NorthWest Carrollton

This looks a lot like what we had, but worse.

Last night I attended a meeting of NORA. It was a hurried attempt to fulfill a public meeting req. An interesting attempt to placate a group of weary citizens.

On the bright side, I also attended a Budget Hearing for the Inspector General. There is a lot of hope in that arena right now. The Inspector General should, if done correctly create a more efficent,honest and functional Government. Click here to listen to The new IG Robert Cerasoli speak.

Grocer Marc Robert II got approval for $14 million in GO Zone bonds for supermarkets at 2222 St. Claude Ave. and at 4001 Canal Street. He recently opened a Robert’s Fresh Market at 135 Robert E. Lee Blvd. and is planning to build another at 8115 S. Claiborne Ave., but the GO Zone financing for those stores has been stalled by holdups in the administrative paperwork.

The State Bond Commission and the project’s bond counsel disagreed about who is to blame for the delay. Robert said he hoped the snag could be cleared soon because the Robert E. Lee store was backed with bridge loans until the GO Zone financing could be secured. He said the store was one of the first projects to apply for GO Zone bonds.

Read the TP and try and figure out why we still don’t have a grocery store.

Dear District A Resident,

We wanted to make you aware that two very important zoning matters in District A that were to be considered by the council this Thursday (November 15th) at 1pm have been withdrawn and deferred. They are:

• Request for a spot zone at 5428 St. Charles Av. in order to demolish a home (Currently being used as apartments) and construct condominiums has been withdrawn by the applicant.

• Request for an increase in the intensification of use of a non-conforming use to allow a restaurant (The requested zoning would allow for a restaurant and not just a coffee shop) at 1901 Carrollton Av has been deferred until December 6, 2007.

Updated Site plan

Another great Go Zone project in Baton Rouge

The Upscale Mall that our suffering built

Baton Rouge is doing pretty well with this program.

On Wednesday, the Bond Commission depleted the competitive pool. About $843 million in borrowing is left in the hardest-hit pool.

In the Baton Rouge area, the commission approved:
* $45 million for a Coca-Cola Bottling Plant under construction near Baton Rouge Metro Airport.
* Up to $35 million for Celtic Management Corp.’s North Winston Avenue film studio and media center near Coursey Boulevard.
* Up to $60 million for Stupp Bros. Inc.’s spiral weld pipe mill. The Ronaldson Road facility near the intersection of Scenic Highway and Thomas Road will produce large diameter light wall pipe.
* Up to $20 million to build a 90,000-square-foot office building.
* Up to $10 million to build a Southern Ionics Incorporated chemical manufacturing facility on Airline Highway near the Huey P. Long Bridge in Baton Rouge.
* Up to $250 million for Perkins Rowe, a retail, office, residential and hotel complex at the corner of Bluebonnet Boulevard and Perkins Road.
* Up to $75 million for the II City Plaza 280,000-square-foot office building and 700-car parking garage.
* Up to $4.5 million for a new headquarters office building for Starmount Life Insurance Co. at Goodwood Boulevard and Connell’s Park Lane.
* Up to $7.5 million to renovate Price LeBlanc Lexus dealership on Airline Highway.

And our Governor elect thinks it is a good thing

People aren’t looking for a handout. They want to go back to work. You know, one of the most effective programs down here has been a GO Zone program that has reduced taxes, given tax-advantaged treatment for people that want to invest down here.

The Go Zone looks to me a lot like legalized patronage.

Because of course Walgreens had to push their way to the front of the trough, and build a store we did not want.

They even attempted to make it seem that they were doing us a favor by bringing in some live entertainment in the way of Richard Petty

They could have had a local musical guest or someone or something that people in this area actually enjoy, but I guess the suits in Illinois think that because we are in the South we all watch cars driving around in a circle.

Just perusing this list is enough to make your blood boil. The Culture of Corruption is La. has been replaced by the Culture of Corporate Greed.

Where is the Grocery Store??

I received this e mail from Councilwoman Shelley Midura.

This meeting will be to create a prioritized list of services that they wish to see such as “A Bank” and not “A Whitney Bank”. Once that list is created they will go to work on bringing retailers that provide those services not just to the shopping center but to his other nearby spaces.

Be sure to attend the meeting mentioned in the post below.

Target Recovery Zone/Carrollton Shopping Center Town Hall –

Please join us at Xavier University this Tuesday for a Joint District A and Office of Recovery Management Town Hall as Councilmember Midura, Dr. Blakely and the Carrollton Shopping Center developer to determine what the surrounding residents priorities are as far as services.

While the development cannot be all things to all people it will help allow the developer to work to fulfill as many needs as possible with this development and the neighboring commercial sites that are vacant.

