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MAURIN’S MISSION

Louisiana developer fights to help get New Orleans back on its feet

By Edmund Mander

The last hurricane to smash New Orleans — Betsy, in 1965 — cut electrical power and sent a 17-year-old Jimmy Maurin scrambling back and forth from an icehouse to his family’s home to replenish the icebox.

But Hurricane Katrina sent him all the way to Washington, D.C., this time to bring assistance to beleaguered New Orleans and the surrounding area. He spent two hectic days meeting federal lawmakers and officials, including the secretaries of energy and commerce. His mission: to keep the city on the federal radar screen.

James E. Maurin, CSM, chairman of Stirling Properties, one of the Gulf’s largest commercial property development and management companies, rattles off a few statistics to help those who have not seen this storm’s destruction firsthand to understand its scale: Hurricane Andrew, which blasted its way across southern Florida in 1992, was at the time the most destructive storm in U.S. history; it killed 43 people and flooded 20,000 homes. Katrina flooded 150,000 homes, and its death toll was 1,100 and rising at press time.

Not that Maurin himself has any need of statistics to comprehend the enormity of the disaster. He sat out the storm with his wife, Lillian, at their home in Hammond, about 50 miles outside New Orleans. They and their property escaped relatively unscathed, save for some 15 felled trees, but as soon as the winds died down, he was out surveying the damage, first in his immediate area, then in New Orleans.

“It looks like a bomb went off,” he said, comparing it to the images he recalls from his schoolboy days’ history lessons about Hiroshima. “Everything is leveled. Houses are down, trees are down.”

While attending to the needs of Louisiana, Maurin simultaneously worked to get his own company up and running again. All his staff — there are 356 of them spread through 17 offices around the region — are safe, though 43 were displaced and 22 had their homes destroyed. A dozen of the offices were open a week after the storm; all but one had reopened as of this writing.

Many property management staff were back at work the day after the storm. Displaced employees, or those whose offices were shut, were guaranteed a job at other locations — on condition that they turn up the Tuesday after Labor Day, eight days after the storm.

“For the good of us all, mentally and emotionally, getting back to work, no matter how difficult, was a very positive step in getting back to a normal life,” Maurin said. “I think all of us who have experienced a disaster or tragedy have that need.”

Then there were the firm’s clients to think about. “Our property clients needed us more now than ever before, and we had an opportunity to show them that we could be there in difficult times,” Maurin said. “Within two weeks after the storm, we had over 90 percent of our properties back in business. In the evacuated areas, it was critical that we get back up and running so that the people would have something to come home to.”

This is not the first time Maurin has found himself on the front lines of adversity in Louisiana. The collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s hit the region’s economy hard. “When our business was failing in the ’80s, I kept going to work each day, and things kept getting worse and worse,” he recalled in a cover story for Louisiana’s State Business Magazine in the fall of 1999. “I asked myself, ‘Why are you fighting this? Give up and start over.’ Lots of other people were doing just that. I don’t know why, but we just kept plugging.”

Compared to peers in the region, Stirling escaped relatively unharmed this time around. Of 70 properties — the company owns and manages 9 million square feet of retail and office space — four sustained flood damage, though there was widespread damage from the winds. Total damage amounted to less than 2 percent of the firm’s portfolio value, says Maurin.

For reasons likely to be the subject of discussion for months, things moved less efficiently on the local, state and federal levels of government. But finger-pointing is a luxury only those with dry feet can afford. Recognizing the need for immediate action, Maurin headed to Washington as a member of Louisiana’s Committee of 100, a group of CEOs and business leaders. Maurin says he left Washington two days later with a sense that he and his congressional representatives had gotten their message across to federal officials about the urgent need for help.

“I do see the leaders of this state and the leaders of our country coming together,” he said just after his return home in the third full week of September. When the federal government got moving, it moved, putting 84,000 federal employees of various vocations on the ground in the region, he says, most of them military or Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel.

Now that the region has gotten the country’s attention, the key is to keep it, he says. “The No. 1 effort is to get it restored and rebuilt better than it ever was before,” said Maurin. For a start, New Orleans’ flood control system of pumps and levees needs to be improved to a standard at which they can withstand a Category 5 hurricane, he says, not the Category 3 threshold that succumbed to Katrina.

And there is much to be learned from the crisis that can be applied nationwide. For one thing, communications have to be improved. With Internet and cell phone service down, Maurin was cut off from his daughters, friends and employees. Even more seriously, “this breakdown in communications is a major inhibitor to the recovery effort,” he said.

Maurin says he is confident that the region will be made whole again. New Orleans in particular has too much going for it to be overlooked, he says, what with its shipbuilding, university and tourist appeal. But he is under no illusion that the city will ever be quite the same.

“There is no question that there are some areas … that are completely lost, and the only solution will be that they be bulldozed,” he said. And many of its former residents will not return, he predicts. “The new New Orleans is going to be smaller.”

But it will be unchanged in one important way, says Maurin: “The culture of New Orleans will survive.”