Emergency management

From last night's District C Budget hearing.

Landrieu: "The interior streets in this city are awful, they're awful ... I'm going to tell you how big it is: $9 billion ... Currently we do not have a long-term plan to fix the interior streets." He says S&WB director and former city infrastructure head Cedric Grant is negotiating with FEMA over funding for interior street repairs.

We're reaching a point where this might not sound convincing to people anymore but many street repairs in New Orleans are still flood recovery issues.  Ten days from now marks the ninth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and we're still depending on FEMA for major infrastructure work.

Good thing, too, unless you guys have $9 billlion laying around.  Well, OK, maybe some of you "entrepreneurs" have it. That's what NOLA.com keeps telling me, anyway.  But probably keeping the feds involved is a good idea. 

In fact, we really shouldn't have to rely on the pretext of disaster recovery for federal support of urban infrastructure. But that's just crazy talk, I know.