Shadow government

Yeah but enough about FNBC for now.

This week, a City Council committee will review candidates for appointment to Sewerage and Water Board. There are 15 nominees to fill 7 open seats in accordance with reforms passed by the legislature last year. The new law is complicated. It requires at least one seat be filled by a civil engineer. Two board members have to be "consumer advocates" whatever that means.

Mainly, though, the ostensible purpose of the reform law was to make the board more politically accountable. It's not clear it actually accomplishes this.  It does assign a city councilmember one seat which is fine. It also sets up this review process for whatever that's worth. But the key to all of it is the selection of the nominees. And look who has control over that.

The selection committee comprises the leaders of New Orleans’ seven universities and colleges, or their designees, and representatives of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, the New Orleans Regional Black Chamber of Commerce and the Urban League of Greater New Orleans.

The mayor cannot reject the selection committee’s nominations, but the City Council can vote any of them down.

Nobody elects these people. It's all professional fundraisers and networkers among the business elites. They do not, in even the slightest way, represent the interests of the poor and working classes who comprise the great majority population of the city.  It's no surprise, then, that the names produced by this process are pulled from GNO Inc., The New Orleans Business Alliance, BGR, and others among the usual suspects in finance and real estate.

There's also the case of the civil engineer, supposedly a good-government effort at providing professional guidance. That doesn't appear to be his primary qualification, though, as McBride points out here.

Note that while Mr. Pilie appears to have been an engineer a while back (his professional engineering license is shown as being granted in 1978 but now expired on the LAPELS website), he is an active member of the Louisiana Bar (admitted 1982), practicing as the leader of a team of environmental lawyers at Adams and Reese, where he has been since 1984 and is currently a partner.

His webpage at Adams and Reese says he leads a team "in all of the firm's legal representation of a major oil producer." Based on filings online, that producer appears to be ExxonMobil, with Pilie representing them as far back as 1991 when it was just Mobil. His Adams and Reese bio also says he "coordinates a large oil company’s docket of litigation relating to naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM)." Based on publicly available court records, he has been defending ExxonMobil in class action cases by filed by workers who cleaned Exxon pipes for a contractor in Harvey, LA in the 1980's and got exposed to the radioactive materials in dust form.

So on Tuesday, city councilmembers will get to review these nominees.  But the table has already been set for them by people who are responsible only to money.