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Despair in Louisiana
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Despair in Louisiana
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by James Dao
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BATON ROUGE - Three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, relief legislation remains dormant in Washington and despair is growing among state and local officials here who fear that Congress and the Bush administration are losing interest in their plight.
As evidence, the officials cite an array of stalled bills and policy changes. Those are crucial, the officials say, to rebuilding the city and persuading some of its hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents to return. They include measures to finance long-term hurricane protection, revive small businesses and compensate the uninsured.
"There is a real concern that we will lose the nation's attention the longer this takes," said Representative Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Metairie, west of New Orleans. "People are making decisions now about whether to come back. And every day that passes, it will be a little harder to get things done."
Officials from both parties say the bottlenecks have occurred in large part because of a leadership vacuum in Washington, where President George W. Bush and Congress have been preoccupied for weeks with Iraq, deficit reduction, the CIA leak investigation and the Supreme Court.
Congressional leaders have been scrambling to rein in spending, and many in Washington have grumbled that Louisiana's leaders have asked for too much, while failing to guarantee that the money will be spent efficiently and honestly.
But, with the holiday season near and the 2006 midterm elections just around the bend, many Louisiana officials say they fear that the sense of urgency that spurred action in September is swiftly fading.
Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, said on CNN, "We feel like we are citizens of the United States who are nearly forgotten."
Walter Isaacson, vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, drew a parallel between governmental dithering in the immediate aftermath of the flood and the situation today, saying a lack of action now would be devastating to the economy. "It's like when FEMA wasn't really that creative, and the water was rising and people were stranded," he said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Once again, people are being stranded and businesses are starting to die."
But Donald Powell, who began work this week as Bush's liaison for the reconstruction effort, said that while the sense of urgency about Hurricane Katrina might have faded somewhat, "The president is committed to rebuilding the Gulf Coast."
© 2005 New York Times Company
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