City and Port of New Orleans make it official
By Sean Cummings on Nov 10 2006 at 11:00 AM
On Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 3 p.m., history will be made when the Cooperative Endeavor Agreement (CEA) between the City of New Orleans and The Port of New Orleans is signed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Gary LaGrange, president and CEO of the Port of New Orleans. The event will be held at the Esplanade Avenue Wharf on the riverfront.
Under the agreement, four key maritime sites in the downtown area will continue to be used exclusively by the Port for maritime affairs. The remaining four miles stretch of riverfront, which spans from Jackson Avenue to the Industrial Canal, will be redeveloped for non-maritime use by the City through the New Orleans Building Corporation (NOBC).
“The two overarching goals are to return the riverfront to the people so there is a tremendous amount of public access to this waterfront,“comments Sean Cummings, executive director of NOBC. Cummings adds, “We want to create one of the best riverfronts in the world so that it will be a separate tourist destination – another compelling reason to visit New Orleans.”
LaGrange said that the City and the Port started negotiating in order to put several emerging projects along the riverfront into a broader context. “If you think of the Riverfront as a neighborhood and each of these development projects as a house, we had an opportunity to not only renovate a few homes, but to rebuild the entire neighborhood and to connect it in a pedestrian friendly vein.”
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