How Ray Nagin Cost the City of New Orleans $28 Million Dollars
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006Ray “School Bus” Nagin has struck again, proving his soaring incompetence in the handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster was not a fluke:
Katrina turned New Orleans into an auto junkyard and the flooded cars are still everywhere, mementos of the storm and of the city’s continuing failure to clean itself up.
Almost seven months after Hurricane Katrina, the Nagin administration still dickers over details of a contract that would gradually rid the cityscape of these vehicular eyesores — at a cost of $23 million over another six months.
Which makes it of more than passing interest to discover that the largest car crusher east of the Rockies, K&L Auto Crushers of Tyler, Texas, offered in October to do the job in 15 weeks and actually pay the city for the privilege of hauling the junk away. How much? How about $100 per flooded car. With an estimated 50,000 vehicles on the street at that time, the city would have netted $5 million, rather than shelling out four times that sum, as it plans to do now.
That’s right, folks. Rather than pocket $5 million for allowing a private firm come in and remove all of the junked cars choking the streets of New Orleans in 15 weeks, Mayor Ray Nagin is instead forging ahead with a contract that will pay a company $23 million to do the same thing in six months. Total cost to the flood-ravaged citizens of New Orleans: $28 million.
This is the same mayor who has toured the country trying to get blacks to return to New Orleans so that they can have a “chocolate” city, and begging people for money to help rebuild. The more I learn about this guy, the more I realize why more people who left after the hurricane hit will never return.
I don’t think another nickel should be spent by the Federal government on the rebuilding of New Orleans until they can prove that they’ve got their financial house in order. Personally, if the mayor of New Orleans can afford to give away $28 million for a job that would have netted him $5 million, I don’t think that they need any more money.
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