.

State law, R.S. 30:4, allows the Commissioner enforcement powers through issuing compliance orders and issuing penalties of up to $5000 per day for violations. If those penalties are not paid, the Commissioner can suspend an operator’s ability to sell oil or gas. If that doesn’t fix the problem, the final and most extreme means of enforcement allows the Office of Conservation to take over and shut down all of a non-compliant operator’s wells.

One might think this threat should be a way to get Indigo Minerals to stop drilling and fracking new wells and instead put some resources into figuring out what is causing pressurization of the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer and blowouts of water wells in the Bethany-Longstreet area.

Yeah, right.

Though the 2014 audit doesn’t say so in so many words, it strongly implies that the Office of Conservation is entirely too cozy with the industry it is supposed to regulate, repeatedly remarking on consistent inconsistencies in enforcement.

For example, the report states: “Although regulations require that all producers submit well tests, OC allows operators of certain wells to be exempt” (Some 25,000 wells, according to the audit). And it states, “Although OC has the authority to impose civil penalties, it does so infrequently,” along with remarking, “DNR stated that it does not routinely seek recovery costs.”

In summation, the audit says, “OC’s informal enforcement process does not appear to deter subsequent noncompliance.”

Then-Commissioner of Conservation Jim Welsh’s official response to the 21 findings was weak:  “Conservation agrees with the recommendations, and will draft standard operating procedures to address this.”

Even if those “standard operating procedures” were drafted now – more than four years later – they have done little to alter the “we’re a team” culture within the Office of Conservation, as Snellgrove described their relationship with oil and gas operators.

If the buddy-buddy enforcement culture (or lack thereof) at OC wasn’t enough to assure Indigo Minerals that they’re immune to repercussions for this looming environmental disaster, then all you really have to do is – as they say – “follow the money.”

Haynesville Shale is the nation’s third most productive natural gas formation, and the Bethany-Longstreet area is the Haynesville Shale’s third most productive field overall, with 800 total active wells. 381 of those are operated by Indigo.

Yet the Office of Conservation doesn’t have the authority to only shut down Indigo’s wells in that one area. Instead, they’d have to shut them ALL down.

At the most recent inventory, Indigo had 1447 active wells in the state, and in 2017 was Louisiana’s #4 gas-producing operator overall: a total of 131,852,676 mcf of natural gas. (At an average price of $2.99 per mcf, that’s $394,239,501.24. And remember, Louisiana’s horizontal drilling incentive, enacted in 1994, rebates their state severance taxes on each fracked well for up to two years, while the well produces up to 90% of its total gas.)

Additionally, up until this year, horizontal wells were exempt from paying into the Oilfield Site Restoration Fund, which is what has been paying for the work being done around this particular emergency.

If state officials were to press the issue to the limits of their enforcement powers, it would bankrupt the entire Department of Natural Resources.

As required by law, Indigo has provided the maximum blanket security bond for its operations in Louisiana: $2.5 million. But the cost to the state for shutting down Indigo’s 1447 wells would be in excess of $200 million, not counting remediation of each well site. DNR’s total budget for the current fiscal year is $15,091,491.

Implementing such a shutdown and finding a way to pay for it would fall under the oversight of the Oilfield Site Restoration Commission (OSR). That ten-member board includes two representatives of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (Don Briggs and Steve Maley), and two representatives of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (Tyler Gray and Grant Black).

The minutes of the April 19, 2018 OSR Commission meeting – when that board was notified about the on-going emergency in DeSoto Parish – show that Gray, who is also LMOGA’s chief counsel, insisted LOGA and LMOGA working with OC could handle this and “protect the environment.” While acknowledging that the situation is “problematic” and “complicated,” they were also insistent that it is “controlled.”

But what if officials of this petro-colonial state actually took to heart what Louisiana’s Constitution requires and decided to hold Indigo accountable? “The natural resources of the state, including air and water, and the healthful, scenic, historic, and aesthetic quality of the environment shall be protected, conserved, and replenished insofar as possible and consistent with the health, safety, and welfare of the people.” 

It may be inconvenient for the company, but they’ll just file bankruptcy and re-form as a new LLC. With a new name comes a “clean record” with Louisiana regulators.

Meanwhile, there’s still gas pressure in the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, and it’s far from “drinking water safe.”

