THE New Orleans Saints are marching back to the Superdome, but one year after Hurricane Katrina turned the giant indoor stadium into a squalid refugee camp, not everyone is celebrating the return of the city’s most popular sports team.

After a $185m renovation programme, the arena that became a symbol of the botched relief effort for tens of thousands of people stranded in a flooded city is almost ready for the kick-off of a new American football season. The Saints play their first home game on September 25.

Officials and sports celebrities are promoting the Superdome’s reopening as a signal to the rest of the world that the recovery of New Orleans is well under way — and that one year after Katrina burst the low-lying city’s flood protection levees, normal life is beginning to return.

Yet others claim that the repaired dome with its shining fresh coat of white paint is symbolic of something else — a sinister failure of both local and federal government to spend its money on the poor black families who bore the brunt of the worst natural disaster in American history.

“The money they are spending on a tourist attraction like the Superdome is coming at the expense of African-American neighbourhoods, churches and schools,” claimed Professor Leonard Moore of Louisiana State University. “Most of the black people who live here can’t afford to buy tickets for a Saints game.”

Tuesday’s anniversary of the levee breach is being marked in New Orleans with what Ray Nagin, the city’s black mayor, called “three days of reflection”, including a jazz gala on the Mississippi River.

It is also being marred by bitter exchanges between black and white communities over the slow pace of renovation and allegations that the city, long famous as a racial melting pot, is trying to rid itself of the poor black community that fell foul of the sludge-filled flood.

“For a long time the city’s power structure has been asking itself: how do we deal with the poor black segment of the city?” said Moore, who is black. “I really believe they want to turn it into a pseudo-Las Vegas, where pretty much the whole city is secondary vacation homes, luxury condominiums and town houses, with just enough old neighbourhoods to be able to staff the hotels and restaurants.”

However, Anne Milling, a white banker’s wife who represents a community group called Women of the Storm, describes Moore’s claims as rubbish. “We do not want to destroy the character, soul or spirit of New Orleans. People are so quick to play the race card but it’s absolutely unjustified,” she said.

Even the mayor’s supporters acknowledge that the city has little to show for the past year of fractious and ineffectual clean-up. While military engineers have repaired and strengthened more than 250 miles of the city’s 350-mile levee network, vast tracts of ruined housing continue to disfigure the landscape.

Abandoned cars are littered across the city. Heaps of mouldy rubble have become home to huge colonies of rats. Surveyors estimate that more than 78,000 buildings were rendered unusable after floods of up to 20 feet. The city’s population has fallen from 470,000 before the hurricane to about 200,000 today. While the French Quarter and other tourist attractions emerged relatively unscathed, hotel and restaurant owners have struggled to find staff and customers.

Fewer than a third of the city’s schools are operating, three out of 11 hospitals are open and only half the city’s bus routes are in service. The federal government has offered $110 billion in aid, but staff shortages and bureaucratic hold-ups have delayed construction projects and only $44 billion has been spent so far.

Milling acknowledged that spending had been slowed by a series of factors, including the distraction of a mayoral election earlier this year narrowly won by Nagin. She also blamed a “disastrous” slowdown in fund allocation which meant that “the money hasn’t even begun to get into the hands of people who need it so badly”.

She said there was no plot to turn New Orleans into a middle-class paradise free of a poor black underclass. “It may be a smaller city, yes,” she said. “But that’s not because anybody is saying okay, we have to lock that component out, or we’re only going to allow people with incomes over X dollars to return. People are not dictating that.”

Moore and other blacks see it differently. “I think you’re looking at basically a town that will be a playground for the rich for the next 40 years,” he said.

Nagin acknowledged that he is wary of property developers with grand designs on ruined black areas: “What I do have a problem with is some entrenched interests that are looking and salivating over certain sections of the city.”

At the Superdome last week there was no trace of the 30,000 refugees who swamped the arena as Katrina tore holes in the roof and flooded the streets outside. Doug Thornton, a spokesman for the company that manages the stadium, admitted that the old Superdome had been “a poster child for misery and suffering”.

He added, however, that the money for rebuilding it had been well spent: “If they see the dome being rebuilt, they’re going to have confidence that the city is coming back. That my neighbourhood, my home, can be rebuilt.”

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