New Orleans mayor race goes on the road to Atlanta

By Karen Jacobs

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Ray Nagin and the top contender for his
job as mayor of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans tried to sway
voters exiled in Atlanta on Saturday as part of a makeshift
campaign critics say is unfair to black evacuees.

Nagin, New Orleans’ face to the world since Hurricane
Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city last August, faced off
against Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and five others at a
forum 500 miles from where the winner will oversee rebuilding
efforts.

An overarching issue in the April 22 vote is how to bring
250,000 people — more than half of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina
population — back to a city sorely in need of housing and
economic recovery.

Some 45,000 New Orleans residents are in temporary housing
in Atlanta. Nagin and Landrieu, whose family is synonymous with
Louisiana politics, also have taken their campaigns to Houston,
home to as many as 150,000 evacuees.

Nagin told about 100 people at the forum in south Atlanta
that with the city struggling to get housing and levee repair
funds from Washington and the next hurricane season set to
start June 1, now was the wrong time to change leaders.

“Do we have the luxury of allowing somebody to come into
office with cute ideas and nice thoughts and be immediately
thrust into the next hurricane season?” asked Nagin, first
elected in 2002.

Twenty-four candidates are vying for the mayor’s office in
the aftermath of the disaster, which killed 1,300 people along
the U.S. Gulf Coast. But only a handful attended the forum.

RACE EMERGES AS A FACTOR

Ron Forman, head of the city’s Audubon Zoo, and Landrieu
are considered strong challengers to Nagin, a Democrat who has
angered some voters by saying he wanted to rebuild New Orleans
as “a chocolate city.”

Landrieu, also a Democrat, said racial divisions should be
put aside as the city famous for jazz music, Mardi Gras and
Creole cuisine tries to revive. His father, Moon Landrieu, was
New Orleans’ last white mayor when he left office in 1978.

“The storm put a magnifying glass on us and it made us see
ourselves clearly,” he said. “What was OK before Katrina is not
OK after Katrina.”

But in a sign that the election itself has become a racial
issue, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson have said the
process is skewed against black evacuees.

The NAACP failed last week to get the U.S. Justice
Department to block the election after Louisiana’s secretary of
state barred the use of voting machines in other jurisdictions
with many evacuees.

Instead the state is offering absentee ballots.

As much as half the city’s black population was displaced
and not everyone has good access to election information, the
group said.

A woman who has lived in Atlanta since Katrina said she
thought it was time to get on with the process, however.

“For those who live there and those who return, there is a
need for strong leadership,” said retired teacher Beatrice
Stanley, 62. “You can’t just drift, and that’s what’s happening
now.”