A look at the final(-ish) Saints 53-man roster

I was hoping to take a look at the Saints’ final 53-man roster this week, as part of the lead-in to the season opener against Tampa Bay, but as the team has been shuffling the roster this week even after final cutdowns, we’re going to look at a few more than the final 53 players. We’ll also skip past the very obvious positions; some of them will be exactly the same as I predicted last time around. I do need to take a moment, though, to express my frustration with this year’s draft. Not only did the Saints give up their 2019 first-round pick to move up for Marcus Davenport, but of their six remaining picks, only two made the active roster. This is deeply concerning given the players the team could have selected there, as well as their approach to the players they did select. As I mentioned at the time, Rick Leonard was regarded as undraftable by many teams; to use a fourth-round pick on a project who couldn’t even cut the 53-man roster is unacceptable. That pick could have been used– as it was in my mock draft— on Shaquem Griffin, who ended up going to the Seattle Seahawks in the fifth round and will be starting for them on opening day at linebacker. If they wanted more pass-rushing help, this could have been a good time to take a chance on Josh Sweat or Maurice Hurst, first-round talents who fell due to injury or health concerns. Natrell Jamerson mostly played safety in college, and Kamrin Moore mostly played cornerback. The Saints tried to move Jamerson to cornerback and Moore to safety. Neither one stuck; they were both claimed by other teams after the Saints cut them (Jamerson by the Texans, Moore by the Giants), so their chances of making the Saints’ roster are finished. This is, all things considered, a very disappointing use of resources. If you don’t have the time or roster room to develop a player you’re trying to switch to a new position, don’t draft him. And if you’re that intent on moving players in the first place… it might be time to reconsider your approach. (Jaylen Samuels, a hybrid halfback/tight end, went to the Steelers one pick after Jamerson; he seems like the kind of player built for Sean Payton’s offensive creativity.) Boston Scott, on the other hand, looked every bit as good as I hoped he would, and even made the initial 53-man cut. He was, however, released this week to make room for another offensive lineman; he did clear waivers to join the practice squad, and I expect he’ll be called up again at some point. Still, though: That’s four draft picks between rounds 4-6 that did not make the active roster at all, while other teams are finding contributors or even starters. That’s not a good way to build a team. I increasingly worry that the Saints’ 2017 draft was even more a product of luck than I previously expected. (Of course, it had to be to some degree– Marshon Lattimore was a top-3 prospect in the draft and shouldn’t have been available at #11; Ryan Ramczyk wasn’t even the original pick at #32. Still, though, results like this suggest that maybe a breakthrough in talent evaluation by Jeff Ireland wasn’t the real cause of the team’s success.) Onward to the actual roster, as well as a few notes on how it still might yet change: QUARTERBACK Drew Brees, Teddy Bridgewater, Taysom Hill Exactly as predicted. (Not a real challenge after the Bridgewater trade.) RUNNING BACK / FULLBACK Alvin Kamara, Mike Gillislee, Zach Line (FB) also relevant: Mark Ingram, Boston Scott, Jonathan Williams The Saints decided they weren’t happy with their backups behind Ingram (currently suspended) and Kamara, so while they retained Scott on the initial 53-man roster, they cut Williams. Eventually, they signed Gillislee after he was let go by the Patriots. Trey Edmunds was also on the roster but released to make room for the offensive line moves; Pittsburgh claimed him (where he’ll be joining brother and first-round pick at safety Terrell), so he won’t be coming back. It’s inconceivable that the team would go into a regular-season game with only two tailbacks on roster, though, so I’d expect them to promote Scott or Williams again before Sunday, depending on what they do at offensive line. WIDE RECEIVER Michael Thomas, Ted Ginn, Cameron Meredith, Tre’Quan Smith, Tommylee Lewis, Austin Carr Despite all the seeming indicators that Brandon Tate had won the return job, I (and many others) were wrong. Lewis and Carr both made the team, which suggests the Saints see more long-term potential for them that justifies keeping them around. (Lewis seems like he’ll get first crack at return duties.) TIGHT END Ben Watson, Josh Hill, Dan Arnold I have to admit I slept on Arnold a bit this preseason. The team seems to like his long-term potential, and as a former wide receiver, he could eventually be a serious pass-catching threat for the team. (That’s him in the header photo.) Watson and Hill were clear choices. OFFENSIVE LINE First cut: Terron Armstead, Andrus Peat, Max Unger, Larry Warford, Ryan Ramczyk, Jermon Bushrod, Will Clapp, Cameron Tom Since added: Josh LeRibeus, Michael Ola I was right that Tom would make the team over LeRibeus; I was wrong that the Saints’ draft investment in Leonard would guarantee him a roster spot. Andrus Peat and Jermon Bushrod both missed some practices this week, which is the most likely explanation for the signings of LeRibeus and Ola. It’s not yet clear whether Peat and Bushrod will be healthy enough to go Sunday (though Bushrod’s missed practice was not injury related according to the report). I suspect that we’ll find out more on Saturday; one of the two recently signed linemen (or even Bushrod) will be released to give the team nine for Sunday, and one of the running backs (Scott or Williams; I’d guess Scott given that Williams and Gillislee’s skill sets overlap more) will be promoted back to the 53-man roster. DEFENSIVE LINE Cameron Jordan, Sheldon Rankins, Tyeler Davison, Alex Okafor, Marcus Davenport, Trey Hendrickson, David Onyemata, Mitchell Loewen, Taylor Stallworth No real surprises here. The most interesting wrinkle is that the Saints were saved a difficult decision at the bottom of the roster when the Browns offered them a seventh-round pick for Devaroe Lawrence. Getting a pick for an undrafted free agent is always nice, and Stallworth played well enough that the Saints were comfortable keeping him instead. LINEBACKER Demario Davis, A.J. Klein, Alex Anzalone, Manti Te’o, Craig Robertson Nate Stupar made the initial 53-man cut but was released when the Saints signed Gillislee. They’d hoped to find a trade partner but had no luck. Though he’s a valuable special teamer, the Saints obviously feel they can make that up with their talent at other positions. DEFENSIVE BACK Marshon Lattimore, Marcus Williams, Kurt Coleman, Ken Crawley, Patrick Robinson, Vonn Bell, P.J. Williams, Arthur Maulet, Justin Hardee, Chris Banjo, J.T. Gray As discussed earlier, neither Jamerson nor Moore made the team. The team did keep eleven defensive backs, which I thought was a possibility but which still seemed like a long shot. P.J. Williams made the team in a bit of a surprise; presumably he’ll be the next man up at outside corner if Lattimore or Crawley is hurt. The final four on the roster are important special teams players who may also find their way on the field for defensive snaps. J.T. Gray was completely off my radar as an undrafted free agent at a position where the team had significant depth both in the veteran category and in drafted rookies, but his strong special-teams play earned him a roster spot. Whether he finds more playing time than that remains to be seen. SPECIALISTS Thomas Morstead, Wil Lutz, Zach Wood No surprises or changes here; this unit is as stable as it’s ever been during the Payton era. The Saints kick off Sunday at home against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers– minus suspended quarterback Jameis Winston– as 9.5-point favorites. Hopefully next week we’ll have a little bit of an in-depth look at someone who stood out in the Saints’ victory. (And the team will have some explaining to do if they don’t win.)

