"'New Orleanians expected someone else to do it all along,' Blakely said in an interview with CalTV, the University of California-Berkeley's online television station. 'They never expected to do it themselves.'
Controversial comments are nothing new for Blakely, who in a New York Times interview during his tenure at City Hall called some New Orleanians 'buffoons.' Typically, his statements have been filled with bravado about what he did to engineer the city's recovery. This time, however, he said he never really wanted to oversee the recovery and should have left his post earlier than June.
'I should have left a little earlier, for two reasons: One, my health wasn't good. Secondly, I had other things I wanted to do, and administering a recovery is not one of them.'"
Comments
This man should never have been hired for the job...
Clearly, this man should never been hired for the job. His heart was never in it. Capitalizing on his small-time celebrity as an urban disaster “expert,” Blakely took money badly needed for recovery in New Orleans, all the while collecting his fat academic salary elsewhere, for a job he says he never wanted in the first place. He comes off as an opportunist, nothing more nothing less, now blaming everyone around him for his failure to accomplish anything in New Orleans. He was no better than the people around him whom he variously accused of lazyness, incompetence, and corruption. I guess there's always a risk in hiring high-priced "experts"... Blakely was a $250,000 mistake. Most of the comments on the NoLa website have it right about him.
chrisinsobe