I need to preface this by saying that I’m sorry that it took so long to get around to making this entry. My mother had a stroke and was hospitalized for quite a while. She’s back home now, but she requires 24-hour care. So, forgive me if the muse wasn’t upon me.
The following is what I had already typed and had in a backup file when she had her stroke. I’m just going to go ahead and make this entry without all of the elaboration I was intending to do. Suffice it to say that I believe I won the bet.
Chapter 4 - There and Back Again, and Back Again (title revised)
The scenario evolved like this:
Now, here’s where some hairs must be split. What I said was “government owned or sparsely populated” and “suitable for building.” What Scylla said was “government owned” and “100 mile vacant tract,” and “adjacent to the Mississippi.” As it turns out, those two concepts aren’t equal.
Admittedly, I did later offer to double the bet, but in my own defense, Scylla changed the bet in mid-stream, and I never agreed to his changes.
But even if I must be held to Scylla’s rules, I think I can weasel out of it by saying that neither of us said when it had to be government owned. Based on that, I can supply the vacant, 100-mile, government owned tract, and it’s probably not in the way you think. (Remember, Scylla didn’t qualify it as being “suitable for building” like I did).
As regards the 100 mile vacant tract, I must assume that he means 100 square miles since that is what we’ve been using all along as the basis for the size of NO. If he claims that he, indeed meant, a 100-mile-long, one mile wide strip mall, then I’m going to have to apply the law and say that there was no meeting of the minds and therefore the bet is null and void.
So, what I’m going to do is this: I’m going to provide a 100 square mile location, suitable for building, adjacent to the Mississippi River, with a 100-mile, government owned vacant tract of land. Deal?
Let’s not waste time. And the winner is…
Donaldsonville, Louisiana - or at least the white area on the map that runs alongside the Mississippi to the west and north as well as up and around the bend.
It falls within my “sparsely populated criteria” since most of the region is primarily agricultural. I can safely assume that by looking at this map. The large rectangular areas are farm fields–I’m guessing cotton, but I don’t know for sure. And, if you zoom in on northwest corner of the map, you’ll see something that looks like seven big boxy buildings. I don’t know what those are, either, but I don’t think they’d be too worrisome since they abut ag land. There is some low-lying land in the middle of the big bend area, but there are still some roads through it and the map doesn’t have the little marsh markers on it, I’d guess the area isn’t a complete washout.
(The white areas on the first map indicate that they consist of high ground. Lowland is green. Lowland with little markers mean that it’s a swamp.)
There is sufficient ‘white area’ to meet the 100-square mile criteria, and it’s immediately adjacent to the Mississippi. We already have the “suitable building criteria” met because we know, already, that the Town of Donaldsonville exists, and it wouldn’t exist if it couldn’t exit. 
It’s not far from New Orleans, but it’s far enough upstream as well as far enough inland so that even a Cat 5 storm surge can’t reach it, so it seems like a nice enough place to serve as a base of operations before we begin our massive building project. And, judging from the unemployment statistics, they’d probably be happy to see us. That, and the fact that we have a huge ready-made workforce available close by means we’d probably be able to start building right away.
There’s just one thing we have to do first.
Own it.
For that, I rely on something called Imminent Domain. A lot of you know what this is, and undoubtedley some of you have misgivings about it, but for what better purpose could it be applied than building an entire city and all of the public good that we can do? For that is the definition of Imminent Domain: The process by which the government may seize private land in order to better the public good as long as the government pays a fair price for the land.
For the purposes of this Chapter, I’m going to say that we (the government) need to purchase 122 square miles of land. We’ll take that whole bend in the river as well as the land along the river up to, but not including, Donaldsonville. The depth of the land away from the river will vary somewhat, but we need to take enough to reach a total of 122 square miles. What that means, actually, is a 20-mile stretch of river, approximately 6 miles deep.
Nothin’ up my sleeve and, presto!, the land is now government owned. 
(Oh, and about those people that previously owned the land… Well, we paid them for it. We paid $1000/acre for the agricultural land as well as $100,000 each for the 100 homes in the little hamlets (smaller than Donaldsonville) that we also had to purchase. And, if they’re smart, they’ll invest that money back into the project, 'cause we’re going to be making some big time cash in a few short years.)
