When New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu started to speak at his State Of The City address yesterday, I was expecting a typical “recap and rah rah” speech. Instead I sat frozen in awe, listening to the condition of our city – the one Ray Nagin never told us about.Seriously, wtf did Nagin DO all day besides playing with his Blackberry and having Tourette’s outbursts?
In the post-Katrina, present-oil gusher environment we’re in, I really didn’t want more bad news. But here it is…
New Orleans has: a 67 million budget deficit, the highest murder rate in the nation, crude oil in Lake Pontchartrain, a culture of political and bureaucratic corruption and waste, an incompetent police department, dilapidated public schools, thousands of abandoned homes in semi-abandoned neighborhoods, and city workers locked in dark closets with no hot water or working elevators. Post apocalypse much? And I’m not joking about that last part, he really said it…
“Take your City Hall, for example. During my first weeks in office, I visited each office on each floor. I met a lot of great people, working in horrific conditions. One worker spends her day in a windowless space so small that it looks like a closet, not an office. Imagine my surprise when I later learned it actually was a closet prior to her moving in. For two years now, there has been no hot water in your City Hall. The elevators frequently get stuck.”
Anyway, my guess is, the reason Mitch did this speech so early in his term was because he was doing a bit of CYA (cover your ass). He needed to let people know up front how bad things were, because HE didn’t know how bad they were, and therefore had to change the scale of his goals. And the voters needed to adjust their expectations. This speech was a necessary (albeit painful) start. And depressed the hell out of me…
“During the transition, we were told that the city had a $35 million deficit. If that was not bad enough, when my team got into City Hall, we opened the books and after a thorough audit found that the budget deficit was $62 million.”
“Since then, we discovered that the city failed to properly account for a $5.5 million deficit in 2005. So the gap is now $67 million. With only six months left in the year, we face a $67 million deficit. We are obligated by law to have a balanced budget.”
“The culture of death and violence on our streets is unnatural. We have the highest per capita murder rate in the country, over ten times the national average. Ten times. And there have been 35 murders since I took office 67 days ago.”
“Just this week, tar balls and oil sheen entered into Lake Pontchartrain – a Lake that our community has rallied to clean and protect for decades.”
Anyway, I’m glad to see the direction he’s taking, cutting the budget so aggressively. A lot more can be done with the money the city is getting. The culture of corrupt behavior is so pervasive. It’s going to take not just one, but a series of aggressive moves to put this city on a good path (shit, ANY path). Unfortunately, by the end of Mitch’s term, most of the voters will be pissed at him for taking away some comfortable scheme/program/gov’t bloat they were benefiting from.
The mayor’s message of hope is noble, and yet there is so much to do that I feel… hopeless. Today I have speech hangover, and the reality of the oil gush – the length of this debacle… I’m starting to hurt like when you suffer an injury, and you assume you’ll completely heal, but instead you’re left with a lifelong ache. Oil gush, like Katrina, is now another stiff joint, occasionally jolting me with pain when I twist it wrong.
PS: I listened to the speech on WWL radio, but it was not carried live on any local TV stations. Not the four local TV news organizations, nor public television. Could WYES and WLAE not tear themselves away from BS like “Sid the Science Kid” for a state of the city speech?!?! Hell if four kindergarteners might miss an episode so the citizens could hear about the real condition of their city. I know they get public funding as well as private donations, but I’m seriously going to be pissed if any city money goes to these two stations. Seventeen year-old Nola documentaries shown at 11pm can not be worth whatever it costs.
PPS: Can we ban this sticker? It’s not funny anymore. After yesterday’s speech… I just hate it. It tells the country, hey, we think it’s shit down here too, come spill some oil on us, we don’t mind.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Hear hear, hear hear!! Reading the transcript choked me up with fury and despair. I’ll need a few days (or more) to get over that and move into the “we can do it” phase of hopefulness. I often feel overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness and frustration. And I too hate that stupid bumper sticker.
Knowing where you actually stand is the first step to making things better.
Ah, fuck that – it’s the pulling yourself up by your bootstraps part.
What was Nagin doing? Aside from attending the Superbowl on the city’s overspent dime?
He spent a large chunk of time travelling. He was named Black Mayor of the year by the… national black mayors association (or something to that effect) in 2006 (I believe). He went to New York and insulted them for not rebuilding the WTC. And for a while he was touring the country, getting paid (presumably large sums of money) to give speeches and (I sh*t you not) teach other cities how to properly handle a crisis.
Oh hell, I missed that. Nagin got an award?!?! How horrible. Did they let an intern research the nominees?
I’ve always hated the sticker. Along with “Proud to Swim Home” and “Proud to Crawl Home.” The first because it pokes fun at an event where 1300 of our neighbors didn’t swim home and the other because it reinforces the false notion that all people do is drink here. One of the reasons why the “Third World” one is so terrible (beyond what you mentioned) is that people in the Third World are starving and have no running water among other shit. The entire embracing of entropy is awful.
The “crawl home” one sounds like a fraternity sticker. The “swim home” one just makes me sad, not proud. I like the original sticker, but the French version. Wish I knew where to get one.
