Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
St. Tammany Parish, LA July, 2009
Fourth & Forward As the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
approaches, the St. Tammany Parish President and the Mayor of Slidell reflect on
the recovery progress made in their communities.
Kevin Davis Probably over the last year, is finalizing some
of the FEMA projects we’ve had in place and
they’ve started to proceed, such as our
buildings here in St. Tammany Parish, our
school buildings, our own public buildings that we own in parish government.
Our school system is not under our direct
supervision but we work very closely with
them. We’ve seen great progress there.
Salmen High School, I graduated from. So it
was refreshing to see the construction going
on, the mitigation. They’d worked with FEMA
on the rebuilding of that, so I live close to
there, so I go by to check on it from time to
time, and it’s looking very, very good.
Brock, same thing. Same problems and
issues. Totally flooded, mitigation issues and
they are in construction of that.
It was previously owned by private sector and
they called it the Towers Building. It’s the only
6 story office building in the parish.
People see it and it’s a very positive sign for
them in their own neighborhoods to see that
the local government is rebuilding buildings of
that magnitude, which we’ll have employees
once we move in, in another 6 to 8 months,
anywhere from 200 to 300, which is always
good for the local economy in that general area.
Ben Morris We’ve been on a basically, a 4 year journey
and since the change of regime at FEMA of
the local authority that was here, I’ve seen
huge progress. We have settled a lot of our
former appeals in the favor of the city.
The city government has been in FEMA
trailers for the last 4 years. So what we’re
doing now, is we’re getting close to
transitioning out of those trailers into new buildings.
Building number one is going to take about
25% of our employees that were displaced,
and put them into permanent structures.
Building 2 will take the remaining and we
should be out for bid by the end of August, first of September.
The auditorium is the same way. March is
when we’re looking at taking it down, and
March of 2010 is the completion date there.
I would think and hope that bids would go out
for the end of the month for the Senior
Citizens Center. We also have to demolish that building.
We had a large population of seniors that
utilized that facility and they’ve been displaced now for four years.
2010 should be Katrina’s final chapter, and I certainly look forward to that.
For more information visit www.FEMA.gov.