Can New Orleans Do Better?

Long before Hurrican Katrina exposed the racial and economic canyons of New Orleans for all the nation to see, Mayor Ray Nagin swept into office with high hopes of bridging those gaps. So how is it that now, in the wake of Katrina’s devastation and dislocation, the Big Easy seems more polarized than ever about Nagin himself? To his fervent supporters, New Orleans’ up-by-his-bootstraps millionaire turned city-hall reformer is just the right man for the job of rebuilding New Orleans, “the only guy who can assure accountability and transparency,” says Tim Williamson, head of the Idea Village, a leading New Orleans business-development group. Earlier this month, Nagin got a standing ovation from some 2,000 local entrepreneurs after pledging that they would get their fair share of the billions of dollars in federal reconstruction contracts about to pour in. “This is a once-in-a-400-year opportunity,” he roared inside a downtown hotel ballroom. “You’re in a position to create wealth for your children and your children’s children. And after you make all that money, give back. The days of haves and have-nots are over!”

To his many critics, however, Nagin, 49, is a mercurial political neophyte incapable of creating the consensus building necessary for such a giant undertaking. He seemed distracted and impatient last week at the first public meeting of his Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Just days earlier, without consulting the commission, he had announced a controversial proposal to allow casino gambling in several large downtown hotels–only to see the idea panned by everyone from Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to chambermaids. And his opponents certainly haven’t forgotten his performance in the first, darkest days after Katrina, when Nagin admonished sluggish federal officials to “get off your asses” but then indulged what turned out to be unfounded rumors of rampant murder and rape and wildly exaggerated estimates of up to 10,000 deaths. (The final number turned out to be just over 1,000.)

Even as the last of some 250 billion gallons of fetid floodwater were finally being pumped out of New Orleans, the rising tide of debate over the city’s upright but erratic mayor showed no signs of abating. “We shouldn’t have to choose between corruption and incompetence on something this important,” says veteran political consultant C.B. Forgotston, once a Nagin backer. “If Nagin remains in charge, the city simply will never get rebuilt.” The debate over his performance is hardly academic. In February, Nagin faces a re-election contest that will help determine the trajectory of New Orleans’ revival. If Nagin can’t convince enough of his displaced supporters that they should return home (he estimates that New Orleans’ population could eventually be halved, to about 250,000), the city’s recovery–and Nagin’s political future–may well be in jeopardy.

The mayor must navigate that tricky terrain in the midst of a new scandal in New Orleans’ notoriously corrupt and ineffectual police department. It was bad enough that some officers were accused of deserting their posts and looting Cadillacs during Katrina, but now two officers stand accused of beating a retired African-American schoolteacher who they claim was drunk and resisting arrest (he denies it) in the reopened French Quarter–a brutal attack that was caught on video and left Nagin’s welcome mat looking all the more tattered. The officers have pleaded not guilty to charges of battery. Nagin has promised that new acting police superintendent Warren Riley will “handle it very seriously,” but Riley’s record is checkered with suspensions, one involving his alleged failure to act promptly enough after a woman told him that a police officer had threatened to kill her. (Soon after that, her body was found in a swamp, and the case remains unsolved.)

Nagin dismisses the criticism as the dying gasps of New Orleans’ Old Guard. “We’ve moved away from the corrupt politics of the past,” he told TIME recently. “I think those who are bashing me and questioning my leadership skills are usually unhappy with the new way of doing things.” Nagin has been doing things differently for quite some time. Raised poor in New Orleans, he attended Alabama’s Tuskegee University on a baseball scholarship, earned an M.B.A. from Tulane University and worked his way up the ranks to vice president at cable giant Cox Communications by turning around its flagging New Orleans cable system. After hearing his son complain about New Orleans’ dearth of career opportunities, Nagin entered the 2002 mayoral race only two months before the Democratic primary and ended up the choice of a city tired of its banana-republic image.

The outsider set out to run New Orleans government like a business. He eliminated a $25 million budget deficit, renegotiated many municipal contracts on more favorable terms and cut red tape by putting applications for permits and other requests online. He won high marks for an anticorruption drive that targeted notorious centers of graft like the Taxicab Bureau and resulted in the arrests of many low-level city officials.