Introducing PetroState

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]

n 1964, nearly a century after it was founded, the Catholic church in tiny Taft, Louisiana- Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary- moved out of town. Their new location was just three and a half miles down the Mississippi River- in between Hahnville and Flaggville, hamlets of St. Charles Parish and still solidly inside the boundaries of an area now infamously referred to as “Cancer Alley.”   

Three years after Holy Rosary’s departure, Taft- which was named after attorney, news editor, and owner of both the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, Charles Phelps Taft, brother of the former U.S. President and Chief Justice- lost its post office.

In order to provide a central repository for resources and our investigative reporting on environmental justice and Louisiana’s mercurial, corrupt, and dysfunctional relationship with the energy industry, we are proud to introduce PetroState.

Within the next few weeks, PetroState will also operate as its own stand-alone website, as a special feature of The Bayou Brief.  

We believe, without question, that environmental degradation presents the single largest existential threat to the people of Louisiana, a stark reality that far too few in public office are willing to acknowledge. 

Eight years ago, Steven Mufson of The Washington Post declared Louisiana as “America’s petro-state.”

“Long before the oil spill, the state’s embrace of the petroleum industry cast it under what economists call ‘the resource curse’: the paradox that countries rich in minerals or petroleum tend to grow more slowly and have lower living standards than other nations,” Mufson wrote. “Simply put, Louisiana is the closest thing America has to a petro-state.”

“Instead of blessing Louisiana with prosperity, the oil industry fostered dependency, corruption and an indifference to environmental damage. Our Cajun sheikdom’s oil and gas riches — like those of the Niger Delta, the Orinoco belt in Venezuela and the Iraqi marshes — also stunted its development, leaving it far behind states with fewer natural resources,” Mufson observed.

“Oil riches didn’t create these problems, of course, but it is striking that they didn’t ameliorate them,” he explained. ‘We’ve always been a plantation state,’ said Oliver Houck, an environmental law professor at Tulane University. ‘What oil and gas did is replace the agricultural plantation culture with an oil and gas plantation culture.'” 

Prof. Houck is right, and 35 miles up the road from Tulane, there is a perfect example. 

TAFT, LOUISIANA


The original location of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary in Taft, Louisiana

Today, Taft, which had once been home to nearly 700 people and had been built by dairy and sugarcane farmers, is largely a memory, a place that only still appears on maps because no one has the heart to correct the mapmakers. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Taft had a population of zero, but a decade later, the Bureau revealed as astonishing turnaround, though it is almost certainly the result of a more generous reading of the town’s borders.

Taft’s current population, the federal government asserts, is 63, all of whom are white and only three of whom are over 65.

The average age in Taft is around 26. This isn’t a place that one comes to retire.

Over the span of the past half century, Taft has been transformed into a petrochemical dystopia. St. Charles Parish’s website fills in some important details:

The Colonial Dairy opened in 1935 in Taft and was at one point one of the largest in Louisiana. That property was sold in the early 1960s to Hooker Chemical….

Union Carbide built their Taft facility in 1966, and added their Star plant (located on the old Star Plantation site) in 1980. While initial construction was going on, a Star Plantation house was used as Union Carbide’s first office building.

Hooker Chemical (which was bought by Occidental Chemical in 1968 and changed the name officially in 1982) likewise built on the old Colonial Dairy plant site in 1966.

IMC-Argico began in the mid-1960s as American Phosphate, and Witco was established in the laste 1960s on property bought from Carbide. Shell Chemical – Star Plant (now known as Montell Polyolefins) was acquired from Witco in 1977. 

Industry, however, both enriched the parish and depleted Taft for land, transforming an area dominated by sugar cane and dairy farming into one of the highest concentrations of industry for the acreage in the state.

But Dow Chemical dominates the town more than anything else.

An aerial map of Taft, Louisiana

Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary may have moved into a new building in nearby Hahnville, but the old cemetery still sits where it always had.

It’s an eight minute walk between Holy Rosary Cemetery and Dow Chemical Company.


“It retains its cemetery in the original location, virtually surrounded by Dow pipelines,” the parish website explains (emphasis added).



Arguably, no one has depicted the cruel and surreal landscape of Cancer Alley better than the writer and producer Nic Pizzolatto, both in his debut novel Gavelston and, particularly, in the first season of his acclaimed television hit, True Detective.

(Full disclosure: I consider Nic to be a family friend, and his younger brother Nath is The Bayou Brief‘s Sports Editor). 

“I think True Detective is portraying a world where the weak (physically or economically) are lost, ground under by perfidious wheels that lie somewhere behind the visible, wheels powered by greed, perversity, and irrational belief systems, and these lost souls dwell on an exhausted frontier, a fractured coastline beleaguered by industrial pollution and detritus, slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico,” Nic explained in a 2014 interview with BuzzFeed. “There’s a sense here that the apocalypse already happened. And in places like this, where there’s little economy and inadequate education, women and children are the first to suffer, by and large.” 

In his 2001 book Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom, Dr. Brian Black uses another term to characterize the oil fields of rural Pennsylvania: “a sacrificial landscape.” 

“Underlying Black’s analysis of these cultural and environmental transformations is the notion that the meaning of the places we inhabit has increasingly become a product of national forces rather than the organic outgrowth of an intimate, local sense of place,” Prof. Robert Rakoff writes in a review of the book.  

Richard Misrach, Trailer Home and Natural Gas Tanks, Good Hope Street, Norco, Louisiana, 1998, from Petrochemical America.
Trailer Home and Natural Gas Tanks, Good Hope Street, Norco, Louisiana, 1998, from Petrochemical America, photographs by Richard Misrach, Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff (Aperture 2012)

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]uey P. Long, the Kingfish, “launched his political career by waging war on the big oil companies, especially what he called Standard Oil’s ‘invisible empire,'” The Post‘s Mufson reminds us. 

Eventually, Standard Oil was dissolved into nearly three dozen different companies, and, as a result and perhaps ironically, the company’s dissolution made its founder, John D. Rockefeller, the richest man on the planet. 

