The 100 fully funded projects that Mayor Mitch Landrieu plans to unveil Friday, on his 103rd day in office, may include neighborhood-based recovery programs, as well as bricks-and-mortar projects. Designed by the staff of former recovery czar Ed Blakely and financed out of a $411 million pot of federal Disaster Community Development Block Grants given [...]
New Orleans will kick in $107.4 million for the construction of a new Veterans Affairs hospital in Mid-City. “That is the total as far as I am aware,” Deputy City Attorney Brenda Breaux told the City Council Thursday. Members wanted to know how much city money would be going to the $995 million hospital planned [...]
The federal government gave New Orleans more than $6.5 million to build or repair affordable housing last year, resulting in 63 rental rehabs and 150 blighted property renovations, according to the draft of a federal report released for public review this week. Another 81 blighted properties were expropriated using the federal grant money, according to [...]
The city gave $50,000 in federal grant money in part to help support sexual abstinence education done by a Christian organization, according to a spending report presented Monday to members of the City Council. The grant also financed tutoring and day camps for more than 100 kids. The money came out of an $800,000 pool [...]
More than two years after New Orleans was given permission to begin drawing down federal recovery grants, the city has spent less than 5 percent of the $300 million in grant money appropriated in the city’s operating budget, the city’s chief technology officer Harrison Boyd told the City Council today. The amount totals $11 million, [...]
No one can say the last two weeks in New Orleans have been uneventful. The Saints broke the team’s Super Bowl drought and their fans beat the NFL in a battle over who owns “Who Dat.” Watergate Junior made national headlines out of the security, or lack thereof, at Hale Boggs Federal Building and Krewe [...]
As Haiti struggles to pull itself together, French finance minister Christine Lagarde is pushing to expedite a cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in Haitian government debt. Haitian historian Alex von Tunzelmann said, “For all of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, Haiti was unable to develop normally” because of crushing debt. [...]