City Hall to receive rebuilding plans soon

By Deon Roberts, Social Media Editor

Mayor C. Ray Nagin spent much of last year blaming state officials for taking too long to get rebuilding dollars into the hands of homeowners.

Now, the world gets to see how quickly he can get projects funded.

A long-awaited list of projects, from street repairs to neighborhood plans, is expected to be in the hands of City Hall by the end of the month.

For months, residents across 13 planning districts have dedicated countless unpaid hours to crafting plans to rebuild their neighborhoods destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, citywide planners have drafted lists of infrastructure needs, such as schools and hospitals. Many devoted themselves to planning, even though they could have used the valuable time to repair their flooded homes.

All planning will soon wrap up, and the ball will be in City Hall’s court.

District meetings will be held from today to Sunday in Districts 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. Final plans for each district will be presented.

Those meetings will be followed Jan. 20 by a citywide meeting scheduled to be held in New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta and Dallas.

A Community Support Organization meeting will be held Jan. 25.

After that, planners will bundle months’ worth of planning and hand what will be called the Unified New Orleans Plan to the City Planning Commission. It will be up to the CPC and Nagin’s administration to act quickly on UNOP and get it to the City Council, which will also mull over it.

The sooner the layers of city bureaucracy approve the plans, the sooner funding can be sought from the federal government, philanthropists and other sources to make the plans a reality.

Steven Bingler, whose New Orleans company, Concordia, coordinated the city’s planning process, said the Louisiana Recovery Authority as well as state and federal agencies and private sources can be tapped into to fund portions of UNOP. For example, the LRA has allocated roughly $200 million for schools, Bingler said, adding that $169 million in block grants is another possible funding source.

But City Hall needs to act on the plans, prioritize projects and aggressively shop them around for funding.

Residents have worked tirelessly on planning. City Hall now needs to work tirelessly to bring the plans to fruition.

“Everybody’s worked really hard over the past year and a half to get the plan done,” Bingler said. “Now’s not the time to stop having meetings. Now’s the time to refocus those meetings on funding and implementation.”•