If you are of the belief that Glen Campbell's ode to Galveston spoke to the city like a deeply-missed and deeply-loved woman, that woman is in awful shape right now.
Nearly four months after Hurricane Ike swept through the city, its eye making landfall directly on the island with a force that belied its Category 2 status, Galveston is making progress towards rebuilding but is still a city in shambles. The city's largest employer, the heavily-damaged University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), recently laid off 3,800 employees while other area businesses struggle to rebuild. Tourism, an industry upon which the island relied heavily, is also moving sluggishly despite recent efforts to clean up the flood-ravaged Strand in time for the yearly Dickens on the Strand. Island residents are still awaiting insurance settlements to rebuild their homes, while entire neighborhoods languish and rot.
Two recent articles in Houston's main papers, the Chronicle and the Press, are asking the tough questions and showing the tough truth about Galveston's efforts to rebuild in the face of national apathy and a brutal recession.
The Chronicle discusses how the island is desperate for funds, to the point that they're begging the Texas Legislature for some assistance:
Revenues from property and sales taxes and other sources are dropping so sharply that layoffs of city employees are imminent even after the city slashed spending and cut all its employees' pay by 3 percent, City Manager Steve LeBlanc told the House Select Committee on Hurricane Ike on Wednesday.
He asked that the state refund all or part of the sales tax revenues generated on the island for two years and provide a long-term, low-interest loan from an emergency fund that's now empty.
"I'm getting to the point of being, in a sense, desperate for help," LeBlanc told reporters after his testimony. "It's becoming very difficult to serve our citizens."
At the Press, John Nova Lomax tries to understand why Galveston's plight has been largely ignored on both a state and national level:
While Katrina's destruction of New Orleans monopolized the eyes of the country and the world for weeks in 2005, Galveston had the misfortune to have Ike fall in the TV-watching dead zone of late night on Friday, September 12, three years later, and then to be eclipsed in the news cycle by even larger national and international events almost immediately.
By contrast, Katrina struck New Orleans at eight a.m. on a Monday in a nonelection year, almost as if it were a gift-wrapped page-one story for news-starved organizations the world over.
The neglect even has a bottom line: Wilma, Rita and Katrina together inspired people to give to all hurricane-related charities to the tune of almost $6.5 billion. The four biggest charities have only been able to come up with $19 million for Ike victims. If you are doing the math at home, that comes up to less than one-third of 1 percent. It's a practically infinitesimal amount, even if you divide the $6.5 billion by three to account for the three storms. One example speaks volumes. The Bush-Clinton fund, run by the former presidents of those names, raised $135 million after Katrina. The same fund only managed to scrape together $2.5 million for Ike victims, despite the fact the storm hit the hometown of one of the principals.
Public consensus seems to lean heavily towards the idea that Galveston will have to rely primarily on private industry and investment to get back onto its feet again, as government and charity spending can only go so far. What this means, however, is a future in which we could see gambling legalized on the island -- harkening back to its old days as a hotbed for organized crime (which is where Tilman Fertitta's family made their fortune, after all) -- and an Atlantic City built on the Gulf of Mexico, the lights from tacky casinos along the Seawall mirroring those twinkling from oil rigs out in the sea.
Would it be worth it? We ask you, readers, would you be willing to see a Galveston in which less focus is on the historical and leisurely aspects of the island -- things like the Strand, the Railroad Museum, Ashton Villa, the Elissa, the beaches and the laid-back vibe -- and more focus is on Landry's-style in-your-face tourism and gambling if it meant that the city could rebuild faster and stronger than before?
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Photo courtesy of Flickr user grovesa16.
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