[StBernard] Walter Boasso known as hard worker

[Westley Annis]

Walter Boasso known as hard worker
By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON
Advocate Capitol News Bureau
Published: Sep 25, 2007

Editor's note: Second in a series of profiles of the major candidates for
governor.

The fact that state Sen. Walter Boasso launched his container cleaning
company with a garden hose and a box of Tide appealed to former legislator
Armand Brinkhaus.

"I thought that's no false pride," Brinkhaus said of deciding to send a
campaign contribution to Boasso after watching his commercial in the
governor's race. "It just intrigued me. I said, 'Let me send that man $500.'
"

Boasso is not focusing much on fundraising in his bid to become governor. He
is using his personal fortune to fuel his campaign.
His commercials tell his story of growing up on food stamps, founding his
business at age 19 and becoming a millionaire.

That money helped propel him into the state Senate, where he took on river
pilots and levee boards, powerful interests that control a lot of money and
patronage. He led efforts to impose state rules on the mostly unregulated
river pilots and to consolidate a fractured levee board system into two
boards.

Now he wants to be governor.

"Big challenges? You bet. But someone has to stand up for the little guy,"
Boasso tells voters in one commercial. "I know I will."
Boasso, a Democrat, acknowledges his goal for the Oct. 20 primary election
is simply to get into a November runoff against the front-runner, U.S. Rep.
Bobby Jindal, a Republican. Boasso's other major opponents are Public
Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, a Democrat, and New Orleans
businessman John Georges, who has no party affiliation.

Most political experts point to Boasso as the candidate with the best chance
of facing Jindal in a runoff.

Boasso - who left the Republican Party after the leadership endorsed Jindal
for governor - started soft, toting around a cardboard cutout of Jindal in a
series of television commercials. Since then, his ads have taken a more
serious turn by delving into issues such as insurance and showing his
flooded home after Hurricane Katrina.

The Katrina catalyst
Colleagues point to Katrina as the trigger that propelled Boasso into the
governor's race.

But his sister, Carol Ortego of Meraux, thinks the seed was planted before
the storms.

She said her brother is running for governor because he is tired of seeing
people leave Louisiana for better opportunities in other states. That
migration was well under way long before the hurricane.

"The storm is just another stepping stone. I don't think that was the
trigger. I think it was there before," Ortego said.

Boasso, 47, said the aftermath of the hurricane solidified his decision to
run for governor, especially a moment of frustration in January when
officials were pointing fingers at each other for the storm recovery's
meltdown.

The recovery's problems are so well known that they have become fodder in
the presidential race.

Insurance companies are leaving the state or escalating their rates. The
"Road Home" program for storm victims is short of money. Crime is plaguing
New Orleans. The northeast corner of the state is racked with poverty.

Boasso's answer to these problems: "Just fix it."

Boasso's campaign platform includes such ideas as a tax credit for the
increase in insurance premiums that homeowners are paying. He sponsored a
credit during the recent legislative session but had to settle for a
less-generous incentive than he envisioned.

He wants to persuade businesses looking to expand to consider vacant
facilities on waterways in the more-impoverished areas of the state.

Boasso says he wants to make Louisiana as business-friendly as possible,
emphasizing vocational education and the need to make it easier for
companies to offer health insurance.

At a Rotary Club in Ferriday, Boasso warned that the state is at a
crossroads and living in a false economy.
Boasso said the state will probably take five to 10 years to recover from
the storms - but added he cannot expect residents to wait that long.

"I want to hit the ground and get them going," he said.

Food stamps to fortune
Boasso grew up in St. Bernard Parish in a family of six children. His father
was a union electrician. His mother was a housewife.
Boasso's father suffered his first heart attack at age 40, forcing the
family to go on food stamps. Boasso was 12.

Boasso said he knew his family was struggling financially when a do-gooder
came to the door at Thanksgiving with a turkey and a basket of food.

Ortego said their parents focused on family activities that didn't cost a
lot of money, such as crawfishing in the swamps.
"We grew up not missing anything because we had a full life," she said.

Boasso was in high school when he started dating his wife, Cindy, when she
was 15. They met through a social organization that brought their two high
schools together. They have been married for 25 years.

At age 19, Boasso went into business for himself with, as he tells it, a box
of Tide and a garden hose.

He was working for a ship-cleaning company while attending the University of
New Orleans. A customer asked the company to clean tanks used to carry
high-proof whiskey.

Boasso says that while his boss declined the job, he jumped at it, working
nights and weekends. He later thumbed through an industry magazine and wrote
to tank companies all over the world to tell them about his cleaning
services.

One morning, Boasso says, his father woke him at 6:30 a.m. to talk to three
men at the front door with tractor-trailers full of tanks - Boasso had used
his home address in his letters.

Ortego said her brother's success seemed to happen overnight.

