New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin accused the federal government of imposing a cumbersome application process on the state that has slowed the disbursement of money to Hurricane Katrina victims.

He suggested that race was a factor in the treatment of the city and that the news media had begun to forget about New Orleans.

“If that would have happened in Orange County (Calif.), if that would have happened in southeast Miami, there would be a different response,” Nagin said.

“If I were to tell you that in trying to get grants to come back to the city of New Orleans, a citizen has to go through a process where they treat you like a criminal -- they fingerprint you and question you -- would that be worthy of coverage?” Nagin told a forum at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Indianapolis on Friday.

Nagin said the bureaucratic tangle that residents face in applying for money to return and rebuild their homes or relocate elsewhere in the city or state is frustrating for them and devastating for the city.

"It’s a city that’s being strangled,” Nagin said.

Nagin and a panel of journalists, most from New Orleans, who covered the hurricane and its aftermath, discussed the difficulties in covering the disaster and continued coverage of the aftermath.

The mayor was, at turns, forthright, testy and somewhat evasive as he addressed the city’s problems.

He snapped at moderator Michelle Norris of NPR when she pressed him for details on what Nagin believed his biggest mistakes were in the days leading up to and in the immediate wake of the flooding.

He said that he wondered, in hindsight, whether he should have ordered the evacuation of the city earlier and relocated buses outside of the city so that it would have been easier to bring them into the city to evacuate residents.

Still, Nagin laid most of the blame at the feet of the state of Louisiana and the federal government. He said money promised to the city has come slowly and that a significant portion has gone to contractors.

“I’m left trying to manage the city on 25 percent of its pre-Katrina budget,” Nagin said. “Little of the $100 billion (promised by the federal government) has come to the local governments. Some of that has to do with no-bid contracts.”

He also said that the city’s population was “250,000 fewer than its 460,000” population before the storm.

“No one is writing about it. No one is covering it.”

Nagin seemed to overlook the bureaus NPR and NBC have maintained in the city, the ongoing “Keeping Them Honest” segment on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” the work of the Associated Press and continual coverage by major newspapers and Web sites and the city's hometown paper, The Times-Picayune.

Warren A. Bell, Jr., a native New Orleanean and associate vice president for university and media relations at Xavier University, told BlackAmericaWeb.com after the forum that he found Nagin’s remarks disingenuous.

Bell rejected the mayor’s contention that more of the blame lay at the feet of the state and the feds. He said he was offended what he described as Nagin's arrogance and smugness.

"Worst of all, for me," Bell said, "he’s glib, but he’s not smart.”

During the forum, Nagin rejected any notion that he or anyone else in New Orleans was ineffective or incompetent.

“People are suffering to this day. Our government still has not stepped up and respected them the way they should be,” Nagin said. “Don’t be hoodwinked. Don’t be bamboozled into thinking that officials in New Orleans can’t get the job done.”

Nagin said it would take five to seven years for New Orleans “to get to a point that people would consider normal.”

He said he expected “by year’s end, we should have the housing situation fixed,” although he acknowledged that it might take longer for the Lower Ninth Ward, which “is basically where a lot of the contention is.”

“It probably will be the last to recover because it was the most devastated and (electricity and water service) haven’t been restored.”

He said “the powers that be” wanted to change the “handprint” of the community and that he had resisted that.

“The Ninth will come back. It is coming back,” Nagin said, but added that the type of housing that will be built there will more likely be multi-story homes rather than one-story houses on slab foundations. The mayor also said that the area on the highest ground would be restored first, and that the areas closest to Lake Pontchartrain “won’t be settled until all this (relocation) money is given out.”

Despite his criticism of the problems with getting rebuilding funds and the red tape with which residents have to contend, Nagin said, “I think the money is in a position to help us,” citing $1.2 billion in funding approved in December and an additional $4.2 billion two months ago.

Asked what he would say to President Bush when he comes to New Orleans for the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina next week, Nagin said, “I’ll encourage him to keep pushing for us so that the money doesn’t keep getting hung up.”

NPR’s Norris opened the session with a moment of silence for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. She then asked journalists in the audience who had covered and were continuing to cover the hurricane and its aftermath to stand and be applauded. At the close, she asked journalists in the audience who had suffered losses in the devastation to stand.

Many in the crowd stood and applauded as one woman in the audience held up a t-shirt that read: “New Orleans -- Proud To Call It Home.”