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144 16. IN THE “BIG EASY,” NOTHING COMES EASY, NOT EVEN LEAVING I LEFT NEW ORLEANS AT THE END OF MAy 2009, WITH A GREAT send-off party given by Mayor Nagin and attended by about 150 guests. I received many accolades: for example, the proverbial “key to the city” and the designation of my date of departure as Edward J. Blakely Day. The city council were unanimously generous in their praise of my service. At an event organized by my staff, I read from one of the many letters I’d received from returned residents, thanking me and urging me to “stay and finish the job.” I did the media rounds and radio talk shows. Everyone in the electronic media, and even many in print, seemed grateful that I had stayed as long as I did. I left New Orleans when I could and should have left. The template for recovery was in place. I had recruited a successor along with a total new city organization approach to postrecovery managing. I put in motion the development of a city master plan that incorporated all the recovery goals and locations as well as the vA Hospital land purchases for a multibillion-dollar investment with thousands of new good paying jobs. I signed off on hundreds of projects that when approved would put cranes on the skyline for the next two or three years with more than half of all the streets in the city repaved, many with streetscaping, combined with a host of environmental programs designed to prevent or mitigate storm and flood damages across the city. I had one last duty to perform, unofficially, as recovery czar: I was to accompany Mayor Nagin to China for a two-day visit. He would be going from there to Australia, where he’d been invited by my new academic unit—the The “Big Easy” 145 United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney—to make a presentation on Katrina. The date for the visit was set before I decided to leave the city, but it was propitious for me. Nagin could see me in action on my home turf—in a sense, take me back home. I considered that a good omen. A week after I returned home to Sydney, I boarded a plane for Shanghai. No longer an employee of the city, I was going to China at my own expense and as the mayor’s colleague. One of our senior economic development specialists , Ernest Gethers, traveled with us. I had made contacts earlier in the year, in Dubai, with officials of a Chinese sovereign wealth fund (a government entity to buy assets overseas). They described their particular fund as composed of all the U.S. dollars and foreign currency reserves they held and wanted to invest in real estate and real assets, not in more U.S. bonds and debt. The officials were therefore interested in New Orleans partly, too, to help me out, since I had worked with them for many years on development in China. They expressed strong interest in helping the Methodist Hospital cover the gap between government funding and the total cost of rebuilding the facility. I wanted to see that project through. The mayor had negotiated a good deal to secure the site; I felt responsible to find the money to make sure the plan became a reality. In Shanghai, familiar territory, I took the bullet train into the city. The mayor ’s staff had arranged rooms for the group at a central hotel. I took a room there, too, to be close to his team. I arrived a half day before they did, and set up dinner with an Oakland Chinese American colleague who had strong Shanghai contacts. My Chinese American friends knew the group with the money better than I did, and in a business transaction in that country, it is always best to have at your side someone you know who has a Chinese background . The Chinese Americans had come to New Orleans three or four times. They knew the city’s needs, and they wanted to secure some kind of agreement involving China. They felt that if they could generate Chinese interest in New Orleans, money would be no object. After all, Chinese firms were reaching out across the world to make deals with all their newfound U.S. dollars. My Chinese American friends and I had a quiet meal with several key Shanghai businessmen and -women. I knew...

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