News Roundup

Planner: Get an outsider to lead recovery: Others say council needs to step up

The Times-Picayune
Sunday, July 16, 2006
By Michelle Krupa

New Orleans needs a rebuilding czar, ideally someone without ties to the city, who can spearhead the stymied recovery process and exercise final authority over the nuts-and-bolts rules of how residents can return home, an internationally renowned urban planner told a citizens advocacy group Saturday.

Ed Blakely, an urban affairs professor who led recovery efforts after Oakland’s 1988 earthquake and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, said success in those and other massive rebuilding efforts resulted from leaders’ swift action, sometimes laying out recovery plans within 24 hours of a disaster, and their willingness to install a single chief to guide a comprehensive plan “so that you’re not moving home by home.”

“It should not be a local person,” said Blakely, who paid his own way from his home in Australia to address the African-American Leadership Project’s summit in Central City. “They (should) have no baggage, but they have to have a real human touch to know where people are coming from.”

Blakely said such a leader would be less likely to be influenced by historical, cultural and political factors that can sway the decisions of local residents on issues including which geographic areas, if any, should be off limits to rebuilding.

“Everyone should be allowed to rebuild. But that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone should be allowed to rebuild in exactly the same place they built before,” he said, noting that property rights derive not from individuals but from the government.

Jeffrey Lowe, an analyst schooled in the planning theory of New Urbanism who also participated in the summit, said it also is crucial that goals for rebuilding be defined clearly by the City Council, which he and AALP leaders agreed has let its authority over the recovery wane since Aug. 29 storm.

“The City Council needs to act,” Lowe said. “They’re the ones that the citizens elected collectively.”

Mtangulizi Sanyika, the AALP’s project manager, criticized the council for taking a back seat in the recovery effort since Katrina and for frequently failing to step in when Mayor Ray Nagin has made conflicting statements about the process or remained silent on some issues, such as exactly which sections of eastern New Orleans may be situated on dangerously low ground.

“There has been a lack of process from Day 1,” he said. “From the beginning, the city of New Orleans has acted paralyzed… . We’ve gotten so many mixed messages that we are thoroughly confused.”

Sanyika suggested, for instance, that the council adopt a formal definition of “a low-lying neighborhood,” as well as catalog, once and for all, which neighborhoods will be allowed to rebuild in their pre-Katrina locations. Such action also could help dispel the notion among some displaced residents that their intentions are being ignored, he said.

“The perception is that business has become the predominant stakeholder and that the citizens’ interest has become secondary,” Sanyika said.

Blakely said the city needs a clear, systematic approach to rebuilding. But he also acknowledged that New Orleans is a facing challenge of immeasurable scope.

“This may be the most unique rebuild in the history of the world,” he said.