Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together, together, together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth Zeigler Foundation and the Zeigler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.

Everybody that I know and do CFS, they want to do a good job.

And so we want to make sure that they have the resources to do that.

A sit down with the new acting secretary of DCFS.

This study is trying to find out what happened before the crash.

High tech is working to make roads more safe.

In my opinion, we should be taxing them at the highest rate possible.

The latest on short term rentals.

It's a very interesting I hope and find look at at the state we call home.

A preview of why Louisiana ain't Mississippi or any place else.

In the state could be in line for big federal money to repair widespread wetlands loss.

This is damage caused by the construction of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet or Mr. go damage that earned it a second nickname, hurricane highway.

Many state leaders say the 76 mile channel a shortcut from the Gulf to New Orleans, helped funnel storm surge that caused a levee failures during Hurricane Katrina.

Yeah, it opened in 1968, was closed in 2009 and rarely used.

But the damage was already done.

The new legislation could be a crucial part of addressing the disastrous legacy of Mr. Go.

The US House approved the legislation Thursday and the Senate is expected to in the coming weeks.

And now a check on other news headlines from around the state.

Senator Bill Cassidy continues to seek relief money for Greater Lake Charles in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura in 2020.

This week announced another nearly $13 million for the region.

The Lake Charles Charter Academy Foundation, Calcasieu Parish School Board and City of Lake Charles will benefit from this grant.

Another insurance company has gone belly up.

United Property and Casualty announced this week it is joining a list of 23 other insurance companies that are insolvent and forced to leave the state.

United Property had the fifth largest share of the Louisiana home insurance market just a year ago, but will terminate policies of 36,000 customers by 2023.

On the 81st anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

December 7th, family and friends gathered to pay their respects to a Louisiana Navy veteran killed in the assault.

Seaman First Class Houston Temples was honored this week at the American Legion Hall in his native Bogalusa.

It seems DCFS is under a microscope after two babies died from fentanyl related causes this year.

The agency has struggled with staffing and resource issues for a while, but the new acting secretary, Terry Riggs, has some ideas on how to improve the agency for 2023.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So let's start off with a simple question.

I mean, when people think of DCFS, they think of just, you know, the child and family services part and going and making sure families are okay.

But there's actually a lot of other responsibilities that come with the job.

Can you tell me what those are?

Happy to talk about the good work at the Department of Children and Family Services and the nearly 3500 people that work for us with us.

They serve us in many different ways.

One of them is like food related services, like SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Also like our Child Support Enforcement Program.

In addition to that, we determine disability for those who have applied for Social Security benefits.

And of course, we also do emergency preparedness work when it's time for an area to have sheltering or to be evacuated.

We insist that with the the offices of emergency preparedness.

So all in all, we serve about one in four Louisianans.

And so we're not just the child welfare agency, but we definitely hold that very near to us.

So that's a lot of responsibilities and a lot of different hats that people in this agency have to wear.

But I mean, this year in particular, it was a difficult year.

Can you tell me where the challenge was with maintaining everything?

Sure.

Absolutely.

So we have to talk about the increase in the number of cases that are coming in to child welfare.

The number of children that are at risk.

It is grown about 34% during the same time period this year versus last year with some of the changes, with people leaving the job or unable to hire.

We've been unable to keep up with that demand and so we've recently taken a lot of steps to actually shore up that area and to bring more people on board.

So whenever it comes to taking care of children and making sure that you're meeting with them, is there a particular area where there is a discrepancy, where there's a struggle?

So we have struggles, I think, throughout as the case loads rise.

But what we're doing right now is making sure that we can identify them a little bit more clearly and give the resources that the employees need to do their job, even better.

And are there particular cities that you're looking at, you know, places that you're focusing on to be equally?

Well, so we're keeping a keen eye throughout the state.

A lot of our efforts recently have been in Baton Rouge to make sure that we can ensure that.

So we're keeping an eye to make sure that if there's any areas that need supplement supplementing, then we're doing that.

So right now, a lot of focus on supplementing in the Baton Rouge office.

So, I mean, earlier in throughout this interview so far, we've talked a lot about caseloads increasing and not having enough people to meet the need.

What is the agency doing now to make sure that they can help those families and those children?

It's such a good question.

I'm glad you asked that.

So much good work has gone in from lots of our partners to help us to use hiring fairs to actually find new people who want to come in and help us.

We've installed new leadership in that office, been able to successfully recruit people that are really great candidates for that.

In addition to that, we're doing some belonging work to change the culture in the department.

We've actually instituted an employee assistance program, which we have not had before.

So we're making sure that we're getting to a place where people can have a better balance in their life.

And as far as 2023 goes, it's around the corner.

What are your goals for this agency next year?

Thank you.

