Bold Move

Slow Friday no more.

From a press release received just minutes ago:

New Orleans, LA – James Perry, as a taxpayer in good standing, filed a request for a preliminary injunction today against the Nagin Administration in Civil District Court.

James Perry, New Orleans Mayoral Candidate: “My hope with today’s filing of a request for preliminary injunction is that the court will act expeditiously to halt the abuse of power by the Nagin Administration by awarding contracts in violation of the City’s Home Rule Charter.”

“As a private citizen I have serious concerns when my government begins to operate outside of its governing charter and without regard or respect for the rule of law,” said Perry. “The City Charter expressly prohibits any city department or agency with the exception of the Sewerage & Water Board, Civil Service Department, the Public Belt Railroad Commission and the Board of Liquidation from the hiring of special counsel without the approval of two-thirds of the New Orleans City Council.”

“I say enough is enough with this use of semantics and creative interpretation by the Nagin Administration to justify the awarding of contracts in violation of the city charter.”

This, the latest lawsuit against the Mayor for abuse of power, comes as a result of the recent contracts totaling $660,000 given to outside law firms. The firms have been retained to help the Mayor fend off prior lawsuits against his administration.

If you've been paying attention to this unfolding drama, you may have noticed a little foreshadowing hidden not-so-subtly in David Hammer's Wednesday article in the T-P.

David Marcello, who served as executive counsel to Mayor Dutch Morial and who chaired a committee that revised the charter in 1995, said there are only two categories of city lawyers established in the charter: those in the City Attorney's Office and "special counsel." Those categories have not changed since the charter was adopted in 1954, he said.

"There's no functional difference between special counsel and outside counsel," Marcello said.

Sal Anzelmo, who served as city attorney under Dutch Morial, agreed.

"That's like saying 'and' and 'also' are different; it's ridiculous to make those kinds of statements," Anzelmo said. "I think when you read that charter, there's no question -- it's not even debatable -- that the council has to approve outside counsel."

City Council Vice President Jackie Clarkson, who signed a letter Tuesday calling on the council's lawyer to review the practice and consider legal remedies, is likewise skeptical.

"You can argue semantics all day long, but this is obviously a violation of the intent of the charter," she said.

Marcello said the clearest way to settle the question would be for a citizen to file a lawsuit in Civil District Court.

Mr. James Perry has stepped up to be that citizen in what is conveniently, also a pretty smart political move for a guy that hasn't even been able to get his name in the paper when his campaign HQ is just missed by stray bullets from a gun battle.

Jackie, Jackie, Jackie

Council President Jackie Clarkson went on Fox 8 this morning to talk shop.




Here's the important passage:

"I think Veronica White should be reprimanded and dismissed. That is not my prerogative. That is not Council's prerogative. That is the Mayor's prerogative. But I truly think what she did was wrong...

"When we can't get our own emails. When we can't make our emails accessible to the public... And she can get emails? That's wrong. And she's not even the City Attorney. I'm sorry, that's wrong. Whether it's ethically wrong, morally wrong, or legally wrong makes no difference to me. It's wrong because she's getting more service than the public. We can't service the public and she can be serviced? I'm sorry. Whatever motivated her is immaterial. It's wrong."

I'm sorry Jackie Clarkson, you're driving me crazy.

-

It's not Council's prerogative? Is she serious?

Then what was she thinking in 2004 when she supported slimeball Jay Batt's ordinance to have Veronica White removed from office? In fact, she was the only Councilperson to do so. Her little dance to abscond from her responsibility as a civic leader is transparent nonsense.

-

You're the Council President! Make yourself useful for something other than a ribbon-cutting.

--

Then Clarkson claims that she doesn't have access to your own emails and that she wants her emails to be accessible to the public. This is also a cruel falsehood. Brad Ott of the Commitee to Reopen Charity Hospital has been trying for well over a year to obtain Clarkson's records in connection to the LSU/VA side selection process. Not even a month ago, he had to hold a press conference to publicly shame her for her failure to comply with the law. Remember?

Committee to Reopen Charity Hospital

PRESS RELEASE & NOTICE:

Press Conference Contesting the City of New Orleans’

Law Department Louisiana Public Records Act Policy

Thursday March 5, 2009 / 10:00am to 10:30am

In front of New Orleans City Hall, 1300 Perdido

This Press Conference is being held in direct response to the City of New Orleans’ Law Department policy directive and practice of compliance with the Louisiana Public Records Act. We contend that the effective exercise of this directive thwarts the timely and complete fulfillment of Public Records Requests made by individuals and organizations concerned with influencing municipal governance and recovery from Hurricane Katrina in the city of New Orleans. The policy and its execution must be reconsidered – as well as any public policy decisions made as a result of the lack of public transparency with the lack of timely and complete compliance with the Louisiana Public Records Act.

