Q: What challenges do you face on your job?
A: You have to react quickly. We have a schedule where we wash sidewalks and clean alleys and wash down benches and clean the transit lanes. Then an RTD bus comes and drops oil all over the transit lane and you have to do it all over again.
Q: What did you do in New Orleans?
A: I was the project manager for the Business Improvement District, but it was a much smaller project than Denver’s. We had a crew of about seven, so I started off small. Here we have 60-plus people in a 120-block area. I work for Service Group International, the same company I worked for in New Orleans.
Q: How does the job your crews do here differ?
A: We did a 13-by-8-block area of the French Quarter. We weren’t responsible for a transit lane and we didn’t do any trash collection, which we do in Denver. All we did was constantly clean and pressure-wash sidewalks. That is a huge need there because there is so much traffic and so much beer drunk and so many people vomiting. It is a big outdoor cocktail party. That is one of the images they would like to shed. It used to be any tourist at any cost, but before the hurricane they were looking to bring in cultural tourists because they figure the people they were attracting to the Big Easy were not big spenders. They would buy a yard of beer and walk up and down the street, end up vomiting and using the sidewalk for a toilet.
Q: You have lived overseas: Can you talk about that?
A: I lived overseas for 25 years, mostly in Third World countries. We planned to go overseas for four years and we put our clothes in storage and I took them out 25 years later. We are not very good planners. My husband is a civil engineer. Our first country was Zaire. (Now the Democratic Republic of Congo.) That was cut short after a year because the war in Angola got too close and we had to be evacuated to South Africa. We were in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. Singapore is pretty much a dictatorship, but I raised my kids there. If I was a Singaporean, I would feel oppressed about the way the law comes down. They take a sledgehammer to kill a fly, but my kids were very safe and you never had to worry about them at night, there is very little crime and no drugs. I think that is a parent’s dream, isn’t it?
Q: Did you lose property to the storm (Hurricane Katrina)?
A: My property had some very slight roof damage from the wind, less than $5,000 worth. The house is about 300 years old. I put it on the market and sold it within nine days.
Q: Did you think about staying there?
A: The hurricane drove me out – I didn’t have a job any more. When the tourism dried up there was no more money to fund the improvement district, which was partly funded by a grant from the hospitality industry. So I went to Mobile, Ala., to do a start-up there for my company. Then I came to Denver to see if Denver liked me and I liked Denver.
Q: Do you miss New Orleans?
A: I don’t really miss it. Something happened to me after watching everything fall apart. I had been a great activist and I had done a lot of public speaking before the City Council and a lot of preservation work in the French Quarter. Some kind of sensitivity chip got removed from my brain and I just didn’t want to be a part of it any more.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Tom McGhee.
