New Orleans - The focus of the forum was housing in a city with an estimated 54 thousand dilapidated homes. Fox 8's Lee Zurik posed the questions, "As mayor how would you deal with blighted dilapidated and abandoned housing in our city?"
Troy Henry answered "What I want to do on a city wide basis is what I am doing today in Ponchartrain park. We have partnered with the residents and found out what their needs were. Second we leveraged every financial resource available to them. Third we did a public private partnership with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority."
James Perry says, "We built enough houses in New Orleans for more than 600 thousand residents. We only have half that in terms of population. There are not enough people to occupy all the houses. It is a market driven issue. We have to grow the population in order to truly deal with the blighted housing problem."
Mitch Landrieu answered, "There are 5 steps that have to be taken much more aggressively. One is inspections. There have to be more of them and they have to be faster. The enforcement has to be strict. Fines have to be leveed. Compliance has to be mandated."
Nadine Ramsey added, "My plan is to tackle blight by first dealing with code enforcement. Making sure we have adequate funding to that the code officers go out and do their job and that the city supports them in their actions."
There were a few zingers tossed at each other and the man they want to replace. Rob Couhig said, "John I want to correct you on one thing. The city charter is not a guideline. It is the law. Part of the problem is we have a mayor who thinks it is a guide line now." And a few eyebrow raising ideas like John Georges saying, "The first thing we need to do is rebrand our city as a more serious brand of historic American city. We are known as a party city. We need all of the party people to go to Las Vegas and we need to start attracting a different type of tourist."
Political scientist Dr Ed Chervenak thinks Troy Henry and James Perry scored the most points this round. Chervenak says, "Whoever inherits this job has a lot on their plate, so you have to convince voters of why you want this job." With only one month to the election, each round counts.
