One by one the petitioners stepped forward, some meek, others nervous, each one imploring their powerful leader to solve a vexing problem. And the leader did not disappoint: He smiled, he commiserated, he dispatched his minions to help.
On another continent, in another century, the scene might have been a weekly audience at some royal court where the mighty king magnanimously intervenes to help his subjects.
But this was a hotel ballroom in downtown New Orleans on Monday, and the leader was Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who has taken to holding weekly “town hall” meetings where suffering constituents mired in the post-hurricane bureaucracy of this beleaguered city are invited to come and ask directly for help.
Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, destroyed more than 110,000 houses, crippled the city’s economy and forced the nearly bankrupt city government to lay off thousands of employees, Nagin’s weekly citizens’ meetings have emerged as the way business gets done here.
The owner of a small business was among the first to approach the microphone, asking for help securing a storm-cleanup contract. “We got that,” Nagin said, directing him to talk to an aide standing at the side of the room.
Another man said he had lost his home in the ruined Lower 9th Ward and then lost his city job of 22 years when the mass layoffs followed the storm.
“You said you had work for people,” the man beseeched Nagin. “Well, I need a job.”
“We’ve got a job fair coming this week,” the mayor replied. “We can help you transition to something else.”
One 50-year-old woman had her problem solved even before the mayor could reply.
Driven from her rental home by the flooding, Lucille Butler-Banks told the mayor she had found another apartment but could not get electricity until she paid her old bill. She had no money to pay the bill, she said, because her job as a public school custodian vanished when the schools shut down.
As she turned from the microphone weeping, a man stepped forward from the audience and volunteered to pay Butler-Banks’ $349 bill on the spot. The crowd broke into cheers.
The town hall meetings–Nagin has held two so far–serve a number of functions for the city and the mayor alike. They allow citizens to vent frustrations over the slow pace of recovery in a city where vast neighborhoods remain uninhabitable.
They allow officials to try to solve problems they never could have imagined before the hurricane, like the city ordinance prohibiting trailers or campers from protruding onto public sidewalks–a pre-Katrina law that prevented thousands of residents of damaged homes from parking trailers in their driveways to provide a place to live. (After a resident complained about the problem at Nagin’s first town hall meeting, the City Council promptly suspended the ordinance.)
And the meetings give Nagin a chance to burnish his tattered reputation just a few months before he must stand for re-election. In the panicked days after the Aug. 29 hurricane, when tens of thousands of New Orleans residents were trapped in desperate conditions inside the flooded city, the first-term mayor emerged as a passionate advocate for his city who nevertheless played loose with many of his facts and ended up perpetuating wild rumors of criminals preying on storm evacuees.
These days, Nagin is much more careful, jetting off to Washington to lobby for federal aid when he isn’t convening rebuilding committees or picking up a broom to personally lead volunteer efforts to sweep debris from downtown streets.
On Monday, as he opened the town hall meeting, Nagin announced the latest increment of the city’s progress: the reopening of two more neighborhoods deemed safe enough for residents to return and begin rebuilding. Areas that housed a pre-Katrina population of 255,000 are now officially open, the mayor said, although only about 100,000 of the city’s 485,000 former residents are estimated to have returned so far.
Nagin’s solution for that problem is to take his town hall meetings on the road. Gatherings for displaced New Orleanians are scheduled for Houston and Atlanta in coming weeks.
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Howard Witt, the Tribune’s Southwest bureau chief, is chronicling the effort to rebuild New Orleans in an occasional series that can be found at chicagotribune.com/antoines