City Council ordinance seeks to limit Mayor's discretionary powers, but only this one time

Yesterday, I wrote about the potential for increased federal scrutiny over the manner in which D-CDBG funds are being monitored by the LRA and used in Orleans Parish.

Recently, Mayor Ray Nagin revived plans to purchase the Chevron Building even though City Council had voted against pursuing such an agreement last summer. The Nagin administration has argued that because only funding sources independent of the city budget would be used - the revolver fund or D-CDBG money - Council has no legal oversight authority. Presumably, that logic would extent to every project the Mayor might pursue using non-budget recovery dollars.

I've now learned that City Councilmembers Jackie Clarkson, Arnie Fielkow, Stacy Head, and Shelley Midura have cosponsored an ordinance that would require the Mayor to disclose plans to use money from the capital project fund or D-CDBG funds and to obtain Council approval for those plans.

Read the ordinance here.

The ordinance only applies to "City Hall Project Worksheet 7746," which represents the proposed purchase of the Chevron Building.

It does not tackle the larger questions about the mayor's power to use D-CDBG and revolver fund money in a discretionary fashion and would not preclude the mayor from applying recovery dollars to other projects such as the proposed LSU/VA hospital or the proposed renovation of Municipal Auditorium with little disclosure or oversight.

The measure will be up for a vote at City Council on Thursday, January 21st.

HUD Monitoring Disaster CDBG Funding More Closely?

For more than a few weeks, American Zombie and I have been wondering aloud Mayor Ray Nagin administration's interpretation of laws governing money outside the parameters of the regular city budget, as well as City Council's oversight of that money.

Of particular concern is the "revolver fund" that the Louisiana Recovery Authority established to advance cash to parishes to pay for projects that will eventually get FEMA reimbursement. Nagin wants to use some of that money to buy the Chevron Building and convert it into a new city hall - even though the council has already rejected such a move.

A statement from Nagin spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett makes it clear the administration believes it has discretionary power over funding streams like the revolver fund and that the council has no legal oversight.

"The matter before the City Council was the appropriation of funding from one capitol [sic] account to another ..not an approval of the acquisition. Funding appropriation –Legislative Branch authority per the charter, Purchases –Executive Branch authority per the charter."

To clarify, Quiett is saying that the proposal to buy the Chevron building that was shot down by City Council over the summer involved the city budget. Because the most recent proposal only uses money from state and federal sources, such as the revolver fund, there is no formal oversight process through which the administration must seek City Planning Commission or City Council approval. Whether that is accurate is debatable, but it is the administration's position nonetheless.

Presumably, that position extends to the city's use of the Disaster Community Development Block Grant money, for which the LRA is the local administrator of federal funds from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. The City Council had obligations when it comes to this money in that the LRA required a recovery plan with community buy-in, including Council approval, before the agency would release the HUD funds.

However, when it comes time to allocate real capital to a specific project, the modification of the original plans accepted by the LRA, or the reallocation of surplus money from a specific project, it would appear that the Mayor has vast powers.

Once the Council approves a framework for yearly DCDBG expenditures, only the LRA or HUD would be in position to block funding for a specific project submitted by Nagin on the grounds that it deviates from the original recovery plan, anticipated expenditures were vaguely documented or if HUD regulations are otherwise violated.

Since the Obama administration took office and Shaun Donovan was sworn in as the new secretary, HUD has been more proactive about cracking down on dysfunctional projects. HUD's receivership of the Housing Authority of New Orleans, for instance, has been totally reshuffled amid widespread allegations of graft and waste.

There is also evidence that HUD is taking a fresh look at its role in the hurricane recovery process both in New Orleans and elsewhere.

In November, AP reported that a HUD review had discovered over 11 million in unaccounted disaster money at the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) that had fallen victim to poor record keeping or a failure to follow HUD regulations.

That same week AP also reported that HUD had rejected Texas' recovery plan for rebuilding areas badly battered by Hurricane Ike in 2008. The notification letter from HUD, which you can read here, suggests that Texas' plan was denied for failures to comply with federal citizen participation requirements.

Are these recent actions highlighting regulatory compliance issues in New Orleans and Texas indicative of a much more widespread concern on the part of HUD administrators that processes governing the efficient use of recovery money were poorly constructed, inattentively followed or even explicitly violated?

What effect will increased federal scrutiny have on controversial local projects, such as the Municipal Auditorium renovation and the purchase of the Chevron Building, for which the Nagin administration claims the City Council has no stipulated oversight authority?

To what extent does the council concede or dispute the administration's interpretation of their oversight authority over irregular DCDBG and revolver funds? How does that effect their ability to halt the mayor from spending money on major developments should they wish to do so?

While the upcoming elections have clearly taken center stage, the dispute between the outgoing administration and the City Council over the discretionary use of federal and state recovery dollars is the most important subplot for engaged citizens to closely monitor. It is this fundamental interpretation of City Charter and of HUD rules and regulations that looms over the individual development controversies that grab headlines - from Municipal Auditorium to Lower Mid-City and the proposed medical complex.

When news broke that the Chevron Building purchase was revived, City Council members expressed surprise and confusion. Yet since the New Year, there appears to have been no follow-up. It should be very interesting to watch what happens as specific projects begin to initiate expenditures.

Process Matters: The Revolver Fund and the Chevron Deal

I think WDSU was the first to report on it but the Times-Picayune has a story as well.

I also learned earlier today that the city was again pursuing the acquisition of the Chevron Building and the abandonment of City Hall. The section 106 (historic review process) notice is here and supporting material is here.

Both of those articles remind us why this is news. Over the summer, the administration negotiated with Chevron Corporation to potentially purchase the Chevron Building from the oil giant for the price of $8 million, pending the process stipulated by City Charter.

There was a process. The City Planning Commission held a hearing and a vote. The City Council held a hearing and a vote.

City Council voted against the project.

So some members were apparently surprised today to learn that the administration was going to go ahead with the purchase and relocation anyway. Travers Mackel reeled in Shelley Midura:

"This is news to me," she said. "(The information) is not factual. The city determined in July that it would not buy the Chevron Building and would not move any city offices into that building."

Frank Donze also caught up with the Councilmember from District A:

She said she has "serious concerns about what is going on here" and described any effort to acquire the Chevron complex with state and federal money as "an undisguised attempt to avoid the council's involvement, and, unfortunately, part of a disturbing pattern of this administration."

Later, I emailed Councilman Arnie Fielkow for his thoughts:

We only learned of this today and are trying to get many of the same questions answered. I, and many other cms, do not support this! The entire project needs to be better thought out, master planned and left to the next administration and council!

And Councilwoman Stacy Head for hers:

I have no idea how he plans to do this without council approval. I am calling around to find out.

I also emailed Ceeon Quiett at the Mayor's Office of Communications. Here is what she wrote back:

The matter before the City Council was the appropriation of funding from one capitol account to another ..not an approval of the acquisition. Funding appropriation –Legislative Branch authority per the charter, Purchases –Executive Branch authority per the charter. The Mayor and the City Council both believe in the relocation of City Hall and the viability of the Chevron building. To this day, as the media has reported, leaking roofs, lack of hot water, broken elevators remain. As you remember FEMA has recognized the depth of damages to 1300 Perdido St. City Hall. Over $5million has been approved by FEMA for City Hall.

--

I think the administration is arguing that City Council and the City Planning Commission had oversight power over the original proposal to acquire the Chevron Building and mothball 1300 Perdido St. from this past spring and summer because at that time, they were being asked to fund the purchase using the city's capital budget.

Indeed, the city's original deal was to purchase the Chevron building for $8 million by using the $5 million FEMA has pledged for damage to our current City Hall and cobbling together the other $3 million through bond sales and the capital improvement budget.

