N.O. Council votes ‘no’ to trains being routed through Hollygrove

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

The payday advance terre haute City Council voted unanimously July 23 to oppose any effort to reroute freight train traffic from Old Metairie through four neighborhoods in New Orleans, ratcheting up a decades-long debate over quality of life, private commerce, government regulation and a David versus Goliath battle along racial lines. The resolution was introduced by councilmembers Susan Guidry, Jason Williams and Jared Brossett.

“You were David and you took on Goliath,” said Councilmember Stacy Head, praising the efforts of the Coalition United Against the Middle Belt, comprised of residents from Hollygrove, Mid-City and surrounding areas. “There are not many people who will stand in the way of a moving train,” Williams said. “Our council will not sit quietly and let our neighborhoods get things personal loans bad credit baltimore md that other parishes don’t want. I understand why Old Metairie doesn’t want it, but we don’t either.” Guidry said the project is now “mired in the mud” as the region waits for a new environmental study to be done by transportation experts.

State Rep. Walt Leger III said any plan to bring more rail traffic through Orleans Parish “has no political bounds” in its opposition. He spoke before the council saying stakeholders “will continue to work with our neighbors to find a solution, but moving their problem to our neighborhoods is a cop-out.” Leger is a member of the Southern Rail Commission and said “everyone needs to put on the same jersey” to work with federal officials to ensure no credit check payday loans in grand prairie tx that freight train traffic is not placed on the city’s door step.

Rev. Earl Williams, a leader in the coalition opposing the Middle Belt project, thanked the councilmembers for supporting the resolution and asked all of the coalition members attending the hearing to stand. Several dozen neighborhood advocates stood behind Williams as he made his remarks, including Mid-City Neighborhood Improvement Association president, Graham Bosworth. “Quite frankly, this is an issue where wealthy white people are looking to transfer their problem over to poor Black people.”

Bosworth’s father was once president of the Hollygrove-Dixson neighborhood association, a group now a part of the coalition fighting rerouting trains from the existing route in Old Metairie, known as the Back Belt, to neighborhoods with large numbers of low-income minorities, a track known as the Middle Belt. Bosworth’s view of the project through a racial lens has long dogged the effort to move the rail traffic, a proposal said not to be feasible through government research, until recently, since the 1950s.

More than 30 people came to witness passage of the resolution, many signing cards to speak in favor of the measure. But Rev. Williams spoke on the group’s behalf, expressing gratitude that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the face of New Orleans.”

This article originally published in the July 27, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.