单项选择题

It may not have generated much interest outside energy and investment circles, but a recent comment by Tidewater, Inc. president Dean Taylor sent earthquakes through the New Orleans business community. In June, Taylor told the Houston Chronicle that the international marine services company — the world’s largest operator of ships service the offshore oil industry — was seriously considering moving its headquarters, along with scores of administrative jobs, from the Crescent City to Houston. "We have a lot of sympathy for the city," Taylor said. "But our shareholders won’t pay us to have sympathy. They pay us to have results for them."
It was the last thing the hurricane-scarred city needed to hear. Tidewater was founded here a little more than 50 years ago, and kept its main office in New Orleans throughout the oi1 bust of the 1980s and the following decades of industry consolidation, when dozens of energy firms all but abandoned New Orleans for greener pastures on the Texas coast. In the nearly two years since Hurricane Katringa ravaged the city, the pace of exodus has accelerated, complicating New Orleans’ halting recovery; according to the local business weekly City Business, the metropolitan area has lost 12 of the 23 publicly traded companies headquartered here, taking white-collar jobs, corporate community support and sorely needed taxpayers with them — and threatening to leave the city even more dependent on a tourism-based economy than it was before the storm.
Making matters worse, some observers say, is the city leadership’s apparent indifference to the bloodletting. Just weeks after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin, then in the very early stages of a heated reelection bid, dismissed warnings that many companies, like displaced residents, might opt to relocate. Nagin said he hoped they would stay. "But if they don’t," he said with typical glibness, "I’ll send them a postcard." The comment might have been written off as one of Nagin’s many verbal missteps. But in the months that followed, the warnings turned out in many cases to be true, even as the city’s rebuilding effort languished, infrastructure repairs limped along, the state reimbursement program for damaged homes faltered and the New Orleans’ infamous crime rate made a sickening comeback.
New Orleans "wasn’t considered a great city for doing business before the storm. People were always dribbling out," says Peter Ricchiuti, a professor of economics at Tulane University. While many of the companies that made it through the storm could stand to benefit from the city’s recovery, he says, Katrina may have hastened the loss of high-paying energy jobs. "We’re losing the white-collar jobs and keeping the blue-collar jobs," he says. "We’re becoming much more of a blue-collar oil industry."
One of the latest examples is Chevron Corp., which is building new offices in the northern suburbs, 40 miles north of the city across Lake Pontchartrain, and plans to transfer 550 employees from New Orleans to Covington by the end of the year. That would take well-paid people out of downtown New Orleans, a move that will impact the central business district’s economy. "We made the decision in May, 2006, when our employees were making important housing decisions," says Qi Wilson, a Cheveron spokesperson. The company, like many employees, decided the north shore offered better security should another hurricane strike, along with fewer of the post-Katringa headaches that still plague the city. The move "will make it easier to retain the talent we have, and to attract new talent," Wilson says. According to Peter Ricchiuti, New Orleans