This time is different, from the Mayor's perspective, because the executive is simply moving forward with the execution of a purchase and is not pursuing funds from the budget, which would reengage the a cycle of public hearings and votes by Council and the City Planning Commission.

The administration's position is that it did not need approval for the project itself, just the funds to move forward with the purchase. Ms. Quiett reminds us that FEMA has already allocated $5 million. That still leaves the same $3 million shortage for the price of purchase alone, ignoring the cost of renovation as a factor. I suppose that means that this time, administration is going to fill in the rest using funds that they have the authority to move around in a discretionary fashion without triggering a cycle of hearings.

--

I closely followed Dambala's recent piece about the potential pitfalls involved with discretionary use of Disaster Community Development Block Grant (DCDBG) funds, which come from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and are administered by the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA).*

Today, he has a post about today's new controversy about the Cheveron Building in which he indicates the administration is planning to use what is called "the revolver fund" to avoid initiating the CPC and Council oversight process.

The revolver fund was set up by the LRA to help hurricane-damaged parishes scrounge up the cash to initiate recovery projects. For instance, when FEMA agrees to reimburse the City of New Orleans a certain amount of money for damage to a public building, they don't just cut the check so the city can go and hire a construction firm. Instead, FEMA reimburses the city once the work has begun. This protects taxpayers by ensuring that these recovery dollars are applied to restore the infrastructure that was damaged and not to other purposes but it also hurts the liquidity of parish level and municipal governments by requiring them to front the cash for all of these projects. To fix the problem, the LRA created revolver funds to help parish and municipal governments get cash up front. New Orleans can now tap revolver money to pay for projects and then repay the revolver fund when FEMA reimbursement checks cleared.

Dambala says today that:

The problem with that equation is that any money spent under the Revolver system must meet FEMA requirements for spending. If you recall in my previous post, the FEMA requirements state the the money can't be used for new development....they can only be used for repairs of exising infrastructure.

But FEMA requirements aren't that inflexible. FEMA money can be applied to a new development, if it is classified as an "improved project." That is what the city requested in its letter (see the WDSU story or the attachments linked at the top of this post) to FEMA.

I am trying to understand, from a procedural standpoint, how the administration can use revolver money for discretionary purposes. The idea is that the fund fronts the city cash for a specific, reimbursement approved project and then the city reimburses the revolver once the FEMA money comes through. Seems like a simple, clean transaction. But it's more complicated than that.

For instance, under the School Facilities Master Plan, the Recovery School District is not rebuilding every single school for which it is receiving FEMA reimbursement money. Or, under the plan guiding construction for the New Orleans Public Library, the city is not rebuilding every single branch for which it is receiving money from FEMA for flood damage.

One would assume that the city would apply every dollar from FEMA toward reimbursement for damaged libraries (just as an example) to building new libraries, even if the plan is to build fewer libraries in a more consolidated system. But maybe that's not the case. Conceivably, if the city spends less out of the revolver fund than they take in reimbursement money from FEMA, there would be a stash of surplus cash sitting in the revolver fund.

FEMA is not, I don't think, supposed to reimburse for construction that is not performed. If the city uses $10 million in revolver money, they're only supposed to get a $10 million check from FEMA to repay the revolver even if FEMA had budgeted $20 million for their assessment of damage. But I don't really know how it works in practice. It might be that the City allocates money from the revolver and gets an expedited reimbursement based on the allocation instead of the actual expenditure.

Some reader insight on this would be great.

Dambala says it is understood that the money leftover in the revolver when it is no longer needed to front anticipated reimbursements would go into the city's pot of remaining DCDBG funds and could be reapplied to other purposes. Is that what is understood and is that what is happening now?

I also want to know more about how oversight and administration of the revolver fund works. My sense is that it is something the LRA created for the Mayor's office to help with cashflow, is not something that is considered a part of the city's revenue or spending streams, and is therefore hidden from the regular budget process. Does that mean that a hypothetical surplus in the revolver fund is purely a discretionary tool for the executive branch? If Council doesn't have oversight over that money, does the LRA?

If there's anybody out there who can add some detail, answer some questions, or correct my mistakes, please leave a comment or email me.


*I have additional analysis and questions on this matter as well that I'll have to tease out in another post. I have been very curious about unaccounted discretionary spending, the 2010 budget, and the use of DCDBG funds as it relates to the demolition of Lower Mid-City and the proposed LSU/VA. If you've been itching for more information about what Dambala might be talking about, check out this story and video. It'll get your brain churning a little bit but it might give you more new questions than new answers.

OIG Report on Budget Processes (Updated)

I've been looking forward to this report for a long time. The way we do our budget is a major source of frustration and a major impediment to some of the easier changes we'd like to see.

Last year's budget battle was awful for every single member of City Council. I'm not sure there is enough time before this year's negotiation but hopefully this report will stiffen the Council's resolve on items where there is common ground.


OIG Report on Mayors Budget

I'll be updating this post with different noteworthy items that I might find as I read through this. You should feel free to do so yourself in the comment section below.


UPDATE:

We've also learned that the city budget is now $68 million in the red, not the $43 million originally estimated.

I have a hunch that we will see the deficit go up again before the next budget is signed, perhaps to close to $100 million.

As it stands right now, the deficit represents almost 15% of the budget.

The Mayor is talking about across-the-board cuts, which as the Times-Picayune points out, is specifically criticized as a poor methodology. The report talks about what is known as 'budgeting for outcomes,' a system that forces a more critical look at what programs actually address municipal priorities and which do not.

I don't really want to talk about boring stuff like budgeting for outcomes but I do want to talk about municipal priorities. That's what immediately jumps out if you page through the OIG review of 2009's budget processes.

If you start at page 27 above and look at where New Orleans ranks on different spending priorities, it will really begin to crystallize.

One of the thing that frustrates me about discourse in this city is that criticism of municipal inefficiencies is too often translated into the language of Jefferson Parish conservatism. The stereotypical impulse to cut taxes and spending as a matter of reactionary opposition to post 1960s political gains has obscured the voices of those who are more-or-less interested in maintaining spending so long as that revenue goes toward programs that extend opportunity and improve quality of life.

It should be really simple to cut waste from the Dept. of Sanitation to shift additional resources to NORD. But it isn't simple here. It is extremely complicated.

I hope that if we can start by producing accessible and accurate budget documents, we'll soon be able to actually discuss whether or not budgets are actually addressing the needs of the city.

Council can win this much for us. This year.

Deputy Mayors?

Ariella Cohen wrote a great piece for Next American City about Mayor Nagin's horizontal chain of command in comparison to the efficient recent reforms undertaken in places like . . . Philadelphia!

Check it out.

One issue that nobody really talks about is governance reform. "Transparency" and open data is one thing, but examining the effectiveness of institutions from a structural standpoint is something else entirely.

I think our next Mayor would be wise to examine some of these kinds of executive branch reforms because they can be implemented starting on day one.

Slightly related, I would also love to hear a discussion between candidates for Mayor and Council about whether it would be worthwhile to expand the number of district seats to make the body more representative.

E-maelstrom: Double Vision

Given my apparent famousness, it should be obvious to readers that I'm pretty much constantly having fancy orgy cocaine parties with other talented celebrities. We do drugs you've never even heard of, drugs that aren't even named until we name them. One thing that's really hot on the scene - excuse me - was hot on the scene, was something we called human ecstaopiajuana, which required a willing female to donate her body for use as something best described as a soft bong. Where on earth do we find these girls?

--

Back on April 6th, parts of former Chief Technology Officer and Deputy Mayor Greg Meffert's deposition in a civil suit related to stolen crime camera technology began to leak. I picked up on one new disclosure rather quickly, Mr. Meffert's admission that he'd let city vendors pay for his excursions to Visions, a gentleman's club known for its 2683 Myspace friends.

