Ed Blakely to Head Recovery Efforts in New Orleans

What responsibilities are you assuming in the Parish of New Orleans?

I am the director of recovery for the city and parish of New Orleans, and my job is to coordinate all the city agencies and subordinate agencies to rebuild New Orleans. We have all the FEMA and federal funding assets. I will be coordinating all the funds that come into the city, whether they are public or private.

What immediate challenges do you face as you walk into this new position in New Orleans? What sort of shape is New Orleans in?

Ninety-five percent of the debris has been removed. The city is functioning. Sewers, water, and electricity are working, and all the assets are back in place. Building stock has been damaged to the extent that it has to be rebuilt in most residential areas.

What was the nature of your job interview with New Orleans Mayor Nagin? What did you need to hear from him? What authority did he grant you?

I told him what needed to be done, and he pretty much listened and asked me what authorities I would need to do it. I told him I needed full authority of his office and full authority to call my own shots and hire my own staff and use funds to do this job, and he just said, yes, you got it.

I told him the first thing we had to do was get out of the planning mode and get into the action mode. We have to start building some things in order to restore public confidence. We have to set up a system so that people who want to come back can come back somewhere in New Orleans as soon as possible. It might be in stages. They might come back to one area of the city, and then they might move into other neighborhoods in a year or two.

A number of large architectural and planning firms, including DMJM, have been working in New Orleans to rebuild schools. How great is the need for such reconstruction?

Some of these assets like schools are reopening, but they're reopening in a very spotty way. I have to get into that, because schools may be reopening in areas where we don't need them and not in areas where we do need them.

How is the city planning to replace its housing stock?

My first agenda is to make sure that all the housing stock that can be repaired and is on ground that can be rebuilt on is rebuilt ASAP. And I want to put some funds together, both equity and debt funds, so that people can rebuild no matter what the current asset base is.

Your professional and academic life has been dedicated to urban planning, and much of the debate surrounding rebuilding New Orleans has been whether to rebuild as was, or to rethink what and where New Orleans should build. Has a consensus emerged?

I've begun thinking about this. We have to build a modern New Orleans. The old New Orleans was built for the 18th century, and that system was not functional. We have to re-do a lot of streets and things like that. It will clearly be on what we'd call a smart growth or New Urban platform, which New Orleans had some of. But there was a lot of dysfunction in the street pattern that's going to have to be corrected.

A number of foundations, business organizations, and developers were drawn down to help New Orleans rebuild after Katrina. How do you decide whom to collaborate with, whom not to work with, and what the city's real opportunities are?

That's a real dilemma because many people have started out doing things that did not need to be done. And since there's been no one in charge, everyone has been operating in a fragmented way. You might have sewer and water in one place and the schools built where there is no sewer and water because they got a grant from a foundation and a neighborhood activist was able to pull that grant out to open the school with no water or sewer connection.

I've asked to pull together what I'm calling a recovery consul to bring people all under one umbrella and sort out an action plan like you'd use to develop a master-planned community.

Around the country land use and planning have always been part of local government, but New Orleans has federal and state authorities now engaged in funding and oversight of the rebuilding. How does the city government relate to those authorities?

They'll have a role, but they won't have authority. This has been the dilemma: the city has not exercised its authority, and one of the reasons FEMA hasn't released funds is that the city hasn't had a plan. They need to know what they're releasing funds to. Are you restoring this building just because it's available, or is it part of some plan? That's federal law.

The feds are insisting on what any planner would insist on, and that is a clear plan as to where you want to put assets, why you want to put them there, how much funding it needs, and that you'll be able to put it on line. I've been through this in Oakland, so I know the drill.

New Orleans political reputation is that it is extremely difficult to find any consensus and take dramatic action. Is this reputation fair?

There are several reasons for this commonly held impression. Local government has not trusted. No one has trusted government down there at any level. Everyone thinks they can do it better. Unfortunately, that background hampers any recovery effort because people decide to do their own thing and dare the government to stop them.

It is a big challenge, but I've been gratified so far that people are coming to me and saying that they want to be on my team and want to work with me. They say I'm the first person who's come in and knows what he wants to do and how to do it.

When you were in Los Angeles as the dean of the School of Public Administration at USC, you worked to engage the university in the community. Are Tulane and other New Orleans academic resources available to assist you and the city?

They've already stepped forward. But remember, they've been going through recovery themselves. They have to rebuild their own facilities and get their students back and deal with FEMA and all these other entities as well. But they've all extended a warm welcome and said they're willing to help.

My plan is to have them help not sporadically but on specific things. Different institutions have different capabilities. Southern University has a very strong school of education. I'll ask them to lay out an education plan for the next 30 to 50 years for New Orleans. I'll be asking Tulane and its school of architecture to come up with design and design standards. The University of New Orleans has a strong planning program.

And then there are schools of business that can look at economic development plans and so on. I want them to hold themselves accountable to delivery.

If TPR were to talk to you in six months, what benchmarks would you like to have reached?

Most of my benchmarks for the first six months will not be very visible. First is to get the federal funds flowing, and that is by having a concrete plan to spend the funds. The second is some demonstration projects to show the kinds of settlement patterns we want so people understand where we're going. The third is to have a communications system so that everyone knows what we're doing, and I mean something more than just a website.

I want every resident to be able to call someone who can work with them to bring them back, and when people come back into the city they're going to be case-managed in the locations we want. That won't be very visible in terms of rebuilding the city, but it will set the framework.

What role do the ports play, today and in the future?

That's an interesting situation. They're going to be a big part of my plan. I want to put airport/seaport/railport connection system in aimed at transporting goods to Latin America and to sub-Saharan Africa. The Mississippi River is moving into a new channel that may move a lot of the port activities 40 or 50 miles away from where they are.

The federal government has a lot of resources, and they might do channeling of the river and things like that. But one has to be careful. What I've been reading is that if you start building things like that, sooner or later you're building a new catastrophe. This river is huge, and if it doesn't like what's happening, it'll fight back. That's exactly what happened with Katrina.

What do folks in Southern California need to appreciate about the situation in New Orleans?

The thing that we need to appreciate in Southern California is how far we've come with respect to dealing with matters here. The city of Los Angeles has an emergency management plan. We've been through fires, earthquakes, and so forth, and we have institutions in place. And we should guard those institutions. We could even put in more money. With climate change, we're going to have to use them.

Katrina was a wake-up call for Southern California, and with landslides and fires, I think every system should start devoting time and money to making sure we're able to respond and not be another New Orleans.

What is New Orleans' population today, and what do you think it will be in two years?

The population is around 200,000, and in two years it will go up only about 20,000 or 30,000 more. But then after that first wave of development, things will happen very fast. So five years out the city might be over 500,000.