The lights are on at the pre-Katrina office building of the Orleans Parish District Attorney that stands across from the Criminal Courthouse, but the agency is still months away from moving back into its permanent home, according to a spokesman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin.

The so-called temporary office of the District Attorney has card tables set up in hallways to hold case management computers and boxes of case files line the hallways on the seventh floor of the Amoco Building on Poydras Street.

"We're in a virtual FEMA trailer,” said Interim District Attorney, Bobby Freeman, “FEMA is paying our rent which is $25,000 a month. On top of that, we have parking, which is $12,000 and change, which comes out of our DA’s operating expense."

The permanent office of the District Attorney sits across the street from Criminal Court, on South White Street. It flooded during Katrina, but more than three years after the storm, it remains in shambles, with snapped trees out front and litter around the building.

"The power has been on and the air conditioning has been on approximately one year,” Freeman continued, “We've been waiting for three years and 39 days, I believe, since Katrina to have our road home," referencing the state-run program designed to get homeowners back into their storm-damaged houses.

With the power on, the South White building is ready for renovation, but since those initial electrical repairs were made, Freeman said no other work has been done, including clean up.

The city of New Orleans owns the building and is responsible for its repair.

"The DA’s office is under renovation,” said New Orleans deputy Chief Administrative Officer Cynthia Sylvain-Lear, “The mechanical and electrical has been completed in the DA's office and what we're working on now is getting the bid specifications for the finishing work on the DA's office."

Those bids were scheduled to be unsealed Tuesday, but that deadline has been pushed back to mid-October.  

Freeman said in the four months that he has as the DA, he hopes to push to get the process moving faster, so that the South White Street facility will look much different six months from now.

"I hope you will be standing in a place where you will have victim/witness access. Where you will have a constant flow of people, a constant flow of services that are provided to the community by the DA's office, what the tax dollars are there for. Not for temporary rent," Freeman said.

According to a spokesman for the mayor's office, it will take eight months to complete the renovations once the rebuilding contract is finally awarded.

"There was a project in that building prior to Katrina. And that being the case, FEMA will pay a portion of it and not another portion," said Sylvain-Lear.

Getting attorneys back in the building isn't just a matter of convenience. A National District Attorneys Association study of the Orleans Parish office found that getting a permanent facility is one of the biggest impediments for prosecutors.

"They're still in somewhat of a chaotic environment with things not being as they should," said New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation Chief Operating Officer, Heidi Unter. Her agency funded that evaluation of the Orleans Parish office to help improve problems with how effectively the office operates.

Freeman said the distance from the courthouse to their current location takes time away from prosecutors, who should be focused on prosecuting criminals, not traveling a mile each way from the office to the courthouse to retrieve files, among other things.