Red tape hinders efforts to rebuild New Orleans

Bureaucratic process slows rebuilding
Paul Pastorek, state superintendent of education, said he will appeal FEMA’s findings — a Kafkaesque bureaucratic process that will leave Alfred Lawless untouched for at least four more months.

While the agencies wage their paper battle, parents who desperately want a high school reopened in the Lower Ninth have been forced to wait more than two years, and could be waiting longer still before construction begins.

“It’s just ridiculous. There’s already been so much time wasted,” said Patricia Jones, executive director of the Lower Ninth Ward’s Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association. “If you bring a school back, the people will come back. If you can get a quality education in your neighborhood, the houses will be filled.”

In a frustrating cycle, the empty neighborhood could further reduce funding for the rebuilding of Alfred Lawless. If not enough residents return to the section of the Lower Ninth that it serves, the district may move the school to a more populated area.

Under the Stafford Act, that move could automatically cost the district 25 percent of the funding for the school, because it would no longer be a true replacement of what stood before.

Kopplin believes a solution to the problem can be found in the federal government’s approach to reconstructing its own buildings damaged by Katrina.

Funds slow to come in
In 2005, Congress committed $550 million to replace a Katrina-damaged veterans hospital in New Orleans, arriving at the projected cost through an estimate of what it would take to build a facility of the desired size, instead of counting each item damaged in the storm. Design bids were awarded last month.

By contrast, another hospital next door, the state’s Charity Hospital, has so far received only $28 million for restoration through the project worksheet process, though projections are that it will cost $226 million to re-establish the facility. Its future remains in doubt.

Tiller, who lost his house in the Lower Ninth, now commutes 90 minutes from Baton Rouge to teach music at St. Augustine High, a Catholic school in New Orleans. But he still wanders back to Alfred Lawless, where he took his first teaching job, and has established a band program with a few students who had never picked up an instrument.

“How can you say this school is not completely destroyed?” he said. “It was a strong school, and a good school. It had a family-type atmosphere, everybody came from the same neighborhood. And for two years there’s been nothing here.”

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