One day after the City Council voted to roll over roughly $600 million of spending into the 2010 budget, ground was broken on two roadway improvement projects. A press release sent out Friday by Mayor Ray Nagin’s office announced the start of street repaving projects on St. Roch Avenue from North Roman Street to St. […]

Election Day is just 48 hours away. Tonight’s mayoral debate on WWL will be the last one. While the event presents one final opportunity to sling mud, given the relative accord on the campaign trail and the largely benign crop of last-minute radio attack ads and fliers this week, I don’t expect tonight’s debate to […]

Mielke Howard Mielke, a researcher for the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research Center, has been collecting soil samples in New Orleans since the late 1980s. Much of what we understand about lead contamination in soils, both locally and abroad, was culled from studies conducted by Mielke, particularly during his time at Xavier University before Hurricane […]

While the mayoral campaign grabs most of the headlines, the result of the first election for the new unified tax assessor’s office could be just as consequential. For more than a century, the city had seven assessors, and each became something of a kingmaker. Without computerized records, assessors had free rein to suppress the assessed […]