So now we own the land. What’s the first thing we should do?
Why, give it away, of course. So we do. We deed it over, lock stock and barrel to the State of Louisiana. All we ask (actually, demand) are a few simple concessions:
-
We get to maintain for ourselves some of the land in order to provide for safety and security, and,
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That the land be given away, for free, to anyone who can solidly demonstrate that he or she is financially capable of building a suitable dwelling on the land (building codes and other red tape are included in this caveat).
We’ll even make some improvements on it. No charge.
Louisiana looks at us in disbelief, and then grabs the pen and signs on the dotted line. Done deal.
I hear you. Stop yelling. I’ll tell you where the money is coming from.
From the money we saved by not having to build immensely expensive projects in and around New Orleans.
Stop grumbling. I’m not saying, nor have I ever said, that the entire city of New Orleans should be abandoned. No. There will always be something there, just not like it was before. But if we take a calm, reasoned approach to it, we can make a rational decision as to what we want to save as well as what is irretrievably, irrevocably gone.
We want to save the French Quarter and the Hotel District. We don’t have to save the 9th Ward nor much of anything of Metarie–there’s nothing there to save.
(I have to equivocate here. It’s been a while since I’ve been there and I can’t recall which areas are contiguous to which others. Let’s just say that we’d like to save the part of New Orleans that remained above water and then maybe try to save a little that wasn’t too deep. I estimate that to be about 25% of the former city. Fair enough?)
Ok, then. How much money are we talking about? I’m guessing our starting budget will be about 15 billion dollars.
You heard me.
The $14 billion project proposed in 1998 is currently worth approx $16.2B today. We’re still going to improve the wetlands as well as building the storm surge floodgate on Lake Pontchartrain, but we don’t have to build a Cat 5-resistant levee around the entire City of New Orleans–only 25% of it. We saved billions of dollars there. What’s more, we don’t have to spend the estimated $20B it would cost to rebuild the entire city (a number I heard on MSNBC today. Work with me.).
So, I’m saying that we saved X dollars by not having to levee-up an entire city and Y dollars in unnecessary rebuilding costs and that those numbers add up to $15 billion.
Hell, yes, I pulled the numbers out of my ass. The money had to come from somewhere. The point is, though, I’m starting with a budget of $15B, and I think I can make it work. You’ll have to bear with me to see how it all works out.
The biggest chunk of our money is already gone. Here’s where it went:
$1000 per acre times 78080 acres in a square mile times 122 square miles = $9,525,760,000
100 homes at $100,000 per home = $10,000,000
Remaining balance: (15,000,000,000 - 9,525,760,000 - 10,000,000) = $5,464,240,000
----------- This is where the back up file ended. From here I’m just going to wing it, short and sweet. ------------
5 Billion left. What’s the only logical thing to do…?
I got to thinking, What could anyone do to help to alleviate the pain and distress of the evacuees? What could help to make them happy again?
Why, The Happiest Place on Earth, of course.
Scenario: An elderly black man is wading out of waist-deep water when he’s accosted by a roving reporter.
Reporter: “Sir, you just lost everything you had. What are you going to do now?”
Man: “I’m going to Disney World!!!”
Actually, Disney World is coming to us. Twice.
“…WDW’s 35,000 acres. That’s 47 square miles, roughly the size of two Manhattan islands.”
Forty seven square miles isn’t enough, so we’ll take two.
Using this inflation calculator we see that:
“The average annual inflation rate for the entire period since 1914 is 3.49%”
Then, we base our cost on this:
"1971 - The opening of Walt Disney World on 27,500 acres of central Florida. Disney makes the biggest investment ever for an amusement resort, a whopping $250 million. "
Using the calculator, we see that:
What cost $500,000,000 in 1967 would cost $2,846,717,342.65 in 2005
This allows for 4 years “secret building time” that Unca Walt used in order to prevent prices from rising while he was building, and the building of TWO parks,
but it also assumes that all costs were paid up front.
Okay, it would seem obvious that we don’t need two parks exactly the same, so I propose that, instead of building two sets of everything, we just build one set of rides and apply the money for the second set of rides and attractions into housing and infrastructure. But speaking of infrastructure…
“The Walt Disney World Resort is located on a 46 square mile site (30,000 acres), yet only 7,100 acres are developed, leaving a lot more room for future parks & attractions.”
