In 2017, Kristin Palmer was elected to the New Orleans City Council from District C, which includes Algiers, the French Quarter, Marigny, Treme, St. Roch, and Bywater. This was one year after the Nice Terrorist Truck event that killed eighty-four. In 2017, $40 million in funds were available to provide extra security for the French Quarter.

Part of that funding was to be spent on bollards capable of blocking vehicles from traveling on Bourbon Street during peak times like New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras.

As we know, those bollards in Palmer’s district never properly worked and they were being replaced at the time of the Bourbon Street massacre by a jihadist named Shamsun-din Jabbar.

During her time on the council, Palmer chaired the Transportation and Government Affairs Committee. There was a relatively large stir at the time around moving the terminal to the north side of the airport. This involved pouring cement (much of it by Landrieu Concrete, a coincidence which fooled absolutely no one) over 32-acres of wetlands. As a likely result, hundreds of homes flooded in Kenner in 2024, airfares have gone up dramatically, and hundreds of millions were spent to build a new flyover, with hundreds of millions more needed to connect the new terminal to Amtrak on the south side of the airport, where employees still have to park.

People love that new airport, it’s true, but the management of the property and ingress and egress to and from it are not exactly a gold standard for city planning.

Palmer’s legacy is creating the Street Renaming Commission to rename Tivoli Circle instead of making it a Blue Star Memorial Park near the World War II Museum as the Italian Federation suggested. Removing Place du Tivoli Park was another mistreatment to the Italian community, however it was in line with Palmer’s DEI agenda.

Her agenda included removing the Washington Artillery Cannon erected by Moon Landrieu and moving inside the statue of US Supreme Court Chief Justice E D White who led the court when it overturned the “Grandfather Clause” that eliminated many blacks from voting.

Her last meeting was January 6^th, 2022, in which she passed a motion to waive parking requirements in West End Lakeshore Park if affordable housing was part of the development.

And of course there was Palmer’s crusade to eliminate plastic straws because of the clogging of French Quarter drains she said the straws caused – when in fact, the City had simply failed to regularly clean those drains despite there having been money annually appropriated for that very purpose.

One can imagine if during her term on the Council, if she had focused on protecting French Quarter Streets with the intensity that she displayed in renaming Tivoli Circle and other New Orleans Streets, how much safer we would be.