Baby, Who Can Drive My Car?

My previous post concerning the recovery of flooded automobiles in the city has gotten a new wrinkle.

The featured local company in a proposed $62 million state contract to remove abandoned cars from southern Louisiana lists a flood-ruined 9th Ward address as its headquarters and has a disconnected phone, according to public documents and a cursory investigation by a state senator.

The Department of Environmental Quality contract remains unsigned, although the negotiations have apparently been completed between the state and TruSource Facility Services of Georgia and L&L Steel Builders Inc. of 1939 Desire St. in New Orleans, state officials said. It is this contract that the city of New Orleans requested to join this week, following days of questions about its decision not to sell tens of thousands of hurricane-wrecked vehicles to crushers but instead to pay a company $23 million to clear the cityscape of the blight.

I have a better idea. Let's let the market work for us. All the city needs to do is develop some mechanism by which all flooded vehicles deemed to be salvaged are to be identified and marked by some kind of official plackard. All identified vehicles are then to be considered "open-range". Free to anyone willing to tow it away.

Now, that wont get rid of all cars but it sure will get rid of a lot of them.

So, once again, our politicians are seeking ordinary means to solve extrordinary problems.