Two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, more signs of recovery are popping up in Louisiana as facilities reopen, millages pass, and recovery plans take hold.
New Orleans Public Library reopened its Martin Luther King Jr. branch October 5, with speakers calling it a beacon of hope for the recovery of the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. “This is the place where you can touch the rest of the world,” Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu told students of Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, who attended the reopening ceremony. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the event included the announcement of significant contributions, “the latest in a continuing stream, to help the city’s library system, which is still struggling after the storm shuttered many of its facilities.”
The gifts included 10,000 books from Scholastic, of which 2,500 are earmarked for the King branch. The publishing, education, and media company also included toys in its gift, which was valued at about $200,000. AmeriCares, a nonprofit international disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization, gave $50,000 to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to help buy computers and books for the King library, and $30,000 came from the Nestlé USA food company and Reading Is Fundamental to help expand the branch’s collection.
In St. Tammany Parish, 63% of voters in an October 20 ballot said yes to a 6.33-mill tax renewal that provides almost all the financing for the parish public library system. Because Katrina seriously damaged two of the 12 branches open at the time of the hurricane, library officials want the option of spending some of the money on repairing buildings or acquiring vacant land, according to the October 11 Times-Picayune. The millage renewal takes effect in 2010 and continues over 15 years.
. In Port Sulphur, a temporary branch of the Plaquemines Parish Library opened with funding from the Gulf Coast Libraries Project, a three-year grant-supported initiative of SOLINET. The facility is located directly across from the Katrina-damaged old library.
After months of struggling to come up with $1.1 billion for the first stage of its rebuilding plan, New Orleans announced October 11 that it has a blueprint that will carry the recovery through the next few years. Released by Recovery Effort Director Ed Blakely, it calls for work on libraries as well as green space, health clinics, community centers, housing, and shopping centers. The Associated Press reported on the same day, however, that “by one estimate, rebuilding New Orleans could cost $14.4 billion in private and government money and take at least a decade.”
For a video update of the library recovery in Louisiana, watch an American Libraries Focus interview with Lon Dickerson, Jefferson Parish Library director, who explains how six of Jefferson’s 15 libraries are still closed, the $10–$14 million worth of repairs that are needed, and how the 2006 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans served as “a shot in the arm.”
Posted October 27, 2007.