The largest problem faced by the city of New Orleans, and my fellow residents of District 95, is violent crime. Many people address the issue of crime as a monolithic law-enforcement issue, lumping all crimes and criminals together, and offering only more police officers as a solution. This failure to understand the problem hinders efforts to find a workable solution.

What is threatening our community is violent crime. These crimes are committed, almost exclusively, by young men with bad schooling, no skills, limited or no economic opportunities and too much free time, who live in a culture of violence. When they commit crimes, which they do far too easily, they are seldom caught or punished by our dysfunctional justice system.

This system perpetuates violence in our community and negatively affects everything else in the city from our tourism industry to our education system. It is a complex and serious problem that requires complex and serious solutions. Every link in the chain of violence must be addressed via different means.

In the short term, our district attorney and public defender’s offices must be reformed and fully funded to allow justice to be done in our courts. Our current, grossly under-funded and poorly run offices fail to convict violent offenders far too often, and the weakness of public defense undermines the necessary faith in the system as a whole.

The failure of the education system in New Orleans combined with a dire lack of economic diversification are the main suppliers of fuel for the culture of violence that plagues our city. More teachers, who are better paid, teach smaller classes, and in properly maintained schools is the most obvious place to start in dealing with education. Well-educated, motivated, goal oriented students are far less likely to buy into the culture of violence.

We must also devote more resources to after-school programs, the New Orleans Recreation Department, job and skills training, and community activity centers like parks and basketball courts. It is imperative not only to educate our children but also to nurture them in a way that will positively influence the choices they make and their lives, we must keep them off the streets.

Economic growth and diversification require us to do a better job supporting small businesses, especially those struggling to recover from hurricane Katrina, as well as using the natural allure of our great city to lure existing businesses from elsewhere to establish themselves in New Orleans.

Finally, we must take action ourselves to curb violence in New Orleans. Active communities can help reduce crime in their neighborhoods by forming neighborhood watch groups, fixing blighted properties, installing cameras and lighting, cooperating with police, and most of all, restoring the strong social stigma attached to violence that must be dominant in moral societies.

New Orleans is the greatest city in the world, rich in culture, tradition, and diversity. I would never want to live anywhere else. We fuse the cultures of Europe, Africa, and America into a lifestyle that attracts millions of people from around the world every year. We are celebrated in art, music, and movies. Despite the many serious challenges that we New Orleanians have faced, we have always persevered.

Yet our city is faltering. Ever since the zenith of the city’s population and economic power in the postwar years, New Orleans has been losing people, jobs, and importance as steadily as we’ve been losing our coastline. The result of our economic stagnation is increased crime, poorer services, and financial hardship for many.

A large part of our problem lies in the structure of our economy. While tourism remains our largest industry, producing over five billion dollars in 2006, it is a less than ideal basis for an economy. Tourism means a lot of money flowing to a select few at the top, and large amounts of unskilled and poorly paid workers at the bottom. A broken system of education, weak unions, crime, and an excessively taxing and corrupt government all make the situation worse.

Again, like crime, the road to a solution to our economic woes involves many long and short-term actions that require concerted effort. In the short term, the first thing we need to do to reverse these trends is to drastically reform our state and local governments. Corruption is not cute; the old ways of doing business must change. Tougher ethics laws, full financial disclosures of ALL elected officials, and the merging or elimination of redundant offices would be a good place to start. All of these steps have been examined in the legislature this year, and all met with strong resistance. It is my hope that by next year, with a new legislature more interested in good government these reforms will see new light.

After reforming government, we need to give a greater number of New Orleanians the skills they need to get good jobs. In order to do so, I propose that the state expand job and skill training programs for citizens looking to further their education and enhance their career. This will light a path from minimum wage service industry jobs, to careers with better pay, opportunity, and benefits.

We must look beyond tourism to diversify our economy. We can start be redeveloping two industries that we’ve slowly lost in years past. Louisiana was crucial to the growth of the United States in part due to the strategic location of New Orleans on the mouth of the Mississippi. New Orleans had been the nation’s most important port for decades until recently. Now fees and disintegrating infrastructure continue to drive business to Houston and other ports. This is the industry that created New Orleans and continues to sustain us today, it would be negligent to write off such a strategic advantage at a time when we need all the industry we can get.

Another Louisiana industry that New Orleans is not fully capitalizing on is energy. Most of the United States’ domestic oil production happens on the gulf coast, and much of our imported oil is carried through and refined in Louisiana. Yet up and down Poydras street we see only a handful of large companies doing business in New Orleans. Entergy remains our sole Fortune 500 Company headquartered in New Orleans.

New Orleans has benefited greatly from the energy industry, but we have also paid a price. Industrial canals and subsidence have contributed to the loss of our wetlands, while the volatility of the oil industry and lack of revenue sharing has severely impacted the economy of New Orleans over the past century. The new congressional plan to increase Louisiana’s share of offshore oil revenues however, stands to benefit Louisiana greatly in the coming years. Using this money to develop new industries, especially industries poised to prosper in a post-petroleum world, is the single most important thing that government of Louisiana should undertake in the next ten years. If the offshore royalties are simply used for pay raises or squandered on pet projects, New Orleans future is dark indeed. If instead, those billions provide seed money for new industries, New Orleans will rise again in the 21st Century.

Two years ago we were all reminded of just how tenuous our position on God’s green Earth really is. I never left the city during Hurricane Katrina; instead I worked with the National Guard in the Superdome during the storm. That first night I worked triage in the loading dock, where the few available doctors were faced with making the terrible decisions of who needed to be evacuated immediately, who could perhaps wait until after the storm, and who could not be moved at all. I still get angry when I hear people from other states say, “Why didn’t all those people just leave? Were they dumb?” I think of the thousands of people I saw in the Superdome, some undergoing dialysis, some who had just completed open-heart surgery the day before and were still too weak to move, and others who stayed to care for elderly relatives who were too old to travel. Try evacuating any American city in a couple of days, and you are going to find thousands left behind. That is simply the nature of modern urban living.

But here we are, two years later. Many things are better. Many citizens of New Orleans have been galvanized by the storm’s aftermath to new highs of civic involvement. The levee boards are slowing consolidating and being professionalized. The seven redundant assessors are being merged into one, and all citizens are taking our environment, from coastal wetland protection to global warming, more seriously than ever before. Yet despite these facts, our beloved city remains unprepared and in peril. Our levees are not high enough, strong enough, or inspected enough and there needs to be more of them. New Orleans should be compartmentalized like our ships are in the Navy. Too much of the city is below sea level, so if one break is big enough it will flood most of the city. Compartments would minimize future damages. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet should be closed and repaired, as should the thousands of shipping and industrial canals that have scarred our wetlands and allowed massive saltwater intrusion and wetland loss. By now, everyone knows that the dying wetlands are New Orleans best protection against hurricanes and yet we still, year after year, refuse to take serious action to protect them.

Only a massive commitment by state and federal government to restore and protect the Louisiana coast can reverse the damages done in the past century and prepare us for the climate-related dangers ahead. As a state representative I will make the protection of New Orleans my highest priority, since, honestly, even our crime and economic problems won’t matter much if we are underwater. There is an urgency here, which too few of us share, but I promise that it will never be far from the minds of the legislature or the governor if I am in Baton Rouge.