Some in Salt Lake worry about use of funds

There is at least some mild angst beginning to grow among locals as Salt Lake City officials consider using local tax dollars and resources to help Hurricane Katrina victims.

And that worry may get stronger, especially since many Katrina victims say they are considering making Utah their permanent home.

"This is home now," evacuee Darnell Burrow said at Utah's Camp Williams Tuesday.

Burrows, 46, told the Deseret Morning News she likes what she's seen in her four days in Utah, especially the family-oriented nature of the state.

Others, including Charles Miller, said he'll be looking for work here. Miller, who is a welder, said he has little interest in returning to his former home, the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

A Tulane University official said he expects many evacuees, who are often poor and have few ties to the place they came from, will choose not to return home.

"Katrina had a tremendous impact on the black people who lived here," Lance Hill, director of a diversity training program at Tulane, told the Los Angeles Times. "This city was tough on a lot of them even before the hurricane. A lot of them were already unemployed or had minimum-wage jobs. Many of them were renters. They don't have anything to come back to. A lot of them are just not going to come back."

Those who want to stay in Utah — about half the evacuees Gov. Jon Huntsman talked with during a Tuesday morning tour of Camp Williams — will get help the state can offer to find jobs and housing, Huntsman said. "We'll work with them, as a community," he said.

But not everyone is happy about newcomers coming in and absorbing needed resources.

Salt Lake resident David Nelson was irked when Salt Lake City Housing Authority executive director Rosemary Kappes suggested hurricane evacuees may receive housing assistance ahead of locals.

Those dollars were earmarked for the poor in Salt Lake City and should go to help out Utah's poor, not the impoverished from New Orleans or Mississippi, said Nelson, who is one of 4,000 Utahns waiting for housing assistance. "It's obscene she would even suggest breaking the trust she had with her Utah constituents for the sake of some whipped-up bleeding heart hubris," Nelson wrote to the City Council.

Nelson said he was happy Utah stepped up to accept evacuees and that corporate sponsors have made large contributions. Still, he drew the line at housing assistance.

"To bend the rules and break laws because of some trumped-up 'moral obligation' and place Utah citizens behind non-citizens" is not good public policy, he said.