In truth, the invisible empire never actually went away; it merely took on different names. 

Big Oil is commonly considered as comprising the world’s top six, publicly-traded (and not state-owned) oil and gas companies, the so-called “supermajors.”

According to a June 2018 report by Forbes, those companies include:

  • Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands), valued at $306.5 billion. Shell owns and operates two major facilities in Louisiana, the Geismer Chemical Plant in Ascension Parish and an oil and gas refinery in Convent, Louisiana.   
  • Exxon-Mobil (USA), valued at $344 billion. Exxon is one of Louisiana’s largest private-sector employers, largely in the metro Baton Rouge area, where it owns and operates a major plant.
  • Chevron (USA), valued at $244.1 billion. Chevron owns and operates a manufacturing plant in Belle Chasse, Louisiana and is the majority owner and operator of the Anchor Field, a deepwater drilling area located approximately 140 miles off of the Louisiana coast. 
  • Total (France), valued at $168 billion. Total owns and operates the world’s largest polystyrene plant, which is located in Carville, Louisiana, and it is a significant investor in North Louisiana’s natural gas industry. 
  • BP (UK), valued at $156 billion. Suffice it to say, Louisiana has a complicated relationship with BP. 
  • Philips 66 (USA), valued at $54.9 billion. Phillips owns two major refineries in Louisiana- one in Belle Chasse that processes light crude oil and another in Lake Charles that processes heavy crude oil. 

It may seem remarkable that six of the largest and most profitable companies in the world all have a significant presence in a state that US News and World Report recently ranked as the worst in the entire country. 

But what is more astonishing and much more problematic: For the better part of the past century, our elected officials have routinely- almost pathologically- put the financial interests of the industry above the best interests of the public.

Earlier this week, Louisiana’s state Attorney General, Jeff Landry, argued that he did not have the legal authority to investigate allegations of child sexual abuse against the Catholic Church. Three days before, Landry made a similarly outlandish argument about litigation against negligent oil and gas companies.

Any threat, including misguided lawsuits, that endangers a manufacturing industry employing one in seven Louisiana workers must be opposed,”  he wrote (emphasis added). 

His two positions are entirely consistent with one another, even though they both suggest a profound misunderstanding of the justice system, the rule of law, and- with respect to his comments on opposing “any” thing he perceives to be a threat to a mega-trillion dollar industry, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (specifically Rule 12(b)(6)).  


It is difficult to know how Louisiana could be even more accommodating to the petrochemical industry: We have allowed them to plunder and pillage our resources for generations and pathetically acquiesced as they shipped out their profits to Houston and Dallas and London; we bargained away the future of our coast in exchange for a few thousand jobs, working for them

(Incidentally, industry apologists claim that oil and gas employs more than 300,000 Louisianians- which is where Landry’s talking point about one in seven Louisiana workers comes from. It’s utter nonsense. All told, the entire industry employs approximately 44,000 people in Louisiana, only 8,000 more than the state’s single largest private employer, Wal-Mart).  

Oh, and let’s not forget: We literally let a chemical company build a plant around a 140 year old cemetery, the final resting place of more than 1,500 people. 


A final note about Taft, Louisiana and the legacy of its namesake, Charles Phelps Taft: His grandson David married a woman named Louise Hale Harkness. Louise was the granddaughter of Daniel Harkness. 

Daniel Harkness was one of the founders of Standard Oil, along with the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller. 


    

Book Review | Landfall by Greg Meffert

We missed having Greg Meffert a.k.a. “Muppet” (a nickname coined by the blogger Jason Brad Berry of American Zombie) to kick around. For those unfamiliar, Meffert was, notoriously, former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s righthand man and tech-fixer whose crooked antics landed himself, his former business partner, and his boss in the slammer. The former mayor, inmate number 32751-034, is still languishing in a low-security federal prison in Texarkana, where he will likely remain until at least May 25, 2023, two weeks before his 67th birthday. Meffert, however, was freed from federal custody not long ago, after serving thirty months for bribery. He had pleaded guilty to receiving $860,000 in bribes when he served as Nagin’s Chief Technology Officer, a reward for steering more than $4 million in city contracts to a company owned by Mark St. Pierre. He avoided a much harsher sentence by flipping on both St. Pierre and his old boss. At his sentencing hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Coman called Meffert a “once-in-a-decade cooperating witness.” (St. Pierre ultimately also became a cooperating witness against Nagin and had his 17 year sentence reduced to 5 years). What does a freed fixer do after being sprung from jail? Write his memoirs and then give interviews to two of the reporters who helped nail him: Gordon Russell of The Advocate and David Hammer of WWL. Meffert has bills to pay and scores to settle, after all.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap] effert’s book is called Landfall, and it landed with a thud in my lap. It’s self-published and appears to be self-edited as well (similar to Nagin’s self-published memoir Katrina’s Secrets). Meffert has a hard time keeping his story straight; at times, he admits to responsibility and criminal liability, at other times, he blames everyone but himself. He’s as bad a buck-passer as he was a fixer. “It’s hard to say how much I infected Ray Nagin and how much Ray infected me,” he writes in the book’s opening pages. The tone of the book is inconsistent and off-putting, a bizarre combination of braggadocio and self-pity. Meffert fancies himself a funny man. He spends much of the book trying to endear himself to readers with attempts at humor. Muppet’s comedic style, such as it is, is to throw jokes at the wall and hope that they stick. Only a few jokes make landfall: Most of Meffert’s one-liners might work in a bar but not on the printed page. He does not have a future as comedy writer. Meffert believes that he’s a fascinating character, sort of an every-nerd made good. He spends the first 60+ pages of Landfall bragging about his business success and his ability to recover from a hangover, which IDs him as a Tulane graduate. “That’s the story I want to tell here,” Meffert explains in the book’s prologue, “(A) mayonaisse kid from a Texas suburb who ends up the notorious confidant to a celebrity mayor in the midst of the worst urban disaster in the country’s history.” In addition to making me queasy, the combination nearly sinks the beginning of the book. I impatiently awaited the first real appearance of C. Ray Nagin. It did not come until page 65 in a chapter titled “Second Coming.” I am not making this up.

