I’ll take a poke at Eddie Rispone here, not because I want to start a fight inside the GOP camp but because I want to point out something that matters.
Which is that back in the fall of 2019, while Rispone was running for governor against John Bel Edwards, having managed a spot in the runoff that year, the new terminal at the New Orleans airport opened.
And when it opened, the state hadn’t even STARTED building flyover ramps from I-10 to the access road into the new terminal. The New Orleans airport was therefore pretty much the only airport in a major city that you had to stop at stoplights on surface streets to get to from an interstate highway.
We said it would be a colossal traffic disaster and a major political problem for Edwards – in the sense that he was wide open to attacks from Rispone on the issue…
As our readers well know, the reason there’s no flyover ramp at the Loyola Drive exit and won’t be for years – until late 2022 or early 2023, at best – is that Edwards and his Department of Transportation and Development never bothered to get one built. The airport terminal went under construction in 2016, Edwards’ first year. Edwards did nothing. We would have bet the farm that the new terminal’s opening would have been delayed past the election. We still wouldn’t bet against that; until the thing actually opens there’s always the chance they’ll delay it again. And why? Because when that airport opens the traffic jam it will cause on I-10 is going to be legendary. If you’re coming from New Orleans or Metairie, to get to this airport you are going to have to get off I-10 at the Loyola Drive exit and fight through THREE traffic lights before you’ll be able to hit the access road. If you’re coming from LaPlace or Baton Rouge or other points west, you’ll have two.
Rispone had the means and the motive at that point. He could have unloaded on John Bel Edwards for the abject, colossal mismanagement of the state’s infrastructure which was the failure to have flyover ramps into that airport from I-10 when it opened, but he didn’t.
Remember, that airport had been kicked around for a decade, and it was under construction when Edwards took office. He had four years, and three years after demanding and getting the largest tax increases in the history of Louisiana, to do something about building flyover ramps into that airport.
It was an absolute gift to Eddie Rispone, who after all was a construction magnate (his company does more industrial construction than road work, but so what?), that work hadn’t even started on those roadways. Seeing as though Jefferson Parish, a place Rispone had to have if he was going to win, would be the site of the traffic nightmares sure to come, it was imperative he go up on the air in the New Orleans market with a full frontal attack on Edwards for not caring about the people and dithering rather than doing his job.
“They took all this money away from you in taxes and they haven’t even bothered to start on one of the most important roads in the whole state,” he could have said. “Don’t tell me this guy is this incompetent. He hates you THIS much. It’s intentional, because he’d just as soon spit on you as give you any value for your tax dollars.”
Rispone’s campaign team was a bunch of out-of-staters, though, and all they figured was they’d just equate him with Trump and talk about illegal immigrants and similar things. Louisiana’s economy under Edwards has been so sclerotic that this is one place illegals don’t even bother to come – there’s not much work for them here, so they skip right past us.
And he missed that opportunity. Thanks to those out-of-touch, out-of-state consultants Rispone didn’t bother to exploit the wide-open shot Edwards’ dithering had given him.
And while there are people who claim that electoral shenanigans in Orleans Parish were the reason Rispone lost by 40,000 votes in that election, what really did him in was that he was beaten by Edwards 57-43 in Jefferson.
While traffic snarls around that airport were backing cars up for miles at every afternoon rush hour.
It’s a little better now, and to some extent Edwards got lucky. No sooner did that airport open but a few months later COVID hit, and by March 2020 nobody was flying into New Orleans hardly at all. The tourist business that would drive that airport virtually disappeared for essentially two years, and by the time it came back the city was enveloped in a nationally-famous crime wave which has hamstrung any real post-COVID recovery. So airport traffic is tepid, and the traffic messes aren’t quite what people thought they’d be.
Though once in a while you do get a chance to see Edwards’ handiwork, or lack thereof.
We mention all this because it’s now the end of September 2023, and guess what’s FINALLY happening…
The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development announced the opening of the newly constructed Interstate 10 West flyover ramp at Loyola Drive Tuesday evening. The new ramp is scheduled to open Friday, Sept. 29, 2023. The DOTD says the ramp is part of the first step in the completion of the $125.6 million I-10/Loyola Drive Interchange Project that began in 2020. The ramp is supposed to help drivers avoid traffic lights passing over the Loyola/Veterans Blvd. intersection. The new lanes divide into a highway that serves as the entrance to the airport. The DOTD says their next step in the project will be opening another flyover ramp, which would allow people leaving the airport to merge directly onto I-10 east towards New Orleans. The second flyover ramp is expected to open two weeks after the first. Opening both ramps will increase traffic flow efficiency and help ease congestion going in and out of the airport off Loyola Drive.
This has been one of the most laughably slow construction projects in human history. We’re talking about simple flyover ramps from I-10 into the New Orleans airport, covering a distance of less than two miles, and it’s more than four years since the airport opened before Edwards and his Department of Transportation and Development, formerly headed by Edwards’ endorsed candidate for governor this year Shawn Wilson, can announce those ramps.
So what does Edwards’ camp have to say about this failure? Well, his press flack went on Twitter to attack yours truly.
Check out this ridiculous dunce who thinks that MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OF FAILURE TO BUILD FLYOVER RAMPS affords an opportunity to play gotcha politics.
Non-morons would be far too embarrassed to do this.
By January he'll be living somewhere else and trashing Louisiana here. https://t.co/73dEMJXSoC
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) September 27, 2023
Because Rispone didn’t take advantage of Edwards’ failure, it’s a mistake to point out the failure?
When the failure persists for four years?
Holl doesn’t even acknowledge the awful performance. He spikes the ball that they got away with it.
Except…have they?
Shawn Wilson is the only “D” in the governor’s race. He can’t crack 25 percent in the latest polls. There are no other Democrats with a hope in hell of winning any of the statewide offices – in two of them, the Insurance and Agriculture Commissioner’s races, they didn’t even try.
And in legislative races it’s starting to look like they’ll manage to hold no more than 11 of 39 Senate seats and, at best, 33 of 105 House seats.
This will be the worst performance by the Louisiana Democrat Party in a statewide cycle since Reconstruction. Edwards and his minions will have utterly destroyed that party electorally, making it a rump of an organization existing only in the state’s failing cities and not even competing in districts which aren’t majority-black.
This kind of failure should mark everybody associated with Edwards’ administration as untouchable.
But look at them.
Eric Holl is one of those vagabond political flacks who’ll be somewhere else next year, just like his fellow Edwards minion Stephen Handwerk, whose fingerprints are all over the demise of the Louisiana Democrat Party and who moved to Michigan when his husband, the true breadwinner of that household, got a job in nursing management, departed for greener pastures. It’s almost certain that Holl, just like Handwerk did, will trash Louisiana publicly on his way out of the state in retribution for what the voters will do to their party in just three and a half weeks.
And maybe when Edwards and his stooges are gone, some new people can pick up the pieces and create a higher standard of productivity such that simple flyover ramps don’t take more than four years – or eight years, really – to be built.