Education Quote by Billy Tauzin

“Live with water” is the kind of line that sounds like civic poetry until you remember why it had to be said at all. In the wake of Katrina, Billy Tauzin isn’t offering a quaint regional philosophy; he’s trying to reframe catastrophe as a design problem. The rhetorical move matters: fear is cast as emotional, paralyzing, even irrational, while “living with” water implies maturity, planning, and control. It’s a soft way to demand hard choices - zoning changes, elevated infrastructure, restored wetlands, buyouts in the most vulnerable areas - without naming the political pain directly.

The insistence on a “master plan” is equally loaded. After a disaster defined by institutional failure, “master plan” signals competence and centralized coordination, a promise that the rebuilding won’t be a scramble of ad hoc fixes and patronage. It’s also a bid for authority: whoever writes the plan gets to decide what parts of New Orleans are preserved, transformed, or quietly abandoned.

Then comes the real audience: “everyone in the country.” Tauzin’s subtext is that New Orleans is not just rebuilding buildings, it’s rebuilding credibility. Federal money, private investment, and population return all depend on confidence, and confidence depends on optics. “Send a signal” admits the rebuilding is partly performance - a public demonstration that the city and its backers are disciplined enough to justify another round of trust after the levees failed and the cameras rolled.