So this focus that we have right now on our partners throughout the community, that means our other state agencies like Louisiana Department of Health and means continuing to work with Louisiana Workforce Commission on hiring.

It also means making sure that our law enforcement office at the law enforcement community is really tight with us as well as other community organizations.

So partnership is important.

The people that we have and that we're trying to hire are important.

And then last thing is that we want to make sure that we're using data all the time.

But all these things are about taking care of the children.

So our whole focus is to do everything that we can to keep an eye on those children and make sure that we have timely response.

And so our short term activities will go through March.

We believe by that time, those 300 people walking around with their with their job offers will be on board.

And by the way, we have another job fair in Baton Rouge on December 15th.

And so we would love to have more people who want to join us in this effort to meet us there.

All right.

And just hopefully get more people in to help bridge those gaps.

That's that stabilizing and then making everybody that is at D.C. offense feel great about being there.

Everybody that I know at first, they want to do a good job.

And so we want to make sure that they have the resources to do that.

And that will be my job for 2023.

All right.

Well, we are out of time.

Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Tragically deadly car crashes happened routinely on Louisiana's roads and highways.

One may be happening right now.

Those involving cars and big trucks never end well.

And the aftermath can shut down an interstate highway for hours.

But thanks to a series of large grants, a team of transportation safety researchers from LSU are using artificial intelligence to find answers.

Here's my conversation with Dr. Helmut Schneider, who heads up the research.

When a crash happened, you come there after the fact.

And so this study is trying to find out what happened before the crash.

What leads to the crash and what are things we have to look into and to prevent crashes to happen in the first place?

What is the exact artificial intelligence used?

Artificial intelligence is computer science programs that use certain kind of visually like videos on the road in our case, and translate that into data.

And so that one can analyze the data, that identify certain characteristics of what's happening on the road.

For instance, is a commercial vehicle or is it a car?

What's a distance of those cars and vehicles, commercial vehicles together?

What's the speed and what is the overall kind of traffic pattern?

So it's all can be translated into data and data can be analyzed much easier.

On video, it said computers can only kind of work with data.

So the whole objective of artificial intelligence is to translate visual.

It's like a video into data.

Okay.

So I want to show you this.

I want to show you this photograph from your office.

And it shows it's a picture of traffic on the Mississippi River Bridge in Baton Rouge, but each vehicle has all sorts of little data attached to it.

So what are we looking at there?

We look at the whether it's a truck or whether it's a car.

Okay.

We look at each individual has a number of speed when it when the truck or a car drove on this stretch of the road.

The distance to the car in front of it and the distance to the car behind it.

And other characteristics is a car moving from one lane to the other that would also be captured.

Does it go ahead and predict what is safe?

What is not safe, or don't we already know that if you're driving too close to somebody, that's not a good thing?

Right.

But when we say don't drive too close to somebody, we we that's a very vague definition of what is to a close.

Okay.

There are certain formulas that allow us once we have the data to calculate what is a safe distance and it says safe distance driving on this stretch of the road or not.

That can be analyzed once we have the data and we can use formulas to which tell us whether what's a safe distance is for that speed.

So the data will help us to understand whether actually a safe driving is going on under the road or not.

Is there another grant coming?

Probably.

Yeah, that's probably the applying.

Continue applying for grants.

Well, one idea is to to make automate that that says the data tells the police.

Well there's something going on says unsafe situations traffic is to close out say for the speed let's go out say and and patrol to make sure that crashes don't happen.

All right.

We'll look forward to seeing your work continue and hearing more about it.

Dr. Schneider, thank you.

Thank you.

There's a new poll on climate change and potential solutions.

And here's an inside look at what Louisianans are saying on the subject.

Yeah.

Many say Louisiana is at the epicenter of climate change.

Our economy is tied to oil, gas and petrochemicals, and our coast is at the mercy of sea level rise and hurricanes.

So here's part of that poll to the question Do you believe that climate change is occurring or not?

42% say it is occurring and it's a very serious problem.

19% said it's not occurring at all.

And has climate change contributed to the severity of recent hurricanes?

33% answered that they strongly agree it has.

23%, though, say they strongly disagree.

Last week I interviewed Anthony Morris with Housing Louisiana about Louisiana's blighted property.

This week, our conversation continues with the last edition of that interview.

Morris gives us updates on the effects of short term rentals on surrounding communities in New Orleans.

So what are the concerns with short term rentals and how they're affecting communities currently?

The first concern is always losing homes that are being used right now to house families, people with children, seniors, that those homes will be taken offline and and made available for for tourists because it's more profitable.

One of the other concerns that we have, though, is the larger issue is that by focusing so much on short term rentals, on Airbnbs, we're ignoring other, easier, simpler ways to address the housing crisis.