The Committee to Reopen Charity Hospital specifically supports member K. Brad Ott’s November 13, 2008 outstanding Louisiana Public Records Request of New Orleans City Council President Jacquelyn B. Clarkson. Pursuant to Louisiana Public Records Act (R.S. 44:1 et seq), Ott request included “for review and possible copying any and all records, memos, agendas, orders, directives, surveys, notices, communications printed and electronic, including e-mail, by fax, and/or postal mail in regards to the public and collaborative party dealings of the proposed VAMC/LSU Academic Medical Center, Section 106 Consultation, National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA], and National Historic Preservation Act [NHPA] through November 13, 2008 … as well as the Rev. Avery C. Alexander Charity Hospital, Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans.” (Bold type his emphasis)

The Committee to Reopen Charity Hospital contends Councilmember Clarkson’s Office as well as the City Law Department thwarted complete public participation in the decisions about the issue in which Ott’s Louisiana Public Records Request referenced. Deadlines for public comment without formal litigation have passed, effectively preventing alteration by the general public as well as by affected parties impacted by the New Orleans City Council’s authorization of funds in its 2009 City Budget for the expropriation of properties, homes and businesses within the Mid-City Historic District for the proposed VAMC/LSU Academic Medical Center – causing undue hardship and the potential internal displacement of area residents, workers and businesses. We are calling on Councilmember Clarkson and the City Council’s Attorneys to fulfill this Public Records Request, as well as to meet with similarly-situated parties to fully comply with the Louisiana Public Records Act. Other similarly-situated parties, individuals and organizations are invited to share their stories during this press conference.

Ott’s Public Records request is attached to emailed press notifications and will be made available at the press conference. We thank and credit The Times-Picayune and Nola.Com for links to the City of New Orleans’ Law Department Inter-Office Memo on Compliance with the Public Records Act, as well as the interview with Mrs. Clarkson regarding her handling of public records:

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Council President Jackie Clarkson: a do-nothing and a hypocrite.

Booooo!

Watershed Moment?

Today, a full 41 organizations joined together to announce a call on civic and state leaders to transparently evaluate the competing hospital proposals in a public setting.

More specifically:

ORGANIZATIONS IN THE COALITION ARE CALLING FOR:

1. Governor Jindal to order an independent, comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the two hospital plans.

2. The City Planning Commission and the City Council to hold public hearings on these critical planning issues.

3. The City Planning Commission and the City Council to include the hospitals in the current master-planning process.

There is no reason not to rally around this effort. Whether you're pro-Charity, pro-LSU, or agnostic, everybody can agree that the time has come to honestly compare the plans side-by-side.

It was heartening to see a diverse group of community organizations come together for something constructive given the gridlock that has become characteristic of pretty much all other civic issues.

[These may take a few seconds to load for you. Also, I apologize for the imperfections; I only had a regular digital camera to work with, people.]

Check out Broadmoor's LaToya Cantrell:


Press Conference 3/25 from Eli Ackerman on Vimeo.


And Charles Allen from Holy Cross:


Press Conference 3/25 from Eli Ackerman on Vimeo.


Here's a list of those organizations and I know that more have joined on since:

●American Planning Association
●Broadmoor Improvement Association
●Charity Hospital School of Nursing Alumni Association
●Foundation for Historical Louisiana
●New Orleans Committee to Reopen Charity Hospital
●Coliseum Square Association
●Doctors for Charity Hospital
●National Trust for Historic Preservation
●Squandered Heritage
●Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association
●Smart Growth for Louisiana
●Preservation Resource Center
●Louisiana ACORN
●Faubourg St. John Neighborhood Association
●Louisiana Landmarks Society
●GNO Affordable Housing Action Center
●Holy Cross Neighborhood Association
●New Creation Christian Church
●Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation
●Lower Mid-City Residents and Business Owners Affected by the LSU/VA Hospitals
●The Renaissance Project
●Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents and Associates
●Southern Christian Leadership Conference Louisiana Women’s Division
●French Quarter Citizens, Inc.
●Lantern Light Inc.
●Irish Channel Neighborhood Association
●Louisiana Justice Institute
●Lafayette Square Association
●Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development
●Mid-City Neighborhood Organization
●New Orleans Pax Christi
●Partners for Livable Communities
●C3/Hands Off Iberville
●Phoenix of New Orleans
●Restaurant Opportunity Center of New Orleans
●Social Justice Committee of the First Unitarian Universalist Church
●The Townscape Institute
●The Urban Conservancy
●United Teachers of New Orleans
●Advocates for Environmental Human Rights
●Historic Faubourg Treme Association

Black, brown, and white. Uptown and downtown. Religious groups and neighborhood organizations. Professional associations and organized labor. Preservationists and activists.

It's all here.

One of the other speakers today was Dr. Sissy Sartor M.D, who also got a letter to the editor published in the Times-Picayune:

Re: "Unhealthy attitude infects LSU, " Other Opinions, March 20. Does LSU really care about returning health care to the New Orleans area? Unfortunately, I fear the answer may be no.

As James Gill so succinctly suggests, LSU officials have viewed the aftermath of Katrina as an opportunity to push forward their desire for domination in the local medical school internecine struggles. This desire seems to have suspended their good judgment in favor of propaganda and obfuscation.

At a health care forum in Jefferson Parish Wednesday night, Alan Levine, Secretary of Health and Hospitals said in surprised exasperation that we are no further along with this issue than three years ago.

Let me make a radical suggestion: Remove LSU from the management of the state charity hospital system and put it in the hands of a nonpartisan team.

We need a team that really cares about health care, not the money, not the power, but health care provision for those who so dearly need it.

Sissy Sartor, M.D.

New Orleans

Boom!

Now if we could just get our City Council and our CPC on board...

Remarkable Timing

Rough Monday for Ray Nagin. He could be held personally liable for his refusal to hand over his emails and calander to WWL per the public records request they made way back in December. He's going to look positively awful in the papers tomorrow, especially after last week's timid attempt to turn the transparency issue back on Council. I mean how do you spin away fro -- screeech!!!!