Meffert was smitten with C. Ray upon first meeting him. I almost expected him to offer to shave, wax, and shine Hizzoner’s bald pate. He does, however, overstate the extent to which New Orleans fell in love with Nagin in 2002. The white business establishment glommed on to him: they recognized him as a hustler who would do their bidding as long as they allowed him to shimmy up the greasy pole of success. I held my nose and voted for him in 2002 because Dollar Bill Jefferson was pulling the strings on his opponent’s campaign, and I knew they’d steal everything in sight. It turns out that Team Nagin did it instead. Additionally, I’ve never been enamored of the whole “I’ll run government like a business” shtick. It did not work locally, and it’s failing catastrophically on the national level. Heckuva job, Trumpy. Meffert spends part of the book bragging about his accomplishments as Chief Technology Officer. To be fair, the city did make some progress on the digital front under Meffert. But he spends this part of the book settling scores with enemies and speaking contemptuously about city employees, the vast majority of whom are African-American. I rarely use the term “white privilege,” but to paraphrase Bob Marley “if the cap fit, let him wear it.” The best part of Landfall is Meffert’s account of his experiences during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood. I’m a sucker for such stories, and Meffert’s don’t disappoint, even if he’s an unreliable narrator. He admits to doing a bit of looting to help supply his City Hall cohort in their hide-out at the Downtown Hyatt. There was much talk back then of Beer Looter Dude, Meffert was Printer Looter Dude. He even claims to have cussed out Vice President Cheney, but I’m skeptical about that story. It sounds like wishful thinking to me. Despite Meffert’s worshipful tone, Nagin comes off badly when they were hunkered down after the storm. C. Ray insisted on staying in a penthouse crib on the 27th floor of a building without power. He insisted that all and sundry climb the stairs for a Mayoral audience. He also took a vacation at the height of the crisis thereby earning himself the nickname, Dallas Ray. Heckuva job, Ray Ray. I met C. Ray Nagin several times when he was in office. I was a neighborhood leader and attended meetings with him both pre and post-K. I was unimpressed. He was charming, glib, and deeply shallow. He may have been the vainest man I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him stride through a hotel lobby and pause to primp in front of a mirror or even, on one memorable occasion, a chrome elevator. I am not making this up. Meffert is less forthcoming about the series of scandals that led to his downfall. He was careless, greedy, and stupid in dealing with contractors hoping to buy access to Mayor Nagin. He’s more interested in telling the story of how he obtained tickets to the Saints-Bears Championship Game after the 2007 season. It was on that flight that Meffert hooked C. Ray up with Frank Fradella who, along with Meffert, testified against Nagin at his trial on corruption charges. Meffert is bitter about being questioned by the FBI as if he were a common criminal. Sorry, dude, that’s what you were. He also has a weird idea that personal animus drove prosecutors Bob and Jan Mann to go after him. Wrong. Muppet was a greedy and corrupt piece of shit who was stupid enough to peripherally involve his wife, Linda, in his crimes. Meffert has gotten more loyalty than he deserves from his wife. She refused to flip on him but the feds were able to leverage charges against her to get Meffert to flip like an acrobat on Nagin. Meffert’s stint as the star witness at Nagin’s 2014 trial was unintentionally funny as I described in a blog post at the time:
Meffert rolled over on his former boss/hero a few years back and ended his life as C. Ray’s puppet, which was one reason the NOLA blogger Dambala dubbed him Muppet. Muppet was awestruck by C. Ray’s hipster douchebaggery and jumped like a bug-eyed frog every time his master’s voice told him to. Muppet’s time on the witness stand was more entertaining than a barrel of crazy monkeys as is best documented by this tweet by the aforementioned mild-mannered Journalistic bulldog, Gordon Russell: Pin msg from Meffert to Nagin: “Gordon Russell up my ass and in my shit 24/7.” #nagintrial — Gordon Russell (@GordonRussell1) January 31, 2014 and this instant classic: Meffert: “As things started to come out, I got increasingly worried. It was all kind of Velcroing to me.” #nagintrial — Gordon Russell (@GordonRussell1) January 31, 2014 Velcroing is a new concept to me and a totally preposterous one, but this trial has so many farcical elements that it’s hard to pick and choose.
Ray Nagin made the mistake of testifying at his trial, which, in addition to Meffert’s testimony, is why he was convicted and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Meffert, of course, received a reduced sentence of thirty months for testifying against the man who once called him an “Undercover Brother.” I am not making this up. One of Meffert’s few redeeming characteristics is his love of the New Orleans Saints. He sat in on most Saints related meetings at City Hall because Nagin was not a football fan; a rarity in football crazed New Orleans. I enjoyed Meffert’s account of meeting with then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue after the storm. The Commissioner deployed his lawyerly skills and let the Mayor’s team know with a wink and a nod that the NFL would not let Tom Benson move the team to San Antonio. People have forgotten how close that came to happening. Landfall is only worth reading if you’re deeply interested in New Orleans politics, and what happened after Katrina and the Federal Flood. If that’s the case, wading through the muck of Meffert’s lousy prose, bragging, and endless self-pity is worth it. I suggest you wear some shrimp boots and bring along your BS detector.

