Is the City going to tell us how much money was expended by it and the CRA on the Heritage site in addition to the $3,750,000 just coughed up to buy City property back?
Are we going to be given a timeline of how this thing came about? Who started this ball rolling? Who finally brought it to a stop?
To keep this from happening again in the future, an examination of what went wrong at different steps in the process that got the City into this situation is needed.
___________________________________
August 30 is Huey Long's birthday. He was one of the more colorful characters in the 1930s before being assassinated in 1935. His demise was a relief to the Roosevelt Administration which feared a run for the presidency by Louisiana's finest.
After his death, the Long Dynasty ruled Louisiana politics until 1960. Huey did not like the Standard Oil Company, (now Exxon-Mobil), he thought it had a stranglehold on the federal government. He tried a tax of a nickel a barrel of all oil refined in Louisiana. This got him impeached by his opponents who he said were bought and paid for by big oil.
In the U S Senate, he supported Paraguay in the Chaco War with Bolivia. He accused Standard Oil of promoting the invasion of the Chaco by Bolivia because of the oil possibilities of the semi-desert area.
Bolivia had all the latest weapons of war, tanks, artillery, etc. The commander-in-chief of its army was a German. Shortly after the war began, Paraguay captured enough weapons to supply its front line troops.The Bolivians were out of their element, they lived in a cool climate above 12,000 feet. The Chaco is much lower and hotter. The only shade was under the occasional tree. When the tanks pulled into that shade and the crew opened the hatch, a Paraguayan up in the tree would drop a grenade down the hatch.
The war did not go well for Bolivia, in appreciation for Huey's support, Paraguay captured a Bolivian fort and renamed it Fort Long.
