Wow, it’s been a really strange year. So many local musicians and cultural icons have passed away. New Orleans has become an “it” place to live. With increased population who are moving in like lemmings from more civilized, less loosey-goosey cities, New Orleans is poised to become a tech center, but one that has a tourist base. Sort of like San Francisco?

To keep the city clean, maintain (and repair) the infrastructure, to create jobs and keep the city’s rep up as a golden place to visit, sans crime (which is definitely the spoiler for the hospitality industry), New Orleans needs to raise some serious money.

Our streets are deplorable. Not only are there all kinds of drainage projects being implemented, with all the new residential construction, there are holes everywhere as for some reason, new housing requires upgrades to the sewer and drainage system. So once where there was a nice travelable street, now there’s a huge hole where the builder was required to upgrade drainage. The city digs the street up, does what it needs to do, but somehow the massive hole that the construction crew leaves behind in the street takes months and months to be repaired. It’s really frustrating and it screws every car that attempts to travel over the hole over two miles-per-hour. Have seen this so many times over the city, in my neighborhood, and on Esplanade.  Is this due to lack of money? Or incompetence on the part of the city and the traffic contractors?

The mayor told a group of people last week that it costs a minimum of $450,000 per block to upgrade and repave a city street. So redoing all the city streets would cost way over $1-billion. How’s this going to occur? The city obviously needs money. The latest scheme to do so is raising metered parking fees, not a little, but a lot.

The city has proposed increasing the parking rates at meters from $1.50 to $3.00 an hour and extending hours through 10 p.m. every night…supposed to raise $4-million+ a year. So how are the residents of the French Quarter going to profit by this? Or the retailers? Or delivery trucks? Or the thousands of people in the service industry who work in the Quarter? How about the poor musicians who have to lug their instruments and themselves to their gigs in the Quarter and Marigny? There are still no loading zones for musicians in this crazy town. This sounds like a nightmare. If anyone local was going to go to the Quarter to shop, well, that’s probably not going to happen now.

I understand the need for money for the city, I really do…but this sounds pretty draconian.

Could we use that $4-million to promote more people taking public transportation? Is it going to help shore up our woefully understaffed police department? The additional parking revenue is supposed to go into the city’s general fund, and who knows where it will end up?

Parking is a never-ending issue in urban settings. Why, for example, are there no serious plans for parking garages in the Marigny? At one point in time the French Market lot between Decatur and Chartres was slated to have a multi-floor parking garage with retail on the first floor. But the neighborhood association in all their wisdom and righteousness opposed the plan because it would have added a few feet to the height limit on Elysian Fields (remember the debacle of Sean Cummings’ plan for an apartment building on the corner of Elysian Fields and Decatur across from the pwer station. The FMIA killed the plan, and the building that’s still there is more blighted than ever. Dumb.

You either have to provide parking garages, or your citizens have to pay the price at meters…or maybe learn to use public transportation, or god forbid, they have to walk more than they ride in their cars (like in Europe or big cities like New York).