Bubble, Bubble: This Gas Means Trouble

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s previously reported here, my meeting with officials from the Department of Natural Resources’ Office of Conservation nearly two weeks ago on the “DeSoto Parish matter” provided some question responses indicating Environmental Division director Gary Snellgrove is being – publicly, at least – less than candid about the situation. One of my last questions to them, in fact, elicited no answer at all. “Since you’ve been getting reports of water well blowouts and bubbling in this area of the Bethany-Longstreet tract since at least 2014, has anyone compared those reports to the dates of horizontal well fracks and completions in the area to see if there’s some pattern?” Conservation’s chief counsel John Adams, Assistant Commissioner Gary Ross and Engineering Director Brent Campbell each looked startled by the suggestion. Commissioner Richard Ieyoub put his hands on his desk, leaned forward, looking to each in turn. Eyebrows were raised, shoulders shrugged, and ultimately all eyes turned to Environmental Division Director Gary Snellgrove. He folded his arms, and with what appeared to me to be a warning glare, shook his head slowly from right to left. Was that a no, or a “no comment”?, I wondered. What has really been going on in DeSoto Parish’s Bethany-Longstreet area – and for how long? Based on DNR’s presentation to GOHSEP (Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness) and the area’s drilling operators this past spring, they’ve been focusing on Sections 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28 of 13N, 15W as the “area of concern.” (The lawsuit filed in June also includes plaintiffs from Sections 20, 29, 33, and 34.) DNR’s account shows the first incident of a pressurized water well in Section 26, where, in July 2014, drilling operator XTO “plugged and abandoned” (P&A) well #31-9595Z “due to the presence of gas”. Then, in December 2015, Indigo had to do a P&A on rig supply well #31-9660Z in Section 22, also due to the presence of gas. One year later, in December 2016, Indigo had to dig a “relief” well in Section 22, to vent gas pressure in the Carizzo-Wilcox aquifer. This relief well was adjacent to a pair of Haynesville Shale wells (#249866 and 249867) Indigo had just begun drilling the previous month (Nov. 2016). Yet according to reports filed by DNR’s field agent, there was a lot more to it than that. They found gas was pressurizing the aquifer, and on 12-20-2016, DNR officially notified the Keatchie Water System to monitor its public water supply well located 500 feet from the new gas well site. The relief well dug to vent the gas flowed as expected, at first, but a day later, the pressure dropped. Left wide open, it died the next day. Two days later it began flowing again, then sputtered out within 4 hours. Then it started flowing again, but with drilling mud, not water. Meanwhile, water and gas bubbles were appearing around the gas well drilling pad. Going back to the “official” presentation to GOHSEP, DNR’s document says the next incident occurred in April 2017. An Indigo crew installing a pipeline in Section 28 reported a previously plugged and abandoned water well blowing water and gas in the woods visible from the pipeline right-of-way. A mile to the west, in Section 29, Indigo was completing fracking on a pair of wells, #249878 and #249879. Three months later – in July 2017 – a DNR inspector notes the same water well (#31-5054Z) had blown its cap, and was geysering water, gas and sand (a notable fracking component) into the air, leaving a crust on the surrounding trees. Meanwhile, Indigo was actively blowing open the shale less than a mile northeast, and four miles underground, fracking well #249867 with its explosively pressurized mix of water, chemicals and sand, according to the official records for that particular well. In September 2017, DNR issued the first emergency declaration, which they expanded the following month as bubbling was reported at another plugged and abandoned water well in section 28. Meanwhile, Indigo was completing its other fracked well to the northeast, #249866, less than a mile away. Emails from that time frame show there was some real confusion at DNR headquarters in Baton Rouge. What was the serial number of the latest water well? Was it #31-5005Z, #31-5051Z, or #31-5055Z? DNR’s Matt Simon was also emailing back and forth with Indigo’s senior drilling engineer Shara Myers, with his initial missive to her on 10-19-2017 stating, “I am the current Engineer Manager for Louisiana’s Oilfield Site Restoration. I have an emergency on my hands. – a rig supply well which is blowing out of control in the area. I believe you are aware of it. Do you have time to discuss how you went about controlling the well Indigo spudded in recently? I understand you had to drill a directional well to kill it.” In November, the DNR emergency contractor drills four relief wells around the initial rig supply well blowout site, and a 5th relief well adjacent to the second. But a pond between the two locations is now bubbling up gas, and each time it rains, bubbles appear along a pipeline right-of-way between the two sites. And the second rig supply well is actually described as “boiling.” Meanwhile, in the section one mile north of these problems, Comstock Oil and Gas was completing a pair of fracked Haynesville Shale wells, #250110 and #250254. It’s also important to note here that all of the horizontal drilling out from the base of the vertical portion of Haynesville Shale wells is required to run north to south, or vice-versa. Problems continue in Section 28 in February of this year, with bubbling reported at a non-Haynesville Shale well operated by Indigo. There’s bubbling all over the surface of the well pad for #229067. The well, which pulls gas from the Hosston formation “only” 1.6 miles underground, had been operating without incident since 2004. Less than a mile due east, in Section 27, two other wells – #215968 in the Hosston, and #158546, one mile down in the Rodessa formation – are bubbling around their respective well pads, too. This happens as, in Section 33, due south of Section 28, and southeast of Section 27, Indigo is completing the horizontal drilling portion of four Haynesville Shale wells: #250494, #250495, #250496, and #250497. The actual fracking of these four wells will take place in June. That’s when a crack — what Gary Snellgrove described as “a crevice six inches wide” — opened up in Section 28, and “gurgling” could be heard coming from underground. They have subsequently “placed a vent pipe in the biggest part.” And in Section 21, due north of this, Indigo is currently drilling #251045 and #251046 into the Haynesville Shale. Coincidental? Possibly. Yet consider how many vertical holes of varying depths have been drilled deep into the earth of DeSoto Parish to tap its underlying water, oil and gas fields. Take Section 28, for example: in this one square mile, there are 10 water wells, and 12 gas wells, ranging from 5500 to more than 16-thousand feet deep. Add the pressures of fracking fluids cracking open the layers of shale, and the chances of fissures forming – essentially man-made faults – are not outside the realm of possibility. And, in fact, as part of DNR’s presentation to the area drilling operators last spring, the state agency specifically asked them: “Do you have any subsurface geologic maps? Additionally, do you know of any faults or shear zones in this area?” That raises another question. Why hasn’t DNR put even a temporary moratorium on drilling and fracking new Haynesville Shale wells in all the sections directly adjacent to those where there’s bubbling and blowouts of water wells? The likely answer to that is the topic of our next report.