Stop the presses!

We have a late-breaking, tight-to-deadline press release from City Hall to pass along:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 9, 2009

CITY OF NEW ORLEANS FILES SUIT AGAINST CONTRACTORS

NEW ORLEANS, LA (March 9, 2009) - The City of New Orleans filed suit today in Civil District Court against six contractors who have failed to document they completed work for which they were paid with City funds.

The City's alleges in the petition for damages that the businesses were contracted for services on behalf of the city and that the contractors have failed to prove that the services were provided.

"As always, the City Attorney's Office is taking the appropriate steps to protect the City's legal interest," said City Attorney, Penya Moses-Fields.

According to the petition, the six contractors should repay the city a total of $217,887.25. The contractors and the amount for which each is being sued are:

Hall Enterprises -- $47,245

Parish Dubuclet -- $103,116.75

Doucette Associated Contractors -- $14,790

Matthew Developers -- $8,980

Joseph Jenkins Construction -- $12,085

Ex-Cel Development -- $31,670.50

The contractors were all hired by the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership to complete duties related to the city's housing remediation program following Hurricane Katrina. The contractors were hired to gut and board and cut the lawns at identified properties.



-END-

Oh looky looky. Turns out Mayor Nagin does hold people accountable! How you like dem apples, Zurik?

-

Let's be clear.

The NOAH program spent millions of dollars. The city has sued to recover just over $200,000. The claim is others were able to provide 'documentation.' However, as you might recall from this past summer, most surveyed homes were actually not remediated at all or were remediated by charity organizations or individual owners. The whole program was a giant funnel scheme. So with some exceptions, and it is important to recognize that some contractors did what they were supposed to do, most of the money spent at NOAH was pure waste. Plus the records kept on the city's end were so atrocious, I just don't see any real way to evaluate who did what and who got paid for what. That's why criminal investigations are ongoing.

So this move is pure optics. That is why you issue this press release at the end of the day. You want to get it into tomorrow's papers but you don't want to answer any detailed questions about how the city determined who owed what from a program that operated as a scam.

--

Take a minute to digest all of this.

We've just witnessed the Mayor voluntarily putting NOAH back into the news to deflect attention from his various other controversies.

He's in such bad shape that he's looking to NOAH for a lifeboat.

Wow.

Snowball

I'd love to put this Mayor Nagin interview side by side with some of the other he's given over the last few months.

So many contradictory statements, such denial. It's incredible. Another classic.




(Props to Fox 8 for making their video embeddable. More of our local stations should do this.)

The best part (if one can even choose) is toward the end when he discusses the crime camera investigation.

Kim Holden: Let's switch gears a little bit -

Ray Nagin: (interrupting): Really?

Holden: Another controversy involving the crime cameras -

Nagin: (agitated interruption): Controversy?

Holden: - That came up this week. The IG report blasting your office for basically failing to hold the contractors accountable for the work they did, way too much money being spent on this, and the fact that maintenance costs are going to be astronomical from this point on. At some point do you say let's just abandon this whole project?

Nagin: I wouldn't do that. I mean, you know, one of the things I want to remind the public is that this is something that we pioneered. This was a research and development kind of project that the city of New Orleans really hadn't done. And when you do research and development and you pioneer things, you know, you're going to have some issues. I want to tell you I was just in Washington and Mayor Daley came up to me and he said, "look, I like these crime cameras that you guys are doing in New Orleans. They're cheaper than hiring more police officers and we're going to do them in a big way in Chicago."

Now, have we had issues? Absolutely. It's been well documented. We started to look at it back in August and make some changes. The gentleman who was in running the department is no longer in charge of that, no longer in charge of contracting, and we're cleaning this up. We have had some issues and we are going to do better.

Jonathan Carter: Well right now there have been a reported three prosecutions coming off of the crime cameras. With a cost of $6.6 million, Raphael Goyaneche of the Metro Crime Commission, I mean, he said that's basically $2 million for a prosecution and... and... in his words, he says, "that's not much bang for your buck."

Nagin: Well, Raphael is not really a crime expert so, I mean, you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. I will tell you that three number I don't think is accurate. I know for a fact the US Attorney's office has used the crime cameras to solve cases. The Police Department has many more cases than three that they've used. Now, whether one case where you prevent a murder or you solve a murder is worth $6 million dollars, I mean, we're going to have that debate for a long time.

Holden: How do you feel about the US Attorney looking into this whole issue and the IG's report reviewing it -

Nagin: The IG? I mean, I'm happy to see that the IG has produced another report. It's the second one in eighteen months, so that's a good thing. The first one we thought was, um, not well written but this one is better. It confirms our forensic audit. As far as the US Attorney, I, I welcome it. We've always said if there's something wrong that we have done or one of our employees [has] done and if there's anything that crosses the line of the law, we were going to turn it over and that's what we're doing here; and we'll get to the bottom of it.

But, my read of this is that I'm not sure what criminal violations happened. But I'm not an attorney so we'll see.

Another interesting exchange came as Nagin tried to downplay the insufficiently nicknamed email controversy.

Carter: Do you have any plans to talk to Veronica White about what happened?

