A note from Gordon Russell, Managing Editor of Investigations

Happy holidays, folks!

Here’s hoping everyone survived the arctic blast, the visiting in-laws, the canceled flights and all the rest of it.

I made a New Year’s resolution in November to update you monthly on some of our best investigative work. The arrival of this newsletter in your inbox today means I haven’t broken my resolution yet!

Before I highlight those stories, let me make a quick plea to support the Louisiana Investigative Journalism Fund with a contribution of literally any amount. Contributions are tax-deductible and they pay for half of our eight-member team. We are trying to hit a short-term goal of $10,000 raised by the end of the year (ish). Not only do your individual contributions directly fund our team, they demonstrate local support for the work we do, which is crucial to our efforts to seek larger gifts from foundations and philanthropists. So - thank you for anything you can do!

Now, the work. I often tell people the key to investigative journalism is having a long memory. This package of stories exemplifies that truism. Since the Road Home program was designed a couple years after Hurricane Katrina, there have been allegations that it shortchanged poor people and people of color in particular. We’ve sought to explore the question for more than a decade, but didn’t have the right data. We finally got it, and with our partners at WWL-TV and ProPublica, we published the results earlier this month. The gist? Poor people did get less of what they needed to rebuild than wealthier people. In New Orleans and most of the state, that meant that Black people tended to be shortchanged, but St. Bernard Parish was an outlier in this trend. Our series, part of a larger look at how disasters tend to exacerbate inequities, also examined the origins of the Road Home formula, and found that Louisiana’s reputation for corruption figured in its design.

Our reporter Andrea Gallo has spent the second half of the year documenting the crisis at the understaffed and overwhelmed Louisiana agency charged with protecting vulnerable children. Her latest piece examines calls for an ombudsman – an independent monitor of sorts who would have the ability to conduct an independent review when the Department of Children and Family Services bungles a case. Forty-five of the 50 states have such a position.

It’s been a horrifically violent year in New Orleans, which is set to recapture its unwanted title of America’s most murderous city in 2022. Reporter John Simerman took a look at how things got so bad just three years after New Orleans recorded its most peaceful year in a half-century.

Despite a blessedly tranquil hurricane season, the skies continue to darken over the shaky property insurance market in south Louisiana. In his latest dispatch, Mike Finch takes a look at how the state’s overwhelmed bailout program for bankrupt insurers is handling a flood of claims occasioned by a string of company failures.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. Have a happy new year, and please consider donating to the Louisiana Investigative Journalism Fund!

Gordon

You can support our investigative journalism efforts through the Louisiana Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Your tax-deductible donation will go directly to support our news gathering efforts.