Botched

Not even a promotion could keep Austin Penny from jumping ship.

Three days after Austin Penny was named a top director in Mayor Ray Nagin's next-generation recovery bureaucracy, a city spokesman confirmed Thursday that Penny is poised to leave city government, setting up another leadership transition in New Orleans' ongoing rebuilding effort.

Wacky stuff.

Some rats swim away, other rats swim back.

Mayor Nagin had Jeff Thomas walk the plank today. It appears he was fired.

Kenya Smith is back on board to replace him.

Thomas sent out an email announcing his departure earlier.

I wanted to let you know that as of today I will no longer be an
employee of the City of New Orleans.

With the City transitioning from disaster-recovery policy development to
implementation, the Administration is restructuring.

Jeff out, Kenya back in.

I guess this is what passes for recycling in Ray Nagin's administration.

Friday! Blakely's turn to not answer quetions

Tough day shaping up for Ed Blakely, who is set to go in front of City Council later this morning to defend his budget and performance as head of ORDA.

Yesterday, he confirmed that one of his top lieutenants, Patricia Robinson, has left her position. She was fired, which is something we know because Blakely refused to say whether she was fired or resigned.

The Nagin administration had delegated responsibilities related to the $5 million economic development fund to Robinson. It seems clear that her departure from government is related to her performance in this regard. As you'll recall, the administration through the grants to Council for approval without basic information like cost-benefit analyses.

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Jarvis DeBerry smells blood. He's got another winning column today.

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Tell your friends, keep pushing:

Dismiss Veronica White Now

Are They Stupid Or Do They Think We're Stupid?

I'm so confused by what's going on between Blakely, his bottle of wine, and his boss.

First, Blakely takes a new consultant job in Dubai. Then he says he misses his family and is considering leaving New Orleans. Then Ray Nagin says that Blakely is likely not going anywhere and was drunk when he suggested otherwise. Then Ray Nagin proposes a budget that writes Ed Blakely's office out of existence.

In that move to a construction-heavy phase, Nagin proposes abolishing the Office of Recovery and Development Administration in June 2009, although he mentioned nothing regarding ORDA Director Ed Blakely’s position or tenure with the city.

“I want to remind you that when we proposed the office, we said it would not be a permanent fixture in city government,” Nagin told council members.

So he's staying?

It's like some perverted Nagin-speak Abbott and Costello routine.

I think he's leaving, but who the hell cares anymore?

Forget rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic metaphor. This is more like crashing a parked '95 Saturn coupe into another parked '95 Saturn wagon.

Confused? Me too.

From the AP:

Nagin said, "I don't think this recovery would be where it is today without his great work."

Nagin, who last year said 2008 would be a tipping point in the city's recovery, said Monday he got it right: "We've tipped."

Yeah, a solid fifteen percent of the way. High fives all around!

Or was Nagin talking wine as well?

Did you volunteer for NOAH or did NOAH volunteer you?

This is a critical angle of the NOAH scandal for which I have had trouble getting concrete, reportable information. It is so helpful to have the Times-Picayune working on this.

The latest effort by Michelle Krupa is excellent and puts together some critical elements of this story to the general public:

It appears, however, that another crew has taken credit for demolition work at Grandpre's house. City records show that Hall & Hall Enterprises, the highest-paid contractor in Mayor Ray Nagin's home remediation program, billed the city $7,830 for gutting and boarding up the house and cutting the grass at the St. Anthony Street property.

The house is one of at least seven addresses that appear on two lists detailing post-storm remediation. One list belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana's Office of Disaster Response, which organized volunteers from across the country to come to New Orleans and provide free home remediation services, such as gutting and boarding up homes, to residents in need of help.

Those same addresses appear on a list produced by the nonprofit New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., which oversaw a remediation program that contractors billed a total of $1.8 million.

There's a problem with this report, however, and I'll explain.

When it became clear to me that volunteers had worked on some of these NOAH houses, there were three distinct scenarios that might account for their involvement.

First is that NOAH had selected properties to bill taxpayers for that had already been worked on my volunteers. This scenario implies that NOAH's seemingly random property selection process happened to also net a number of properties that had received volunteer services and that NOAH was just going around adding properties to their list with no intention of ever even checking whether or not a home needed gutting or boarding services. Also within his general scenario is the possibility that NOAH specifically chose properties they knew had already been worked on by volunteer groups. This implies that NOAH officials sought out lists of properties that they knew had already been worked on OR that officials from volunteer organizations had unwittingly, mistakenly, or intentionally provided their database of properties to city officials.

The second scenario is that NOAH was prepared to bill for a list of properties and contacted volunteer groups directly or through other city agencies to have them gut properties for which NOAH had already planned to pay contractors.

The third scenario is that volunteer organizations themselves sought out lists of homes that needed services from the city and NOAH officials ensured that some of their properties were provided to them.

Each of these scenarios allow for different degrees of complicity by volunteer organizations and officials with the Nagin administration. On one end, as I'd like to believe, nonprofit organizations were pillaged by city officials and volunteer labor was used to cover up NOAH's money laundering. At the other extreme, certain volunteer organizations or their leadership bears some degree of culpability for sharing lists with the city. For city officials, we face the possibility that officials throughout NORA and ORDA knew about NOAH and attempted to aid it in covering its tracks on one end or the possibility that Stacey Jackson and her staff specifically cultivated confusion and manipulated relationships under the radar of administration brass on the other.