Saints 53-man roster prediction

The final preseason game has been played; the team’s gotten every chance it’s going to get it to look at players. Cutdown time is Saturday, 3 PM Central. There’s always a chance New Orleans picks up a player from another team’s cuts– they did it with Austin Carr last year; Rafael Bush landed in New Orleans for a four-year stint this way– but trying to predict something like that seems well out of my purview. Without further ado, my semi-informed 53-man roster prediction: QUARTERBACK (3) Drew Brees, Teddy Bridgewater, Taysom Hill Brees is a no-brainer, and Bridgewater joins him there after Wednesday’s trade, making Tom Savage expendable. Hill gets the third QB spot largely because of his value on special teams. (At one point I would’ve called him a developmental QB for the future, but Bridgewater is more than two years younger than him, despite entering the league three years earlier.) RUNNING BACK (3) Alvin Kamara, Boston Scott, Jonathan Williams All indicators are that Williams has seized the lead to replace Mark Ingram during the latter’s suspension. (Ingram will of course make the team, but while he’s suspended, he won’t count toward the 53-man roster.) Kamara will be the lead back in Ingram’s absence, and Scott has shown enough to at least make the roster, perhaps even to get some change-of-pace work during the season. FULLBACK (2) Zach Line, Trey Edmunds Edmunds is now listed as a fullback, although his main role is special teams anyway. It’s difficult to picture the team carrying two fullbacks, but Line’s role is entirely different from Edmunds’. (It is possible Edmunds is cut if the team feels like it can replace his special teams production, but he was one of the top performers for the unit last year.) WIDE RECEIVER (5) Michael Thomas, Ted Ginn, Cameron Meredith, Tre’Quan Smith, Brandon Tate In case you didn’t hear, Cameron Meredith is back: The top four receivers were never in doubt here. Tate seems to have locked up the return man job and so he gets the last spot. It’s just a numbers game for Austin Carr and Tommylee Lewis, unfortunately. TIGHT END (3) Ben Watson, Josh Hill, Garrett Griffin I was tempted to go with only two tight ends to balance having two fullbacks, but having three tight ends with varying skill sets comes up surprisingly often in the Saints’ offense. Michael Hoomanawanui was the blocking tight end standout for a long time, but he’s been injured all preseason and the beat writers seem to think his roster spot is in jeopardy. Undrafted rookie Deon Yelder was a popular dark-horse candidate to make the team, though he’s had a quiet preseason. Griffin seems like the most likely choice. OFFENSIVE LINE (9) Terron Armstead, Andrus Peat, Max Unger, Larry Warford, Ryan Ramczyk, Jermon Bushrod, Rick Leonard, Will Clapp, Cameron Tom The projected starting five returns. Bushrod takes Senio Kelemete’s spot as the versatile sixth lineman. Rick Leonard has received some positive early reviews– a relief for those of us wondering how he became the Saints’ fourth-round pick– but he would make the team even if he hadn’t; most teams won’t put a high draft pick out there to be claimed by another team even if the player struggles or is a redshirt project. Clapp, the seventh-rounder, makes the team on merit, having looked well enough at center and guard in preseason to earn a backup role. The last spot came to Tom and Josh LeRibeus; the latter is more valuable now in how the team occasionally uses him as a sixth lineman, but Tom’s potential upside as a future starting center makes him the more valuable player to hold, with Bushrod being a likely candidate for the Saints’ jumbo package. DEFENSIVE LINE (9) Cameron Jordan, Alex Okafor, Sheldon Rankins, David Onyemata, Tyeler Davison, Marcus Davenport, Trey Hendrickson, Mitchell Loewen, Devaroe Lawrence The top seven were locks. (The top-six snap-getters along the defensive line in 2017, plus a first-round draft pick.) Those final spots were up for grabs in a camp competition, and Loewen (who likely would’ve made the final 53 last year had he not suffered an injury at the end of preseason) and Lawrence have been the reported standouts. (The team could even go with eight linemen, in theory.) Other possibilities include 2017 sixth-rounder Al-Quadin Muhammad (a likely practice squad candidate), undrafted rookie tackle Taylor Stallworth, or Jay Bromley, a third-round pick of the Giants in 2014 who never lived up to his draft position. LINEBACKER (6) Demario Davis, Alex Anzalone, A.J. Klein, Manti Te’o, Craig Robertson, Nathan Stupar Davis and Anzalone are the obvious locks. Klein hasn’t looked very good this preseason and might even be a trade candidate, but given Anzalone’s injury history, may be a valuable player to have around to fill in if Anzalone gets hurt. Te’o performed better than expected when injuries forced him into a bigger role last year. Robertson and Stupar are core special teamers, and Robertson has proven he can fill in capably enough when injuries or poor performance warrant it. (Stupar’s had quite the preseason, too.) Jayrone Elliott is a long shot. I’m not sure whether to slot Hau’oli Kikaha at defensive end or linebacker, and that sort of speaks to the problem with the 2015 second-round pick: He may be versatile, but it’s not clear that he does anything in particular well enough to justify keeping him. DEFENSIVE BACK (10) Marshon Lattimore, Marcus Williams, Kurt Coleman, Ken Crawley, Patrick Robinson, Vonn Bell, Natrell Jamerson, Chris Banjo, Justin Hardee, Arthur Maulet Much as I didn’t want the team to cut a draft pick, I just couldn’t find room for Kamrin Moore. The team certainly could make that room if they so wanted by dropping to eight players on the defensive line, or dropping a fullback or tight end. You can find most of my reasoning in the article I wrote about the position. I would like to single out The Other Marcus Williams, who has actually performed quite well since signing with the team and has a reasonable shot of making the roster. I just couldn’t figure out who the right cut would be– Lattimore, Crawley, Robinson, and Jamerson definitely aren’t going anywhere, and Hardee and Maulet have made too many plays in the preseason and on special teams last year to want to let them go. (That said, The Other Marcus Williams or Moore might make the team over Maulet.) P.J. Williams, like Kikaha, is another high pick from 2015 that just doesn’t seem to have a role on this squad. SPECIAL TEAMS (3) Thomas Morstead, Wil Lutz, Zach Wood No surprises here. Morstead returns as the second-longest tenured Saint behind Brees. Lutz enters his third year with the team and has the leg strength and accuracy to finally give the Saints some stability at the position. Wood was a late signing last year after Jon Dorenbos, the intended long snapper acquired in a trade with Philadelphia, was diagnosed with a heart condition that required surgery and forced him to retire just three days before the regular season opener in Minnesota. None of the three have competition. Next time: Perhaps a look at the final 53-man roster and a preview of the season or of week 1. We’re not too far away now, folks.

