He will deliver his first State of the City address on Thursday
As he winds down his first year in office, Mayor Mitch Landrieu says he's satisfied with his administration's work since his May 3 swearing-in. But he's not doing a victory lap.
View full sizeOne year in, Mayor Mitch Landrieu still faces many of the same, seemingly intractable problems he vowed to tackle upon his inauguration. He was photographed Tuesday on Rex Place in Central City. "We have gotten a lot of stuff done, but we have gone 1 yard -- and we have 99 yards to go," Landrieu said in a recent interview. "It's not unlike a football team, where it's all right if in your first year you don't make it to the playoffs. But in your next year, you'd better. And if you're supposed to go to the Super Bowl, you've got to find a way to get there."
One year in, Landrieu's team still faces many of the same, seemingly intractable problems -- a sky-high and rising murder rate and vast expanses of urban blight foremost among them -- that the mayor vowed to tackle when he promised in his inaugural speech to "transform the culture of death on the streets of New Orleans into a celebration of life and freedom, of joy and possibility."
Those issues remain at the top of the mayor's Year Two agenda, which he will sketch out in more detail Thursday morning when he delivers his first State of the City address at the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts.
The speech, he said last week, will follow in the vein of his other major addresses, such as his 2011 budget proposal, which highlighted the city's financial woes and set the stage for a series of austerity measures, including employee furloughs and property-tax and sanitation-fee increases.
"It's going to be the hard-work-of-governing speech," he said of this week's event. "There's nothing really sexy about the hard work of governing. It's just hard work. So, we're going to be in the business of that."
While the mayor's first 365 days saw a flurry of bureaucratic reshuffling, a few bold policy announcements and an unsparing look at some of the problems plaguing City Hall, his administration during the next 12 months will simply focus on setting the reordered gears into motion, Landrieu said.
The mayor said he is poised to prove that the sacrifices he has asked of residents and city workers will pay off in the form of improved city services and less waste.
"Now what we have to do is execute and we have to deliver. People are going to start seeing the value of their investments," he said. "The second year will be very boring in many ways. Implementation and execution are going to be the priorities of the day."
The philosophy should be evident in even the most mundane facets of city government, Landrieu said.
"So a street light goes out. How long does it take us to get it back up and operating? How long does it take us to fill a pothole? How long does it take to get up out of the ground a red light that (was) knocked down over the weekend?" he said, noting that tracking initiatives already have been implemented to measure efforts to reduce crime and blight.
Merit-based system touted
The mayor also plans to embark on an overhaul of the antiquated civil service system this year. The plan, he said, is to "release" city employees and hire them back into newly defined positions, a process that could prove politically difficult.
"We're going to have real performance measures and real ways to measure their performance so that we get merit-based growth," he said, adding that in the end, the city may have "a slightly contracted work force because fewer people can do more work effectively if you get technology moving in the right direction."
View full sizeNOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas, right, speaks during a news conference at City Hall as Mayor Mitch Landrieu listens on March 25. Still topping the mayor's priority list is reducing the murder rate, which spiked in the first quarter of this year.
While murders have slowed a bit in April, "that doesn't make me feel good," Landrieu said. "Where we were last year was still the worst in the country, so to me, that's an inconsequential statistic. I haven't seen meaningful changes.
"It troubles me very badly, and we're going to redouble our efforts on that," he said.
Returning to a central theme of his campaign, Landrieu said he also will engage more deeply during the next year in the debate over the fate of the city's public schools.
He says he doesn't want direct control, but his administration will try to influence the redevelopment of school facilities in line with the city's overall recovery effort. The mayor also said he'll try to steer policy toward his priorities of accountability and parental choice.
"I'm pretty clear that I don't want to go back to the old way ... of centralized bureaucracy that's run by board members who are trying to micromanage the schools," he said. "But I'm not really that interested in fighting about whether it ought to be a charter school or a traditional public school.
"What happens in these fights is that people get stuck on the wrong thing. I need them to get stuck on the outcomes and not on the mousetrap," he said, referring to the nuts and bolts of how individual schools are managed.
Going to bat for eastern New Orleans
Also on Landrieu's docket is working with the NOLA Business Alliance, the public-private partnership recently established to retain and recruit companies, to attract more retail operators to the city, especially to areas east of the Industrial Canal, Landrieu said.
"I've been in communication myself with people from Wal-Mart. Our economic development folks have been in touch with Target," he said. "We are really working hard to get it done. But their answers to us are the same that everybody else is: Is it safe? Can we make money?
"The city has never focused its economic development efforts on attracting retail. And retail (outlets) leave for the same reason that citizens leave: if they think the government's corrupt, if they think the city's not safe, if they think there's too much crime, if they think they can't make money," the mayor said. "So we'll spend a lot of time working on that in the next year as well, and hopefully in the not-too-distant future, you'll see some retail work going on in New Orleans East."
Meanwhile, Landrieu said he'll continue to press the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover the cost of fixing public facilities that remain in disrepair nearly six years after Hurricane Katrina.
"I think FEMA and us agree that we would like to put them out of business," he said. "I'd like them to write me a big check and leave."
Already Landrieu said he's persuaded the agency to pay for items that former Mayor Ray Nagin had given up on, such as demolishing nearly 1,000 structures ruined by the flood. The mayor also helped confect the recent $1.8 billion global settlement to repair and replace public schools, and he said he's pushing for similar lump-sum payments for city-owned recreation and criminal justice facilities. With such a settlement, not all damaged facilities would have to be restored.
"I hope that by the end of this year, we're going to come to a resolution," the mayor said.
'The next big fight'
Landrieu, like Nagin, has also argued that Katrina destroyed the city's water and sewer systems, and that FEMA should thus pay to replace them in their entirety. But he concedes that's an argument that won't be won quickly.
"In my mind we haven't scratched the surface yet. That's the next big fight," he said. "That's a heavy, heavy number. I'm well aware of the fact that we're in a very austere budget crisis in the country. I don't want to go fast for fear of losing a more long-term, sustainable way to handle it, rather then getting a lump sum. So I think we'll be in that battle for some time."
Michelle Krupa can be reached at mkrupa@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3312.