John Warner Smith
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ROWELL: How much, in pre-Katrina days, did the state of Louisiana depend upon the economy of the city of New Orleans? How much did New Orleans depend upon the economy of the state? My asking these questions assumes that each economy depended upon the other. Did they?
SMITH: Absolutely. Before Katrina we had a civilian labor force of roughly two million workers. About six hundred thousand of those jobs were in the New Orleans metropolitan statistical area. Nearly a third of the state's labor force was basically in that region. Of that six hundred thousand or so jobs, nearly half were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. The jobs that were lost were in sectors that were the engine of New Orleans. When you knock out the tourism business, you cripple New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. For example, just the other day hotels in New Orleans had a ninety percent occupancy rate, but the occupants were different than they were before Katrina. They aren't tourists. They are mostly evacuees, construction workers, and other folks working on the recovery. These are not the people who come as tourists who eat, drink, sleep, and spend millions of dollars in New Orleans every year. There is a saying that, "So goes New Orleans, so goes the state of Louisiana."
In the rebuilding process, we have held job fairs all over the state of Louisiana. We held a couple of job fairs in New Orleans for the Louisiana Restaurant Association. The restaurants were trying to come back. They were trying to open the doors, even though they had limited menus and limited food service, but they struggled to find workers. Our agency partnered with the State Department of Transportation and started a free bus service from Baton Rouge to New Orleans for anyone who wanted to get on it and look for work, go to work, or just go to New Orleans to inspect their property. Fortunately, we were able to link some workers with job opportunities. We've been doing this for a couple of months now. The ridership is probably about six hundred or so a day—not a big number, but for those three hundred to get on, come back, and be able to hold a job, it's certainly helpful.
Don't forget that we were also hit in southwestern Louisiana by Hurricane Rita a month after Katrina. I am talking about Lake Charles, the Cameron Parish area, and, to some extent, Jefferson Davis Parish and Beauregard Parish. Those parishes were very dependent on the petrochemical industry and there were some job losses there. Much of that area has recovered, but the lower part of the region, Cameron Parish in particular, is probably similar in devastation to St. Bernard Parish in the southeast. Cameron Parish is going to [End Page 1390] be a long time recovering. The economy there was heavily dependent upon the fisheries and seafood processing industry. There are still some challenges in the service sector in general, with businesses struggling to find workers. Many of those workers went to Texas. Many of them ended up in Houston and Dallas, and are still there because they can't find housing in their home parishes. So, the impact of the storm is still being felt in that corner of the state, even though the petrochemical industry has bounced back somewhat.
ROWELL: What can the federal government do at this time to assist the state of Louisiana?
SMITH: We are receiving federal funds for workforce training. The U.S. Department of Labor has given us sixty-two million dollars of National Emergency Grant funds. This grant will initially provide temporary job assistance to evacuees, and then provide more comprehensive training that will move trainees into permanent jobs. Federal community development block grant funding might be available at some point. The federal government has...
