Date Published:
October 1, 2005
*Editor's note: exact date published is unknown*
The
People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition (PHRF/OC) is a
broad coalition of Survivors of Katrina and Rita and supporters around
the country. PHRF is working to ensure that the people most affected –
poor Black communities who were disenfranchised long before the storms
– have a voice in reconstruction; and that those responsible are held
accountable for the destruction of homes, communities and lives.
This
platform comes from the demands articulated by Survivors at three
national gatherings since September 2005, and by coalition groups
working for Reconstruction with Justice in New Orleans.
Reopen & recreate housing in New Orleans
- Reopen public housing & Section 8 lists
- Direct HANO to reopen public housing immediately to residents
- Hire and train public housing residents to repair damaged HANO developments
- Refute
the idea that New Orleans can “fight crime” by denying Right of Return
to public housing residents; instead, set up human development programs
in marginalized communities
- Ask
HUD to reopen the Section 8 waiting list in New Orleans and offer
subsidies to waiting-listers for permanent housing available
immediately in other cities
- Get real on trailers & temporary housing
- Direct recovery $$$ and support to community-based initiatives for temporary housing
- Demand that FEMA end bureaucratic delays in providing trailers
- Restore access to housing & community for renters and homeowners
- Enact rent control and direct recovery $$$ to make sure rental units get rehabbed
- Use city leverage to press deadbeat insurance companies to release funds to homeowners
- Support and foster community organizations who can take on adjudicated parcels for community-determined uses
Reunite New Orleans families
- Demand accessibility of FEMA, Red Cross and other databases so families can find each other
- Call
for amnesty for all people arrested for survival activities during the
storm; press the New Orleans D.A. to immediately release those arrested
for looting and those whose cases have been affected by the storm,
including the 3500 people (85% non-violent offenders) being held past
their release date due to collapse of the court system and loss of
evidence
- Demand re-opening of public schools so that parents with school-age children can come home
- Provide intensive homecoming assistance to seniors, people with disabilities and caregivers
- Provide free buses between New Orleans and evacuation hub cities (Baker, Houston, Atlanta, etc.)
- Reject
the plan to exclude unemployed low-income from the Right of Return.
(Reject the requirement that low-income people have jobs in order to be
allowed home).
Justice and safety for Katrina survivors
- Convene a tribunal on corruption and human rights abuses before the storm and during the storm/flood
- Convene a commission to address issues of racial inequity in New Orleans and the State of Louisiana
- Establish
an office of the Independent Monitor with broad investigative authority
that reviews NOPD policies, procedures, complaint patterns, and quality
of complaint investigations; and makes regular reports to the
Superintendent, elected officials, and the public
- Acknowledge and address of police violence and corruption in New Orleans
- Press
Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman to release the names and records – which
he now holds illegally – of individuals incarcerated in Orleans Parish
Prison (OPP) at the time of Hurricane Katrina; support community-led
efforts to identify those who may have died and those who remain
missing following the abandonment of prisoners in OPP
- Conduct
an investigation into current conditions inside OPP and support
community-led demands for human and civil rights in the criminal system
- Conduct
a nationwide search with citizen input for a Superintendent of the New
Orleans Police Department who will clean out corruption and reform the
NOPD
- Re-convene a
Police-Civilian Review Task Force that, in partnership with national
consultants and the NOPD, will create a 5 Year Plan for Recovery and
Reform
Community-based democratic process for all reconstruction decisions
- Acknowledge
the injustice of these elections; demand satellite voting for all
elections affecting New Orleans voters until voters return or are
permanently resettled
- Adopt,
and provide support for, minimum standards for democratic participation
in neighborhood planning, including verifiable inclusion of displaced
residents and renters
- Provide
clear information on criteria for plans, as well as resources available
to carry out plans such as funds, land, underutilized buildings, zoning
flexibility, etc.
