News Roundup

Neighborhood plans wind down: The next step is city planners

Times-Picayune
By Michelle Krupa
January 14, 2007

Closing another chapter in the protracted effort to create a rebuilding blueprint for New Orleans, residents across the city made final tweaks this weekend to long lists of projects they would like to see included in the city’s lagging recovery.

Rounding out a process that began in October, participants in six of the city’s 13 planning districts nailed down their recommendations for neighborhood-level recovery projects, such as reopening playgrounds and redeveloping retail corridors, though their work left largely unanswered crucial questions about how such work would be financed and when it might begin.

Another six of the planning districts recognized by the Unified New Orleans Plan held their final meetings last weekend. The 13th district, the New Aurora and English Turn sections of Algiers, wraps up its work today.

The focus of the planning process now shifts to a citywide meeting next weekend that will serve as the public culmination of the effort to create the Unified New Orleans Plan, a recovery blueprint that will prioritize rebuilding efforts and offer suggestions for financing and implementing them.

Thousands of residents have attended dozens of meetings to create the citywide and district draft plans.

Saturday’s Community Congress, like a similar session late last year, will allow New Orleanians to participate simultaneously from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and from sites in Atlanta, Dallas and Houston.

At Saturday’s session, the professional planners guiding the process are expected to unveil an outline for overall recovery, focusing less on specific projects than on overarching issues such as flood protection, mass transit and education.

No real specifics

Although some meeting-weary residents have expressed the desire for a decisive document, planners in recent weeks have intimated that the product of the entire planning process will not offer definitive timetables and schematics.

“What you won’t see in the plan (are) directives that prioritize certain neighborhoods or districts over another, because we believe that they’re all viable,” said Joe Butler, a spokesman for the planning process. “And we are not in any position to select how they are brought back and the timeline (on which) they are brought back.”

Both the citywide and the district plans, including last-minute alterations to the citywide draft made at the Community Congress, are expected to be delivered to the City Planning Commission by Jan. 30. That body later will forward them, with its recommendations, to the City Council.

Although the final district sessions during the past two weekends allowed residents to crystallize their ideas for restoring their own neighborhoods, many participants, including some who said they had not missed a single meeting of the unified plan, again raised questions that have dogged the process since it began.

Residents of lakefront neighborhoods attending a meeting Friday night at St. Pius X School in Lake Vista wondered just how their favorite projects might be paid for.

Meeting organizers, who have said only that the recommended work is likely to be financed through a combination of public and private sources, admitted they do not know exactly how much money is available. The local meetings, they reiterated, were designed to enumerate the needs of a city that is vying for recovery money with all other victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“We’re in competition with 33 other parishes,” said Steve Villavaso, the leader of a consulting team working on citywide infrastructure issues. “There’s just a lot of competition for this money. Without this plan, we go nowhere.”

Who gets the money?

In Algiers, Barbara Foundas, president of the Algiers Council of Neighborhood Presidents, asked Saturday whether West Bank residents should expect a smaller slice of the financial pie “because we didn’t flood.”

State leaders months ago told local officials, who had backed an earlier planning exercise in flooded areas only, to create a plan that included all parts of the city.

Architect Hank Alinger told Foundas that sources of money have yet to be identified for the recommended local projects, although the Louisiana Recovery Authority has allotted $116 million in federal grants for infrastructure work in New Orleans.

In eastern New Orleans, resident May Nguyen urged residents Saturday to come up with a list of five top projects crucial to the recovery of their part of the city.

Participants in three eastern New Orleans planning districts have held joint meetings throughout the process, though they developed rebuilding priorities specific to each district. Even though every desired project should be included in the district plans, Nguyen said, she feared that the three districts’ lack of population post-Katrina and far-flung geography would reduce residents’ ability to get their pet projects accomplished.

“We really need to have a unified voice when we get to the city level,” she said. “Let’s be honest: When it gets to the city, it’s going to be a big, thick document… . If it gets to that point, we don’t want our top five priorities to be lost.”

In the end, more than 120 residents at the eastern New Orleans meeting settled on these five priorities: reopening a local hospital, setting new standards for construction of low-density multi-family housing, redeveloping the Chef Menteur Highway commercial corridor, reopening police and fire stations, and reopening schools quickly, possibly with modular units.

Question a hot potato

During the final series of district meetings, planners tried to defuse an increasingly contentious issue by saying they will disregard several questions posed in December at the second Community Congress. That meeting allowed New Orleanians here and in other cities to vote on citywide recovery priorities by answering questions on computerized keypads.

In at least two of six recovery “scenarios” presented at the congress, residents were asked to select from three options, including one in which money and other resources for rebuilding would be concentrated in “areas of the city with greatest need.”

Though a discussion guide distributed to participants indicated that such areas included “neighborhoods where more people and businesses are located,” some residents said they believed the phrase meant most money would go to neighborhoods where flooding was worst and where many blocks still resemble ghost towns.

When district-level planning meetings last month were told that a majority of those voting at the Community Congress had supported concentrating resources in the so-called greatest-need areas, many of the district sessions ground to a halt. Residents refused to continue their discussions until they could settle on a definition of “areas of greatest need” — whether it meant neighborhoods that have recovered the most or those that have recovered the least.

“Both positions are valid,” Villavaso said in an interview last week.

Because of the confusion, Villavaso and other UNOP directors decided to “throw out” the questions that included the “greatest need” options, he said. “We decided to … just not take those statistics into consideration.”

Hard to ignore

Although Villavaso said that deleting those questions “left no holes in our data,” some participants in the UNOP process worry that the omitted questions are crucial to the final plan. Those questions dealt with how resources should be distributed to rebuild roads, transit and utilities infrastructure, along with police, fire and criminal justice facilities.

“If you’re really looking to the neighborhoods and what the people think, this is an extremely important question,” said Musa Eubanks, who lives near Bayou St. John. “Because of the money that’s coming in — aside from housing — this is the most crucial question: Where are the resources going to go for the infrastructure of the city?”

Troy Henry, a management consultant to the planning effort, said that in the final citywide draft, the issue of “greatest need” would be handled “by sector.”

“The greatest need as it relates to economic development might not be the same as the greatest need as it relates to housing,” Henry said. He declined to be more specific.

Meanwhile, Butler said, the term “greatest need” has “evaporated” from planners’ discussions.