Specifically, Meffert said, "sometimes they'd pay."

--

Meffert and me, we're a different kind of famous.

He borrows his friend's Ponchartrain yacht for a party with the Mayor.

I, on the other hand, own my own yacht.

In space.

Gregory Meffert might have thought he was the cock of the walk getting to go out to Visions using "OPM," otherwise known as "Other People's Money" or the Vince Fumo Memorial Payment Plan.

But real celebrities, we don't go to Visions.

Visions comes to us.

--

I was sitting outside eating breakfast and recovering from one of my fancy sexy space-yacht parties over this past weekend when up walks this nice young lady who seemed determined to sit nearby. No complaints. It always feels good when blonds feel compelled to bask in my aura.

But when she decided to strike up an unprovoked conversation about the high price of mangoes in the Greater New Orleans area compared to the Austin market while I was so clearly busy looking for pictures of myself in Rolling Stone magazine, I became a little annoyed.

How do I get out of this conversation?

She uncrossed her legs to get up, "I have to go home to get ready for work."

Problem solved!

"I'm sorry to hear that, where do you work?"

"Visions on the East Bank."

At this point, the biggest, dumbest smile imaginable took over control of my face.

Visions on the East Bank

"You guys out there have done us a great service."

She made me explain at this point, after which she got defensive because I think she took away from my abridged summary that I was saying that Visions was somewhat at fault.

"Strip clubs get a bad rap."

"I agree. That's not what I meant."

Pause

"So do you know anybody named... eh never mind."

--

Mr. Meffert said "sometimes they'd pay."

Who paid all the other times?

I think we could find out pretty soon.

--

In other news, yesterday Mayor Ray Nagin was deposed in that same civil suit over stolen crime camera technology. I actually don't expect too much scandalous stuff to come out when the transcripts are released to the public. I imagine that lawyers for the plaintiffs will explore more than just the trips to Chicago and Hawaii - it won't just be stuff that's already been in the paper. But I don't think there will be anything earth-shattering.

I do think that we've now officially entered into some really bizarre legal territory that I hope someone can comment about.

Mayor Nagin has not yet retained private council. This has struck me as peculiar not because I'm assuming that Mayor Nagin is guilty of some criminal behavior, but because it seems inherent that there might be conflicts in terms of the interests of the Office of the Mayor compared to the interests of Mr. Ray Nagin. Bob Ellis is not Mayor Nagin's personal attorney. He's a city attorney.

And now that the city has taken legal action against Dell Inc., one of their own co-defendants in the crime camera civil case, it would appear that much more important for the Mayor to retain a separate criminal defense attorney. I mean, the City Attorney's office is simultaneously fighting charges with Dell while leveraging charges against Dell. I think that the T-P's Michelle Krupa asked about this in one of her most recent pieces but I can't find precisely where now that I'm trying to link to it... Michelle Krupa indicates that indeed that question was asked of Penya Moses-Fields in her article about the cross-suit.

Moses-Fields said Nagin's testimony Monday about the travels squares with what he has said previously and should dispel any notion that the mayor acted inappropriately. She added that Nagin was not a party to the conspiracy alleged by the plaintiffs and should be dropped as a defendant.

"It's very clear that the city believes that the mayor has done nothing wrong, " Moses-Fields said.

Responding to questions, Moses-Fields said neither she nor the mayor has received subpoenas from a federal grand jury investigating the crime camera program. She said she believes Nagin has no criminal exposure in the case and that he has not retained his own defense attorney; the city attorney's office will continue to represent him, she said.

--

One more thing to watch is the impending release of the City Council emails. Yesterday, a judge blocked their release after finding the action taken by the City Attorney's office to retract privileged information to have been "inadequate."

But that stuff is going to come out soon. Within a couple of weeks. I would advice you not be surprised if release of the Council emails was timed conveniently with the unsealing of Mayor Nagin's complete deposition transcript.

--

We're always receiving these improper gifts of coincidence in New Orleans.

Sometimes they pay. Sometimes we pay.

Stacy Head steps up to the plate

The Councilor for District B has written a letter to the City Planning Commission in support of a full public town hall on the LSU/VA site selection.

By Hand Delivery
Edward Robinson
Chairman, City Planning Commission
1340 Poydras Street.
Suite 900
New Orleans, La. 70112

Re: Public Hearing on LSU/VA proposal March 16, 2009

Dear Chairman Robinson:

I believe that the decision regarding the location of the proposed Southeast Regional Veterans Administration Hospital and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Medical Center are decisions made by the federal and state government respectively. Nevertheless, as the costs and benefits of these hospital facilities will be felt directly by the citizens of New Orleans, I fully support a City Planning Commission public hearing. This would allow all parties of interest to present their respective positions. There appears to be confusion, misinformation, and legitimate questions that need to be vetted. You have my commitment to attend this meeting and I hope the entirety of the Council will do the same.

Please let me know your decision and I will assist you in any way I can.

Sincerely,



Stacy Head
Councilmember, District B

Wow.

How about it?

Give it up for Stacy Head!

It takes real political courage to be the first to stand up and say something. I hope all of our Council representatives will also get behind this effort.

---

So much for 'done deal,' eh?

E-maelstrom

Okay guys, that's the name of this scandal, at least as WCBF is concerned. I need something to tag these posts with and I just can't wait around anymore for the proper democratic process to provide a better idea. It's all happening too fast. So there you have it: E-maelstrom.

I think that's pretty good. It describes the email controversy AND the larger scandal-sucking vortex that the email controversy seems to be precipitating, which is what I'll be discussing at length in this post.

Fair?

Fair.

Many of us have been on the edge of their seats as confirmed and rumored reports of Federal raids and computer seizures have proliferated between City Hall whisperers and blogging interneters.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate known fact from unconfirmed report and reasonable speculation from straw grasp.

I won't promise to do that here but I will attempt to express a little bit of what I know, what I want to know, and what I expect to know.

If you've been reading the blogs this week, there's a certain difference between what has been discussed online and what has been good enough to print in the mainstream press. WWL, WDSU, the Times-Picayune, and the like aren't totally missing the boat. I think they're wise to be cautious. Certainly the Mayor's people are anxious to find bad reporting on which they can capitalize to obfuscate what's really going on.

But us web operators can help make up for whatever analytical boldness might be lacking in the mainstream press during these early public stages of what is clearly a very complicated scandal.

Mr. Clancy DuBos is straddling those two worlds quite nicely and has been a great read lately, particularly his coverage and analysis of Judge Ledet's court and the legal angle of the Council email leak element of this. In fact, his superb post today is the impetus behind my post now.

One thing we're all seeming to be in agreement about is that this is only partially about the 'unusual' leak of City Council's emails to Attorney Tracie Washington and the Louisiana Justice Institute.

Briefly for the uninitiated, Tracie Washington went around City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields and the normal protocol for a public records request by submitting a request for three years worth of Council's emails through Sanitation Director Veronica White. This occurred in early December, just hours after WWL's Lee Zurik submitted a request through the City Attorney for a year's worth of emails and calendar appointments from the Mayor. That request remains unfulfilled after the Mayor's office claimed that the emails had been lost or inadvertently deleted, though it is important to point out that city policy mandates that emails are backed up on a remote server every three months.

This was also amidst a political storm around Veronica White, who was clashing with Council over poorly kept records and her department's 2009 budget.

The Nagin administration and those associated with Washington's Louisiana Justice Institute have been couching the release of Council's emails as unorthodox and unusual but totally above board. Beyond that, they've described the controversy around the release of the emails as exposing the hypocrisy of Council's repeated calls for transparency from the Mayor's office.

