Claim: The mayor of New Orleans turned down an offer for the city to make
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2006]
Ray Nagin does it again Do you remember New Orleans 'Katrina' mayor Ray Nagin? The one that tried to teach According to The New Orleans Times Picayune there were 50,000 vehicles ruined in Katrina and abandoned by their owners. The largest auto crusher east of the Rockies, K&L Auto Crushers of Tyler, Texas offered to pay the City of New Orleans $100.00 per vehicle, 'as is, where is', an estimated Of course, mayor Nagin knew better how to do the job and refused the offer saying the city would do the job themselves. It seems that now it will cost the City Now, lets see if I have this correct. By doing it J&L's way the City of New Orleans would net This is the same mayor that wants The United States taxpayers to give Brit Hume reported this on Fox News. |
Origins: This is one of those tales that sounds like it couldn't possibly be true. And yet it is.
In October 2005, K&L Auto Crushers of Tyler, Texas, approached Mayor Nagin with an offer to pay $100 apiece for each flooded, abandoned vehicle it removed from New Orleans and to have emptied the city of such junkers within
(The company would have taken title to the vehicles, crushed them, and sold them for scrap). Given that there were then an estimated 50,000 such vehicles to be removed, had that plan been agreed to, by January or February of 2006 the city would have been both rid of its wrecked car problem and
The mayor turned down that offer, instead opting to pay an engineering company
Louisiana's first attempt at getting the state's Katrina-damaged junkers hauled to the crusher had it inking a
Orleans. Concerns were repeatedly raised that neither of these companies had the manpower or experience to handle the job and would not be able to complete the work successfully. However, those concerns became moot once the companies proved unable to secure financing for their performance bond and therefore lost the contract.
The statewide contract has since been awarded to DRC, a construction and disaster services firm in Alabama that bid
DRC is currently being sued by the U.S. government over its USAID work in Honduras. The 2004 lawsuit (still being contested in D.C. federal courts) alleges that DRC misrepresented its personal and equipment assets, improperly subcontracted most of the work, and submitted false invoices totaling more than
As to who is footing the bill, in March 2006 FEMA set up a fund to cover
Barbara "this is one waive Louisiana is hoping to catch" Mikkelson
Last updated: 1 July 2006
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