Nagin: Uh, I...I'm, that's... she reports to the Chief Administration Officer Dr. Brenda Hatfield. And I've asked Dr. Brenda Hatfield to look into this a little further and if there's any, you know, thing we need to do from a disciplinary standpoint, we will do that. . .

Very interesting defensive posture to take to a very basic, non confrontational question. He won't even discuss the matter with his own Sanitation Director. That's how isolated this guy is. He won't even directly "talk" to his own sanitation director, who controls one of the city's largest and most consequential service departments and who controls a budget of tens of millions of dollars. Is Brenda Hatfield the only person the Mayor talks to on his own staff?

Not one of the questions he was asked was particularly probing. They're all open-ended. They just ask "well what about this thing" and give him a platform to get out his message Imagine if a reporter actually pegged him with some tough questions that ask him about specific names and dates or specifically confront some of the bogus claims he makes.

For instance, he got angry during the interview when Holden asked him if it was "fishy" that all of council's emails had been leaked when he himself has been subject to a records lawsuit because his administration had refused to hand over his own emails before it was revealed that they had been deleted. He went on some long explanation about how the council and mayor's emails are stored on different servers (which doesn't really appear to be true) and how all of his emails are now available for public consumption (which almost certainly isn't true).

Overall, it's gotten to the point that even the mere suggestion that one of these issues be labeled a "controversy" is out of bounds.

And this is pretty much the only media outlet that Ray Nagin still talks to at this point.

--

At onset, I thought Nagin would be able to once again out maneuver Council in terms of political tactic but there are just too many 'fishy controversies' confronting his administration at the same time. It's really looking disorganized over there and there's too much bad press coming all at once. This Mayor was and is deeply unpopular. Council isn't fighting itself over the emails matter. He needed that in order to "win" on the transparency/emails kerfuffle and by proxy, obscure the crime camera disaster and now this new expenditure issue.

It's too much at once.

The Mayor is on very shaky ground right now. He might have been better off just staying in the bunker.

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?)

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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.

Cooler Heads Prevail

Fielkow makes the smart decision by choosing to back off the contract veto override vote. Council needs to find ways to compromise and it's not worth it to wedge coalitions on a purely symbolic vote when there is substantive progress to be made on other things, even on the issue of transparency in terms of a possible charter change amendment.

---

I noticed this bit within that article:

Carter said last week that he had received "hate e-mails" because of his failure to vote. He said he missed the vote because of a personal commitment.

For the record, here is the hateful email I sent to Councilman Carter, which was not returned:

Hello Councilman Carter,

My name is Eli Ackerman, I maintain the blog We Could Be Famous. I'm hearing from a lot of readers who are upset that you left today's rancorous Council mtg prematurely. (Especially since Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell stayed to engage in a discourse) Would you please explain why you decided to leave the meeting?

Thanks,

Eli

But then again, he's never returned any of my emails.

Transparency and efficiency are not mutually exclusive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Times-Picayune

WWL article, WWL TV report

WWL video of Nagin's closing remarks.

--

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

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

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

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

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

I'm done. I have implemented transparency.

Most transparent administration EVER!

Most of the Nagin administration's emails from 2008 have been deleted.

Conveniently, he's heading to Washington D.C. tomorrow.

This is one of the more outrageous things to come down the pipeline in some time.

---

More: WWLTV on the issue of public meetings.


Well someone's recovered those emails apparently.

Indeed indeed. Pay attention.

The relevant memo: html or pdf

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."

For fun?

Mayor Nagin has said that he does not believe additional oversight and accountability is a good thing. He believes it gets in the way of the recovery. Mayor Nagin's position is that New Orleans is amongst the most transparent in the nation as a result of the reforms he's made and therefore, he will not be championing anymore changes that would (further?) open the executive branch to public scrutiny.

Thus, though City Council unanimously approved an ordinance that requires the Mayor to hold in public all committee meetings that evaluate bids on legal, architectural, and engineering contracts, the Mayor has decided to veto the measure.

The following quotes come from this interview with Liz Reyes from the portion in which she asks about the open meetings/public records law at issue.

"Pure politics. Pure politics! That is the biggest misnomer out there. Go look at the records and you look at my administration. It is the most transparent it's ever been. Never before has there been the openness of contracting. Everything is done publicly."

"I think we're as transparent as just about anybody in the country and I challenge them to prove otherwise."

"We'll continue to work with them [Bureau of Governmental Research] to see if we can't get to a better place but that's for the next administration. I'm done. I have implemented transparency."

"There is nothing here of any substance. This is pure politics. Pure politics."

"There's nothing here. It's transparent already."

It would be one thing for the Mayor not to champion additional transparency measures. But to stand in the way of the consensus common-sense reforms passed unanimously by Council is beyond obstructionist.

He's blatantly playing politics because he knows and we all know that Council will soon vote to override the Mayor's veto.

He's openly and proudly standing in the way of recovery.

And since he's "done" opening government to public scrutiny. Perhaps he should resign his office. He seems to think that everything being done by Council represents political grandstanding for next year. He could make that transparent by leaving office now to move up that election timeline.

A Million Bucks for Public Records?

So over a year ago, the ACLU calls up Sheriff Marlin Gusman's office about conditions at OPP. Gusman thinks it over and figures there will be some expenses incurred by his office in the preparation of relevant documents. So he comes up with a number for the ACLU to compensate his office: $1.75 million.

One million seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. For copies of public documents.

That's an insult. Gusman should be ashamed.

