Alan Gutierrez

Mayor C Ray Nagin managed to forget to spend our recovery money on us. The AP is reporting in La. officials rebut Nagin’s money complaints.

That leaves over $595 million in federal money that is available to the city but has not been requested, said Col. Jeff Smith, chief of the homeland security office. Once the proper documentation is submitted, the money is available for replacing city property and structures damaged or ruined in Katrina and its aftermath, such as police cars and buses, the city jail, roads, and the sewer and water systems.

Those things all sound so nice.

Dr. Blakely says that we must go to New York, not to Washington. Don’t worry. He has friends in New York.

When is it okay for us to draw conclusions?

I was invited to a meet and greet with Dr. Ed Blakely last Saturday. I’ve not had time to write about it until now.

The meeting started with M.T. Sanyika and Shelia Danzy talking about how we are going to start to press for a recovery implementation. These were people who were part of the summer planning, so it was people from flooded neighborhoods, including Mid-City, Northwest Carrollton, the Historic 7th Ward, the Historic 9th Ward, and all over the East.

Talking about an implementation was heartening. We were told that primarily, recoveries need unity, and that we are all begining to display that unity. I can’t quite describe how they were hitting every cord, presenting funding matricies, where neighborhoods had detailed each park, school, commerical development, and how much each cost. It was recovery buffet. Just add political will.

For example, Steven Dominick said that plans for parks are not pie in the sky. If the park has been used as a FEMA trailer park, then the park will be remediated by the federal government to return it to a park, when the FEMA trailers are removed. This is where you start the funding the park, and use your political will to find other sources of federal and state funding.

Blakely started out talking about how he is spending a billion dollars of his own money to build a development in California. It was strange. It’s nice to be a player, but building a development in California is not the same thing as leading a recovery in New Orleans.

He talked about the 1991 Oakland fires, his recovery experience. It sounded good. Turn a Safeway into a reccovery center. Call your friend at Allstate to get people settled out when they walk in the door. That sounded reassuring.

He talked about basing the recovery around job creation, which resonnated with me. He spoke ill of the tourist industry, which really struck a cord. Spoke highly of medical and information technology. He made a case for New Orleans as a port city, gateway to Latin America, and a cultural center that uses the Internet to export that will begat the next Pixar with all this raw talent.

Then he said that we are not going to Washington, we are going to New York, which sucked the air out of the room. It was deflating. We need to take this to Washington this year.

Political will.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis spoke before Blakely. She was on message with recovery implementation, rather than planning, and afterwards, I told her that I for one, believe that Washington should be engaged.