Mayor Nagin Tells Black Journalists ‘No One’s Covering’ His City

He suggested that race was a factor in the treatment of the city and that the news media had begun to forget about New Orleans.

“If that would have happened in Orange County (Calif.), if that would have happened in southeast Miami, there would be a different response,” Nagin said.

“If I were to tell you that in trying to get grants to come back to the city of New Orleans, a citizen has to go through a process where they treat you like a criminal -- they fingerprint you and question you -- would that be worthy of coverage?” Nagin told a forum at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Indianapolis on Friday.

Nagin said the bureaucratic tangle that residents face in applying for money to return and rebuild their homes or relocate elsewhere in the city or state is frustrating for them and devastating for the city.

"It’s a city that’s being strangled,” Nagin said.

Nagin and a panel of journalists, most from New Orleans, who covered the hurricane and its aftermath, discussed the difficulties in covering the disaster and continued coverage of the aftermath.

The mayor was, at turns, forthright, testy and somewhat evasive as he addressed the city’s problems.

He snapped at moderator Michelle Norris of NPR when she pressed him for details on what Nagin believed his biggest mistakes were in the days leading up to and in the immediate wake of the flooding.

He said that he wondered, in hindsight, whether he should have ordered the evacuation of the city earlier and relocated buses outside of the city so that it would have been easier to bring them into the city to evacuate residents.

Still, Nagin laid most of the blame at the feet of the state of Louisiana and the federal government. He said money promised to the city has come slowly and that a significant portion has gone to contractors.

“I’m left trying to manage the city on 25 percent of its pre-Katrina budget,” Nagin said. “Little of the $100 billion (promised by the federal government) has come to the local governments. Some of that has to do with no-bid contracts.”

He also said that the city’s population was “250,000 fewer than its 460,000” population before the storm.

“No one is writing about it. No one is covering it.”

Read More
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b5a638b787d533feb0cdfc85b94c7fd9