In truth, there is no love lost between LJI and the Mayor's office. Washington has habitually expressed her distaste for Mr. Nagin and his destructive policies. But on this matter, the early noise in the press was pretty similar.

So why is it such a big deal that Council's emails were released anyway?

Well, if the records request had been fulfilled following proper procedures, nothing would have been wrong with it. We all have a right to see what our public officials have been doing with their time. However, because the disclosure of records was done without the knowledge of Council or Council's attorney, there could be any number of things released to the public that would have otherwise been redacted, and for good reason.

Email correspondence with federal law enforcement, email correspondence about federal investigations, email correspondence with whistle-blowers should be protected from public release because of the possibility of criminal obstruction of justice.

And as Clancy points out, there was likely correspondence between Council and Council attorney's about a lawsuit AGAINST the Mayor and City Attorney:

Why did Moses-Fields meet with Hatfield and Boyd to discuss how to protect privileged information? In fact, why did Moses-Fields get involved at this or any other point in a request for City Council records — particularly when she knew full well that the council has its own independent legal counsel? Moreover, she knew at the time that the reason the council hired its own lawyers is because it was considering litigation against Moses-Fields and her client, the mayor. Moses-Fields obviously knew or should have known that some of the council emails would contain attorney-client communications, which are privileged, and she also knew damn well that she had no right — and no authority — whatsoever to review or even to see those privileged communications, particularly when she is legally adverse to the parties and the attorneys who are engaged in those communications.

So there may be criminal activity involving the release of the emails at a number of contact points. Certainly a bigger issue would be that the Mayor's Office of Technology has direct 24/7 access to Council's email files. This seems like a huge breach of basic municipal separation of power and opens a lot of troubling doors. I can confirm from knowledgeable sources that many members of Council and Council staff have operated as though their emails were tapped and being read by the Mayor's people for some time. I can't accurately say if that means three months, six months, or twelve months but my best guess is that this has been going on for longer than the time line of the e-maelstrom scandal.

Yet, one wonders whether Councilors were as careful with their words one would think they'd be knowing that their correspondence was being read - given the excitement one can infer on LJI's end about the bounty of information that could be in those emails related to the demolition of public housing, the LSU/VA site selection process, or whatever other nefarious words or dirty deeds could have conceivably been discussed via email.

Nevertheless, it would appear to me that even in isolation of some of the other issues I'll get to in this post, the release of Council's emails by the Office of Technology and the Sanitation Director represents more than a procedural anomaly. Criminal behavior seems a very likely possibility.

Let's take a look at some of the players on the email leak side of things and see where that takes us in terms of the larger scandals to which we've been alluding...


1. City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields

Clancy's analysis seems pretty clear:

The law is crystal clear on this: attorneys who come into possession of adverse parties’ documents or communications that may be privileged have an ethical duty to notify the attorneys for those parties immediately — and to avoid opening, reviewing or otherwise violating the privileges that attach to those documents or communications. So, why exactly did Moses-Fields admit to an intent to review (and perhaps actually review) emails that she absolutely knew contained privileged information and/or communications between an adverse party (the council) and that party’s attorneys? [snip]

Why did it take Moses-Fields, by her own admission, two weeks to notify the council’s attorneys that a public records request had been filed for documents that probably contained privileged communications between the council and its attorneys? What was she thinking? Or better yet, what was she reading?

Beyond that, Moses-Fields has already given a sworn deposition on the matter that is extremely vague but still exposes certain vulnerabilities depending on how facts play out. Either way, it is probably reasonable to speculate that Penya Moses-Fields could find herself in much hotter water than she's been in to date.


2. Louisiana Justice Institute Attorney Tracie Washington

City Council's own attorney Steven Lane has seemingly, on a few different occasions, largely exonerated Ms. Washington in terms of her role in acquiring the emails from Sanitation Director White. However, Washington has indicated in interviews that she's proliferated some of the emails to unknown people or groups that have asked for them. I'm not a lawyer but it would appear to me that she exposes herself to a certain degree depending on the parties to whom she passed on the emails and depending on whether she bares any legal responsibility for the content in the emails, whether she's read them or not.

The other issue for LJI involves optical perception. The narrative of events also lends to questions related to Washington's awareness of White's pull in the Mayor's Office of Technology. Washington's past willingness to get involved in Bill Jefferson's legal defense and other similar efforts has seemed to undermine her credibility on this issue as an impartial seeker of public records, even amongst some regular allies. On the other hand, Jay Arena has started a petition on her behalf that has seen low traffic but has yielded some high impact signatories, such as former Mayor Marc Morial and Color of Change's James Rucker.

(I don't think anybody is disputing Washington or anyone else's right to see Council's emails but the petition text seems to consider some of these legal issues to be totally without merit or implicitly directed at Washington herself, which makes no sense given that Council's attorney Steven Lane has repeatedly reiterated the legitimacy of Washington's request and has not alleged wrongdoing on her part that I'm aware of. In short, and as someone that has supported a lot of Washington's work around social justice issues and who has tried to understand the argument coming from the LJI side, I think that the communications strategy at work here is absolutely ludicrous given the legal nuance and the emerging federal criminal investigation. I also, however, would like the legitimate public information within Council emails pertaining to actual important stuff - like the LSU/VA site selection process - to be released as soon as possible.)


3. Sanitation Director Veronica White

White has drawn the brunt of the legal activity related to this case so far, as it has been confirmed that federal agents have seized her computers. White has retained the services of a high profile criminal defense attorney and the Nagin administration has not been as publicly protective of her as they usually are for employees that have come under fire in the past, including White herself on a number of previous occasions.

Given the tenuous political situation in which she found herself back in early December, many are suspicious that she maliciously circumvented municipal protocol and potentially broke the law in order to prematurely leak these emails as a result of her professional troubles with Council and personal troubles with Councilwoman Stacy Head in particular.

A couple of related unanswered questions:

(a) Did White communicate to Washington that she would be willing and able to expedite a public records request pertaining to Council's emails and how?

(b) Did White see any email content? [Especially important given that much of the most recent correspondence included was likely to pertain to her own performance as Sanitation Director]

(d) Who else was aware of the request and when? [Did White collude with other administration officials in the Mayor's Office of Technology or elsewhere in the administration to expedite the records request or view the data herself?]

Another issue for White, is an emerging investigation into a bodyguard assigned to her who has ended up aiding a recall movement against White's enemy Councilwoman Stacy Head. From my view, this is tangential. It's not totally irrelevant but doesn't necessarily appear to have much bearing on some of the other elements under consideration.


4. Chief Administrative Officer Dr. Brenda Hatfield


Dr. Hatfield essentially acts as the Mayor's Chief of Staff and is heavily involved in every function of the executive branch. She was present at many of the meetings about the Council email release and will likely have to corroborate the testimony already provided by Moses-Fields and otherwise disclose what she knew and when. The Mayor has delegated the responsibility of investigating the matter and recommending disciplinary action in this matter to Hatfield but it isn't entirely clear that Hatfield herself might be deserving of reprimand for, at the very least, being totally unaware of what was occurring between White and the Mayor's Office of Technology over a two month period.

She's certainly going to be asked what she knew and when she knew it. The known details of her involvement remain sketchy at best.


5. Interim Chief Technology Officer M. Harrison Boyd

In the deposition(pdf) given under oath by Penya Moses-Fields, it was on February 28th that someone from the Mayor's Office of Technology finally came forward to disclose that Council's emails had already been placed on CDs and released to Tracie Washington.

8. On February 28, 2009, the Director of the Mayor's Office of Technology informed the City Attorney's Office that at some point in time prior to February 28, 2009, he had provided Veronica White with one set of discs containing emails of the City Council.

