Just announced via breaking news on CNN. Mayor Ray Nagin just held a press conference and said that “the city is OUT of money.” The plan, of course, had been to bring people back to the city and employ them…. why isn’t that working? A commentator said that there are garbage piles 15 feet high that only private contractors are picking up.
From the A.P. at Yahoo:
NEW ORLEANS – Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday the city is laying off as many as 3,000 employees – or about half the city’s workforce – because of the damage done to New Orleans’ finances by Hurricane Katrina. Nagin announced with “great sadness” that he had been unable to find the money to keep the workers on the payroll. He said only non-essential workers would be laid off and that no firefighters or police would be among those let go.
And — probably related to the political impact of hurricane Katrina — the Dept. of Commerce “has issued a blanket media policy to employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), requiring that all requests for contact from national media be first approved by the Dept.,” according to Raw Story.
Does this mean that we would have not received the National Weather Service’s urgent warning on Sunday before Katrina hit? Because the courageous weather analyst who wrote it would have been forced to go through the Dept. of Commerce? Do they answer their phones on Sundays? What are their criteria? Would they have made him edit the dire warning he issued, which turned out to be prescient?