Short term rentals aren't the biggest problem that you have when it comes to affordable housing, and we need to be sure that we're looking at other ways of creating affordable housing while still developing and maintaining our tourism economy at the same time.

But we can't let short term rentals just take over neighborhoods.

We can't just let them push people out.

We've got to be able to interrupt that cycle, and we've got to be able to provide folks with better opportunity this to make sure that our neighborhoods are diverse and healthy and and most importantly, home to the people of Louisiana, not just a bunch of visitors who want to come here and have fun.

So in New Orleans, we've been hearing about short, short term rentals for years now.

What's happened with them?

I mean, has anything changed?

What's the current status other than legalizing them?

There's not been a lot of sort of good news on this front.

And it's leading to, you know, other communities.

Shreveport has been looking at how do they look at legalizing short term rentals.

Baton Rouge has been talking about it for a while.

And sometimes the model in New Orleans is held up as a good model, but it's not being implemented well and it actually causes more consternation.

It was legal recently, a legal ruling that struck down or made it a way to strike down a lot of the rules that they were put in place.

There was an attempt to try to prioritize local owners over out of town owners, and that was seen as problematic.

Instead of doing something like simply capping the number of short term rentals, which is what the Fifth Circuit actually said, they said, why didn't New Orleans cap its short term rentals instead of setting up this tiered system?

And that was something that was actually recommended and said, listen, if we're worried about having too many, let's find the number that we think is tolerable and set a limit, in your opinion?

I mean, is that good, a good way to implement change?

Absolutely.

That was one of our recommendations that we actually looked to cap it because at the same time, you want to be focusing on instead of playing Whac-A-Mole and stopping short term rentals, you've got to be making sure that we're being proactive and creating housing opportunities for the people of Louisiana.

People need somewhere to stay and they need that.

Someone needs to be safe and healthy and decent.

And while we've been talking about short term rentals, no less than three times in the last six years, New Orleans has not been dealing with its slumlord problem.

We've been ignoring the needs of renters while focusing hyper, focusing on where tourists stay, and allowing the renters that we say that we care about to live in ever, ever riskier conditions without putting together real strategies to help them.

So when you talk about the status in New Orleans, I mean, you mentioned earlier that people think short term rentals are really the issue.

Whenever it comes to housing.

But what is the big issue when it comes to housing in the city?

Lack of affordable, safe, decent and affordable housing during the pandemic, in the first year of the pandemic, short term rentals in New Orleans fell to an all time low.

At the same time, eviction for black women and their children went through the roof.

So while you want to make sure that there's not too many short term rentals, particularly neighborhoods near job centers, you also want to make sure that you're creating more affordable housing.

It's not simply enough to be against something.

You've got to be for something.

You've got to be actively creating opportunities.

And short term rentals could, if properly managed, they haven't been properly managed.

They've not been properly.

The rules that have been put in place have not been followed.

They're not even collected.

The taxes that could be used to create affordable housing, the revenue that short term rentals are collecting.

So we've got to put together rules that make sense and enforce them and then move on to the larger problems that affect the people of Louisiana.

So in a perfect world, how would you solve this issue of having short term rentals and affordable housing and everything you know, lives together in a healthy environment?

Prioritize short term rentals, put aside, prioritize housing, prioritize affordable housing.

That means making sure we're putting the needs of the people first and saying, okay, this is where you want to live.

This is where you need to live, making sure that you have everything that you need and short term rentals being a part of that calculation.

You, in my opinion, we should be taxing them at the highest rate possible and using that revenue to create affordable housing and limiting where they go, limiting how many of them that we have say what's a healthy balance in our ecosystem of hotels and housing and restaurants and community gardens and parks and playgrounds?

What is that calculation?

And then giving people the chance to be able to participate in a and in a cultural economy that isn't so predator free, that isn't so, that isn't so embattled.

That's so out of whack.

That's what we should be doing, putting the needs of the people first and then making the calculation from there.

All right.

So I was writing down some of these things so I can remember prioritize housing, using tax revenue and putting that toward affordable housing.

And also the cap that the court mentioned earlier.

Yeah, the same.

Don't put don't build the city.

Right.

Don't let it be unfettered and unregulated.

And they're everywhere.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for telling us about this and thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

We have a treat for you this Sunday and Monday night at 7:00 LP B presents the two part premiere of Why Louisiana, eight Mississippi or Any Place Else.

It is definitely television programing that you will want to see.

I talked with the creator, Jay Darden, and he gives us a preview.

I want to say, if you live here long enough.

70% of your body is Mississippi River water.

The rest of the Sazerac.

This Sunday and Monday night at 7:00, a world premiere of the television show Why Louisiana eight.

Mississippi or any place else?

Right.

Jay Darden, you have been working with this theme for some years, decades, as a matter of fact.