It has been assumed that this is a reference to M. Harrison Boyd and this has been repeated in accounts in the mainstream press. I'd like to know if in fact anyone has explicitly confirmed that it was Boyd who produced the emails on discs to White.

The reason I'm skeptical is that it seems extremely counter-intuitive that Boyd, a recent hire from out of state, would knowingly take part in such blatantly legally ambiguous activity involving the emails of a separate branch of government.

Assuming that he was in fact responsible for obtaining Council's emails from the server, putting them on a disc, and handing that disc to White, well then he's going to be in some serious hot water. Some questions related to this scenario:

(a) Why weren't White's request for records on behalf of Washington greeted with skepticism?
(b) Were their orders to produce the emails from elsewhere in the administration?

However, I wonder whether the deposition refers to someone else entirely from the MOT, or if Boyd was holding himself accountable for the actions of another staffer within his department.

And that brings us to...


6. Former Chief Technology Officer and current Management Information Services Enterprise Director Anthony Jones

Now we're cutting closer to the heart of the matter.

It is believed, though it has not been confirmed by the mainstream press, that Jones' computers have also been seized by federal agents. Now, this could be because Jones was in fact responsible for the release of Council's emails, not Boyd as implied by the deposition of City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields. But it likely has a lot more to do with Jones' illegal activities during his time as CTO from 2007-2008. Both the Inspector General and a separate auditor contracted by the city have issued reports highly critical of Jones' conduct around the award of contracts related to the city's crime camera program.

From the Times-Picayune's David Hammer:

Last week, when the city's independent inspector general alleged years of questionable contracting and $4 million in overpayments for an often-inoperable network of crime cameras, Mayor Ray Nagin's administration released its own audit of the camera program. It focused almost entirely on the last two years of the project, when Jones was interim chief technology officer.

The most troubling findings by PFM Group of Philadelphia were that Jones filed false invoices to hide the camera project's costs, and accepted plane tickets to a conference in Colorado from a contractor that earned millions on the camera project in a no-bid arrangement. The report called those actions, which Jones denies, "potential misconduct and unlawful activity" and recommended that the city inform law enforcement.

Jones was demoted in August, mainly because he had falsely claimed to have a college degree. He also overstated the number of college credits he earned on at least one job application.

Jones is almost certainly going to be charged with several crimes, that is, unless he agrees to testify against others. What others?

That the Mayor's audit focused only on Jones' administration of the MOT and crime camera program is indeed quite telling.


7. Mark Kurt, Former Chief Technology Officer
8. Greg Meffert, Former Chief Technology Officer

Greg Meffert was a huge donor to both of Ray Nagin's mayoral campaigns and served as CTO and as something of a Deputy Mayor from 2002-2006. Kurt was a private sector associate of Meffert, was brought in by Meffert to serve in the MOT, and was subsequently named as Meffert's successor. The two gentleman, along with other private sector associates, are involved in a tangled web of insider contracting involving all aspects of the city's push to modernize technology and information systems under Ray Nagin. Blogger Ashe Dambala from American Zombie has cultivated a number of knowledgeable sources and has systematically broken down the graft starting in the summer of 2006 with the publication of a story detailing some of the contract trading and the existence of a corporate yacht owned by Meffert associates and enjoyed by the Mayor himself. He stayed on the issue through 2007 as the crime camera program was expanded and his breakdown of the IG's recent report helps illuminate the systemic corruption in the Mayor's Office of Technology.

Some areas in which contracts were handed out between associates of Meffert and Kurt involve the design and maintenance of several city websites - including the tax assessor's database and cityofno.com; the design, implementation, and maintenance of the city's short-lived wifi service; the design, implementation, and maintenance of the city's maligned 311 call system; installing and maintaining the crime camera system; maintaining city email servers across all departments including City Council; and much more.

The city contracts, which bilked the city out of tens millions of dollars or much more, provided affiliated individuals and corporations a spring board to national prominence and untold wealth.

Scariest is what we might find once investigations begin to reveal the lengths to which cronies went, not just to conceal their crimes, but first and especially to maintain the power necessary to continue to wring the city of every last penny though various no-bid and bid-rigged contracts. What we do find, we'll find first on American Zombie, so make sure to bookmark him.


9. The Honorable C. Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans


Ray Nagin and Greg Meffert are neighbors on Park Island, an exclusive and obscure cul-de-sac off of City Park.


View Larger Map

Meffert and various associates from the city's fledgling IT community bankrolled Nagin's campaign in 2002 and his reelection in 2006 with tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

The chief target of the federal investigation must ultimately Mr. Nagin. It has been reported on AZ but unconfirmed by the mainstream press that the Mayor's computers have also been seized by federal agents.

The ultimate legitimacy of all of these investigations and possible seizures will rest on whether or not US Attorney Jim Letten is able to gather enough evidence of collusion/conspiracy between the Mayor, Meffert, and Meffert's associates to file charges that stick. Thus, all the interest in the Mayor's email archives.

--

What is increasingly clear is that there is else behind the swift action by federal investigators in regard to the release of Council emails, something else that has is only tangentially related to this one procedural miscue by the administration.

(Though it does seem like there may be criminal activity involved with it specifically, possibly on a number of levels.)

Rather - and I this most certainly isn't the first time I, Clancy, Oyster, or Zombie have made this point - the council email release controversy is a convenient pretext to fast track an ongoing and incredibly grave longer-term investigation into the overall politicization and corruption of the Mayor's Office of Technology.

Perhaps more consequential in the most immediate short term is what this e-maelstrom means in terms of the operation of municipal government. Where there was once a high-tension environment toxic to coalition building, now it is probable that there is only totally demoralized gridlock. Even now, though the e-maelstrom has only begun to escalate, it is simply impossible to imagine Council being able to do anything in concert with the Mayor's office.

Viral Email or Email Virus

This email thing could be bogged down in the legal system for a good little while.

Today I wondered what types of material is generally supposed to be redacted from an email records request.

According to one Council aide:

"Personnel files, city credit card info, passwords, whistleblower emails, attorney-client privilege, correspondence pertaining to city litigation such as with Entergy, personal emails from family, friends, or doctors; constituent emails containing their contact information, emails with federal authorities of federal investigations - those are the examples that come to mind."

What of that is explicitly redacted under the law?

"The law is explicit with attorney-client privilege and personal email. Some of the other categories are derived from other laws, including case law. Making correspondence with the feds public or distributing could be obstruction of justice."

Yeesh. Serious.

Not looking good on WWLTV, either.


Someone did something stupid between Veronica White and the Office of Technology and could end up getting in trouble.

T-P:

Asked if the administration is considering disciplinary action against city employees who took part in releasing the information, Nagin spokesman James Ross said no decision has been made.

"This is the first time during Mayor Nagin's administration that such a situation has occurred, " Ross stated in an e-mail, adding that Chief Administrative Officer Brenda Hatfield is reviewing the matter and will make a recommendation to the mayor.

It's a rare day that the Nagin administration even suggests that someone maybe could be recommended for possible discipline-like action. So it definitely sounds like somebody did something really wrong between Veronica White and a select few individuals at the Mayor's Office of Technology (and those guys are in enough trouble as it is).

**(Not to mention the Mayor's own optics problems when it comes to his emails. Did you see read Jarvis DeBerry's recent piece where he compares Nagin to Kwame Kilpatrick?)

---

To go on a related tangent, is it just me or is Tracie Washington always getting people into trouble in the magical world of the electronic letter?

Here's a great one Tracie Washington sent to Brenda Hatfield from 2007 that has since circulated:

Brenda:

I represent the children of Verlin J. Dix, Sr., one of the recipients of the
CONO letters advising of impending property demolition.  Kindly remove this
property from the demolition list.  This property has been boarded and poses
no health threat to anyone, or anything.  The family is awaiting insurance
proceeds so that they can begin remediation.


