Orleans Levee Board

MSNBC reported Is the Orleans Levee Board doing its job?
Critics allege corruption, charge the board with wasteful spending

The unveiling of the Mardi Gras Fountain was celebrated this year in typical New Orleans style. The cost of $2.4 million was paid by the Orleans Levee Board, the state agency whose main job is to protect the levees surrounding New Orleans — the same levees that failed after Katrina hit. "They misspent the money," says Billy Nungesser, a former top Republican official who was briefly president of the Levee Board.

This sounds like Senator Mary Landrieu making sure money planned for flood control got redirected to other pork barrel projects.

"Any dollar they wasted was a dollar that could have went in the levees." Nungesser says he lost his job because he targeted wasteful spending. "A cesspool of politics, that’s all it was," says Nungesser. "[Its purpose was to] provide jobs for people." In fact, NBC News has uncovered a pattern of what critics call questionable spending practices by the Levee Board — a board which, at one point, was accused by a state inspector general of "a long-standing and continuing disregard of the public interest." Beyond the fountain, there's the $15 million spent on two overpasses that helped gamblers get to Bally's riverboat casino. Critics tried and failed to put some of that money into flood protection. There was also $45,000 for private investigators to dig up dirt on radio host and board critic Robert Namer. "They hired a private eye for nine months to find something to make me look wacko, to make me look crazy or bad." says Namer. "They couldn’t find anything." Namer sued and the board then spent another $45,000 to settle. Critics charge, for years, the board has paid more attention to marinas, gambling and business than to maintaining the levees. As an example: of 11 construction projects now on the board's Web site, only two are related to flood control.