But around the time he endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal over Democrat Blanco in the 2003 race for Governor–a miscalculation that has left a noticeable chill in his relationship with Blanco–New Orleanians began to have second thoughts about Nagin. For all his reforms, residents wondered whether their long-awaited antipolitician could realize critical projects like transforming the city’s abysmal schools or breaking its dependence on the low-wage tourism industry. In a city suffering some of the nation’s highest poverty and crime rates, African Americans questioned whether their concerns fit on Nagin’s pro-business agenda. One of New Orleans’ leading black ministers, Bishop Paul Morton, even called Nagin “a white man in black skin” a few months after the election.

Ironically, a large part of the former communications executive’s current problems may well be how he communicates–or doesn’t. The CEO mayor relies almost exclusively on an ultratight circle of confidants brought in from the halls of business, especially McDonald’s franchise baron and fellow millionaire friend David White. State and federal officials say privately that Nagin’s insular and politically inexperienced staff has hurt him when it comes to the kind of public relations and coalition building he’ll need from here on out. “This administration tends to dismiss too many people, especially career political people,” says New Orleans City Council president Oliver Thomas, a possible mayoral candidate next year.

Certainly in the weeks since Katrina, Nagin could have used some p.r. help, as he has often come across as irritated and defensive. He complained to state legislators that he was “getting more criticism than God knows who,” as if “you all think I’m crazy.” After encouraging residents to return to New Orleans despite federal warnings that conditions weren’t yet safe, Nagin groused that the Katrina recovery director, Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen, was acting like the “federal mayor of New Orleans.” It won’t be so easy for the mayor to win back the Big Easy’s confidence. When he encouraged evacuees last week at a number of shelters across Louisiana to “come back and work” in New Orleans, many angry former residents retorted that they were tired of hearing empty promises. “Before Katrina, the man used to give us straight yes and no answers, and we liked that,” says John Washington, 40, an owner of a small print shop who lives in the city’s Ninth Ward, perhaps the hardest hit by the hurricane. “But I guess you never really know the measure of a man until disaster strikes.”

Nagin has to hope those initial measurements can be altered, and he does seem to have regained a bit of the reassuring and charismatic swagger that got him elected. Sporting silky black knit shirts, he often uses streetwise vernacular in his chats with the city’s beleaguered residents. Visiting with a group of small-business owners last week, he urged them not to let large outside firms steal all the recovery business up for grabs. “Don’t let ’em pull a razoo on you,” he said, using the local slang for cheating at marbles. A day after dining on hickory-grilled rib-eye steak and praline bread pudding with Allen and President George W. Bush in the French Quarter, Nagin managed to salvage a potentially deflating photo op last week. The Rev. Jesse Jackson had arrived with a bus convoy of what was supposed to be 200 New Orleans evacuees returning home but turned out to be mostly down-and-out residents of other cities like Mobile, Ala., and Memphis, Tenn., looking for reconstruction jobs. The event could have been an embarrassing rebuke of Nagin’s come-home rallying efforts, but the mayor turned it around by welcoming the new arrivals as a “test case” for the city’s job opportunities.

If Nagin sometimes comes across as impatient or irascible, or his agenda as hurried or business-centric, his allies say, it’s because New Orleans’ fiscal problems–which he has said will result in layoffs of possibly 3,000 municipal workers–are so pressing. In a letter to Blanco, Nagin recently laid out his vision for a new, more prosperous New Orleans. It includes creating charter schools, loosening restrictions on the city’s ability to levy taxes and passing state-income-tax exemptions for manufacturers who set up plants to process some of the 23 million tons of raw materials–such as rubber, steel and coffee beans–that move through New Orleans ports each year. Nagin is also talking up initiatives like a biomedical corridor to lure firms that will leverage the research done at local hospitals and universities.

“If I get too ahead of things sometimes,” he says, “it’s because to attract people back here, we have to offer them a vision for the city as soon as possible. They need to see we’re serious about making this one of the most livable cities in the world, where the old monopolies won’t be allowed anymore.” It’s certainly a bold vision, even if his detractors call it a dream. Either way, Nagin has four months to convince the Crescent City that a businessman can make it a reality.