Incredibly ill-advised

You heard it here first, but Fox8 News traces the hectic and premature departure of the Blood Center, long located in the proposed LSU Footprint, to a temporary facility in an old car dealership in The East:

"It's just hard to sit here and watch it. We put so much into that facility. This is my life," said Blood Center President Billy Wheales. It's really mind boggling for me considering we have been here for more than 50 years."


The state gave the Blood Center an August 1st deadline to be out of the remainder of the building.


This has made for a hectic few weeks and an unusual move to New Orleans East to the site of an old car dealership. For a facility that supplies the entire region with blood, it's been a challenging transition," he says.

And there you have it.  Functionally, by forcing the Blood Center out of the site unnecessarily, the State of Louisiana, LSU, and the UMC Board have jeopardized the blood supply, an important aspect of the metro region's healthcare.

The site plan for the UMC could have easily incoporated the Blood Center facility, but as with McDonogh No. 11 and Deutsches Haus, it decidedly quite forcefully not to do so.  There was no reason to weaken or put the blood supply at risk when the land the facility sat on was not essential to building the proposed medical complex - a hospital that does not have adequate financing or a business plan.

As with so many aspects of this process, I'm forced to sit back and ask rhetorically, once again...where are the adults in the room?  Can someone tell me what is really driving all this belligerent insistence?  One can look at land, at power, at financial greed...but this just does not make any sense.