Had the ACLU gotten the public documents on time, they might have been able to expose the poor conditions that perhaps contributed to some suspicious deaths of overnight inmates. Including someone close to many bloggers and friends of mine.

New Orleans recovery hurt by too much transparency, debate

Last night's VCPORA forum featured a panel of preservationists and the architects responsible for the alternative plan to build a new state-of-the-art hospital in the old Charity building. After the presentation, one belligerent mumbling guy got real upset because the speakers didn't present the LSU/VA side of the debate.

The response was that representatives of LSU/VA were invited to participate but declined.

That was in fact the case. WCBF has obtained a copy of the correspondence.

Dr. Larry Hollier, the Chancellor of LSU Health Services, responded to the VCPORA invitation quite curtly:

Thank you for your invitation. However, I do not see any value in prolonging this type of discourse. As you well know, the State has already made the decision to proceed with the process for building the new LSU/VA Hospital on the announced site and are in the process of property acquisition. Any further "debates" such as you propose are a severe disservice to the people of New Orleans and can only delay the development of the badly needed Academic Teaching Hospital.

Wow. Let's just break down Mr. Hollier's points.

1. Discourse = worthless
2. LSU/VA development = done deal
3. Public debate = "severe disservice to the people of New Orleans"

I forget why but I recently re-watched the angry press conference the Mayor held in order to yell at Lee Zurik and Karen Gadbois for "hurting the recovery of the city" as a result of their work on uncovering the NOAH scandal and the abuse of CDBG dollars from Washington. So it's interesting to see now that those asking for transparency and public debate are again perpetrating a "severe disservice" to our own neighbors about to lose their homes to the LSU bulldozer.

Pretty slimy...

Meg Lousteau of VCPORA spoke to Mr. Potato Head on WWL this afternoon. I called in and raised the point that it was unlikely that the Obama administration would make up for LSU's funding shortfall in an economic stimulus given that the option to rebuild Charity is cheaper and faster. It's interesting that even though the state has done everything within its power to bury the proposal to reinvent Charity, it is still closer to being "shovel-ready" than the state-backed LSU/VA redevelopment that had the benefit of everybody's undivided TLC since the day after Katrina hit. At this point, Spud made a bad joke ("haven't you ever heard the term brother-in-law?") insinuating that the cheaper faster less destructive more sustainable plan wasn't going to grease enough palms to get political support. What was weird about the joke was that whereas I see the potential for insider palm-greasing as being a great reason to try to fight the LSU/VA hospital, he seemed to be pretty resigned about that being the normal way to do business.

No, I don’t. Oh, God, I don’t laugh at any of this.

Make sure you read Kevin Allman interview with Inspector General Robert Cerasoli.

But I think some of the most interesting pieces were left for the internet (including the post title):

There are a lot of people that are engaged in the business community, there are a lot of non-profits that are engaged. But it’s not up to them; it’s up to the government. This attitude here, of putting everything into the hands of non-profits to do, instead of having the government do, has gotta end.

The government has to stand up for its responsibility. And that will initially, by the way, be counter-intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive. For us to go public and say, “We want to take all of the government and put it under the mayor and the council,” people might step back right now and say, “Oh, God, I don’t want to do that.” But in the future, you have to, because there’s no accountability here, there’s no “the buck stops here, it’s our responsibility, how come this isn’t being done?”

I agree. This city needs to expand the capacity of municipal government.

While that might be a difficult sell for a discredited administration like Ray Nagin's, it won't be so objectionable if it's proposed by a leader that can first prove that the government we do have is capable of functioning effectively and efficiently.

More Info From McBride and WWL, More Silence From Nagin and White

WWL did a report on the city's "audit" of our sanitation contracts. There's also video.

"A normal standard audit would be comparing the data the contractor gives you with reality," said Councilwoman Shelley Midura.

But the company hired to do the report for the Mayor's Office, Public Financial Management, says they're not doing an audit. In an e-mail to Councilwoman Stacy Head, PFM Consultant David Hoskins writes, "We want to emphasize the fact that the project is not an audit of the collection contracts. Our assignment has been to create a baseline assessment of the number of locations served by the three contractors."

---

In a statement e-mailed to us, the Mayor Nagin's Director of Communications Ceeon Quiett writes "the letter sent by PFM to the Councilmember, emphasizes and reiterates the testimony and comments made by the Sanitation Director and a PFM representative before council several weeks ago."

Yet, according to council minutes and video tape from an April 25 meeting, Sanitation Director Veronica White called the report an "audit."

Neither the Mayor nor Sanitation Director Veronica White will speak to the press or answer questions about any of this. Wouldn't that go a long way toward clearing this up, if it can be cleared up? The silence is deafening. For many, it is damning.

Matt McBride has done amazing research and has provided a lot of the raw information to us, which no surcharge on our monthly statements:

Dear New Orleanians,

As you now know, the Metro and Richard's trash collection contracts have been poorly administered by the city's Sanitation Department. It is possible millions of dollars have been wasted, and an upcoming report from the Nagin administration - touted as an "audit," will do nothing but cloud the issue by attempting to replace existing inadequate records with even more records of dubious value. You can find the previous piece in my series of missives about this here (thanks, Eli):

http://wecouldbefamous.blogspot.com/2008/12/mcbride-and-another-thing.html

I thought it would be best for the public to see the actual records from the trash companies which were contractually required; these records are supposed to be the basis for the monthly invoices and payments on the contracts.

