Mayor says New Orleans' future 'in peril'

By KEVIN McGILL

NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans is facing a $67 million budget deficit, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced Thursday, in an unflinching "state of the city" address in which he decried a litany of daunting problems, old and new, and said the future of the city is "in peril" unless it changes the way it does business.

Never mentioning former Mayor Ray Nagin by name, Landrieu, who took office May 3, said the deficit is the result of "mismanagement from top to bottom" at City Hall prior to his inauguration.

He noted that his new police chief, Ronal Serpas, recently had to cut 50 employees, but added that the police department budget was bloated and that public safety can be maintained despite the cutbacks. He said other budget cuts in other departments are coming, while contracts are being re-examined, renegotiated or, sometimes, canceled.

Landrieu entitled the speech, delivered to an audience of several hundred people at Xavier University of Louisiana, "Eyes Wide Open," and said to move forward, "we must first come to grips with our reality today."

Landrieu decried a "culture of death" on New Orleans' streets that has resulted in a murder rate 10 times the national average. "And there have been 35 murders since I took office 67 days ago," he added.

He said his invitation earlier this year for U.S. Justice Department help in reorganizing a corruption-scarred police department is one step toward fighting crime. But, he added, the long-term solution is a better school system, and he said he is working with the state congressional delegation to secure $2 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help rebuild the school system.

Plans to revamp a deteriorating recreation system for youths, to restore low-income housing badly depleted by Katrina in 2005 and bring a hospital to eastern New Orleans -- still without one five years after the storm -- also were outlined in the speech.

But the $450 million-plus budget was perhaps the most immediate concern.

Listing examples of bloated contracts and shoddy workmanship on some city projects, Landrieu likened the city's spending practices to the ongoing Gulf oil spill. "Like the spill, it's worse than we thought and there are no quick fixes," he said of a deficit that only recently was pegged at around $35 million, instead of $67 million. "We must plug the hole."

And he addressed problems posed by the spill itself. He noted that oil pollution already has forced the shutdown of a 134-year-old French Quarter oyster house and that oil recently infiltrated Lake Pontchartrain, the recreational haven on the city's northern boundary.

Landrieu said he has joined the congressional delegation in calling for President Barack Obama to quickly implement stronger oversight of offshore drilling and end a moratorium on deepwater drilling that threatens the state's economy.

Landrieu, a Democrat who left the Louisiana lieutenant governor's office to become mayor, is the majority black city's first white mayor since his father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978. He replaced the term-limited Nagin, who first won the job with strong white voter support in 2002. Nagin went on to win re-election in 2006, defeating Landrieu with strong black support, amid fears of many low-income African-Americans that they were being left out of the Katrina recovery and losing their voice in city politics.

Nagin's popularity, however, plummeted during his second term as the Katrina recovery seemed to falter. Landrieu, running a campaign mindful of the city's divisions, won the February election with 66 percent of the total vote, including 63 percent of the black vote, over a diverse group of 10 opponents.