Is Teddy Bridgewater now the Saints quarterback of the future?

Wednesday’s NFL transactions wire brought a bit of news that, though rumored in certain outlets, was something of a surprise nonetheless. The Jets traded Teddy Bridgewater to the Saints, along with a sixth-round pick in 2019, in exchange for New Orleans’ 2019 third-round pick. The Jets signed Bridgewater this offseason to a one-year deal, with the promise of competing for a starting position and heavy incentives for playing time and team success. But later that offseason, the Jets had the opportunity to trade up in the draft, and Sam Darnold was there at their #3 pick. Though Bridgewater played very well during the preseason, Darnold also played well enough– and was the obvious quarterback of the future– to be given the starting job, and with Josh McCown also guaranteed $10 million this season (inexplicably, in my opinion), Bridgewater, still only 25 and seemingly over the horrific knee injury from training camp 2016 that threatened to end his career, seemed the obvious choice to be moved. Enter the Saints, who have the talent to contend for the Super Bowl this year, but who also have a 39-year-old quarterback. Drew Brees’ age becomes a factor in the short- and long-term: At a certain age, one never knows when a quarterback will fall off, and when he does, it’s usually for good; Brees’ day will surely come eventually, and this move leaves the Saints both prepared for an injury or unexpected cause of his downfall, and for the potential of a long-term replacement when Brees’ contract expires after 2019 (assuming they re-sign Bridgewater). Personally, while I do think that, in a vacuum, criticizing the Saints for trading a pick for a player who was available on the free-agent market is fair. On the other hand, as one of the original members of the Teddy Bridgewater Fan Club, I’m stoked that he has seemingly recovered from his injury and is now a Saint. He’ll back up Drew Brees this year: Apparently the team didn’t have much faith in Tom Savage or Taysom Hill, but they believe they can be a contender again, and if something happens to Brees, management wanted to know that the QB position wasn’t going to sink the team. What Bridgewater brings to the table– the traits that made me so high on him in the first place– is a highly advanced, almost preternatural pocket presence along with accuracy. Bridgewater is excellent at sensing the rush, at using his footwork to avoid it, and at finding the open man and delivering a pinpoint ball. The weakest element of Bridgewater’s game is his deep ball; he doesn’t have the pure arm strength to effortlessly uncork a long pass, probably a major reason he fell all the way to 32nd in the 2014 draft. (Despite the degree to which quarterback is a technical and mental position, scouts continue to be enamored with players with overwhelming size and arm strength, even when they can’t read defenses or deliver passes accurately. We saw it that year with Blake Bortles going 3rd overall; we saw it again this year with Josh Allen going 7th overall. We saw it in 2011 when folks seriously talked up Blaine Gabbert as a better QB prospect than Cam Newton, and we saw it when both Gabbert and Jake Locker were picked in the top 10.) That said, this is an area where Bridgewater can improve with time, has likely improved and he can still hit all the other routes on the tree very well. (Look at that first GIF– even if Bridgewater can’t deliver a perfect bomb 50-60 yards downfield, throwing a perfect corner route 30 yards away is nothing to sneeze at.) What’s more important in the Saints offense, with all the talent on hand, is that Bridgewater be able to deliver accurately. Between the talent of the skill players and Sean Payton’s designs at getting them open, Bridgewater’s job should be relatively easy, and he’s got the accuracy and the acumen for it. Bridgewater’s career path even mirrors Brees’ to some extent. (I’ve got to give Arif Hasan, now of The Athletic, credit for first pointing this out.) They were both underestimated on draft day due to their physical attributes; they both suffered a potentially career-ending injury; and their original teams moved on from each of them. How appropriate would it be if, once again, the Saints’ next franchise quarterback was somehow a Pro Bowl talent whom nobody seemed to want? It remains to be seen if Bridgewater will stay on long term. He walks into an ideal situation if he does, though; the Saints’ other offensive players are largely young, especially the skill position players, and the overall level of surrounding talent on offense may be the best it’s been in the Sean Payton era. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense for the Saints to give up what they did in trade for him if they don’t intend to keep him, so I for one am hoping they try to work out a reasonable extension for him with some sort of plan to have him be the future starter (some incentives in the contract to that end would probably encourage him to stay long-term). The Saints are all-in for 2018, and this move will keep the season from being scuttled in case of the unthinkable. If management plays their cards right, this could also be a seamless transition from Brees to a 5-10 year starter. Last, I’ll just leave you with one truly ridiculous play from Bridgewater’s college years. How did 31 teams pass on this guy? BONUS COLUMN! I was planning to use this week to write a 53-man roster projection, but the Teddy Bridgewater trade required its own column. Don’t worry; that other one is coming soon on Friday as well. (And then on Saturday, we can find out just how accurate my predictions were.)