| By Drew Broach | Deputy metro editor
SHOCK TREATMENT: Entergy Louisiana customers will be on the hook to pay an extra $3.2 billion over the next 15 years to cover the utility's expenses from storms that clobbered the state in 2020 and 2021. After the Louisiana Public Service Commission approved the plan in a 4-1 vote Wednesday, the utility said the expense works out to $8 a month per 1,000 kilowatt hours; its typical ratepayer uses about 1,250 kilowatt hours per month. The commission meeting came on the same day that Entergy reported another year of robust earnings and promised higher shareholder dividends.
CARNIVAL: In a confluence of Mardi Gras season costumes and aerosol street art, the Dames de Perlage, one of those fabulous 21st-century, do-it-yourself Carnival walking clubs, are strutting their handiwork in several New Orleans parades, including Tucks on Saturday. Elsewhere: - During the Krewe of Druids parade Wednesday night, a woman fell headfirst from a carriage onto the pavement of St. Charles Avenue in the Central Business District.
- City officials advised revelers to have fun but hold onto those public health masks, as New Orleans moves into the final days of its first public Carnival since the deadly COVID-19 outbreak after Mardi Gras 2020.
- And Carnival historian Arthur Hardy takes us back to the 1950s, when New Orleans hosted a royal couple, parades still rolled through neighborhoods and no bakeries advertised king cakes.
COUNTDOWN: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has until March 14 to decide whether he'll veto any of the six bills that Republicans in the Louisiana Legislature passed to redraw the state's next decade of voting maps. A Democrat, Edwards has voiced unease that the maps do not add more majority-minority districts, but he has not committed to vetoing them. If he takes no action by the deadline, the maps will take effect.
REGRETS: In the Front Page newsletter published on Feb. 23, The Times-Picayune improperly characterized the story reporting on the arrests of two JPSO deputies for manslaughter in the shooting of a homeless man. The headline and summary were racially insensitive and off point. We regret the error.
Six days to Mardi Gras! Keep up with the latest news all day on NOLA.com. D.B. | 
