Federal coordinator for Gulf Coast recovery to step down

The Texas banker tapped by President Bush to coordinate Gulf Coast recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina announced his resignation Friday. Donald Powell, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, became federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding in November 2005 to help prioritize and facilitate recovery operations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Powell's chief of staff, Paul Conway, will become acting coordinator when Powell returns to Amarillo, Texas, where he intends to resume banking. It's unclear if the White House will appoint a permanent replacement; the position is set to expire in November.

One of Powell's top priorities had been to create greater transparency of how and when public funds were spent on infrastructure. Only with such transparency would people understand where rebuilding bottlenecks were and be able to exert pressure on public officials to speed up the process.

To that end, with help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state and local officials in Louisiana and New Orleans, Powell's office last week launched a Web site with a map tool that allows users to determine the status of individual schools in New Orleans. By clicking on an icon for a particular school, citizens can see when the school is scheduled to open, how much money FEMA has obligated in public assistance grants to the state for the school, and how much of that money the state has spent on construction.

While the information available is limited to schools in New Orleans, and it provides only a snapshot of a portion of the recovery funding available, it is the first time citizens have had easy access to such information. Eventually, Powell and his staff hope other Web-based tools will provide similar snapshots for other infrastructure, such as police and fire stations, and water and sewer systems.

"I wish it were up on everything, but you've got to crawl before you can run," Powell said in an interview last Thursday. "I think [spending data on] every major public infrastructure project ought to be available to the people in a user-friendly way. But it's one thing to have transparency, and it's another thing to get it done."

Originally, Powell intended to launch the schools Web site last November, but technical glitches and the difficulty of aggregating data from multiple sources delayed the program. He declined to speculate when additional data would become available.

Powell clearly has been frustrated by the slow pace of recovery and the byzantine regulations governing federal reimbursement for recovery costs. In an interview last October, he said the Stafford Act, which governs FEMA's response to disasters, needs to be rewritten and injected with "common sense." For example, if FEMA determined a building was not damaged more than 51 percent, it could not be rebuilt elsewhere, even if doing so was more efficient, less expensive and better for citizens.

"We need to find a process where we can make quick decisions faster and hold ourselves accountable, acknowledging that we'll make some poor decisions occasionally," Powell said.

The democratic process itself was sometimes an impediment to rebuilding, he said. "You can't rebuild schools or rebuild water and sewer systems until you know where the locals have determined they're going to rebuild. Sometimes it takes a long time to build consensus among the local people about what area they want to rebuild and how they prioritize," he said.

"If I had my way, I'd go down there and say, 'Do this, do that,' knowing that I'd make some bad decisions. But this is a democracy, so we appreciate everybody's views," Powell added.