To the extent you all cannot comprehend the devastation these letters cause
our elderly citizens, Verlin J. Dix, Sr. was my uncle, and his family has
owned this property and Alexis Fried Chicken and Seafood for generations.
Post Hurricane Katrina, they have battled with the insurance companies
trying to be made whole so that they can reopen this business, and the many
other businesses formerly housed in this building.  Those battles continue.

Unfortunately for my uncle, the post-Katrina depression brought on by the
many pressures of losing his properties, which he had worked so hard during
his adult life to acquire, were just too overwhelming and, frankly, I
believe this last letter from the City of New Orleans was just too much.  On
Saturday morning he took his life, simply walking into the Mississippi
River.


I don't sue the City of New Orleans and its mayor for sport.  These
defendants are sued because their actions and ineptitude often cause real
tragedy, especially for our older African-American citizens.  I'm not sure
you all get this, and that's just plain unfortunate.


Tracie

Tracie L. Washington, Esq.
The Louisiana Justice Institute

--

There are a bunch of scandals going on right now and I'm a little disappointed we haven't been giving them fun names. I mean, what are we supposed to tag posts related to this email kerfuffle? It seems to be just that complicated.

Traciegate? Nah.

I almost titled this post E-MOAH but the two scandals aren't really related enough for it to work.

Help me out here.

Simple Politics, Nuanced Reality

Okay so City Council's Attorney just filed a restraining order to prevent (temporarily) the further dissemination of Council's email records released to lawyer Tracie Washington and the Louisiana Justice Institute.

I've been trying to pry around about this as best I can.

It would appear that the release of the records, via the Mayor's Office of Technology and Sanitation Director Veronica White, was sloppy and in violation of protocol and policy. What's less clear is whether any of this violated actual law.

So they'll argue about it.

Council's attorney Steven Lane broke it down like this:

"Basically what happened here is in December of 2008 Tracie Washington filed a public records request,'' Lane said.

"She sent it over to IT at City Hall and the city attorney. For some reason, and I still don't know why, the report was sent to Veronica White at the Department of Sanitation. Ms. White, who is not an attorney and with no attorney oversight, produced the document to Ms. Washington,'' Lane said.

I don't think that's quite the right narrative. It'll take some additional digging before anyone can say authoritatively how the email records may have circulated amongst the City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields, Sanitation Director Veronica White, various employees at the Office of Technology, and Tracie Washington.

Certainly I have many questions for the mysterious series of tubes comprising the IT dept.

--

In terms of political optics, you have the white members of Council blocking the release of their email records in the midst of a buzz word transparency campaign that opponents have alleged is racially motivated. Certainly it looks weird for the white members of Council to fight the release of their own emails after weeks of criticizing Ray Nagin for failing to release his.

Obviously the whole story is way way more nuanced than that. But until more comes out, people are probably going to emphasize whichever elements reinforce their base perspective on the larger polarized transparency debate.

And certainly the point could be moot if the lawyers can hurry up and vet the emails for sensitive privileged information and release them to the public. If Council digs in hard, they'll be total hypocrites.

WTF?!?

So much is happening in the world of municipal politics this week it's hard to keep track of it all.

We've got HANO whistle blowers coming forward in advance of new HUD chief Shaun Donovan's visit.

New DHS Chief Janet Napolitano also comes to town for the first time this week as new allegations swirl around the New Orleans FEMA office.

The Office of the Inspector General has released its report on the perpetually wasteful crime camera program and criminal prosecutions seem likely.

Then there is this email clusterf#ck.

WWL has been suing the city for access to public records that the Office of Technology says were deleted, while simultaneously our old friend Sanitation Director Veronica White was somehow granted access to the City Council's email archives, which she promptly turned over (without checking for privileged material potentially related to ongoing lawsuits against the city or FBI investigations) to civil rights attorney Tracie Washington. City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields claims to have been unaware of this until last week, after the emails had been delivered to Washington.

White is on vacation somewhere.

Talk about inside baseball! There are many layers to this onion.

And these last few items, as Oyster says, are probably related.

Helluva week, huh?

Please submit your theories as to how the email kerfuffle went down. What do you think happens next? Do you believe that Moses-Fields didn't know? Is Veronica White going to be held accountable? Or do they circle the wagons once again? What's the most sensitive item hidden in those emails? I know I'd love to take a look for myself.

Transparency, right?

--

I know Tracie Washington is probably going to take some heat for only requesting emails from the white members of City Council. But let's put this in context. Only three Councilors actually answer emails anyway. So the real question is what the hell she possibly hoped to get out of Jackie Clarkson's virgin email account. Jackie has always struck me as a rotary phone kind of gal.

Camera Ca-Ca

The executive summary of the OIG's report on the city's horrendous crime camera contracting process via WWLTV (the whole report is available via the Gamblog):

The City of New Orleans Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted a review of a project to deploy a city-wide system of neighborhood surveillance cameras to help the police in their battle against crime. The project originated in 2003 when Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced a plan to install up to 1,000 video surveillance cameras as part of a crime fighting initiative. The OIG review determined that the Mayor's Office of Technology (MOT), which was charged with implementing the project, did not conduct an orderly planning process, comply with prudent procurement practices, or exercise effective contract oversight at any stage of the project. The City's surveillance camera project was undertaken without a realistic budget or a funding plan. After conducting a flawed request for proposals process, the MOT awarded a contract for the deployment of 240 cameras to Southern Electronic Supply, Inc. (Southern) in 2004. With the project less than 25 percent complete after two years, the MOT abandoned Southern‟s contract. Over the following two years, the MOT went through a series of three more contractors before the project was completed on July 31, 2008 with 214 cameras deployed. The MOT‟s internal cost estimate for the 240 camera project was approximately $2.6 million. After vendors submitted initial project proposals, it became apparent that the MOT had seriously underestimated the likely cost. The MOT also failed to control expenditures and allowed costs to mount to more than $6.6 million, exceeding the amount appropriated for the project by a wide margin. Despite its cost, the completed project is not designed or built to operate reliably and will be expensive to maintain. None of the four contractors on this project was held accountable for the quality of work or the performance of the camera system. When the final contractor deemed the project complete on July 31, 2008, it reported that 205 of the 214 cameras were operational, but an OIG inspection determined that only 114 of the cameras were working on September 18, 2008. The City blamed Hurricane Gustav, which struck on September 1, 2008, for most of the camera failures observed by the OIG. The high rate of failure may be partly attributable to the architecture of the communications network, in which the movement of a single antenna can disrupt the operation of an entire series of cameras. The OIG found that many installations were highly vulnerable to wind events, as camera equipment and plate antennas were often installed in a makeshift manner that would not meet the standards for a traditional public works project such as traffic signals or signage. The findings in this report describe problems that contributed to the project‟s failure to meet the City‟s expectations. Major findings include the following:

The organizational structure of the MOT, which relied on subcontractors to manage its operations, undermined accountability.

The MOT lacked the expertise to successfully plan the surveillance camera project and relied on assistance from one vendor to the detriment of fair competition.

Installation of Crime Surveillance Cameras 2003-2008 Office of the Inspector General, City of New Orleans 10 of 50.

The MOT's request for proposals process did not ensure that the City received the benefit of competitive prices for equipment and materials for the project.

The contract with Southern did not hold the contractor accountable for system performance or provide a meaningful warranty for the work.

The MOT failed to control expenditures and made $286,423.85 in overpayments to Southern, based on records provided to the OIG.

The MOT tacitly approved an improper lease agreement that allowed a subcontractor to profit from self-dealing.

