Our Views: Nagin denials hurt recovery
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Of all the problems that dog the recovery of New Orleans, not least is the administration of C. Ray Nagin and the city government itself.
The hapless mayor of New Orleans was re-elected in the wake of the storms with a racial appeal to keep black leadership in city hall. Since then, Nagin’s been virtually AWOL, and the city stumbles toward an unknown and perhaps bleak future.
The latest scandal in the city: a city-created nonprofit intended to clean up and restore storm-damaged houses.
Federal funds were to be spent through the nonprofit to benefit the poor and elderly. Now, the $1.8 million program has been found, to say the least, to have significant deficiencies.
The FBI on Monday raided the agency running the program. Nagin had denounced press criticism of the program, particularly from WWL television, as damaging negativism about the recovery.
We believe WWL and The Times-Picayune have contributed to the recovery, not damaged it. They reported that some of the repair work was paid for but not done by contractors, or was done by volunteer groups but the contractors got the city checks.
Some of the “repaired” houses were untouched, apparently, since the hurricanes of 2005. Some of the “remediated” houses were then demolished, and poor and elderly residents were mystified at turning up on the city’s list of those supposedly helped. Some of the houses did not belong to the poor and the elderly at all, but actually were owned by businessmen or landlords.
The New York Times called this “the classic New Orleans blend of possible corruption and certain mismanagement.” We could not say it better.
Nagin once said it was “completely untrue” that federal money had been misspent on work never done. But he has been forced to admit that there were documentation problems and “discrepancies.”
One of the contractors involved with New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., or NOAH, is the mayor’s brother-in-law.
That Nagin was unclear or uninvolved in the detail of important city initiatives is not news. But his flamboyant level of denial about this scandal is nevertheless distressing.
“It’s got to stop,” the mayor railed a couple of weeks ago about media criticism of the recovery. It’s not going to stop, and we have news for the mayor: We don’t think the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office are going to stop, either.
The hapless mayor of New Orleans was re-elected in the wake of the storms with a racial appeal to keep black leadership in city hall. Since then, Nagin’s been virtually AWOL, and the city stumbles toward an unknown and perhaps bleak future.
The latest scandal in the city: a city-created nonprofit intended to clean up and restore storm-damaged houses.
Federal funds were to be spent through the nonprofit to benefit the poor and elderly. Now, the $1.8 million program has been found, to say the least, to have significant deficiencies.
The FBI on Monday raided the agency running the program. Nagin had denounced press criticism of the program, particularly from WWL television, as damaging negativism about the recovery.
We believe WWL and The Times-Picayune have contributed to the recovery, not damaged it. They reported that some of the repair work was paid for but not done by contractors, or was done by volunteer groups but the contractors got the city checks.
Some of the “repaired” houses were untouched, apparently, since the hurricanes of 2005. Some of the “remediated” houses were then demolished, and poor and elderly residents were mystified at turning up on the city’s list of those supposedly helped. Some of the houses did not belong to the poor and the elderly at all, but actually were owned by businessmen or landlords.
The New York Times called this “the classic New Orleans blend of possible corruption and certain mismanagement.” We could not say it better.
Nagin once said it was “completely untrue” that federal money had been misspent on work never done. But he has been forced to admit that there were documentation problems and “discrepancies.”
One of the contractors involved with New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., or NOAH, is the mayor’s brother-in-law.
That Nagin was unclear or uninvolved in the detail of important city initiatives is not news. But his flamboyant level of denial about this scandal is nevertheless distressing.
“It’s got to stop,” the mayor railed a couple of weeks ago about media criticism of the recovery. It’s not going to stop, and we have news for the mayor: We don’t think the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office are going to stop, either.
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