"50,000 Sprinkler Heads and 2,000 miles of irrigation pipe are needed to water more than 3,500 acres of landscaping at Walt Disney World Resort. "
Any of you who have ever been to Walt Disney World can attest that there is plenty of infrastructure as well as thousands of hotel rooms right on the property. So, if you need a government building, take a hotel. Need a school? Take another. And so on. We’ll have excess infrastructure.
“Walt Disney World is currently 30,500 acres and employs 35,000 people”
“Walt Disney World Parks and Resorts had revenues of $7,750,000,000 in 2004.”
I think that, in time, we can do better than that.
All right then, we still have $5,464,240,000 left over, and if we subtract $2,846,717,342 for the price of two WDW’s, that leaves us:
$2,617,522,658 to work with.
But this sin’t going to be 'Disney" World. This is going to be Lola World.
Lola is southern and steamy, cafe au lait and creole, Lady Marmalade and LSU cheerleader, and what you’d get if you finally let the Disney animators let their imaginations and libidos run wild. (You just know they’ve all been saying for twenty years, “Teats! Just once I wanna draw some teats!”)
Just one sweet whisper from Lola’s honey-drippin’, down-home drawlin’ lips’ll make the Colonel stand up and whistle Dixie faster’n Goober gobblin’ gumbo.
And, there’ll be no silly little mouse ears decorating Lola Land. No, we’ll have little drawings of a “Y” sitting inside a “U” --representing Lola’s cleavage-- festooning this park.
Finally, a Disneyland for adults. I mean, that’s what the French Quarter has always tried to be anyway. And don’t underestimate the drawing power of vice. Las Vegas has done pretty well with it.
I’ll leave it to you to come up with new names for the rides. (Too bad “Love Canal” has a bad connotation since it would make a good moniker to rename ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ after a little re-working of the scenery.)
Leave the kids at home. Lola Land is adults only.
Nude beaches. Bars. Blues clubs. Gambling. Girls Gone Wild gone corporate.
I’d bet our revenue would approach that $7 billion raked in by WDW pretty quickly.
I can see a drawback here: Bible Belt fundamentalism. But what the hell, New Orleans itself was probably one of the most corrupt cities in the US (find your own cites), and it functioned for quite some time–why couldn’t our little enterprise?
Now, remember back when I said that the government was going to maintain some of the land for its own use? Well, that land includes a 1 mile border surrounding Lola Land. There will be flood control wet lands, upgraded levees and docking facilities, and your basic governmental functionary buildings. What’s more, it meets my “100-mile-long, government-owned strip” as required by the bet. 
So much for the “There” part. Now for the “And Back Again.”
Why wouldn’t I want to build anything there? As I mentioned in the old thread.
Interesting Louisiana info, some clips:
“…one of more than 50 petrochemical plants and oil refineries in the Mississippi Delta region between Baton Rogue and New Orleans, referred to by industry as “Chemical Alley” and locals as “Cancer Alley.” Louisiana has among the highest rates of cancer mortality in the nation, and many cases are concentrated in the communities near this strip of plants.”
and
“The Bayou State is second only to Texas in terms of the volume of hazardous waste it generates from manufacturing, and “on a per-capita basis we have more toxic chemicals than any other state in America,” according to Florence Robinson*, a former biology professor from Southern University”
For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to include the tons of links I found regarding cancer deaths, dioxin levels, air pollution, etc. In sum, even though I located the area, it might not be the best place to build.
(And now for the “And Back Again” part.)
Remember Una’s dike? I assume she was using clean fill. What say we spread Una’s dike over the area–sort of like a cap over the bad stuff? Maybe we just need to cover over parts of it since the agricultural land (hopefully!) isn’t too polluted.
After all, if someone was either uninformed enough or foolish enough to live in a city-sized bath tub in an area known for hurricanes, who’s to say that they wouldn’t want to move to an area with lovely landscaping and where everything is brand new…and where there would be jobs galore? Probably pretty interesting jobs in some cases.
So, that’s it. I won the bet. And I had a couple of billion dollars left over.
Scylla, make a $2 donation to the hurricane relief fund in my name.