Annunciation | NOLA

Where's Waldo?

The T-P and NOLA bloggers have all been riding Mayor Nagin for his constant travel around the country and now there's a website devoted to tracking his movement wheresnagin.com. The big hoopla is his 100-day initiative he announced when re-elected - the hoopla over the questions: when is day 100, what where the goals and what has he done. This morning there was a open house meeting with the Mayor, members of his administration with the people of my district, District B. The turn out was good even on a Saturday morning. City Council Rep. Stacy Head started the meeting off and then turned things over to Nagin. I'd like to note Stacy was received with hardy clapping and whistling - not so for da mayor; he got more of a polite "golf clap" but people did refrain from booing. The mayor worked the room, he does best in these intimate settings, relaxed and confident, inviting straight-forwardness; he said subtlety is lost on him, be direct. People took him up on it.

It was a well organized meeting - there were handouts with information at the door, people collected handwritten questions from the audience, sorted them and directed them to correct person to answer it. And there was quite the spread of food. The mayor let his people answer the questions, stepping in from time to time. We stayed for 2 hours; topics covered included Entergy, NORD parks and pools, crime, the judicial system, the break down of the juvenile justice system, rental property, debris, schools, levees and Corps, FEMA and Road home money (or lack of)... I have no idea how long it lasted because it was still going when we left. I was wondering why this now, to a small portion of the city. It was excellent information, info all citizens would benefit from not just Dist. B. Why hadn't the mayor's office distributed this info before? When we got home I finished reading the paper and say that on Tuesday the Mayor is finally going to be talk, addressing the 100 day initiative. Maybe this was just to test the waters, see how people react? Today's paper had an abridged recap of the meeting.

Today's paper also had an article by Chris Rose criticizing the mayor. He's been generally supportive of the mayor up to now - I think this is telling how fed up people are. We are tired of waiting. Nagin said the money isn't flowing to the city or to the people. Several people in his administration talked about the FEMA worksheets they have filled out and the bottlenecks. Then Stephanie Grace wrote about that same thing today in regards to city park. OK now I'm depressed. I guess I'll go update the cat blog. That always cheers me up.