Opponents to move City Hall to Municipal Auditorium must come up with their own plan — without city resources — mayor says

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and members of her administration met with a coalition of community organizers called Save Our Soul, which formed to oppose her plan to relocate City Hall to the Municipal Auditorium in Armstrong Park. In tense exchanges that escalated at times to shouting, Cantrell presented the organizers with a seemingly infeasible option for pre-empting the move and signaled that, despite a groundswell of public opposition catalyzed by SOS, she’s still fighting for it.

Cantrell told the organizers repeatedly that if they wanted to see the auditorium serve as something other than City Hall they should put together a proposal themselves and bring it back to her administration in October.

“If City Hall is off the table, it’s off the table,” she said. “Then you have 90 days to identify another use” for the building. “You’ll find the money; you’ll be able to figure out how it’ll be operational; you’ll figure out how to maintain it.”

Asked if the administration would partner with the group to create that plan, Cantrell refused to offer any city resources. 

“That can come from you all,” she said, “It’s yours.” Near the end of the two-hour meeting, though, the mayor revealed that she saw this ostensible alternate route as a dead end, telling Jackie Harris of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, “It’s going to take longer than 90 days to come up with a plan and the resources associated with it.” 

Cantrell said the 90-day timeline is necessary because of deadlines imposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has offered the City $38 million to repair the auditorium. Those funds have to be spent by August 29, 2023 — 18 years after it was damaged in flooding following Hurricane Katrina — and the City is running behind schedule. 

Today (July 21, 2021) according to FEMA, what the agency calls the “Period of Performance” for the auditorium will expire because the city has not produced the requisite “plans and specifications” for the renovation to keep it active. Though the expiration likely does not mean that FEMA will rescind the $38 million, it underscores the urgent need to move the project forward.

According to Cantrell, the city was recently granted a 90-day hold by FEMA to pause the clock. When it ends, she said, the City will have to present a plan to FEMA to initiate work on the site. 

She did not acknowledge two recent unanimous votes by the New Orleans City Council designed to prevent that from happening. One is a zoning ordinance that, for the next year, bars the administration from developing a government building in Armstrong Park. The other starts a process that could change the city’s Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance to mandate that the City Council has to approve any relocation of City Hall.

Read the full article here: http://www.louisianaweekly.com/opponents-to-move-city-hall-to-municipal-auditorium-must-come-up-with-their-own-plan-without-city-resources-mayor-says/