- Eliminate the June 30th deadline for the completion of neighborhood plans
- Assign a professional planner, skilled in an equity planning approach, to each neighborhood
- Establish a consultancy for each neighborhood with the American Planning Association’s Planning in the Black Community division and Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility
- Categorically
exclude acquisition and/or development of land by developers until
democratic processes are in place for community land use decisions
- Eliminate the August 29th
“fix-or-bulldoze” deadline for damaged buildings, provide meaningful
communication and funding for displaced people to return and repair
homes, and withhold “blight” rulings until communities and the city
have meaningfully engaged with displaced homeowners
- Require
that any community plan presented to the city include an evacuation
plan that is plausible for that community’s residents, and incorporate
local plans in city-wide evacuation plans
Promote and expand quality public health care
- Demand and pursue fully-funded health coverage for all hurricane survivors from the federal government
- Pending
the provision of the above coverage, demand that the state expand
Medicaid eligibility to include all Survivors who cannot secure private
insurance
- Actively support
the demand that LSU Medical re-open Charity Hospital and that the state
legislature reclaim oversight of Charity’s budget
- Support
legislation and budgeting to create community-controlled,
publicly-funded primary health care facilities, without substituting
local clinics for the advanced care capacity of Charity hospital
- Actively
support funding and esteem for Charity as an integral part of the
health care delivery system in NO, and support its continued central
role in provider education and trauma care
- Demand
that FEMA extend the time period for grants to medical and mental
health providers serving Survivors, and ensure that these grants are
marketed to Black providers
Restore public education
- Support
and pursue the following demands from the State until the public and
charter school system devolves to City administration:
- Grant immediate access to all public schools facilities
- Provide structurally sound and ecologically safe buildings conducive to learning
- Supply equal funding for all public schools; upgrade infrastructure and IT systems
- Increase funding to programs that provide skills training
- Provide on-the-job training programs to complement school-based skills training programs
- Incorporate community service and physical education programs for students.
- Use
schools to affirm the cultural life of the city of New Orleans; commit
to teaching music, visual arts, dance, crafts and local art forms, and
include Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs in curricula
- Develop
and support a capacity-building collaboration between low-performing
schools and colleges and universities within Orleans Parish
- Develop and support a tutorial program utilizing the skills of retired persons
Promote human and community-based economic development
- Enact
policy measures requiring immediate restoration of all public utilities
to all neighborhoods of New Orleans; enact penalties for utility
providers who fail to comply
- Support strengthened state legislation against disaster price-gouging
- Enact policy requiring proportional distribution of city contracts to black/minority vendors
- Direct
city-controlled federal recovery dollars equitably to community
organizations and small businesses in low-income and Black
neighborhoods, and neighborhoods whose residents face disproportionate
difficulties in returning. Direct funds to neighborhoods that need to
restore local services in order for residents to return, rather than
favoring only neighborhoods whose populations have already
reestablished themselves.
- Substantively
challenge poverty by developing asset-building programs and legislating
support for community initiatives including: IDAs for adults and youth;
financial literacy programs; community land trusts; cooperatives and
employee ownership; micro-lending, micro-enterprise, and
cottage-industry development; business improvement districts;
residential commercial corridors; community-based research and
development to increase access to high-growth sectors
- Work
with the City Council to shrink the city’s budget for incarcerating
youth, low-income people and people of color, and redirect funds to
human development programs
Facilitate connections between community-based economic development and global competitiveness
- Use
profitability from Global Enterprises, i.e. Port of New Orleans for
community-based development through resource (human and financial)
linkages
- Support local enterprises to enable growth and entry into the global market place
- Place
a cap on foreign investment to ensure the wealth of the community is
not exported, and reject the historical practices of “free enterprise
zones,” “empowerment zones” and “opportunity zones” that provide tax
incentives, concessions and subsidies to large corporations
Support New Orleans’ indigenous & community artists & culture
- Pay a living wage to each local artist employed at city events, including ensemble members like Mardi Gras Indians
- Respect Mardi Gras Indians and Social & Pleasure Clubs as an art form, and end police harassment
- When
marketing art for tourist dollars, pay & identify artists when
using images of their art; require photographers who sell images to
city publications to pay & identify subjects.
- Support
cultural education in schools and community centers, including
instruction in local forms of music, dance, visual art,
pottery/ceramics, sculpture etc.
