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NEW YORK (AP) ― New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, confronted with accusations he's taking too long to rebuild his city after Hurricane Katrina, takes a swipe at New York's redevelopment of the World Trade Center site on a television news show.

Nagin, weaving through the wreckage in the devastated Ninth Ward neighborhood, claimed much of the debris was removed from public property, but when a "60 Minutes" correspondent pointed out flood-damaged cars on the streets, Nagin shot back, "You guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed, and it's five years later. So let's be fair," according to CBS.

The program is scheduled to air Sunday night; text and a video clip from the Nagin piece were posted on CBS' Web site Thursday.

The New Orleans mayor is known for his blunt, unpolished style, which has been the source of local popularity and numerous gaffes since last year's storm. And he's not the first to compare the two cities; New Orleans residents frequently complain that the response of the federal government to the needs of the Gulf Coast has been far more sluggish than it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Still, his comment rankled some New Yorkers.

The chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency created to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and downtown Manhattan, pointed out that New York sent firefighters, police officers and engineers to New Orleans to help in the days following the hurricane.

"We understand how difficult rebuilding a city after such destruction can be," the chairman, Kevin Rampe, said in a statement.

Rampe said "tremendous progress" has been made in lower Manhattan, with the Freedom Tower, a transportation hub and a memorial to the nearly 3,000 attack victims currently under construction. Work on the tower and the memorial is in the preliminary stages, and the construction is going on 70 feet below street level.

The agency is set to go out of business this fall following the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attack because it has completed its mission, Rampe said.

A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg said lower Manhattan was thriving.

"Record numbers of people live downtown, and new cultural attractions are making the area a vibrant, 24-hour-a-day community," Stu Loeser said. "We wish the same bright future for New Orleans and continue to stand ready to provide any help we can, just as we did in the immediate aftermath of Katrina."

Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, and levee breaches made a soup bowl out of New Orleans, wiped away towns and caused at least 1,321 deaths in and around the area.

The subsequent rebuilding in New Orleans has been marred by scandal and stalled by bureaucracy. Audits found that the federal government wasted millions of dollars in the contracts it issued in the days after the hurricane struck.

Wrangling among Nagin and members of the City Council over which areas of the city should be given resources to rebuild stalled the adoption of a unified redevelopment plan, leaving homeowners in many wrecked neighborhoods in limbo, unable to plan for the future.

An estimated 22 million tons of construction and demolition debris were created by Katrina. By comparison, Louisiana's largest landfill handled only 1 million tons of debris in an average year. An estimated 400 other facilities statewide were opened to handle the enormous amount of debris created by the storm and floodwaters.

(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)