In addition to locating the texts of the trash companies' contracts there, I have created two new folders at the following link:

http://www.box.net/shared/18s6vzjbao

One contains the original, raw address list files as the city council received them from the administration on November 14th. There are four files there: the May, 2007 and October, 2008 address lists from both Metro and Richard's. To reduce download times, I've also placed those files inside a ZIP file.

The other folder includes my annotated files. The annotated October, 2008 lists from both companies are there, as well as the annotated May, 2007 list from Metro. I've also placed those files inside a ZIP file. I ran out of steam and never got to the Richard's May, 2007 to clean it up. It was a lot of work to get these files in a shape to use for analysis. Note that I didn't destroy anything in this analysis, only added stuff. But when I found obvious errors and misspellings, I corrected them.

If you are interested in finding your address or any other address, I strongly encourage you to look at the annotated files, since the original files are not very well sorted (Metro much more so than Richard's). My files are sorted by street, direction, and then street number.

Metro's area covers roughly everything north of I-610, while Richard's covers roughly everything south of I-610 and Algiers (except the Quarter, whch is SDT's). The actual map can be found in the text of the contracts, which are also at the link above.

I've hidden some columns that I used for work purposes. The columns with numbers in them and with titles including "Duplicate" contain how many instances either a complete address (which includes an apartment number or letter) or a building (which excludes apartment numbers) occurs on the list. I used these to find duplicates. Also included - for the October, 2008 sheets - are columns showing the results of cross referencing the building addresses against various demolition-related lists.

I've left the Autofilter feature on to allow folks to easily drill down to particular results, address, or whatever they wish.

The "audit" is expected to be released on Friday.

Dismiss Veronica White Now

McBride: Trash Irregularities Abound

(I've added links to the photographs)

Matt McBride:

You are likely aware of the recent problems between the New Orleans City Council and the Sanitation Department. At the center of the dispute is an attempt to determine which houses are actually getting serviced by the city's three main garbage contractors, SDT, Metro, and Richards on a month by month basis.

A couple of weeks ago, the Sanitation Department handed over Microsoft Excel address lists from Richards and Metro to the City Council (no SDT information was submitted). Stacy Head's office compiled a memo summarizing preliminary findings after an examination of the data. It's attached, and it provides good baseline information like rates the companies charge and how many houses they were charging for at various times over the length of the contract.

I have also received the monthly house count spreadsheets for October, 2008 for both Richards and Metro, as well as the May, 2007 sheet for Metro. I spent a lot of time over the past few days cleaning the three sheets up, and then analyzing the results. They are very interesting...

Duplicates

While media accounts and and city officials have simply counted the number of rows on these sheets and considered that equal to the number of houses, I found that was false. In fact, there are thousands of duplicate addresses buried within these lists. This is found when one cleans up the addresses and sorts them properly.

The problems with duplicate addresses seem to be far more severe with the Metro contract than with the Richards one. I analyzed the lists to isolate unique addresses. Here's what I found;

Metro, May 2007, 40,110 rows, billed for 40,000, actually 38,835 unique addresses

Metro, October 2008, 45,626 rows, billed for 45,336, actually 43,592 unique addresses

Richards October 2008, 64,101 rows, billed for 63,000, actually 63,600 unique addresses (it appears they are underbilling the city, but read on...)

So if one just looks at the number of rows compared to the number of billings, it would appear the city is actually getting houses serviced free. However, when one takes into account the inflating effect of duplicate addresses on the spreadsheets, it appears the city is paying money they shouldn't.

In October, 2008, there were about 2500 duplicate addresses between the two companies, including some addresses which appeared four times. Here's the details:

Metro May 2007:

1265 duplicates (3.2% of unique addresses)

9 triplicate addresses

1 quadruplicate address (4319 Chartres, Apt B)

Metro October 2008:

2014 duplicates (4.6% of unique addresses)

18 triplicate addresses

2 quadruplicate addresses (4319 Chartres, Apt B, and 13411 Curran)

Richards October 2008:

484 duplicates (0.76% of unique addresses)

16 triplicate addresses

1 quadruplicate address (2723 Jackson)

As the City Council memo indicates, the billing rates for Metro are $18.15 a residence. Theoretically - if the city can find a way to recoup these funds - it appears the city paid an extra $23,000 in May, 2007 and an extra $36,500 in October, 2008 to Metro. Using an average of these two numbers ($29,750), that would mean an average estimated overbilling of $375,000 per year due to duplicate addresses on Metro's contract.

What is noteworthy regarding the Metro duplicates (besides the large amount of them), is that 665 addresses that only appeared once on the May, 2007 list then became duplicate addresses on the October, 2008 list. Additionally, all but six of the 1256 duplicates on the May 2007 remain as duplicates on the October 2008 list. The remaining 99 duplicates on the October 2008 list were brand new duplicates that month, when compared to the May 2007 list.

Since the city paid for 600 fewer unique addresses than Richards says they collected from in October, 2008, it seems that the problem of duplicates on the Richards contract did not affect payments. But there are other problems with the Richards contract, as detailed below.

Multiplexes

For multi-unit buildings with more than four units, the owner is required to contract with a private trash contractor rather than signing up for the city's service. Such places should not be showing up on the lists of residences serviced on these municipal contracts. But they are.