I always get in trouble when I say people here don’t know what suffering is. But the truth is, on a global scale, even in modern times, Katrina was a scrape.
eh, im not seeing the hate on the “Proud to…” stickers. remember they were about Proud to Call It Home. after the levee disaster this was updated to “swim home”, to show that “Hey, I still call this home, I love my home, and I will always find a way home — even if the levees are busted and I have to swim.” thats what the sticker is saying.
this is something to be proud of, not to frown upon, imo.
Hey Matt, yeah you nailed it. Thanks.
I’ve always found the “Third World” sticker to sound a false note. But then again what do I really know? I grew up in a place and time where America’s supremacy seemed unquestionable. Every day here in New Orleans I see reason to question that — now, and before the floods of 2005. There are many factors at work here, such as poverty, which I am not pretending to celebrate. But at the same time I have to admit that the “First World” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I think it depends on how you define supremacy. If money is all that matters then yes, America is ‘supreme’, however if you gauge a society’s worth on the happiness of its people then I’d say America is somewhere in the middle. People in the south generally take a more laid back view on life, which the north (and west) tend to interpret as laziness. I think we just like to enjoy life more deliberately, even if that means giving up a bit of wealth.
Many many 3rd World countries have desperate trouble with Big Oil, take any 3 African nations. But I hate that bumper sticker too and don’t agree with it. That said, we have to see the effects of our own ground here before we can stand against any preternational corporation. Last I checked our ground is washing away and now its people are getting poisoned. Sounds pretty 3rd World to me.
Maybe we’ve just dropped to 2nd World?
Pistolette, thanks for this great post. Sometimes it is indeed hard to see a diamond in the bald sunlight.
Great post. I was flabbergasted to hear that Nagin had blown through most of New Orleans’ money for 2010 before Mitch could take office. This seemed like an intentional move. The obvious solution to preventing these kind of things (it seems to me, as a casual observer) would be to make the fiscal year align with the election year, or at least limit the mayor’s budget in an outgoing year to the portion of that year’s budget proportional to the the months he’s still there. In other words, if Nagin is in office for 2 months of 2010, he should only get to spend 2/12 of the year’s budget, not 75% or whatever he apparently spent. (Asshole.)
On the bumpersticker topic, I am also totally sick of the “3rd World and Proud of It” sticker. I thought it was funny for about a year after moving here, but the longer I’ve lived here, the less funny I have found it. (Of course that’s true of nearly all jokes.) On the other hand, I agree with Editor B’s point about the First World also sucking in a very large way, and that’s one of the reasons I found New Orleans charming. Upside: every restaurant is not an Applebee’s. Downside: Huey Long’s legacy of corruption and jerks like Nagin. I think Katrina killed off the last bit of humor if there were any left in that joke, but actually for me I think it was reading about the corruption in the New Orleans school board before Katrina.
Varg: I am good friends with the dude that came up with and printed the original “Proud to Swim Home” bumperstickers and I can tell you that in no way was it meant to “make fun” of anything other than try to make a desperate and horrible situation a little lighter in some weird way. The levees had just broken that day, the rain was pouring down on us in Memphis and he was wanting to express the fact that some people (like us) were going to WANT to come home NO MATTER WHAT. This was before the media coverage at the Superdome, much less any of the horrors that you think it makes fun of. It never occurred to me until much later that someone might misconstrue it in that way.
Sure, it has lost its potency over time and has no real relevance now, but then you must remember that people did not know if there would be any city to come back to, and this was a statement of willingness to return and rebuild, no matter what, no matter how you had to get home to do it. Thousands and thousands of stickers were sold before anyone was allowed back in the city and the money all went to charity.
I also can tell you that it was really really uplifting to see all those stickers on the cars when we came back (as soon as Nagin opened up the city.) Unfortunately as months went by lots of other people like Mushroom Records made unauthorized copies/versions of the stickers (as well as T-shirts) and sold them for their own personal profit, and the original intent was somewhat diluted.
Thanks. I also think that holding our mayoral election between the Superbowl and Mardi Gras was a dumb idea, but the law says so. Guess Ray thought we’d be too busy partying to notice his spending (and we were, apparently). The city council is not totally blameless here either, but we’ll see how they respond to new leadership.
In league with a comment above “What WAS he doing with his time…?” I gotta wonder too, how can you spend that much money so fast without having SOMETHING to show for it, to put before a grand jury?
FAIL like that must have taken some doing. Right?
Great post. The candor of the mayor, cover your ass or not…(agreed) was a great start. Doing what I do for a living, working with people, sometimes ya have to break it down in honest terms first, otherwise there’s going to be nothing but disappointment to come. Realism, imagine that, after all those years of Nagin and his promises to do…what? Where the hell is he now anyway? And more importantly, are people taking their turns insulting him on a daily basis? The next few years would have been rough in New Orleans, even without the oil spill and the closing of the shipyards in Avondale…at least Mitch had the good sense to bring you in and tell ya the facts first.
I believe our entire budget deficit can be erased by the collection of overdue commercial/corporate property taxes and/or the auctioning off of said properties as well as other properties that have remain untouched/unrepaired since Katrina….