New Orleans revisited

The reelection of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Saturday briefly put his city in the spotlight again. Nine months after Katrina, though, the media and most of us have moved on.
We were there in early May to help St. Paul-based Public Strategies Group produce a working conference on ways local government could do a better job. In the process our group spent hours with the Katrina Krewe picking up trash in a mid-city neighborhood. We drove up and down countless streets, seeing what a place looks like with three-fourths of its homes uninhabitable, with 8 million tons of debris stacked or strewn in yards and streets.

from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune