Does Arnie mean Eddie?

We shouldn't be all that surprised that Arnie Fielkow isn't running for Mayor.

He clearly doesn't have the stomach for a potentially nasty election. I think the ground for this was laid last February and March when the Councilman couldn't get the votes to pass his contract transparency measure and was totally demoralized. Within days, this widely-circulated rumor was reported by Oyster. He was in full-on sulk mode at the time.

I don't mean for that to sound so disparaging. This is going to be a difficult job for whoever is elected, one that I'd liken to a weekly water-boarding.

I respect the Councilman's decision.

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Everyone is probably abuzz about who might pounce on the opening.

I think the in the short term, it means that Eddie Sapir looks like a lock to run.

I don't know very much about Mr. Sapir.

What has he been doing since he last held elected office?

If you've got background, please provide it in the comments below.

Moving City Hall - Is there a real plan?

Update: See also this Gambit commentary

I'm not in love with our current City Hall building and it seems clear that it doesn't quite have the capacity we need for all of our departments. However I really question the efficacy of the purchase of the Chevron building for conversion.

I wrote this late last week at SaveCharityHospital.com about attempts in the legislature to undermine the New Orleans Master Plan:

It has become increasingly clear to us that the Master Plan has been partially undermined by the failure to include the city's major development projects in its scope. Without a substantive evaluation of the impacts of the two competing hospital plans - the LSU-preferred $1.2 billion medical campus or the less expensive and faster alternative to renovate Charity Hospital - the Goody Clancy Master Plan remains insufficiently comprehensive. The failure to critically analyze other large development projects such as the potential abandonment of City Hall in the wake of the proposed purchase of the Chevron building, the Reinventing the Crescent Waterfront riverfront project, and the proposed sports entertainment district around the Superdome.

Taken individually, none of these are necessarily catastrophic proposals. On balance, however, they represent an enormous commitment of recovery dollars to projects not subject to the skeptical analysis of the Goody Clancy planning process.

The failure of City Council and the City Planning Commission to acknowledge and deal with these deficiencies has created a climate that has invited such bold moves which undermine the master plan concept, such as those attempted by Senator Murray and his allies.

Should attempts to undermine the Master Plan ultimately fail, the City Planning Commission and the City Council will be charged with approving or rejecting the version being crafted by Goody Clancy. Yet, the deficiencies in the scope of the plan will still remain and so too will public queries to the CPC and Council about the strength of the document.

Now I didn't support SB 75 because I would like to see New Orleans adopt a comprehensive plan that might help us make smarter development decisions going forward. I do think there are legitimate criticisms of the process that need to be made but those that offered the bill weren't making them.

That the City Planning Commission has given their trademark rubber stamp to this proposal to relocate City Hall is really frustrating and speaks to their overall abdication of responsibility over the last several years.

City Hall wasn't built all that long ago and when we built it, the city razed a whole section of the city to do so. It was planned. The streets were planned that way. That's why when you stand on Rampart you have this site line to the neon sign atop that building.

I'm wary of the casual way in which we're about to entirely abandon all of that. Especially since we don't seem to have a plan for that entire area of downtown we're prepared to leave vacant. Think about it. Between City Hall and the state office building (currently under demolition) and all those nasty parking lots around Loyola Ave., what exactly is planned for that huge swath of real estate?

Surely someone will propose a really neat sounding project - maybe a park. And maybe it will be a good idea in isolation.

But again, what exactly are we doing? How many more critical recovery projects will get pushed off because of some absolutely critical political legacy project like a new downtown park or a new city hall?

Are those really our priorities?

How much longer are we going to have to put off sustainable investment in neighborhood nodes because of the apparently pressing need to move money around in downtown New Orleans?

Making such a big decision to abandon large swaths of the old administrative and downtown medical district (Charity and the VA), will leave a big gaping hole in the middle of the CBD with absolutely no public plan for what we're going to do with that land.

For the City Planning Commission to be so casual about approving the purchase of the Chevron building strikes me as pathetic.

Why are they so eager to undermine the master plan they worked so hard to create?

I really appreciate Arnie Fielkow's stand on this issue. It takes guts even if this statement kind of sounds like a tweet.

"Great city needs such as the reopening and enhancement of playgrounds, police and fire stations, street repairs, etc., certainly should be top priority when competing with limited city funds," Fielkow wrote.

Yes! What exactly is the vision here? Are we in the business of making this city livable for residents or are we just leaving legacies? Let's put the brakes on this train.

This is precisely the type of thing I thought a comprehensive master plan was supposed to address. I'd love for someone to get Dave Dixon of Goody Clancy on the record about some of this stuff.

Look, I think we need better administrative buildings for municipal government. I also think a monorail rising above the Mississippi River from Riverbend to Holy Cross would be awesome.

Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean we should put it at the top of the list.

James Perry, Leader?

I wanted to say something last week about Council's failure to override Mayor Nagin's veto last week but got caught up in Mardi Gras.

First off, there's been a lot of unfair criticism of Cynthia Hedge-Morrell's decision to abstain from voting. I think she made the right decision. She angered a lot of people by articulating people's mistrust for the good government crowd but I thought it would have been extremely useful as a starting point for negotiating a consensus response from Council to Nagin's executive order.

Part of the reaction derives from people's misunderstanding of what that vote meant. Hedge-Morrell did not kill a transparency law. The proposed ordinance, passed unanimously by Council and vetoed by Nagin would have brought professional services contract advisory committees under the purview of public meetings laws. Nagin circumvented the ordinance entirely by simply abolishing the advisory committees. So when the vetoed ordinance came back to Council for a potential override vote, it was totally worthless.

In my opinion, there was no reason to hold the vote. Hedge-Morrell suggested at City Hall that Council instead focus on discussing the language of a potential charter change - the only means Council has at its disposal to substantively alter the impact of Nagin's executive order. But instead, Fielkow and Clarkson pressed ahead with the vote, posing an unfair political challenge to Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell, who was the only African American willing to sit in on the meeting.

While I don't understand why Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis had to be in Washington D.C. with the US Conference of Mayors instead of at Council for this debate, at least she has an excused absence.

The person to be disillusioned and angry with is Councilman James Carter. He was at Council chambers when the contentious debate began, only to slink out when things got too hot. It was unforgivable gutlessness. He could have provided a level-head and helped foster a respectful conversation. Instead, Councilman Carter headed for the hills. I believe the best excuse his office mustered to the media was a "previously scheduled appointment" or some nonsense like that.

The disdain he seems to have for his own responsibility is increasingly noticeable and unfortunate. He's a coward.

As soon as Carter abandoned ship, the vote should have been postponed.

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Meanwhile, in a stunning juxtaposition....

What is all this?

Am I really seeing a New Orleans political figure synthesizing viewpoints to take a stand in the midst of a fiery controversy? Huh?

Go read what James Perry says in Race and Trust in NOLA:

To build trust we need to have information from disinterested sources. We need information that provides clear unbiased data that we can rely on.

In New Orleans there is strong racial mistrust and general mistrust of our elected officials. We can use honesty and transparency to overcome that distrust and create a new basis for working together. Information and data, are key components in building this new trust. When objective data is unavailable, regardless of what the truth is, people revert to historic racial dividing lines. In today’s information age, there is a new opportunity. We can share all data and information and build relationships in much the way that friends do.

In working towards a post-racial New Orleans, sharing data is key. If we all have the common goal of a better City then there is no harm in making information available to everyone. Decisions about contracts should be open, inclusive, and transparent. Transparency and openness provide a base allowing trust to endure even through disagreement and bad reasoning. We need transparency in New Orleans government now. The progress of New Orleans’ racial dialogue depends on it.

This is an interesting way to construct the argument in favor of transparency since a lot of folks have been saying that the whole reason we can't have common sense public meetings and records laws is because of racial mistrust.

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Certainly the issues last week were extremely frustrating but I'm at least glad that when things finally broke down last Thursday, there was some frank talk (in Council and online) about the racial tension that too often manifests in blood pressure doubling passive aggressiveness.

James Carter's cowardly display was not what we needed. Arnie Fielkow's poorly contrived attempt to symbolically rebuke Mayor Ray Nagin was not what needed.

What we need is leadership that isn't afraid to substantively and publicly tackle the political and racial controversies that hamstring our recovery.

Someone is mad at the mayor...

Transparent government is sure to be a cornerstone of Council vp Arnie Fielkow's mayoral run and today our current leader provided him with a bit more ammo.

Here are some choice passages from the statement Fielkow released following Nagin's announcement that, in the name of recovery, open government would not come to the city of NO.



"Under the proposed new Executive Order contained in Monday’s Times Picayune back page, and in an effort to avoid the Louisiana Open Meetings laws, the Mayor, instead of embracing enhanced openness and transparency, has taken several steps backwards. The Mayor has returned the city’s professional service contracting process to an era of closed door decision-making. Indeed, if the proposed new Executive Order goes into effect, the only individuals reviewing and consulting on the proposals will be employees appointed directly by the Mayor, namely the CAO, the City Attorney and/or the ORDA Director. Their evaluation of contracts and input to the Mayor may be either verbal or written, thus ensuring that the public, including the Inspector General, will now be totally excluded from the selection process."

"The City Council’s actions two weeks ago ensured that the contracting process would be open and transparent and that the public could be informed and engaged as to how their dollars are being used. Meetings would have been publicly noticed, citizens would have been able to view and participate and minutes of all meetings would have been kept. Sadly, despite the Mayor’s stated intentions to achieve openness and transparency, his current actions contradict his words and negatively affect a citizen base which desperately seeks to have its city government operate in the sunshine."

Fielkow: "I Don't Think That's Democracy"

Arnie Fielkow isn't particularly enthused about the latest detente negotiated between Councilwoman Clarkson, Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell, and Mayor Nagin.

Responding to a question about Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell's plan to cut off microphones in the event of future heated exchanges, Councilman Fielkow concludes:

"I don't think that's Democracy."

He doesn't believe it's addressed the underlying issue that lead to the recent spat over decorum - whether or not the Nagin administration is providing the information that Council requests.

“Ultimately, that is the most important question. Does the council have the information needed to formulate an opinion on the particular sanitation contract? I don’t know the answer to that,” Fielkow said.

Here's another WWL report.

Apparently, then-Councilman Jay Batt tried to get Veronica White removed in 2004 with an ordinance.

The only other 'yea' vote in that effort belonged to none other than Jackie Clarkson.

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I did not know that.

I wonder if Jackie has signed this petition, which calls for Veronica White's dismissal from her post as Director of Sanitation.

Sign it and spread it, friends.