There's more of this irregularity on the Richards contract than on the Metro one, and it only appears to be a few instances. But they are obvious.

On Richards, I found the following more-than-four-unit properties getting billed in October, 2008:

418 Pelican (eight-plex)

1015 Washington (appears to be six-plex, and - oddly - owned by the same person as 418 Pelican, a William W. Benson)

3351 Kabel (what appears to be a commercial multiplex property)

3820 3rd (six-plex)

3214 Diana (nine-plex) - I've attached a picture of this place from Google StreetView with 7 Richards cans out front. If you go on Google Maps and search on this address, and then click the little guy to see it in StreetView, you'll see an 8th can against the building. All 9 units actually show up on the Richards list.

In total, there are 35 "buildings" on the Richards list apparently receiving five or more cans, though not all have five units or more like those examples above. Some are fourplexes with duplicate addresses in individual apartments. Others are legitimate, and are artifacts of odd address assignments by the city. For example, there are 16 cans shown as assigned to 1 St. John Court. But that's because all the houses in that Bayou St John cul-de-sac have the same number address, but use letters to distinguish themselves.

Temporary trailer parks

This was one of my oddest findings. I discovered that Richards is still billing for temporary trailer parks as recently as October, 2008. It is unclear if trailer parks were even allowed to receive city trash cans under the contract. However, that question seems moot, because Richards continues to bill for them on the October 2008 list, even though (I believe) all these parks were shut down months ago. The addresses are:

Trailer park at 1605 Horace and 3220 Lawrence (trailers are all gone) - Richards appears to have been double billing this place, since both addresses are at the same corner. Looking at this place on Google Maps StreetView shows it as an empty lot when the StreetView van went by (last summer I believe). I have attached a screenshot of this. In the lower right corner, you can see the even older overhead shot from Google Maps which shows the trailers when they were there.

Trailer park at 2379 Rousseau (picture attached of Richards cans in front of trailers - note Google StreetView van passed by in 2007, so this picture is a historic document - all the trailers are now gone)

Trailer park at 9018 Dixon (picture attached of Richards cans in front of trailers - note Google StreetView van passed by in 2007, so this picture is a historic document - all the trailers are now gone)

Demolished properties

In response to an order from a federal judge, on November 13th the city finally began issuing lists of properties it has demolished and for which it received FEMA reimbursements. The latest version of the list was issued on November 26th. It covers demolitions performed by the city's contractor, DRC, between December 2007 and November, 2008 and can be found here:

http://www.cityofno.com/Portals/ImminentHealthThreatDemolitionProperties/Resources/CompletedDemolitions11-25-08.pdf

This list is the most authoritative list of city-initiated demolitions, since it includes the actual date a house was demolished. I cross referenced this list against the Metro and Richards sheets for October, 2008. Here's what I found:

Metro: 67 properties with demolition dates between December 1, 2007 and October 31, 2008

Richards: 33 properties with demolition dates between December 1, 2007 and October 31, 2008

My research indicates that the rebuild rate on demolished lots is about 10 to 15 percent, meaning that the vast majority of these 100 lots are likely still empty, but the city is getting billed for trash collection at them.

I also cross referenced the Metro and Richards October 2008 lists against four other types of demolition-related lists:

a) Properties which have appeared on one of the 10 Imminent Danger of Collapse lists from September 15, 2007 until July 17, 2008. Imminent Danger of Collapse (IDC) properties are those targeted for demolition by the city because they are about to fall down, or have already fallen down.

b) Properties which have appeared on one of the 22 Imminent Health Threat lists issued by the city from March, 2007 until November 20, 2008. Imminent Health Threat (IHT) properties are those targeted by the city for demolition because they are ungutted, unsecured, have tall grass, or some combination of the three. They are not in as bad a shape as IDC properties, but they are extremely unlikely to be occupied and receiving trash service.

c) Properties which received demolition permits for anyone - private owners or the city's or Corps of Engineers' contractors - during the term of the contracts - from January 1, 2007 until October 31, 2008

d) Properties which received any demolition permits since Katrina.

Here are the results:

IDC properties

Metro - 11

Richards - 9

IHT properties:

Metro - 181

Richards - 90

Demo permits from 1/1/07 to 10/31/08:

Metro - 607; including 34 duplicates

Richards - 191; including 18 duplicates

Demo permits from 8/29/05 to 10/31/08:

Metro - 1284; including 85 duplicates

Richards - 365; including 29 duplicates

While appearance on the IDC or IHT lists, or even the existence of a demolition permit, does not necessarily guarantee that the property is gone, or unoccupied, or otherwise unsuitable for garbage collection, they are strong indicators of that unsuitability. When one adds in the estimated rebuild rate of 10-15% on demolished lots, it seems clear there seem to be very many questionable properties on both Richards' and Metro's address lists.

Conclusion

There are many irregularities in the Richards and Metro address lists provided to the City Council. While at first blush it would appear that both firms are actually underbilling the city, it would appear Metro is definitely overbilling, and Richards is borderline.

Among the irregularities are:

- thousands of duplicate addresses being counted in the billing totals,

- billing the city for apartment buildings with more than four units, commercial buildings, and non-existent trailers (even double billing a trailer park in one case)

- billing the city for properties that have been demolished, targeted for demolition by the city, determined by the city to be in imminent danger of collapse, or which have had demolition permits granted to them.

With this many irregularities, it seems the skepticism some have expressed over the contracts' cost effectiveness is justified.

