National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner David Stern has applauded the warm welcome given to the transplanted team and said Oklahoma City would be the clear favourite location if the Hornets were to relocate on a more permanent basis.

It is obviously a delicate subject, but Oklahoma City, of all places, can sympathise with the grief and devastation that New Orleans is experiencing. This spring marked 10 years since the city went through its own hell, though at the hands of man rather than nature.

“We are highly sensitive to the feelings of the people of New Orleans,” Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett stresses. “A lot of businesses are unfortunately having to relocate from there; the NBA team just happens to be the highest profile.”

Oklahoma City has coveted an NBA franchise for a long time but, given the circumstances, the arrival of the Hornets is not so much a cause for celebration as perhaps validation of the city’s decade-long effort to join the big leagues.

Founded in 1889 when the firing of a pistol launched a race for potential settlers to put their stakes into the ground, Oklahoma City became an oil town when the black stuff was discovered there in the late 1920s. Worn out from riding the boom-and-bust cycle common to energy-dependent economies, city officials made stabs at diversification in the 1980s, with limited success. The years immediately following the city’s centenary were bleak ones.

And then, on April 19, 1995, at 9:02am, the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was blown to pieces by a truck bomb, killing 168 people. It constituted the largest domestic terrorist attack in the history of the US and, until September 11, 2001, was the country’s largest terrorist attack of any kind.

Oklahoma City had officially reached rock bottom. “When the bombing hit we were as low as we could be,” recounts Mr Cornett.

The blast left a deep and lasting scar on the city’s psyche. “Terrorism is a different sort of psychological hit than a natural disaster,” the mayor says. But eventual recovery from the disaster also brought self-confidence, something the city had long since lost, and in the following decade the city has changed in ways unrelated to the bombing, mostly for the better.

The Hornets are not the only organisation to find a happy home in the revived Oklahoma City. Though energy remains the city’s dominant industry, the underserved technology sector received a big boost recently from Dell Computers, which set up shop there after considering more than 100 other locations.

Might Oklahoma City’s recovery story provide some hope or solace to the hurricane-ravaged regions along the Gulf of Mexico?

“We’re a faith-based community that works hard and dreams big,” Mr Cornett says. “I suppose [Oklahoma City’s recovery] could offer a blueprint for Gulf Coast communities.”

GULF STATES’ AID WISH LIST:

In many ways, development officials in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are working off the same wish list as they approach Congress and state governments for aid and other rebuilding assistance. According to Tommy J Kurtz, senior vice-president of Greater New Orleans, Inc, the state of Louisiana is working for the following mix of state and federal incentives:

• Broad-based incentives, such as employment credits;
• Incentives targeted at specific sectors, such as biomedical research;
• An investment tax credit of 5% of all new oil and gas investment, including capitalised labour;
• An increase in the state new market tax credits from 11% to 32% in disaster zones;
• An increase in state historical tax credits from $5m to $10m and in the qualified rehabilitation expenses from 25% to 33%;
• A state residential development credit in disaster zones;
• A provision that would prevent the state tax code from penalising businesses and individuals that receive federal tax incentives, because it is unclear which disaster recovery tax incentives the federal government will offer. Without this provision, the federal credits and deduction might increase the amount of state taxes owed because Louisiana ‘piggybacks’ its state income tax with the federal income tax;
• An immediate 100% exclusion for manufacturing machinery and equipment purchased to replace equipment damaged in the hurricane, or for new investment in the hurricane disaster areas.

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