April 17th, 2019
ACV Members in the Upper 9th Ward Take Action on Streets, Drainage, Flooding & Blight to Bioswales
ACV members in the Upper 9th Ward met with the Mayor’s Office on the corner of Law & Piety streets to show them their struggles with blight and flooding due to torn up street and drainage systems.
Despite numerous calls from residents like 74-year old Gloria Williams, an A Community Voice member who lives in the 3200 block of Law street in a beautiful home and perfectly manicured yard, City Officials are nonresponsive to pleas for help to deal with blight, flooding, unpaved streets and potholes.
“I worked hard to come back from hurricane Katrina,” says ACV member Gloria Williams, “I spent all this money to rebuild and the City doesn’t care about how we are in a jungle with no paved streets and no drainage.”
Mrs. Williams cuts the abandoned lot next door to her home and struggles every day with dump trucks, school buses and city buses speeding down her dusty unpaved, potholed-riddled streets. Chronic flooding occurs due to lack of drainage and buses driving on the sidewalks to avoid huge potholes. The street is littered with abandoned homes. Children have to wait for the school bus next to an opened and un-boarded abandoned house. Residents have respiratory problems due to the white dust from speeding buses on the unpaved streets in front of their homes.
Residents can hardly make it to Pastor Johnny Arvie’s Law Street Missionary Baptist Church on a Sunday morning because of all the potholes and bad drainage leading up to his church at 3132 Law Street. Possums and all types of wild animals come out of the 3300 block of Law Street due to the jungle of overgrown blight. These lots would be prefect for A Community Voice’s Blight to Bioswales Campaign to install raingardens/Bioswales on abandoned lots to reduce flooding and chronic blight.
A Community Voice asked that the Mayor address the residents’ concerns and fix their street, install working drainage systems, cut the vacant lots and allow the installation of Bioswales to reduce flooding in the street, as well as stop the speeding buses and dump trucks from damaging their homes.
ACV next steps on the Blight to Bioswales campaign is to meet with the Mayor and City Attorney about access to blighted lots for the installation of Bioswales/raingardens and to follow on the residents’ concerns from today’s meeting. To report blighted lots in your neighborhood, call us at 504-941-2852.
