Brewer man sees progress, frustration

BANGOR – In the storm of chaos and dysfunction that continues to plague the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans, Drew Sachs has been working in the eye, where at times there’s not a lot of activity but the pressure is arguably the highest.

Sachs, a former economic development director for the city of Brewer, still lives with his family in Hampden. But since shortly after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast two years ago and triggered a devastating flood in New Orleans, Sachs has been headquartered in Baton Rouge, La., acting as an agent for the overwhelmed state government as it grapples with the mountainous bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Over breakfast at a Bangor restaurant on Tuesday, he reflected on the progress that’s been made so far in Louisiana – and the many challenges that remain.

Sachs said media reports of the area’s stagnation and lack of progress since September 2005 are “overstated” and fail to take into consideration the vast scope of the damage and the complexity of rebuilding.

Conditions in New Orleans, Sachs said, “are not as devastating and as sad as [they] may appear.” Approximately 60 percent of the city’s population has returned, and a number of neighborhoods are functional and lively. The music and arts scene is thriving. Many people are working at jobs in the service sector, the energy industry and the recovery effort itself.

That said, Sachs was quick to admit to professional frustration with the pace of the recovery. He lays much of the blame at the feet of FEMA. The agency is the source of billions of federal dollars approved for spending in New Orleans and coastal Louisiana, but Sachs said FEMA, restructured after the Sept. 11 attacks, “is not as fast or as flexible as it needs to be to address a catastrophic event” like Katrina and its aftermath.

The result, he said, is a rebuilding process that is bogged down in minutiae, awaiting piecemeal approvals for large-scale projects, many of which involve complexes of roads, public utilities, hospitals and schools.

As one relatively small example, he said, the process of furnishing dozens of flooded-out city schools with new desks, books, pencils and other supplies required planners to fill out a meticulously detailed itemization when a simple funding allotment for “school supplies” could have eliminated hours of needless accounting.

“You need to back the trucks in to deal with all the documentation,” Sachs said.

Some other frustrations include an environmental compliance process that insists on a time-consuming structure-by-structure assessment, and FEMA’s balkiness at approving the hiring of a single project manager to coordinate more than 680 building projects going on concurrently in the area.

FEMA aside, Sachs said it is “terrible” that new levees have not yet been built to protect the city of New Orleans.

Despite his evident frustration, Sachs is confident the area will be restored. For one thing, he said, corporations have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in downtown New Orleans skyscrapers and other real estate. Though many of these buildings are now sitting empty, he said, companies will return when the city is safe and its infrastructure has been rebuilt.

Equally compelling, he said, is the need to support two of the area’s greatest economic drivers: the energy industry and the shipping port at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

And, he said, it is critically important to preserve the deep-rooted culture of southern Louisiana – a culture he has come to appreciate over the long months of his involvement in the area.

“By no means is this a dead city,” he said of New Orleans. It may take 10 years or more, he added, but the city neighborhoods and business districts will repopulate and regenerate.

Originally, Sachs went to Louisiana as a private consultant to James Lee Witt Associates, a crisis and emergency management consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. The organization’s founder directed FEMA under President Clinton, and Sachs worked with him there for nine years before moving with his family to Brewer in 1999.

After Katrina, Sachs took leave from his job in Brewer to work with his former boss and has since joined the firm. His current job title is director of mitigation and planning, but he will soon be promoted to vice president for crisis and consequence management. He now spends 10 or 12 days a month in Baton Rouge and the surrounding area.

Sachs said he would hate to leave the Bangor area, but noted that southern Maine offers better air travel options.

James Lee Witt Associates, which in 2003 became a subsidiary of Global Options Group, has recently been awarded a three-year contract to continue its services to the state of Louisiana.