Best regards,

Matt McBride

Here is a link to the helpful preliminary report from Stacy Head's office.

Is a real municipal department of sanitation out of the question? Why doesn't the city own trucks or employ a workforce? It doesn't really seem like it's been particularly cost effective to go the selfish contractor route.

Certainly one place to make a change is at the top.

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.

-

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.

Suspicious Omission

As my regular readers are already familiar, I have spent a lot of time discussing the Recovery School District and the future of public schools in New Orleans. My research often extends beyond the online world in this regard to include some original reporting.

I originally became concerned as a result of the lack of oversight of Superintendent Paul Vallas' spending habits, a risk I saw as too great to ignore, given his mixed track record in Philadelphia.

As I learned more about how the RSD was operating, I became increasingly curious about the ten year master plan currently in the works. It is absolutely clear to me that this facilities master plan represents the most important and far-reaching initiative for which the RSD is responsible. I grew worried about the implications of the facilities master plan. Would the RSD be contracting the capacity of the school district in a way that reduces the ability of viable neighborhoods to rebound?

When it was clear that the firm hired by the RSD to develop the master plan, Parsons, was the same which had also come under investigation for fraud in Iraq, I felt certain that further research was necessary. When it was brought to my attention that Steven Bingler, the president of Concordia, the local firm partnering with Parsons, was also the brother-in-law of the CEO of of the influential New Schools for New Orleans, I became even more convinced that an inquiry was in order.

I began making public records requests of the RSD at the beginning of March. Formal requests are legally required to be honored within 5 business days but as evidenced by multiple Times-Picayune lawsuits filed against the city, requests often go unfulfilled. The first request I made from the RSD was the master plan request for proposal. I received it very quickly. Next, I began asking for some of the deliverables required of the RFP, including the demographic projection data informing the process and the preliminary engineering reports evaluating each school. I also asked for the proposal put forth by the winning firm, Parsons/Concordia.

Fourteen days later I had heard nothing and began hounding. Fourteen days beyond that, I received some of the information I had requested and was told that my requests vis-a-vis the Parsons proposal were vague.

I agreed to resubmit a clearer request and did so that day, April 11th. I expanded my inquiry this time, asking to see not only the proposal submitted by the winning firm Parsons/Concordia but the contract the RSD eventually signed with them as well as all other bids that were ultimately passed over. I was in Philadelphia at the time and was quickly assurred by RSD officials that the information I requested had been set aside and would be available for my viewing upon my return. When on May 7th, I attempted to arrange an appointment to see the records I had requested, things became extremely frustrating.

I was told that the documents would be mailed to New Orleans from Baton Rouge. Six days later I was told that my New Orleans contact had received an incomplete fax and that completed documents would be hand delivered. On May 15th, I was told that the documents I'd requested would be overnighted from Baton Rouge. On May 19th, I was told that no package had been received and that RSD lawyers were working on attaining the documents I'd requested. I asked for an explanation more than once over the next several days and was finally assurred on May 28th by an RSD lawyer that my request was being worked on in earnest. I was also told that it was unclear whether or not original documents could legally leave the Baton Rouge office but that duplicates may already be available in New Orleans. This frustrated me because I had just been stalled out for weeks with promises of packages that were never sent and never needed to be because the materials were already available. After expressing my anger, I relented after being provided a short term timeline within which my request would be completely honored.

Finally, on June 13th, I was faxed the contract signed with Parsons/Concordia and assured that the proposal documents were available on Poland Ave for my viewing pleasure.

I went to see them on Tuesday, June 17th.

A receptionist came out with six binders representing the six bid proposals and was told I could not leave the premises with them. Thus, I sat there in the reception room balancing these six binders on my lap.

I kind of felt stupid looking at these things. I'm just not qualified to evaluate which firm had the best proposal or even what kinds of master planning methodologies were preferable.

But I'm not stupid. I know what a table of contents is and I know how to use it.

I also know how to count.

One thing I decided to look at was the "price proposal" page for each of the bids. This seemed like a logical place to start my uninformed, cursory evaluation of the binders in my lap.

Thus, I dutifully turned to those pages in each of the proposals and noted the number.

The last one I looked at was the prosal submitted by Parsons/Concordia. It said in the table of contents that I would find their estimate on page 120.

There was no page 120. It had been removed or omitted.

It was the only proposal that did not include this information.

That struck me as extremely suspicious.

I just sent an email to various RSD officials that have routinely been forwarded my requests over the course of this process requesting immediate clarification. I will update you if I hear from anyone.

I feel obliged to publish my experiences with this situation immediately. I can't admit to being an expert on the legal ramifcations of this, if there are any. I do not feel qualified to make any concrete allegations or attempt any explanation.

That the release of the master plan has been delayed until August as a result of Mr. Pastorek's rejection of an initial draft underscores the need for immediate transparency and clarification.

UPDATE:

I am in discussions with the RSD and I am hopeful that the case of the missing page can be resolved. I will keep you posted.

UPDATE II:

I have just received a scanned copy of the missing page. In the fax I'd received last week, the RSD included the Parsons+Concordia price proposal with the detailed pricing information redacted, per their request regarding trade secrets. However, there was no way to authenticate that this was taken from the proposal because of missing a page number and an indistinguishable template. The rationale I received for why the page was removed from the original copy was that it was impossible to redact without defacement.