Katrina Panel Highlights Important Steps to Recovery
Feature Story by Jenna Sauber - 3/23/2007
A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the area's infrastructure is still in disrepair, race relations are tense, and thousands of residents have yet to return home.
At a March 19 Foundation for Ethnic Understanding panel, civil rights leaders, Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., and FEMA officials discussed continuing efforts to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
"I don't know where to begin and I don't know where to stop," said Congressman Jefferson, a representative from Louisiana's second district. "There is so much to be done."
All the speakers agreed that although some steps have been taken on the road to recovery, there are still major challenges ahead that need to be addressed by the government, with the help of advocacy groups and the American people.
Rep. Jefferson called for more help and funding from the federal government to strengthen state and local infrastructure, particularly for health care, finances, police and fire departments and to fight crime. He also stressed the need for low-income displaced residents – the majority of whom are African American -- to move back to the New Orleans area.
Rep. Jefferson said that even before the storm, New Orleans was struggling with poverty. With 50 percent of the city's children living in desperate conditions, Jefferson said that "In the long run, we need to attack the issue of systemic poverty."
While most of the attention has been focused on the black population and the issues of the Ninth Ward, significant numbers of Asian Americans were also affected by Hurricane Katrina. The shrimping industry was hurt and disabled and elderly Asian American immigrants lost benefits or saw delays in the citizenship process.
Tuyet Duong, staff attorney for the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), said the large number of Asian Americans who don't speak English well made it harder for them to seek adequate assistance. "Because of language barriers, many did not or could not receive FEMA disaster benefits or Small Business Association loans," she said.
Duong advocated an expansion of multilingual outreach efforts by the government, but also called for increased collaboration between ethnic communities in the Gulf region. "Any fracturing between the communities of color in the Gulf Coast will hurt us all," she said.
Congressman Jefferson, Duong and Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington bureau, said that the American people must push the government to follow through on its commitments to the people affected by the hurricane. "It's the federal government's job to fix it, and we [must] insist on it being done," Rep. Jefferson added.
Even with financial support from the government, the need for funds continues to grow for the Gulf Coast, and private companies that profited from the disaster are being targeted by recovery advocates.
The Katrina Information Network (KIN) is asking Congress and the President to obtain just recovery for hurricane victims, after the Government Accounting Office cited several businesses that mismanaged recovery funds that should have been reinvested in the community. "In Baton Rouge, there are 1,000 FEMA camps and people are turning on each other," said Le'Kedra Robertson, of KIN. "This is not just a race issue, it's a cultural issue —there is not enough funding."
The Unified New Orleans Plan commission is still working hard to address major problems of the city, not just hurricane-related issues. "We still get up every morning and give it 100 percent," said Stephen Peychard, a FEMA official and native of New Orleans. "This is very locally driven. We're hiring locals to help in the rebuilding, and it's up to the local government to decide how the money is spent."
