Transparency and efficiency are not mutually exclusive

Today may have been the first time I ever left City Council chambers with a smile on my face. Sure, the Mayor had just announced a vicious power grab to give himself sole control over the award of professional services contracts. But at least he was there in the flesh to hear public comment.

In spite of all the predetermined pageantry that sought to shield the Mayor from direct criticism, he still got dressed down pretty good.

It's weird because in an objective sense, this has been a horrible week for New Orleans. Mayor Nagin has erected the barricades. If it wasn't clear before, it's perfectly clear now that he has no intention of working with anybody on anything remotely productive for the rest of his term.

The meeting today merely fulfilled a legal requirement associated with the Mayor's new executive order and will take effect in seven days. There was no mystery to that.

Today was just for show in that regard, so it was nice to see the choreography come undone to a certain degree.

Arriving at noon, I was surprised to see that between a third and a half of council chambers was filled with NOPD officers dressed in recently reinstated powder blue. I wasn't entirely sure what the NOPD had to do with open meetings laws and executive orders but I was soon enlightened.

Much of the opening statements from city attorney Penya Moses-Fields and Mayor Nagin focused on their concerns with the recent City Council ordinance requiring the administration to comply with preexisting rules for take-home vehicles.

Of course their rhetoric was the typical "we are focused on recovery and these things get in the way" stuff with which we've become so familiar. But the substantive point was that the ordinance failed to exempt first responders from having to sacrifice their take home cars.

I'm pretty sure the original ordinance from the 80s limited that first attempted to restrict the take-home car fleet already exempted first responders. The IG audit of take home car policy purposely didn't touch the NOPD. Last week's ordinance requiring compliance with the law, therefore, implicitly exempts NOPD and EMT because there is a different law governing take vehicle fleets for first responders. And still, it is likely that the ordinance will be modified to make this explicit since clearly nobody wants to restrict the ability of first responders to get to work, given that NOPD and EMT are always on call.

So this non-issue was puffed up as the main event even though the real reason the meeting was called was to present the executive order banning advisory committees for professional services contracts.

As luck would have it, when the time came for comment, there was a steady stream of city officials and people associated with first responder organizations ready to speak out against the take-home car ordinance, eating up time that would have otherwise been used to discuss the executive order.

You had speakers from Police Association of New Orleans, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Black Association of Police, etc.

Police Chief Riley spoke. So too did CAO Brenda Hatfield and Director of Public Works Robert Mendoza - all about some made up or easily resolvable qualm with the take home car ordinance. This is why the whole place was stocked with uniformed NOPD officers.

Citizen comments (nearly unanimous in opposition) related to the power grab executive order, at the beginning, were interspersed with additional trumped-up outrage related to the peripheral car issue. But toward the end of the meeting, it was one frustrated speaker after another. Brave citizens looked Mayor Nagin in the eye and told him exactly what they saw.

That's why he was so irritated during his closing remarks, when he said how much he was looking forward to leaving office in order to watch candidates struggle to clean up after his own mess.

The Times-Picayune

WWL article, WWL TV report

WWL video of Nagin's closing remarks.

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Clancy DuBos' separate analysis for WWL was not good. He describes the controversy as representing a clash between the democratic values of 'transparency' and 'efficiency.' He sets up a dialectic between the efficiency of closed-door authority and the inefficiency of transparency. He says that in a Democracy, you have to balance these "competing interests."

However, he fails to understand or articulate the underlying reason why people are fighting so hard for open government at this moment in New Orleans. Folks are not interested in transparency because of the thrill of the democratic process or intellectual curiosity. Certainly an efficient and effective recovery for New Orleans is way more important to me right now than the philosophical purity of a completely open direct democracy.

Rather, the reason the fight for transparency and open government has become consumed this city is because people are trying to figure out why the recovery has been such an inefficient failure to this point. The most poignant moments of citizen indignation came when people wondered why it was nothing was getting fixed, why there are no cranes on the skyline, and why we see so little evidence of the flowing recovery dollars Mayor Nagin continues to promise.

I care about transparency precisely because I care about efficiency and recovery. Quite frankly, I wouldn't mind if Nagin used city money to install a gilded toilet in Greg Meffert's stretch Escalade so long as he'd also crafted a long term vision for regional sustainability, brought home displaced residents, advanced the causes of economic and racial justice, improved city services, and raised our collective quality of life.

Bring me a government that works efficiently to advance the public interest and I'll never say transparency again. Until then, I'll work to find out why the Nagin administration seems to be doing just the opposite.