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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Don't taze me, Stacy

Stacy Head:
"If I had a Taser, a ticket book, and a bulldozer, I know I could solve most of my problems in District B, and I don't have any of them."


Head is, of course, employing hyperbole here to express just how gung-ho she is about improving the city's responsiveness with regard to code enforcement.

Since Hurricane Katrina, few departments at New Orleans City Hall have been busier than Code Enforcement, which inspects blighted properties, and Safety and Permits, which authorizes construction projects and enforces zoning rules. So City Council members on Monday wanted to know why a single administrator has been overseeing both offices since last summer and why that official, Pura Bascos, couldn't answer questions posed six weeks ago about city demolition programs.


Doing "more with less" has long been this administration's battle cry so it's difficult to see why anyone would be surprised that these departments have been de-facto combined.

Anyway during a time when New Orleans residents are living in fear of a brutal untrusted police department, are nickeled and dimed by draconian parking enforcement policy, are seeing their credit ratings held hostage by a hated traffic camera shakedown scheme, and are, 7 years after the flood, still being victimized by an abandon-and-demolish hazard mitigation edifice, it's telling that Ms. Head states outright her enthusiasm for governing via torture device, petty citation, and demolition implement.

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