The City made payments totaling $770,624.52 to Dell, Inc., without documentation to show what was purchased.

The MOT failed to either maintain project records to document work performed or inspections done of contractors‟ work.

In 2008, the MOT entered into a no-bid, open-ended agreement with Ciber Inc. to enhance the City's communications network without determining the likely cost.

The MOT's agreement with Ciber provided no warranty or performance standards and the network Ciber built does not meet the MOT‟s expectations for reliability.

The MOT incurred charges for the surveillance camera project that exceeded its budget for 2008 by $2.5 million.

The management problems detailed in this report pre-date the tenure of the City‟s current Interim CTO, who began work in August 2008. In his first few months, the current Interim CTO has taken steps to address some of the problems identified in this report, but more changes are needed to guard against performance failures and cost overruns in future projects. The report concludes with the following recommendations for change:

1. The City should reduce its excessive reliance on contractors for information technology services.

2. The City should procure all services using a competitive process based on a clearly defined scope of work and a maximum contract cost.

3. The City should adopt contract terms and contract oversight procedures that hold contractors accountable for the quality of their work.

4. The City should correct weaknesses in its fiscal oversight procedures that threaten the integrity of its budget.

5. The City should develop a plan and budget before undertaking any future project.

What does it mean that our city's government just had to be told that it "should develop a plan and a budget" before it proceeds with initiatives?

It means our city government is pathetic. But everyone that lives here knows that. How sad.

It's very nice of the OIG to release this report as the Mayor moves to hand out a professional service contract for the maintenance of our crime camera portfolio. As you'll recall, two weeks ago, Mayor Nagin abolished the advisory board that would have acted as third party to the award of that contract after City Council attempted to make the entire proceeding open to the public.

Executive orders have consequences.

I urge City Council to work together to unanimously and unequivocally end the crime camera program forever.

The cameras have been largely inoperable. They have not aided in the prosecution of any criminals. They have cost us millions of dollars over several years.

All of that money should go toward repairing street lights around the city. Properly functioning street lights can deter crime and allow people to feel more secure in their own neighborhoods.

How do we work this out in a unified way?

--

Meanwhile, interim Inspector General Len Odom and US Attorney Jim Letten will have to decide whether or not to pursue prosecutions related to the crime camera investigation. I urge them to proceed. White collar crime is the most harmful kind of crime. Individuals that have broken the law should be held accountable.

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.

-

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.

-

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.

City Hall Party Tomorrow

Big day at City Council tomorrow. The docket:

1. Fielkow offers an ordinance that would subject competitively bid contract reviews to public meetings laws and make the contracts themselves into public records.

2. Midura and Head offer an ordinance that would require the Mayor to reconcile administration take-home car policy to conform to existing legal limits.

These items will likely be taken up in the early afternoon.

Trash Talk

This is just embarrassing. Raw video available at WWLTV.

There was surprisingly some intelligent, cool-hearded, rational discussion about the personal tensions underlying the gridlock. But none of that gets to the substance of the sanitation contracts and the selective enforcement of the rule of law.

We simply do not have civilized debate on policy in the public realm in New Orleans.

Mayor Defiant

From the belly of the beast:

STATEMENT FROM MAYOR C. RAY NAGIN


"Today's veto override had little to no effect. In fact, it brought us
back to December 1. It did not improve the financial conditions of the
city.


"We still intend to implement the cuts I announced last week. The Mayor
still holds the checkbook and signs all contracts and CEAs. No third
party will receive any funds unless they are approved by the Mayor.


"There also is a new reality today as a result of the Council's proposed
deeper cuts. These cuts will definitely have a severely negative impact
on residents throughout the city. I believe all citizens deserve
adequate services based upon available resources. It is unfair to
sacrifice the basic services of most citizens while providing enhanced
or extra services to one segment of the city.


"Also, with these deep cuts and the inability to finalize the budget
until sometime in January, we will not be able to encumber service
contracts on January 1, which could further impact our ability to
provide needed services.


"Finally, the City Council's cuts to the budgets for fleet purchases and
fuel have the potential to negatively impact public safety. With those
cuts, we would be unable to replace vehicles in the police department
and other public safety agencies. There also would be insufficient fuel
to supply public safety vehicles for the year."


C. Ray Nagin

Mayor

The Mayor has decided to take an extremely defiant stance. It's one thing to communicate your intention to be flexible with executive spending in order to navigate the larger economic climate, but he's not doing that.

Instead, the Mayor is doing three things:

1. Asserting his authority.

I think he's a little bit over the top in his tone, as stated above.

2. Fortifying a communications posture

By claiming that Council's budget seeks to impose "deep cuts" on services, the Mayor is attempting to make his budget, the one that imposes a citywide 2.5% budget cut and deprives the public defender and district attorney, the budget of social justice. Council gave him a millimeter of room to make this argument because they've advocated for the restoration of full French Quarter sanitation services. This allows him to make some sort of populist appeal about rich people getting lemon scent sprayed upon them. The problem here is that I'm not sure that Council made any kind of recommendation that the Mayor fully execute the SDT contract at the expense of anything else. I think it is pretty clear that the Mayor's budget makes painful cuts across the board to every section of this city, whereas the Council budget attempts to eliminate those cuts. Plus it's not like people give the Mayor the benefit of the doubt on anything, so I'm not sure what the intention here is.

If I were on the Mayor's communications team, this whole thing would be couched as something that needed to be done because of the financial crisis. He might be able to get away with a reasoned argument centered on that theme. But the Mayor seems to have given up on presenting reasoned arguments a long time ago.

3. Doubling down on corruption and waste

In the last section of this release, the Mayor clings to his posture that New Orleans needs a bloated city car fleet for "public safety." This argument seems especially ridiculous in the same press release in which he refuses money to the DA and the office of the public defender. If he's attempting to claim that the car fleet cuts would touch the NOPD, I believe he's mistaken. The Inspector General audit on which these cuts were based did not examine the NOPD. The office of the Mayor alone has 73 take home cars (it might actually be 74). Each City Councilor has their own take home car. Veronica White has her own take home car. So does Brenda Hatfield. So does Ed Blakely. And Ceeon Quiett. And a lot of them are big huge SUVs. These people can afford their own cars and our auto industry could use some business.

It is blatant waste. Just fix it.

This Day In City Politics

Today I put on my Wednesday best and went to City Hall for the budget vote and then to check out the Committee to Reopen Charity's protest of LSU.

And I took notes.

City Hall buzzed more than usual. Somehow this was the first time I'd ever made in time to see the official opening credits. Here's what I wrote down shortly after it was appropriate to sit:

Did you know that every city council meeting begins the same way?
First is an exceedingly long prayer. This made me uncomfortable.
Then is the pledge of allegiance.
Then is an extremely poorly produced video of the star spangled banner with all sorts of images of New Orleans – Pre Katrina. It’s weird and it’s a waste of time.

Normally I'm okay with Christian prayer, even when the venue is somewhat inappropriate in a secular society. (I'm an agnostic Jew) I think that a lot of times, those that care about the separation of church and state pick poor battles by going after things like the ten commandments on courthouse walls, etc. This prayer before the start of this Council meeting felt pretty wrong. Generally, it's not a matter that I get worked up about, especially considering the other types of things that get decided sometimes at Council. Today however, it certainly foreshadowed my discomfort with the entirety of the proceedings.

The stupid New Orleans chamber of commerce Star-Spangled Banner public access video is unintentional comedy and is especially redundant after the pledge. I'll stand by that.

Okay so taking stock of the attendees...

Lots of employees wearing SDT Disposal apparel. Trashanova himself wore a suit and sat front and center, right in the middle of all his guys. Smart.