About decades now it's been 25.

It's going to happen.

Five.

All right.

But it's been a while.

It has been first time.

It has become a full presentation.

Full feature like this.

Yeah, it's been.

A it's been a three hour presentation that I do with a lot of music, but it's just been me talking basically.

Now it's a four hour television production with interviews with a lot of Louisianans.

And it's it's a very interesting, I hope and fun look at it.

The state we call home.

In this case, we take a look at music, we take a look at culture, we take a look at Native Americans.

We take a look at the plantations, the history of that.

We take a look at everything that makes up Louisiana, the food, you just name it.

The whole premise is Louisiana is unlike any other place in the world.

And it's not just Mississippi that we think it's everybody.

It's no put down on Mississippi in the no comparisons.

It could be like Louisiana, Montana.

The point is, we're a unique place.

Our culture is unlike any other place in the world, and primarily because of the Mississippi River, which brought people to the new world through New Orleans, not through Ellis Island or any other port.

And the presence of Catholicism from our earliest days were parishes, not counties.

And the influence that that religion has had in south Louisiana compared with other parts of the state, we kind of look at this whole amalgamation of of religious zeal and joie de vie that that meld together and make Louisiana special.

Now, in the past, you given this talk at different clubs around the state, and in this case, you got a chance to interview a wide range of people.

Who were some of the people that you talked to for the first time about?

Well, we've got we've got James Carville, Jimmy Swaggart, Kim Mulkey, Richard Lipsey, a number of Terence Simeon, Irma Thomas.

All are all a part of the show.

Yes.

And they're not just the interviews.

They're participatory events with them being involved in the show.

We've got some comedic skits with some Louisiana native comedians who kind of give a different slant on historical events in Louisiana, because this is going to have an educational life after the show that K-12 education they were going to be putting together.

So we wanted to create a way that students would find history to be fun.

We learned the television actually was broadcasting back in the 1700s and 18.

That's right.

Welcome back, Louisiana.

The year is 1873.

As you know, our carpetbagging governor, Henry Clay warmth has been impeached.

Live ensued.

So now his replacement, the first governor of African descent in American history, PBS's Prince Back.

Welcome.

It was a it was a pleasure being governor of Louisiana.

How long were you, governor?

35 days, but it felt like a lifetime.

It's interesting that you get a chance to go all over the state.

Jimmy Speicher, for example, he was a first cousin.

Is that right?

To Jerry Lee Lewis, who recently passed away?

Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart all grew up in Faraday, Louisiana, and all grew up using the same piano that the family bought for Jerry Lee.

And all grew up being torn between the lure of rock and roll and the teaching of the assembly of God church.

And that in itself is a story.

And Reverend Swagger tells that story.

Yeah, absolutely.

Anything else that stood out to you that maybe you had not known that much about?

As you look at this, I know.

There was so much.

Is it the disproportionate impact that Louisiana has on Americana sports, music, arts, history, culture?

We punch above our weight in terms of our population compared to other states.

And that's really the whole nature of this presentation is that Louisiana is a special place.

It's had a disproportionate positive impact on America.

It's bizarre that we consistently rank low in some of the rankings that we see reading, etc., in school.

And yet what we get back is something that people tend to forget.

Perhaps, well, maybe they're used to it.

And sometimes we take it for granted and we want to get off the bottom of all those lists.

And we've got a long way to go in Louisiana, but we also have much to be proud of and a legacy of culture that that really you don't find in other places.

And people outside of Louisiana understand that and appreciate that.

That's why they want to visit here so often.

This is a hope, a presentation that's going to make people feel proud of the fact of the place they call home.

Especially there is a companion book, a coffee table book that goes with this.

That's absolutely.

Beautiful.

It really is.

Carol Highsmith, who's donated her entire body of work to the Library of Congress, including Oliver Photography of Louisiana, will be in the Library of Congress, Free for America.

But this book that we put together with her photography that I've written is an adjunct to the show, and hopefully viewers will want to have a copy of the show and a copy of the book and can help.

LBB At the same time.

I think it's time for us to air.

It's called the Sunday night, 7:00, Monday night, 7:00.

And check out the graphic here.

So you there's no way you can miss it.

And it's someplace you definitely want to be tuning into Libby at this time to watch why Louisiana, Mississippi or any other place do.

Darden, thank.

You so much.

Thanks.

Good to talk to you.

And again, that's this coming Sunday and Monday night at 7:00.

And we're both in it.

So make sure you tune in.

Hey, everyone.

That's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything, lvb, anytime, wherever you are.

With our Help PBS app.

You can catch LP News and public Affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.

For everyone at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, I'm Andre Moore.

And I'm kerosene sear.

So next time, that's the state we're in.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen to gather together.

Together, we power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.