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Mayor and Uptown residents debate city’s priorities at standing-room-only public meeting
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Civics is hard, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told a packed room of hundreds of Uptown residents on Monday night, after hearing their calls for better roads, less blight, lower taxes, improvements to Gert Town, and full staffing of the fire department and city planning offices. All those issues are undeniably crucial to the city’s future, Landrieu said in a sort of pregame show for the budget he will unveil after a series of community meetings around the city. How to allocate a limited amount of money to each of those priorities is where the real difficulty comes in. Take the firefighters, for example. “I have great respect for them, [but] they are just like everybody else when it comes to budget,” Landrieu said.