We also have a whole mess of protesters. They’re not here to push for the reopening of Charity, they’re here to rabble rouse against Councilwoman Stacy Head.

They have lots of signs.

“Recall Stacy Head”

A lot of these protesters are here representing the local chapter of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

More on them later.

Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, as chair of the budget committee, is in charge of the talkings once Jackie Clarkson finishes testing the vote buttons. I don’t know what it is, but I really like the way Cynthia Hedge-Morrell conducts herself from her budget seat, on a personal level. She carries herself with a certain sarcastic dignity, like she hates her job but doesn't want anyone to know. She somehow always emerges from these food fights with less mashed potatoes on her clothes than everyone else.

They will be voting to override the Mayor’s veto, with some changes. Twenty-Five percent of the sanitation budget will be placed in reserve, pending the “audit.” Also, Council recommends that the Mayor make no service cuts once that money is released from reserve. As the Mayor, Ray Nagin has the power still choose not to execute parts of the sanitation contracts. So the lemon chemical spray will continue to be part of our lives.

Before we get to the vote, Cynthia Willard-Lewis is given the opportunity to grandstand for awhile because she has decided to buck her colleagues and vote to sustain the Mayor's veto. I've said it recently in this space but I'll say it again right now, Cynthia Willard-Lewis is Mayor Nagin's staunchest ally and most reliable vote on City Council.

It is important not to gloss over Councilwoman Willard-Lewis' speech because I thought it was quite revealing. The entire thing was a lie. I wish I had a transcript for you but allow me to relay a few of the key points she was making.

- There are a lot of people out there that question why resources are going into the city's most devastated neighborhoods, like the ones in her district. These discussions are "fallacious" because these areas are returning and she'd like to symbolically put an end to those "fallacious" discussions today.

- She is voting against Council because she wants to vote for a budget that has "humanity" in it as well.

- Throws in the prerequisite dig at Stacy Head with a comment about the sanitation contracts: "Some people say we paid for a Cadillac. Well we asked for a Cadillac."

Then the rest of City Council voted to override the Mayor's veto, cancelling the spending cuts Mr. Nagin had proposed across the board.

Each was allowed to say a few words. A lot of high fives over funding for the DA and for the office of the public defender. James Carter says this is the first time that Orleans Parish has ever funded the public defender. Is that true? That's sad if it's true. It's about time.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis then got another chance to grandstand, touching on many of the same themes. This may have been when she used the "humanity" term but the speeches were more or else the same.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis

I want to go into some detail here because I found her statements to be some of the most hypocritical I've ever heard delivered by an elected official in a public setting.

It's one thing if she's going to talk about the nefarious intentions of those still trying to backdoor a shrink the footprint campaign to raze her district, but she really just used the idea of that threat to create an unidentifiable other. She voted to sustain the Mayor's veto, so she was quite literally voting for the Mayor's budget that would have made major service cuts to her district. The other sad irony is that if Cynthia Willard-Lewis really cared about injecting "humanity" into the budget process, then she would have made an issue out of the proposed $79 million to be spent buying houses to raze in Lower Mid City instead of going toward the rebuilding and reopening of Charity Hospital. She has the power to question expenditures like $30 million for the Reinventing the Crescent project in the Marigny. She could have come out and opposed the school facilities master plan, which I argued shortchanged damaged neighborhoods. Instead, she voted for the Mayor's budget and his plans to strip the public defenders office and to strip after-school programs. She could have offered Councilwoman Midura some help in restoring the money needed to pay to fix bad street lights. She did not. She instead voted for the Mayor's service-cutting budget and gave a speech about how she was this great champion for social justice. It was an insult to anyone that pays attention to anything in this city. Cynthia Willard-Lewis is a toady for the Nagin administration and it is Nagin administration policy to shrink the footprint by contracting out master planning services to firms that work to implement artificial measures of neighborhood "viability" as the primary means of determining who gets rebuild money and who gets nothing. Cynthia Willard-Lewis is no champion of social justice and her speech of lies today made her look more like a scam artist than a public official.

Sorry for the rant but that speech made me so angry.

Anyway, then Cynthia Hedge-Morrell explained how awful this whole budget process is, how rushed and inefficient it is. Word. It's totally disorganized.

She promises to get with Mr. Cerasoli to work on ways to improve the process.

Then it was time for public comment and Spiver Gordon of the SCLC was permitted to speak first.

The SCLC was once a great organization at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the South. Dr. Martin Luther King founded it.

Some things have changed but SCLC's membership has not. The organization has not been dynamic, has not recruited a new leadership class, and has not been fully engaged on the issues where other AA political insurgent organizations are leading.

This can happen with movement organizations sometimes. After a series of initial successes, some organizations lose focus or are unable to shift to respond to changes in political opportunity structures. As organizations earn victories, they are unable to reframe their purpose in a way that effectively maintains rank and file mobilization. Or, they are co-opted into establishment structures.

I'd argue that this occurred to the labor movement as unions appeared to become more concerned with the maintaining bureaucratic norms they were able to win during years of boom (perhaps because they got to close to the leaders of the Democratic party) than with actually fighting for higher wages and better workplace protections. It is happening in the LGBT movement right now as grassroots activists are rebelling against the Human Rights Campaign for their narrow focus on organization building and 'acceptable' campaigns for reforms to hate crime laws.

The SCLC also succumbed to the bureaucratic temptation of many movement organizations before it and after it, they became establishment.

Spiver Gordon

I wrote about this extensively well over a year ago when I went to the Jena 6 protest and watched Spiver Gordon hog the microphone while the much younger crowd rolled their eyes. I wrote about them again last year when Spiver Gordon threatened to boycott the city of New Orleans for investigating the sanitation contracts. Oyster wrote about SCLC then too, noting that the organization that once mobilized 42,000 people to march in Selma now only has 3,000 dues paying members worldwide. He highlighted a sad quote from former SCLC President Fred Shuttlesworth as he lamented a disastrous meeting in 2004 shortly before his resignation:

For years, deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten away at the core of this once-hallowed organization.

And here was Spiver Gordon once again in front of City Council railing against Stacy Head because Councilwoman Head has this history of rudeness when it comes to interacting with some African American preachers.

Reverand Dr. Marshall Truehill, who is someone I respect a great deal, explained Stacy Head's conduct in the context of her policies, by highlighting the kissing incident that occurred at that unfortunate Council vote that sealed the fate of the city's public housing developments.

Reverend Truehill has the credibility to speak out against Stacy Head because he was there outside of City Council last year and fought for the rights of the city's poor public housing residents every step of the way.

But Spiver Gordon and SCLC were not there last year. They mobilized to protect Jimmie Woods and Alvin Richard but they are too often MIA when it comes to issues that really matter to young black people in the city of New Orleans.

--

So I got up and walked over to the protest being conducted by the Committee to Save Charity Hospital. These guys are doing something that's really important. The failure to reopen Charity remains a scourge on this city's reputation. It's absence has contributed to the public health nightmare that is Southern Louisiana. Poor black people have relied on Charity for decades but our state and municipal leadership would rather raze a residential neighborhood to build two private hospitals than to even entertain the idea of rehabilitating Charity.

There were about thirty people there to picket an LSU administrative building. They had signs and slogans but the thing they had more than anything else was an issue of critical importance. I don't know if I can say I was empowered by the turnout, I thought the protest should have been at City Hall, but it's easy to second-guess. Certainly, there is a core there but it will be important for mobilizations to get bigger and louder if mobilization is indeed critical to blocking the plans.

Renew - Restore - Reopen Charity Hospital

Spiver Gordon and the SCLC didn't turn up here, I'm sorry to say. Could've used 'em.

--

There were several ironic juxtapositions to think about as I walked back to my car. They were all disheartening to a certain degree.