A little light reading

Here is the mayor's budget proposal.

Feel free to leaf through at your leisure.  Some of these reporters may have a head start on you, though.

Nearly every city department budget will either be increased or remain the same under the 2015 proposal. Total departmental budgets will increase $31 million above 2014, according to the budget document, with money for 150 police recruits and 5 percent across-the-board raises for the New Orleans Police Department, as well as a minimum wage increase and paid maternity leave for city workers. And unlike Landrieu’s 2014 budget, which counted on 170 full-time positions lost to attrition, the 2015 proposal adds about 127 full-time positions.

“Revenue is up and so we can invest more in what the people of New Orleans say they want,” Landrieu said, adding, “Make no mistake there is a long way to go, and there are looming liabilities on the horizon.”

Also horizon-related, some LSU economists have a new report out projecting job growth in the metro are and the state over the next two years.  I'm looking forward to reading this too because, despite the rosy picture Loren Scott typically paints for us in blurbs like these...

“Louisiana is in the midst of an industrial boom unlike any other in our history, with over $100 billion in industrial projects either under construction or at the front-end engineering and design phase,” LSU economists Loren C. Scott and James A. Richardson said in their annual two-year forecast.

The full story isn't always quite so great. 

After Katrina, the New Orleans metro area lost 133,700 jobs, more than one-fifth of total employment. The sudden drop wiped out three decades of employment growth, the report says.
The city saw a pre-storm peak of nearly 620,000 jobs. After the blow from the storm, the metro area lost 6,700 jobs in the national recession, a 1.3 percent drop.

Today, after four years of job growth, the metro area has about 553,100 workers after recovering 72,500 jobs lost after the storm.

Economists predict the metro area will add 8,300 jobs, a 1.5 percent increase, in 2015, and 9,000 jobs in 2016, a 1.6 percent increase.

"A disheartening factor has been the slow recovery since the storms," the report says.