This project needs a powerful manager

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's suggestion that President Bush appoint a powerful super manager to oversee the federal governmentwide efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina's ravages is logical — if not imperative.

Even without the anti-government barrage leveled at it by Gingrich and his conservative cohorts since the Reagan years, the immense federal bureaucracy — self-protective and fragmented into multiple agencies — would be hard pressed to focus effectively on the post-Katrina rebuilding challenge.

As for personally directing the effort, President Bush would appear to have neither the time, the personal skills, nor sufficient remaining public support.

But a super manager — even former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Gingrich's pick — would have to exhibit skills far beyond barking orders or busting heads.

Why?

First, there's limited time. The reaction to a Katrina-like event, says Robert Yaro, president of the New York Regional Plan Association, is shock, dismay and quick focus on rescue and recovery steps.

In New York soon after 9/11, civic forces did intervene quickly to initiate intensely public discussions on redesign and rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, and to get major public money committed to improving transit lines and terminals and housing in Lower Manhattan.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports, private contractors, ranging from the Halliburtons to local road builders, are hiring well-connected lobbyists and rushing to pick up nonbid contracts, cashing in on the unprecedented Katrina recovery funds already flowing.

A super manager, some person of impeccable personal integrity, is needed to control the greed, to assure an already deeply disillusioned American public that its expenditures of literally hundreds of billions of Katrina relief dollars will not be cronied or corrupted.

Simultaneously, a post-Katrina czar must grasp and respond to the deep racial fault lines the hurricane has exposed, like a raw nerve, for all the world to see.

The vast majority of those killed or displaced by Katrina have been African Americans, innocent victims of a calamitous hurricane and deeply flawed emergency planning. But the images of looting, gun-wielding and violence (many by drug addicts) have also been overwhelmingly black.

Deep racial divides, deprivation and its consequences, are nothing new to New Orleans, a city with a crippling 23 percent poverty rate. Right now there's talk that the crescent of higher land that encompasses New Orleans' French Quarter, the Central Business District, the convention center, Garden District and Uptown, not too seriously damaged, may be fairly easy to restore.

But what of the big remainder of the city up to Lake Pontchartrain, much of it shotgun houses and public-housing complexes? This is lower-lying territory, forever reliant on massive pumping to keep dry. Right now, it's mostly under water. How many properties will be reinsurable — and thus rebuildable — when insurers evaluate the toxicity leaked into the soil and the frames of the buildings?

And then: Can and should the federal government build replacement housing within New Orleans just for the poor, in stigmatized neighborhoods, when all experience now says doing so invites future disaster? Or must it find ways to construct mixed-income communities (even though the Bush administration has sought to destroy the Hope VI program that does just that)?

Failing to plan and act aggressively could mean that many of New Orleans' remaining poor blacks end up in temporary, probably heavily guarded camps of housing — a nightmarish American Soweto.

But a federal manager, knowledgeable about bureaucracy but also sensitive to racial and social issues, could help forge new understandings. With the carrot of truly big-time national government aid, he could negotiate with officials of historically corrupt and racially divisive Louisiana to reach accords impossible in normal times.

President Bush needs such an individual. So does the country. Ask yourself: Who would be the overwhelmingly logical individual, one Americans of all parties and races would most readily accept and welcome in this critical job? The nomination from this corner: former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But whoever, quickly, please, Mr. President.

Neal Peirce's column appears alternate Mondays on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com