New Orleans election campaign courts evacuees
Posted on: Saturday, 25 March 2006, 13:19 CST
By Erwin Seba
HOUSTON (Reuters) - New Orleans city election campaigns are being waged where the voters are -- in cities like Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas and Austin, where many residents ended up after being scattered by Hurricane Katrina.
Mayoral candidates including incumbent Ray Nagin and chief rival Democratic Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu have flown and driven to meet with evacuees still living outside their devastated city, which exceed the number of people who have returned.
The campaign revolves a controversial rebuilding plan supported by Nagin that accepts a population less than half of the 500,000 who lived in New Orleans before Katrina struck August 29.
About 180,000 people were estimated to have returned the city by January, according to city emergency officials. The Federal Emergency Management Agency counts 106,000 New Orleans residents living in Baton Rouge and 69,000 in Houston. More than 100,000 others are scattered around the country.
In Houston, using FEMA lists, volunteers carrying clipboards are knocking on doors in large apartment complexes on the southwest side of the city that Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt has identified as hotbeds of criminal activity.
The volunteers, sponsored by local and national non-partisan political organizations, have signed evacuees up for absentee ballots or bus rides to satellite polling stations Louisiana officials plan to place in Lake Charles, Louisiana, three hours east of Houston.
"This is a hard piece of organizing," said activist Michelle Paul.
But the voter registration and education campaign may determine the outcome of the April election in which 24 candidates are running for mayor in addition to about seven candidates for each of seven city council seats.
The rebuilding plan is seen as the key to which ethnic groups will decide the future of New Orleans.
On Friday, a University of Maryland sociologist who has studied African-American population trends said New Orleans may have a majority white population for years to come.
The 2000 U.S. Census showed blacks made up two-thirds of the city's population.
"We cannot imagine a majority-black city for a long time to come, barring some miraculous turnaround," William Falk said at New Orleans sociology conference, according the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Source: REUTERS
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