WHAT: District A & Office of Recovery Management Town Hall

WHERE: Xavier University Center

William & May McCaffrey Ball Room A

1 Drexel Dr.

New Orleans, La

WHEN: Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

6:00-7:30pm

WHO: Councilmember Shelley Midura and Executive Director of the
Office of Recovery Management Dr. Ed Blakely

I went to the informational meeting about the Carrollton Shopping Center. I think the one clear message that I took away was “don’t hold your breath” As far as I can tell there is no real interest in the site by any retailers.

With Victory in Mid City, and Old Navy and Best Buy building in Elmwood I can not imagine who would want to open there. We do have 2 new Stores opening Dollar General on Earhart and Family Dollar on Carrollton. Seems to me that we have plenty of Dollar stores.

There seems to be no interest in the area and no plans to fix the interstate exchange that makes that area such a mess.

In addition I heard of no plans to fix the drainage which cause flooding each and every time we get a medium to heavy rain.

Here is a link to the owners of the property

City Works New Orleans, will conduct an informational program on
development at the Intersection of I-10 and S.Carrollton Ave., which
has been designated a “Re-Develop Area” by the Office of Recovery
Management, City of New Orleans. The focus of this initial program
will be on the development of the Carrollton Shopping Center. The
purpose of the program is to inform and educate residents and
neighborhood groups on how a large-scale commercial development can
benefit everyone - the neighborhood, the developer, and the city.
There will be speakers on the zoning and permitting process, what a
neighborhood and elder friendly shopping center could look like, smart
growth, energy efficiency and green building, traffic patterns, and
more. We will also review the renderings of the Carrollton Shopping
Center included in the Lambert and UNOP plans.

The program will be held as follows:

Saturday, June 9, 2007
9 a.m. to 12 noon
University Center Bldg. # 17 Room 205.
Xavier University

This program is being sponsored by ten neighborhood and nonprofit
organizations around the shopping center and along Carrollton Ave. We
hope this program will help neighborhoods in Carrollton become
partners in the development process as all the plans that have been
developed begin to be implemented. For more information contact

Jim Livingston
City-Works
jlivingston@ city-works. org
504-754-1427

Paul Baricos
Carrollton-Hollygro ve Community Development Corporation
paul.baricos@ gmail.com
(504)483-7037

Read the article

May 24 Island Update

Times Picayune reporting murder and shooting at Daiquri Island

ISLAND UPDATE

I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday discussing Zoning on Daiquri Island. Since the Zoning is Light Industrial, they are able to build this addition because the Parking regulation for this type of establishment is 3 spaces.

I have seen 20 or more cars parked on Earhart at night, spilling across the street to other business owned by the same proprietor. This is a bar we may want to keep our eye on to avoid spill over into the Neighbor.

There have been multiple meetings in regards to the Design of the Walgreens/ Roberts at the corner of Carrollton and Claiborne. Since there seems to be such wide community interest in that development I thought there may be a similar interest in what is happening on the other end of the Neighborhood.

Earhart Blvd. has long suffered from poor planning and design.

Here is a photo of some questionable new construction.

The cinderblock building is located in the Parking Lot. Which begs the question, Where do the patrons park?

In other Cities where there have been massive disasters there is a flurry of Post Disaster building, some shanties, some businesses hoping to build and not get caught. And some legitimate residential and commercial neighbors who want to create something better than before.

We are going to spend the next decade dealing with these issues.

While we were mouring the loss of our City shortly after the Hurricane ,many felt that the future in New Orleans would be a brighter,cleaner smarter City

Those early days of hope are gone, replaced with a nagging sense that we are in stasis, and looking in the wrong direction.

Ask your self this question,What does it mean to rebuild a City? Remove the bricks and morter from this scenario and ask yourself again, What does it take to rebuild a City? I suggest it involves transparency,strict code enforcement,partners with law enforcement, timely and accurate information from ALL City and State agencies and continued dialog with out leaders.

As long as we have agencies that do not enforce the rules, we will have residents and leaders exploiting them for their own gain.

The following speech was read at the May 3rd City Council Meeting when the Accessory Parking Lot, CPC Report and BZA decision was endorsed by City Council. All Carrollton & New Orleans residents should be aware of what is taking place on this corner. Anyone interested in contacting our Council Representative, Shelley Midura, regarding this issue can contact her via Email at smidura@cityofno.com or via phone at 658-1010.

The board of NorthWest Carrollton would like to respectfully request that this matter be deferred until the next City Council meeting.

We want to believe that our issues and concerns can be addressed in a civil and organized fashion and be successfully resolved. Marc Robert has everything he needs to go ahead with the construction of his grocery store. This parking lot issue can be resolved as the primary development progresses. We are not attempting to “hold up construction” of the grocery store and resent the implication by Council Member Midura’s staff that this is the case. We have been consistently told that the grocery store and the parking lot were 2 SEPARATE issues. Now the implication is that one can not proceed without the other. Which is true?