- Establish
local cultural centers throughout the city, with programming
corresponding to interests & experiences of neighborhood residents,
possibly modeled on the Houses of Culture supported by municipal
governments in France
- Commit
to using the stories & experiences of children in schools, their
families and neighbors as the basis for curricula, enabling children to
see connections between their education and their lives in the community
- Support
local arts & culture as a critical part of developing understanding
of our own history, rather than simply as an engine for tourism
Support the rights of all workers and Survivors’ right to reconstruction jobs
- Establish a program to guarantee full employment at a living wage to all returnees
- Establish a one-stop training/placement center for career counseling, job referrals & skills training
- Restore
collective bargaining power for pre-Katrina unions of city and
municipal employees, including Orleans Parish teachers
- Demand
that companies doing business with the City of New Orleans restore fair
contracts with their workers; specifically, Waste Management and RTA
- Support the right to organize and collective bargaining of the returning workforce
- Establish
hiring preferences for hurricane survivors as they return home, along
with anti-discrimination protections for workers who have responded to
the call for reconstruction labor
- Support
model day-laborer legislation, based on the guidelines of the National
Employment Law Project, that protects the right of laborers to solicit
work, ensures that contractors meet minimum safety standards and
enforces the rights of laborers to fair treatment and pay
- End police harassment of reconstruction workers on New Orleans streets
- End city support for ICE raids on workplaces and living spaces of reconstruction laborers
- Support
safety for laborers and all New Orleanians by ending practices that
stop undocumented immigrants from calling on emergency and security
services; this includes ending collaborations between police and ICE,
and making explicit any relationship between the two agencies
- Ensure
that all city agencies – including police, courts, jails and other
institutions – provide translation for Spanish-speakers,
Vietnamese-speakers and others; and that police on the street have
access to translation in interactions with non-English-speaking New
Orleans residents
- Support a statewide increase in minimum wage to at least $1 above the federal minimum wage
- Support
stronger industry standards of wages, benefits and workers’ right to
organize in workplaces that get tax breaks, zoning waivers or special
consideration (eg. Downtown Development District)
Uphold and advance environmental justice
- Reject predatory “green-washing” of neighborhoods into parks and green space
- Reinstate
the closure of the over-capacity Gentilly landfill, which was reopened
to waste and toxin-infused materials in the absence of community
members and without their consent
- Prohibit
the location of landfills near New Orleans neighborhoods; instead,
reduce hurricane debris through recycling and use existing permitted
landfills for non-recyclable hurricane waste
- Provide
means for residents to remove debris quickly, safely, and efficiently,
including access to free safety equipment, debris containers and timely
waste removal
- Demand that
EPA and DEQ remove or remediate sediment on streets, sidewalks, and
yards in neighborhoods inundated with toxic floodwaters
- Support
and sponsor community-led projects to clean up contaminated sediment,
e.g., Safe Way Back Home project by the Deep South Center for
Environmental Justice and US Steelworkers Union that involves soil
removal and replacement with clean soil and sod cover, and the
bioremediation efforts by Common Ground Collective that involve
neighborhood plantings of arsenic-absorbing sunflowers and
sludge-eating organisms.
- Develop and support a recycling program for automobiles, glass, and metals
- Create
incentives to reduce use of fossil fuels and increase use of renewable
energy to mitigate the impacts of climate change, which includes
warming waters that intensify hurricanes
- Advocate closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and federal funding to restore coastal wetlands
- Support community-led efforts to clean up toxic sites and reuse them for area improvements
- Establish
public education programs to raise awareness of the need for
individuals and households to take post-Katrina environmental safety
precautions; and of the importance of protecting against future
pollution and erosion
Safeguard the levees and waterway system
- Demand
the Army Corps of Engineers build Category 5 levees immediately,
starting with the areas most vulnerable to disaster – those whose
populations are poorest, least able to afford insurance and most
debilitated by the loss of homes and land – and those whose populations
have most been forced by economic inequality, the failure of support
from government and profiteering of insurance companies to use their
own labor and funds to rebuild
- Demand the closure of MRGO and the restoration of natural protective wetlands
- Sue
the owner of the barge that destroyed portions of the Lower Ninth Ward
levee and many Lower Ninth Ward homes for illegally and recklessly
docking in the Industrial Canal