NEW ORLEANS – Mayor Ray Nagin, who has vowed to resurrect his crippled city, conceded Tuesday that New Orleans will shrink to nearly half its pre-hurricane population and will have to make do with one-third of its previous budget.
With as many as 250,000 homes uninhabitable and some neighborhoods still lacking basic services, Nagin estimated the city’s shattered infrastructure could support 250,000 to 300,000 residents over the next year, compared with the half a million people who lived here before Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29.
“That’s every available space,” he said.
Nagin said his staff is scouring lists of blighted properties that could be renovated for temporary housing, as well as scouting for vacant lots, parks and supermarket parking lots to place thousands of trailers.
On Thursday, Nagin, who once oversaw a $600 million annual budget, intends to unveil a $230 million spending plan, boosted – “if we’re lucky” – by tax revenue from businesses reopening in the city’s least damaged sectors, he said. That projection, he said, relies heavily on loans and has a $70 million to $80 million shortfall that he has yet to figure out how to fill.
Nagin expressed continued frustration with a federal bureaucracy that has given him “very little” control over the hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated for Katrina relief. So many businesses have fled that Nagin has been forced to travel outside the state to try to woo them back. And, he said, it will be up to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to decide whether the city’s February primary elections will be held as scheduled.
But it is housing that has been the most nettlesome problem facing Nagin, as well as federal officials and private employers working to put this wrecked city back on its feet.
The mayor’s staff has identified more than a half-dozen locations that he said could support 4,000 trailers. FEMA housing expert James McIntyre said the agency has approved construction of sites to handle more than 1,700 trailers. Trailers will be placed in the parking lot of Touro hospital, three city parks, public school property and a former Winn-Dixie parking lot.
The first few thousand units will be set aside for people involved in the reconstruction, Nagin said.
“You jump to the front of the line if you come as a worker,” he said.
But Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the recovery effort, said federal officials may have to nudge some reluctant residents out of hotels in other states and into FEMA trailers.
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