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Blakely says racism hinders N.O; paints grim picture of city's future

Blakely says racism hinders N.O; paints grim picture of city's future

Credit: WWL-TV

Former recovery czar Ed Blakely

by Michael Luke / Eyewitness News

wwltv.com

Posted on November 2, 2009 at 4:46 PM

Updated Tuesday, Nov 3 at 7:26 AM

NEW ORLEANS – Painting a bleak picture for New Orleans and predicting possibly a violent, grim future, in an online interview with a California-based show, former recovery czar Ed Blakely called racism a major impediment to the city’s recovery post-Katrina and added that he should have left the job earlier.

When asked by reporter Yaou Dou what Blakely would change about New Orleans if he could, “Racism,” he flatly replied in the interview for “InFocus,” an online show produced by the University of California-Berkeley.

“Everyone’s a racist,” Blakely said when Dou asked who was the target of racism in New Orleans. “It’s part of something we have in this country. But it’s deeper and more virile and more visible and entrenched in New Orleans than any place I’ve seen.”

Blakely said that racism was a factor in the recovery effort and that it polarized the city, saying decisions by government were interpreted by New Orleanians through a racial lens as they often wondered if the decisions would benefit black or white citizens, rather than considering if a decision would benefit all New Orleanians.

“There is a sense now in the white community that there is blood in the water and they can recapture the political apparatus, and kind of put their foot back on the black peoples’ throats and that will be explosive and very dangerous,” he said when asked if racism will continue to impede the recovery.

He said he believed the city’s shrunken tax base is another major hurdle in the recovery.

“And I think unless the next mayor is very clever, it’s going to explode and there will be race riots in New Orleans.”

Blakey also said that New Orleanians expected too much from others during the recovery, and added that it has been that way historically. “But New Orleans has expected someone else to do it all along. They have never expected to do it themselves.”

“I think I should have left a little earlier,” he said when asked if he had any regrets. “For two reasons, one my health wasn’t good and, secondly, I had other things I wanted to do and administering a recovery is not one of them.”

Blakely said “the forces of nature are such that it’s unlikely” that New Orleans would exist in 100 years.

“Because if the Mississppi (River) blows and a hurricane comes at the same time, New Orleans would be wiped off the map. And that’s a likely event.”

While Blakely pointed out the many faults of the city, both environmentally and socially, he said he believes he was successful in streamlining the city’s bureaucracy, explaining that 20 people used to report to the mayor and now only five do. He said trimming 4,000 employees from city government’s workforce to 2,000 employees was beneficial to the city.

Saying that cities such Los Angeles and San Francisco has very sophisticated professional bureaucracies, according to him, nearly 30 percent of the city government staff needed literacy courses and many were underqualified for their jobs.  

“There was tendency in New Orleans to reduce the job to your level, rather than lift up to the requirements.”

“The state bureaucracy was hostile to New Orleans,” he said, which further hurt the recovery.

He admitted that the city did not have a plan to rebuild the city in place, which caused the federal government to delay releasing money, but he felt that the federal government should have sent money before the plan was in place. And, he said that the federal government could have done so legally.

“They didn’t have any. They were busy fighting a war in Iraq,” Blakely said when asked what was the reasoning or rationale by the federal government to delay releasing the money for the rebuilding effort.  “They didn’t have the money.”

Most of the money New Orleans received from the federal government, Blakely said, was money that the federal government paid to itself, such as paying the Coast Guard for rescues or rebuilding levees but was charged on counted on the “New Orleans account” yet “flowed right back into the federal treasury.”

Dou said he was an intern in the New Orleans Recovery Office in Summer 2008. He said the interview was done in August 2009.

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