The Best and the Worst of the Week
Belle Chasse Primary Schoolstudents in kindergarten through fourth grade recently granted the wishes of five children in the Make-A-Wish program. The school children raised $30,000 by selling paper angels for $1 apiece. In the five years of the Angel Art program, the school's students have raised about $80,000 and granted 15 wishes.
Sammy's Market & Deli
raised $2,000 to benefit Kevin Callen, 20, a store employee and sophomore student at the University of New Orleans who is battling leukemia for a second time since high school. Callen has no health insurance. Shelley McNeil and her sister Ashley Flick, the new owners of the Bucktown deli, hosted a crawfish boil for Kevin, and employees donated a month's worth of tips.
Mayor Ray Nagin
ignored the ratings of a city evaluation panel for a home-monitoring program for offenders sentenced by Municipal Court. The mayor passed over two higher-rated firms -- including a local, African-American-owned company -- to award the contract to Community Based Corrections LLC, whose owners contributed substantially to Nagin's campaign. 'I'll take my hits,' Nagin told WWL-TV last week. He sure will.
Johnny Rombach,
the legislative fiscal officer since 1988, resigned on March 17 after a recent state audit showed he might have violated state law in recent years by giving himself nearly $100,000 in extra compensation, including a retroactive pay raise. Rombach says he did nothing illegal, but admitted breeching the trust of legislative leaders by failing to follow protocol.