We are simply working citizens who have repeatedly taken time off from their jobs to attend City Council meetings, CPC meetings and to meet separately with CPC and our Council member. We have been put through the grinder of city practices and protocols without the aid of the legal representation developers can afford and with very little assistance from anyone in city government on how to manage this maze. We have asked that the entire site plan for Roberts & Walgreens be developed holistically. It the fall of 2006 this it was even announced in the newspaper that would be the case. Yet there was a separate CPC processes for the primary Roberts development. The accessory parking lot at issue today was handled as multi-phase and convoluted conditional use grant, the CPC process and now this Council process. Walgreens has been handled separately because they agreed, under duress, to follow city ordinances. This is not the definition I have of holistic development.

1) More than a year ago during the many meetings and discussions held regarding the Roberts & Walgreens development we told Council Member Midura and Marc Robert that we were opposed to the conversion of residential property to commercial.

2) In the fall of 2006 Council Member Midura introduced a “Conditional Use” for this property “as an accessory parking lot”. The accessory parking was to be for employees only. This was done with out any discussions or notice to the citizens who had repeatedly communicated concerns over the intrusion of commercial space into the neighborhood, When the conditional use issue was first introduced we asked what we could do next. We were told “Nothing, it is done”. This was not completely true. It turned out that there was a CPC process. But even after the CPC process, what we were told yesterday makes it look like there really was nothing we could do to influence the process. Should ordinary citizens need lawyers to allow them to interact with the city government we elect and pay for?

3) In August of 2006, When the “compromise” was announced and Walgreens agreed, under duress, to follow the city’s zoning laws, a “design review board” was created. Never once, before yesterday evening, was any mention made of using this space as a storage facility. This design review board has not met consistently and has not addressed the concerns of the residents. It has only enabled the developers. It has been essentially a farce. We have only been asked what color lipstick we want on the pig. Although I’ll agree it appears that for the Walgreens & Roberts primary development it appears to be nice lipstick.

4) When the provisos were being worked for Roberts primary development we repeatedly told CPC that the citizens of the neighborhood were more inclined to grant Roberts waivers on the number of parking spaces required than to have this residential space used as a parking lot. We also indicated this at the meetings held during the initial Walgreens & Roberts placement discussions. This does not ever seem to have been an option.

5) At the April 10 CPC hearing on this issue there were a number of provisos attached to the use of this site as a parking lot. The space, that we are now being told will house a large storage facility, was referred to as green space. CPC report even goes so far as to recommend that this remaining green space be offered to the residential property owners impacted by the creation of a parking lot. No mention is made of a storage facility.

6) Immediately after April 10th CPC hearing we met with CPC and reviewed our remaining concerns over the accessory parking lot with them. We were told that these concerns were “minor” and could be addressed by Council Member Midura. We wanted this to be the case. We arranged a meeting with Council Member Midura last week. When we advised Ms Midura that the parking lot was to be used for both employee and customer parking, she indicated surprise. When we expressed our concerns regarding appropriate fencing and security on the “green space” no mention was made of a storage facility. We have repeatedly asked CPC, Ms Midura, Marc Robert, the design review committee to ensure that after hours this parking lot would be free of cars and secured. On Tuesday, because we had heard nothing from Council Member Midura regarding our concerns we respectfully requested that this matter be deferred. Yesterday in an afternoon phone call from Ms Midura’s staff one of our board members was told that the matter would not be deferred, our concerns were not going to be addressed in advance of this meeting and to add insult to injury that a storage facility, one not mentioned in any CPC report or to the design review committee, was to be built on the site

Given that, during our meeting with Ms Midura last week, we asked and she indicated it was possible to add an amendment which would cause the entire property under discussion today to be remideated back to green space should the Robert development prove non-viable; the last minute revelation of a storage shed was a bit of a shock. We want a grocery store. We do not want the intrusion of commercial space into the heart of a residential block. The space that we are now told will house a storage facility plunges like a knife into the middle of a residential block and abuts 5 residential properties. There are too many unresolved issues to charge ahead.

So again we respectfully request that this matter be deferred until the next City Council meeting. Council Member Midura was sent Emails this morning from the president of Central Carrollton Association and member of the design review board supporting our request and concerns. Ms Midura was also sent support from Claiborne-University.

I would also request that this Council cause CPC to issue a revised report including the revelations uncovered yesterday regarding use of the “green space” for a storage facility and this revised report be reviewed at CPC meeting before this issue comes before City Council. We want to believe that the CPC was sold a “pig in a poke” and may not have recommended for approval of the conditional use if they had known that the green space which abuts 5 residential properties would not stay green. We would prefer not to have to put lipstick on yet another pig.

Helm Paint has opened a new store on Earhart and Carrollton. Yesterday I went in for, of all things, paint.
It was the grand opening and this Saints player was signing footballs.

I knew he was a Saint cause he wasn’t signing baseballs.

But who is he?

Yesterday afternoon Mr. Chills Barber Shop opened on Carrollton at Apricot.

Mr. Chill had the whole family there including his Dad.

3 Generations pose for a photo.

And the Barber Chair gets broken in.