In a move to promote the redevelopment of storm-ravaged City Park, a New Orleans City Council committee agreed Thursday to a plan under which the city will let the park have as much as $3 million in sales tax revenue that otherwise would go to the city.

The plan for a City Park tax increment financing district was endorsed by the Budget Committee and is almost certain to win passage by the full council next week.

Signs of renewal are everywhere at City Park.

Work crews are putting finishing touches on a remodeled concession stand inside the shuttered Casino building. Heavy equipment is rumbling across battered fairways of the north golf course, preparing for a late-spring reopening. New bleachers are going up at Pan American Stadium.

Visitors soon will see more: a new -- and far bigger -- Ferris wheel at the amusement park, a rebuilt tennis complex, sidewalk repairs, new landscaping near the New Orleans Museum of Art and a massive replanting of Couturie Forest.

By mid-2009, access to the park also should improve as road repairs proceed along Marconi Drive, Wisner Boulevard and Harrison Avenue.

Two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina flooding left City Park a tattered wasteland, New Orleans' high-profile swath of green space is experiencing a revival. The flurry of building and repair projects is unlike anything the 1,300-acre park has seen since a massive work force dug lagoons and built bridges and buildings during the Depression, turning City Park into a regional attraction.

Strolling down to a lagoon, across an overgrown former South Course golf fairway, Julia Bland said the serene City Park setting, complete with moss-draped oaks, a stout 1939 Works Progress Administration bridge and boys kicking soccer balls, seemed a perfect backdrop for teaching children and parents in fun ways.

It could become the setting for an elaborate new complex for the Louisiana Children's Museum, which has flourished in the Warehouse District since 1986.

A 12-acre City Park site, which may include building construction over lagoon waters, would be easy for families from Mid-City, Gentilly and Lakeview to reach. And museum officials aim to attract families regionally with an array of ramped-up programs to educate parents and teachers about childhood development, Bland said.

City Park's board on Tuesday endorsed -- with restrictions -- the idea of redeveloping flood-ravaged golf courses with the help of the nonprofit Bayou District Foundation, and a Louisiana Children's Museum proposal to build a new "early learning village" museum complex on the Roosevelt Mall.

But the board rejected a request by Louisiana Public Broadcasting and the WLAE public television station to build a studio in the park near Tad Gormley Stadium, saying the studio wouldn't be the sort of cultural facility typically seen in a park setting.

After two months of speculation and public discussion on three proposed amendments to the City Park master plan, the park’s board met this evening and made their decision: the television studio is out, a children’s museum is okay with certain restrictions and there’s no need to decide yet who will manage the golf courses.

In its bid to create an ambitious mixed-use development at the site of the St. Bernard public housing complex the Bayou District Foundation, a nonprofit with financial ties to restored City Park golf courses, might be accused of post-Katrina fantasizing.

Golf and public housing may seem like odd bedfellows. But the plan uses as its model Atlanta's East Lake housing and golf development that replaced a notorious Atlanta public housing complex with what by all accounts has become a thriving mixed-income neighborhood. That unique project taps the golf revenue to finance education and recreation programs for families in subsidized housing.

ATLANTA --The skyscraper magnate faced a political gantlet, a seemingly impossible sales job sure to raise suspicions of a rich developer profiting at the expense of the poor.

His team faced dozens of potentially explosive appearances before wary public housing residents. They needed support for tearing down Atlanta's East Lake Meadows public housing complex to make way for a mixed-income development -- one linked to, of all things, a restored golf course next door. Not just any course: a private, rich man's golf course, a potent symbol of a realm foreign to the East Lake residents.

An attentive crowd of more than 200 people applauded warmly Tuesday night after each of three presentations on proposals to develop a children's museum, a television studio and a state-of-the-art golf complex on the grounds of New Orleans' City Park.

But when it came time for those in attendance to comment on the proposals, words of support were few and far between.

"There's no shortage of empty real estate out there," said David Muth, referring to the vast swaths of property in the city left vacant by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. "We don't need to turn this park into a highly developed, money-making operation."

Proponents of separate proposals to bring a new and expanded Louisiana Children's Museum and a studio housing Louisiana Public Broadcasting production facilities to New Orleans' City Park will go public today with their first detailed descriptions of the ambitious plans.

Also on the City Park Improvement Association agenda is an update by the Fore!Kids Foundation, which wants to replace the park's storm-battered golf courses with a state-of-the-art complex suitable to host PGA Tour events.

The three projects -- all works in progress lacking definitive price tags -- could become part of a restoration blueprint for the park, revising a master plan adopted before Hurricane Katrina inflicted more than $40 million in damage to the city's premier green space.

The post-Katrina recovery of City Park has a two-steps-forward, one-step-back quality about it.

For example: FEMA recently determined that the park's headquarters received more than 50 percent damage from the storm, and thus will be replaced at government expense.

The caveat: It's going to take at least two years, meaning the staff will remain in trailers in the interim.

I usually enjoyed City Park’s East Course but occasionally I’d give the West Course a turn because it was supposed to be more of a championship layout. I never saw that side of it but it did offer private time with the alligators.

What will happen to the City Park golf courses and the neighborhood surrounding the St. Bernard public housing complex? The two facilities are located along opposite shores of Bayou St. John near Lake Pontchartrain north of downtown New Orleans.

Rumors have run rampant for months about a mixed-use, mixed density redevelopment of the blighted, former housing project and the City Park golf courses.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin confirmed the project is being discussed and said he fully expects it to happen. Some former residents of the St. Bernard projects have vowed to file lawsuit after lawsuit to see that it doesn’t.

These rumors will fuel either consternation or hope about the future of the housing development and City Park depending on one’s viewpoint.

At an update on the recovery at City Park, the question was an appropriate one: Would anyone in the room live to see the majestic canopy of live oaks restored over Lelong Avenue that greeted visitors for generations before the storm?

"How old are you?" deadpanned Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, drawing laughter from the park boosters gathered inside the antique carousel, still under repair.

Gallows humor comes naturally to officials entrusted with reviving the crown jewel of local parks, a 1,300-acre tract that sustained an estimated $43 million in damage from Katrina's winds and floodwaters.

At 1,500 acres, New Orleans City Park stretches two miles from Mid-City to Lake Pontchartrain. From its inception in 1881, this expanse of urban forest and wetland provided the city’s residents with a wide variety of recreational activities, including golf, tennis and fishing. One of the 10 largest urban parks in the United States, City Park features 110 acres of lagoons and 105 acres of water in the adjoining Bayou St. John with 11 miles of shoreline.

By now, it is no secret how much damage Hurricane Katrina caused the state of Louisiana in the summer of 2005, and few places suffered more extensive damages than City Park. With funds recently obligated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the park continues with its recovery process.

Before Hurricane Katrina blasted through in August 2005, New Orleans's City Park was a recreational paradise, the city's outdoor heart and soul. Annually more than 11 million people visited its grounds, playing golf, tennis, soccer, and baseball; strolling through its grove of mature live oaks (some of them 600 years old); visiting the New Orleans Museum of Art; attending weddings and other celebrations; boating; picnicking; or pursuing myriad other activities the park accommodated.

Established in 1854, when a 100-acre parcel near the center of New Orleans was willed to the city by its former owner, City Park expanded over time to more than 1,300 acres, making it one of the largest urban parks in the country. Katrina left 90 percent of the park covered with floodwater and its infrastructure in shambles. But a year and half later, City Park is again beginning to hum with activity as New Orleanians find refuge and respite there. The story of its valiant struggle to recover from the storm testifies to both the resilience of a city and the healing role that parks can play in a time of extraordinary psychological stress.