friday, july 16

i am anxiously awaiting the completion of the lafitte greenway, which will open up the center of the city to a sort of "highway" for cyclists.

The city is in the final stages of negotiating a design and construction contract for the greenway with Design Workshop of Austin, Texas, said Bart Everson, a board member of Friends of Lafitte Corridor, a nonprofit group that has been pushing for the greenway since 2006.

Last month, the state approved two pots of money for the project: nearly $400,000 in transportation and trails money and $2.6 million of federal Community Development Block Grant disaster-recovery money awarded through the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
(June 2006)times picayune

http://folc-nola.org/

The city has set aside $7.6 million of CDBG money for planning and developing the park but has not decided who will get the contract, said Ryan Berni, a mayoral spokesman. He said the city hopes to make that decision in a few months.

A previous contract with a design firm under the Ray Nagin administration fell apart when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began to look over all city projects using CDBG money.

While it wasn’t clear whether there were problems with the Lafitte Greenway contract, Nagin terminated it and asked companies to submit new proposals, but he did not award a new contract before leaving office last month.

The Landrieu administration will subject those proposals to new contract rules, Berni said. A panel of Landrieu aides and other city employees will review the proposals and recommend a winner.

Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant will oversee the project.

While the corridor in the most recent past saw railcars rumble through it, it was originally part of the Carondelet Canal, dug in the late 1700s to ship goods to the French Quarter. A turning basin at the end of the canal gave Basin Street its name.