Take my car...please

This isn't easy to explain, but I'll do my best:

There are thousands of post-Katrina junked vehicles in New Orleans. FEMA has made it clear that if the city does not get rid of them by June 30, it will reimburse cleanup expenses at the rate of 90% instead of 100%. The city looked at a number of bids for removing the cars and trucks, which ranged from $350 per vehicle to $1,000 per vehicle. One company even informally offered to pay New Orleans $100 per vehicle in exchange for crushing the cars and getting to keep the scrap metal.

Which company got the contract? If you guessed the one that wants $1,000 per vehicle, you know your New Orleans government culture.

When the news got out about the contract, people had a fit, of course. The Times-Picayune is opining that perhaps the selected contractor was a favored one, and the city figured that FEMA, having wasted millions of dollars on post-Katrina stupidity so far, might as well waste more money. This is a viable theory, and one I like. In fact, no other theory makes any sense.

Now that he has been confronted, Mayor Nagin, who was silent at first, says that the city could not negotiate with the company that wanted to pay New Orleans because FEMA's rules forbid the city from making money from the cleanup operation. Fair enough. But he still has some explaining to do about the city's choice of CH2M Hill, a company whose expertise, by the way, is in conducting water and wastewater projects.