New Orleans residents await new plan for going home

By Ellen Wulfhorst and Kenneth Li

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – The New Orleans mayor planned to
give anxious residents a new timetable on Wednesday for
returning to the city, while the Louisiana governor began
lobbying Washington for support to rebuild the storm-battered
state.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco declined a chance to respond in
Congress to comments by the former head of the federal disaster
agency blaming her for problems in the response to the storms,
and said she would rather focus on her economic case.

“Today I came really to talk about job creation,” she told
the Senate Finance Committee.

She has said the state needed nearly $32 billion in federal
aid to help rebuild the state’s infrastructure.

“This country and its economy must have a vibrant
commercial center at the mouth of the Mississippi River, its
most important waterway,” Blanco said. “Katrina and Rita
brought our economy to its knees.”

Blanco said an array of incentives, from a fund to spur
business development to tax credits and hurricane recovery
bonds, are necessary to help Louisiana. Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita had left 71,000 firms, or almost 41 percent of the state’s
businesses shuttered or displaced.

She vowed to rebuild the state with more secure levees,
which breached during both hurricanes, and stricter building
codes.

The governor’s appearance followed dramatic testimony on
Tuesday by former Federal Emergency Management Agency head
Michael Brown, who called Louisiana “dysfunctional” after
Hurricane Katrina struck and said he was stymied by differences
between Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

Also on Wednesday, Congressional Republican leaders
promised to look for ways to cut spending to help pay for the
huge costs of post-hurricane rebuilding. Congress has approved
$62.3 billion in aid after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast
in late August. Early estimates of the total eventual federal
bill run as high as $200 billion.

FRESH TIMETABLE

Nagin planned to release a fresh timetable for allowing
people back into the city. Plans to repopulate New Orleans were
postponed last week as the city braced itself for Rita, which
was the second powerful storm to slam the state in less than a
month and set off new flooding in the city.

Nagin’s original plans were criticized as premature and
overly ambitious by federal officials. U.S. President George W.
Bush also urged Nagin to be cautious.

Now, residents say plans to return are moving too slowly.

They have been unable to return to the city’s mostly
heavily damaged areas, in particular the devastated low-income
Ninth Ward. Only in the Algiers section, which did not flood,
have residents been allowed to move back home, while in others,
they have been allowed only to visit and assess the damage.

“It’s been a month. Some people have to have closure. They
have to decide life-altering decisions,” said Cynthia
Hedge-Morrell, New Orleans city councilwoman, whose district
includes parts of the Ninth Ward.

The mayor defended his timetable at a city council meeting
on Tuesday, the first since Katrina hit on August 29.

“It’s very important for people to come back to the city
and take a look … and understand,” Nagin said. “There are
some people saying you shouldn’t bring people back … to not
bring people back to the jazz and the gumbo.

“We’re going to move forward aggressively,” he said.
“Whoever doesn’t like it, too bad.”

Nagin said he would be briefed on the flooding and basic
services such as electricity, sewer and water before deciding
which sections to open.

One resident of the Ninth Ward addressed the city council
meeting in tears.

“We clearly feel like we are the have-nots,” the sobbing
woman said. “We need to see it.”

Katrina and Rita, which hit on Saturday, devastated the
Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama. Katrina killed at least 1,122
people and ruined New Orleans. The storms forced more than 2
million people to evacuate and caused tens of billions of
dollars in damage.

(Additional reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi in New
Orleans, Michael Christie in Baton Rouge and Jeff Franks, Matt
Daily and Mark Babineck in Houston)