P.O. Box 24378 New Orleans, LA 70184 504.324.2270
District Five Recovery News
Minutes Infrastructure Committee Meeting 5/02/06
The Committee has decided to meet every other Tuesday to enable members to complete final data to be included in our plan. The work of this committee will continue to be on going as there is still so much left to accomplish.
Information concerning contact persons, volunteers, and committees from the Associations of: City Park, Country Club Gardens, Lake Vista, Lakeshore, Lakewood North and South, and Parkview was presented. Neighborhood Projects and Wish Lists were reviewed.
A newsletter has been completed and is being mailed to all Lakeview Civic Association members. It will also be posted on our web site.
STREETS: The city is putting together a volunteer group to identify problems with streets. They are developing a methodology to identify and prioritize street problems. The Committee decided rather than wait for the city it would be better to set up our own volunteers perhaps by using block captains to check out street conditions in Lakeview. Committee members will set up a form to aid in assessing conditions such as, holes, manhole covers, curbs, catch basins, leaky fire hydrants and street lights.
PERMITTING: The maps showing the building permits issued in the City are up on the City website and can be accessed from the opening page of the website. Currently you can access the permits by the zipcode of the area of interest and it will show 3 color-coded permit types: Electrical, Mechanical, and All Other. As of March 28th there were a total of 2783 permits issued. As of May 1, the total is 7768. Permits have more than doubled in 1 month.
MOSQUITO CONTROL: District 5 is still in need of a system to identify untreated pools and other sources of water.
STREET LIGHTS: Presently major streets, business areas, and all streets that have electrical power have Power. Entergy tripled crews to 21. Street Lighting is now noted at: West End Restaurants, Lupo Office Bldg., Canal Blvd Office Bldg. Well lighted streets include Marconi Blvd, Argonne Blvd. Canal Blvd. except one full block near Robt. E. Lee. West End Blvd. Broken lights reported on Pontchartrain Blvd. are now lighted.,
It is noted that smaller streets like Stafford, Spencer, Downs, Derbes, Bragg, have improved with lighting. Still there are small streets as in Smith and French that are cave like. Larger streets with cave like appearance are: Marshall Foch, Memphis, Louis Fourteenth, Ave. A&B, and large parts of Vicksburg. Lake Vista is well lighted except for Lakeshore Drive.
Lights that were reported have not all been repaired. Entergy continues to send crews out and new reports of outages are given to Entergy.
The Dept. of Streets needs the addresses of those street lights that are not functioning.
COMMUNITY TRAILERS FOR CITY PERMITS: Training class was attended by several representatives of the committee on 4/19/06. There is a bottleneck with the City which has kept the trailer transaction with FEMA from being finalized and the two trailers from being delivered.
COX COMMUNICATION: By May 10, 2006, all work in Lakeview should be complete and residents can receive all services by contacting Cox Communications. We were warned, however, that this was not etched on stone.
BELLSOUTH: There has been poor communication between what service representatives are telling customers and what is reality. A representative from BellSouth has agreed to address our Committee on May16, 2006.
AIR, SOIL & WATER: We are attempting to put the booklet “The 9th Ward Residents’ Guide To Do It Yourself Soil Clean Up Using Natural Processes “ on the Lakeview Civic Web Site. We are exploring using UNO for our first bioremediation workshop.