Uptown Messenger (https://uptownmessenger.com/tag/kara-morgan/page/2/)
“She touched so many people,” Irish Channel resident Keirsten Williams said. “Here is a young woman grieving the loss of her child. This is like two weeks later, and the headlines are still about the out of towners. What about this local family that’s suffering?”
Central Carrollton Association 2011 Officer and Board:
Officers:
President – Barbara Johnson
Vice President Administration – Phyllis Jordan
Vice President Operations – Joe Tucker
Secretary – Robert Demarais Sullivan
Treasurer – Mark Vail
Board:
Michelle Sartor
Paul Baricos
Dorothy Jones
John Pecoul
Larry Lorenz
Mike Ainsworth
Kurt Buchert
John Schackai
Nahum Laventhal
John DeFraites
Barry Kohl
Uptown community leaders expressed guarded enthusiasm for the city’s nascent campaign against blight after a third public progress meeting Thursday morning, even though the effort’s effect on specific neighborhoods has yet to be described in detail. The city’s “BlightStat” meetings gather agency heads from across the city around the table to discuss benchmarks in the greater goal of eliminating 10,000 blighted properties from New Orleans in three years. Though the twice-monthly gatherings largely have the character of internal policy-shaping meetings, the Landrieu administration has opened them to the public, and neighborhood activists by the dozen have attended the first three meetings. “It’s really nice to have access to the numbers, access to all the people in one room and to be able to ask questions,” said Eva Sohl of the Freret Neighborhood Center. Thursday’s meeting, the third, still showed little in the way of concrete progress.
The Irish Channel Neighborhood Association is continuing its efforts to clean up properties owned by a troubled nonprofit by taking members’ concerns about crime and neglect to the mayor’s office. In July, a home in the 2300 block of Laurel Street owned by Galilee Housing Initiative was the target of a drive-by shooting, the second such incident there, said Irish Channel board member Adolph Lopez at the association’s monthly meeting Thursday night. The neighborhood then compiled a record of all the police calls associated with the address over the past 17 months and compiled it into a letter, and sent it to City Councilwoman Stacy Head for review, Lopez said. Head then read the letter into the record during the city’s budget hearing on blight issues, said board member Ed McGinnis. The next step, he said, should be either an audit of Galilee by the city or an investigation into criminal activity at the property by the district attorney’s office with an eye toward seizing it, McGinnis said.
