New Orleans Mayor Moves Past Failed Recall Effort, but Unease Persists
To some residents, the challenges seem too complex to blame on the mayor, or feel anything but resignation about the city’s future. P. Town Moe, a local rapper, celebrated the end of the recall effort last month by performing a song called “The Recall Is Ovaaa” live on Instagram — not because he supported Ms. Cantrell, he said, but because removing her would do little to change the course of things.
“It doesn’t matter to me who’s in office,” he said. “Because we always get the same outcome.”
Ms. Cantrell, the first Black woman to be elected mayor of the majority Black city, took charge of New Orleans in 2018 with a reputation for being brusque to those in power but solicitous toward average residents, particularly those who felt their neighborhoods had been neglected. Her popularity soared with her steely response to the pandemic after Mardi Gras in 2020 became an early superspreader event.
But after easily winning re-election in 2021, Ms. Cantrell was besieged by new crises, most notably Hurricane Ida — after which trash pickup collapsed and has yet to fully recover — and a crime rate that continued rising through 2022. The number of murders last year, while falling far short of the peak in the early 1990s, was the highest since Hurricane Katrina. Fears over carjackings, in particular, grew as thieves roved the city. Exasperation mounted with crater-pocked roads and error-ridden, runaway utility bills.
Critics argued that Ms. Cantrell, a Democrat, had become distracted and defensive. They needled her for taking economic development trips to Switzerland, and to the French Riviera at a cost of $43,000 over four days. They criticized her for spending much of her time in a city-owned apartment in the French Quarter typically reserved for official business.
Source: The New York Times
