A recent Brookings Institute report has some pretty positive things to say about New Orleans.

Jarvis Deberry has an interesting op ed in the July 3rd Times Picayune. It seems that despite there being more than a few marginal employees working for the City of New Orleans, only 31 of the 4,315 city employees evaluated in 2010 were found to "need improvement." I'm not kidding, 31! And just one received an "unsatisfactory."   

I'm not a big fan of employee performance evaluations. I think most employer's do a lousy job of the evaluation process. I also think its implausible to believe that a supervisor is going to give a frank evaluation of an employee he/she does not yet want to fire. As long as a supervisor's department or job is dependent on the performance of subordinates, there is an inherent conflict in the evaluation process that plays against fair evaluations. And no, I don't mean unfavorably towards the employee. Only after a supervisor has made a decision to "get rid" of a subordinate can you expect a full accounting of job deficiencies, and sometimes not even then.

New Orleans has the lowest jobless rate (6.5%) of any major metropolitan area in the country, according to an otherwise bleak Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released yesterday. The unemployment rate was higher than it was in February 2009 in 347

of the 372 metropolitan areas, and lower in only 21 areas.