So let's keep the volunteer scenarios in mind and take another look at Krupa's article:

Other groups that have provided free gutting services declined to share with The Times-Picayune the addresses to which they sent volunteers. The nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now Inc., also known as ACORN, cited privacy concerns. A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans cited a federal law that protects medical patients' rights and said it bars the release of such information.

That's problematic because Amanda Davis of the Episcopal Diocese disaster response office was willing to go into detail:

Davis said that while she was not aware of the duplications on the Episcopal Diocese's and NOAH's lists before this week, she long had harbored suspicions about the city's remediation program.

Touted as a centerpiece of Nagin's 2007 budget, the mayor said in late 2006 that he wanted the city to offer gutting services because faith-based and grass-roots groups providing such services had become overwhelmed.

That theory, Davis said, raised eyebrows in the tight-knit community of disaster recovery organizers.

"The idea of this program always seemed silly to us, because we have hundreds of volunteers each month," she said. "There's no reason to hire professional demolition crews to gut houses for old people."

Indeed, as the community nonprofit groups prepared in the spring and summer last year to receive thousands of unskilled volunteers, they were at a loss for properties. Several, including ACORN, a Catholic church group and the Episcopal Diocese program, solicited NOAH officials for some of their addresses, city officials have said.

"It was always kind of funny, though," Davis said. "We knew at the time that something weird was going on. They wouldn't e-mail the lists. You had to drive by City Hall and pick it up from somebody."

Now that's fascinating. According to Krupa, city officials are alleging that volunteer organizations specifically solicited NOAH officials for lists of properties. This after the NOAH home remediation program raised eyebrows throughout the volunteer community for being "silly."

Now Davis' organization seemed to make the same foolish mistake that ACORN and some Catholic charities made and will also have to go back into the books to provide more details. Who did they pick up their lists from? Why didn't they say anything even when they knew something weird was going on?

But what this really must do is force ACORN and the Archdiocese to open up and help us figure out how this occurred. I'm sorry but citing "privacy concerns" of homeowners that may have been fleeced for their tax dollars or of individual volunteers who may have been unwitting slaves for the city's money laundering scheme seems a little bit inappropriate. These organizations have every interest in completely examining their role in the NOAH scandal.

The Times-Picayune Helps Office of Recovery Development Administration Appear Above the Fray [UPDATED]

Or, NOAHtes on a Scandal

Today adrastros expresses his disappointment with the Times-Picayune's overdue treatment of the NOAH scandal.

I'm partially in agreement. Some of it does come off as a little generous to Mayor Nagin and regurgitates a mythical history of Nagin's reform efforts.

I think that their follow-ups with Mr. Willard of Willard Painting and Russell Kelly of Affordable Trucking are useful, relevant pieces of journalism.

More substantively, I question the amount of space provided for the denials and explanations of Anthony Faciane from the Office of Recovery Development.

Mr. Faciane has not been named in the NOAH investigation, nor has his agency. Not on my blog, not on Karen's blog, not in any of Lee Zurik's reports.

Yet the Times-Picayune gave him an advance opportunity to ensure that we all know that Stacey Jackson acted alone.

"We really didn't have to confirm that the companies were good, " Faciane said. "The only thing that we had to rely on was that NOAH said they had qualified contractors that did the work."

There you have a high ranking official totally absolving his organization of any responsibility. The Times-Picayune didn't press, letting that quote dangle in the wind. Instead, the T-P went on to describe the Nagin administration's recently launched in-house investigation.

Meanwhile, inspectors this week have surveyed about 100 of the 870 properties at which NOAH officials claimed its subcontractors worked during the program's eight-month tenure.

"Our inspectors to date do not show that payments were made at properties where work was not performed, " Faciane said, adding that the review should be completed by next week.

A responsibly-written article might have determined that, given the intentional release of multiple "inaccurate" lists and the obviously shady practices going on here, maybe people might question the validity of a ORDA-sponsored audit. A responsibly-written article might have then gone to a City Councilperson or to Karen Gadbois or Sarah Elise Lewis for a quote supporting healthy skepticism of an audit based on an "accurate" list that the city has yet to produce for anyone in the media.

The Times-Picayune did not do that. They irresponsibly refused to question whether or not the Nagin administration had the credibility to do their own audit. They follow up Faciane's touting of a totally questionable internal review like this:

He told the council's Recovery Committee on Wednesday that "if we find any duplication of payments or payments that were made for work that was not done, we will seek the city attorney's advice and work to make sure the city is reimbursed."

Basically, the Times-Picayune has determined that the Nagin administration is capable enough and credible enough to police this in-house with their own attorneys. Don't look at the man behind the curtain, City Council. We'll handle it. We can totally fix it. We can correct it ourselves. No need to look at systems, no need to question the lack of oversight that allowed the inconsistencies to occur in the first place.

After all, Nagin told Lee Zuirk that "I don't know, we'll take a look. But if there are any problems, we'll clear 'em up."

My question to the Nagin administration and the Times-Picayune is if money is laundered but then reimbursed when the graft is exposed, is it just a system glitch that gets corrected? Does that mean that the crime that occurred magically never happened?

Interestingly enough, Michelle Krupa wrote an article about NOAH in late 2006 that also lead with quotes from Anthony Faciane:

The city hired four contractors for the gutting program, though officials couldn't immediately explain the process for hiring them.

I guess they still can't immediately explain that process, can they?

UPDATE:

Last night, nola.com featured the NOAH article in its own little front page box that included links to lists of properties so citizens could check if they ended up on the city's inaccurate only correct list or whatever it is.

This morning that NOAH box has been removed from the front of nola.com and replaced with a prominent news index box for "Alligator Attack."

Good Job.