It Doesn’t Add Up
Since Hurricane Katrina, the City of New Orleans has less residents and less households so that it would seem that it would have less services to render and less revenue necessary to render those services. Augment that dwindling population base with the millions of dollars that have come into the city post-Katrina relative to federal assistance, etc. and one would think that we are facing a rosy picture here. Unfortunately, what we in fact have is higher property taxes, pushes for increased mileages and the perennial threat of diminished services.
As I look at my Christmas gift from the City of New Orleans, my property tax bill received the day after Christmas, I was totally befuddled at why I should pay thousands of dollars to this city. I don’t have children so I don’t use the public schools. I even pay my own recycling fees to recycle my garbage. The streets in my neighborhood are as bad as the streets in every other neighborhood and even in Downtown New Orleans. The street lights on my main avenue have yet to be turned back on after Katrina.
In sum, something is wrong with this picture. As I drive through pot holes the size of small cars and pass still-vacant businesses, strip malls and houses that are about to cave in, the only thing I can say is, “It Does Not Add Up.”
Tags: latino, latinola, new orleans, new orleans government, new orleans taxes, nola cubano, puentes
February 11th, 2010 at 7:40 am
There will be a change since there have been a “changing of the guards”. The money will free up a little bit because the cajuns will step in. The plutocracy that governs our city helps and hurts our city but if it was not in place New Orleans would have become a disneyland long time ago. The ole guards keep the city’s charm, architect, mystic culture protected from outsiders who don’t have our best interest at heart. They about $ and won’t conserve our unique identity. I am proud to come from a such a rich culture inside the much anglonized US. I am from a subculture within a culture. Although we always been economically impoverished we didn’t lose “our thing”. New Orleans has gained world wide attention again so things will get better just as Haiti has now.