Priorities!!!

Via email:

Unfortunately, there is no more money in the 2008 budget to make streetlight repairs for the rest of this year, and the 2009 budget that was passed includes only the smallest amount for repairs in 2009, despite Council Member Midura’s efforts to get this infrastructure fund properly funded at the budget meeting.

It is possible your lights are likely to remain out for a while. We will continue our best efforts to provide a remedy to this situation.

Thank you.

Where is our money going instead?

Just a peek, from City Business:

The budget includes $75 million to acquire 34 acres of property for the new VA hospital and remove infrastructure, although the city is still evaluating “that which we can keep and that which we can get rid of,” Blakely said.

Also in the spending plan is $30 million for the first phase of the Reinventing the Crescent project, a plan to redevelop nearly 7 miles of the Mississippi Riverfront. It will pay for “the design and development of 1.5 miles of new riverfront, roughly tripling the length of what folks can access now (at) Woldenberg Park,” said Sean Cummings, executive director of the New Orleans Building Corp. and the project’s conceptual architect.

Sounds like we've got our priorities straight. Zero money for average residential neighborhoods. Tens of millions of dollars to demolish one such neighborhood or for 'economic development' in an elite neighborhood.

Such progress we're making giving all this money to a neighborhood that didn't flood and is doing just fine without the extra assistance.

I live in a neighborhood expected to benefit greatly from the RTC project. I'd love to have pedestrian access to the river, I really would.

But I'd gladly put the whole thing off for a decade in the blink of an eye to help out the neighborhoods that truly need it.

Did you know that for the 2.1 billion some odd dollars we're collectively sinking into the destruction of Lower Mid City, we could build a brand new comprehensive mass transit system? Probably we could build two of them for that kind of money.

If we had a plan to that ready to go, we might even get it funded by the Feds. After all, Obama is proposing to spend a trillion bucks on local infrastructure projects within the next several months.

Update:

Jan Moller tells us that the state is ready to demolish a neighborhood without the hospital construction money in hand. It's apparently illegal for the state to put itself in that much debt. Perhaps they'll scale back plans by NOT demolishing a neighborhood and instead rebuilding Charity Hospital.

With the economy slumping and energy prices falling, state revenue is expected to plunge well below current projections, giving the state even less room to issue construction debt. Moreover, hundreds of projects across the state are competing for money under the cap, making it unlikely that the state would commit $400 million to a single project.

Update II

I was going to let it slide but I can't. For some reason, in an article that profiles the various ways we might reduce the state's financial obligation, in an article that floats a "scaled-back alternative," Moller doesn't even mention the proposal to rehabilitate and reopen Charity.