"He was cleaning the tanks, and then the next thing I knew he had an office
and somebody working in the office," she said.

As soon as Boasso had $175 in profits, he bought a shipping container and
started selling containers as well as cleaning them.
He recently sold Boasso America for $60 million. He said he plans to stay
with the business for three years as a $50,000-a-year consultant.

Storm story
Boasso ran for the state Senate in 2003 using $350,000 of his own money. He
entered politics, he said, after seeing a man's tears over his child and
grandchild leaving Louisiana to pursue their dreams.

As a senator, he acknowledged the difficulty of the transition from running
his company to running in a pack of 144 legislators. He tackled issues, but
it took the hurricane to thrust him onto center stage.

Katrina hit in August 2005. The storm surge overwhelmed St. Bernard Parish's
levee system. At St. Rita's Nursing Home, 35 drowned. Across the parish, the
water chased residents into their attics and onto their rooftops.

Boasso evacuated his wife, three children and dogs to the safety of Baton
Rouge, where he ran into Capt. Brian Clark at the state Office of Emergency
Preparedness.

Clark, who works for the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, was in the
first wave of emergency workers who went into New Orleans after the storm.
He let Boasso hop into the convoy. From New Orleans, they worked their way
down to Clark's hometown of Chalmette.

"Everything was under water," Clark said. "It was me, Walter and another
agent (for) two days straight."

Working together, they pulled people into boats, moved power lines and cut
down trees while they waited for more help to arrive. They slept for an hour
with guns on their chests.

"It was like we were there and that was it, and we saw nobody," Clark said
of the wait for state and federal help.

The Hole
Boasso dubbed his flooded parish "the hole" for the hellishness of it.

His memories include a man begging him to go look for the 4-year-old who
slipped from his arms into the flood water and the pleas of a trapped person
whose cries faded before Boasso could find him.

Boasso developed a routine.

"I'd go to Baton Rouge every night, beg for help, take a shower and drive
back," he said.

State Sen. Rob Marionneaux, D-Grosse Tete, helped set up a supply chain at
the Port of Baton Rouge. Food, clothes, generators and barbecue equipment
were loaded onto barges and shipped to Belle Chasse.

Marionneaux said Boasso directed the efforts.

"He's the kind of person I would want to have help me in a time of need.
He's the kind of guy who doesn't take 'no' for answers," he said.

Some of the supplies came from Houston, where they were loaded onto Boasso's
company plane and flown to Louisiana.
A warehouse on the river in St. Bernard Parish became a makeshift shelter.

Boasso drove to a school and solicited people who could operate heavy
machinery to move plywood out of the way inside the warehouse, Clark said.

"The next thing you know, (they're) moving heavy equipment, making temporary
beds," Clark said. "He spearheaded that."
Boasso does not readily talk about the hurricane.

"Walter went through a tremendous gush of feelings during the storm," said
Ortego, his sister. "There's stories that he has related to family that he
has not related to the public. Stories that brought him to tears."

Into the fray
After Katrina, Boasso found himself at the center of a political firestorm
when he sponsored a plan to put levee operations in southeast Louisiana
under the control of two boards.

The idea was to shift oversight from politically connected appointees to
professionals. Critics of the boards claimed they were patronage machines
that had long focused more on things such as marinas than on storm
protection.

Originally, Boasso pushed for one "super board." The proposal evolved into
two boards representing the east and west banks of the Mississippi River to
make it more palatable to political leaders. The compromise did not soothe
everyone.

Marionneaux said Boasso would rather go through a door than knock on it. He
meant the analogy as a compliment. But Boasso's forcefulness grates on
others.

St. Bernard Parish President Junior Rodriguez and state Rep. Ken Odinet,
D-Arabi, felt the proposal took control away from individual parishes.
Odinet accused Boasso of letting his ego lead him.

Odinet said officials were not brought to the table on a proposal that
affected their constituents.

"It seems to me we could have had more consideration and been allowed to
have some input into the bill," he said.

He said he still thinks the bill was bad because it lacked a provision for
pumping out St. Bernard Parish, something the abolished levee district
handled.

But Odinet said he no longer wants to bad mouth Boasso.

"I'd rather not express an opinion. He's running for governor, and I don't
want to hurt his chances one way or another," he said.
Boasso's sister said there is a softer side beneath his can-do
aggressiveness.

She remembers her brother coming to the hospital after the premature birth
of her youngest child. The baby, weighing under 4 pounds, was whisked to the
intensive-care unit and hooked to a machine to help the infant breathe.
Boasso looked at the infant and broke down in tears.

"He cried when he saw that baby because he appreciated the life and
struggle," Ortego said. "He's got a heart on the inside. He doesn't always
let it show, but you put kids in front of him and he will turn into a bucket
of mush."