[StBernard] EDITORIAL: Louisiana in Limbo

[Westley Annis]

Periodically, the press office will share editorials about Governor Blanco's
work in various areas.

EDITORIAL: Louisiana in Limbo 

By: The New York Times
Published: Monday, January 30, 2006


New Orleans waits. While some heroic efforts at rebuilding are taking place,
hundreds of thousands of residents have put their lives on hold until they
know what the government's next steps will be, leaving the shells of their
houses as placeholders. But the Bush administration has now rejected the
most broadly supported plan for rebuilding communities while offering
nothing to take its place. 

It has been five months since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and
for many the norm is still the claustrophobic new reality of tiny trailers
and multiple families crammed into single apartments. Louisiana is trying.
You can hear jackhammers pounding and buzz saws whirring on Canal Street in
New Orleans. Dedicated workers endure a grinding daily commute from points
north, like Baton Rouge, as they try to make the city and the region whole
again. But the mission is far from complete and the challenge is beyond the
scope of a broken city and a poor state. 

New Orleans's crisis has little relation to anything the nation has faced in
modern memory, and traditional solutions will simply not help. Homeowners --
many very poor people whose houses had been in their families for
generations -- had varying degrees of insurance before the disaster. When
entire neighborhoods are devastated, their mildewed furniture and drywall
piled on the roadsides, it's impossible to tell the people who are well
insured to rebuild and hope that the houses all around them will somehow be
reclaimed somewhere down the line.

But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative
Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the
capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and
the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days
after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush
suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a
plan.) 

Instead of an alternate solution, the president's Katrina czar, Donald
Powell, has offered sleight of hand, touting $6.2 billion in development
money for Louisiana passed last year by Congress as if it were somehow a
substitute. And in an attempt to narrow the scope of the problem, Mr. Powell
says the government first needs to care for the roughly 20,000 homeowners
without flood insurance who lived outside the federally designated flood
plain. The real tally of destroyed or damaged homes in the region is well
over 200,000. And the real need is housing for residents, whether they were
renters or owners, insured or uninsured, living above the flood plain or
trusting the federal government's levees to protect them from storms.

Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the wreckage of poor, low-lying
New Orleans neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. That has sparked the
unproductive, blame-the-victim debate revolving around whether people should
have lived there in the first place. The Ninth Ward provides a misleading
picture of the city, as do the relatively unscathed tourist areas like the
French Quarter and the Garden District. Huge swaths of the city have the
empty quality of a ghost town. Stores wait for residents to reopen;
residents wait to see if neighbors will return. The city and surrounding
parishes will not meet Mr. Powell's neat categories, when renters lived
beside owners, insured next to uninsured. He is talking like an actuary when
a leader is needed to rescue this region.

Now, Congress has a responsibility to follow its own lead rather than the
president's. We were outraged once, shocked at the images on our television
sets, at the poverty in our collective backyard and at the devastation of a
great city. As the disaster threatens to become permanent, we have every
reason to remain so. 


-30-


The Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation
Louisiana's Fund for Louisiana's People
www.louisianahelp.org