"Fresh start"

I never picked a side in the race to select the next Inspector General. I did offer several times to do the job myself but I am afraid my salary demands may have been a bit too high.

I do find it interesting,  however, that the board chose the candidate who does NOT have a history of siding with the independent police monitor,  who does NOT have a record of asking troublesome questions of even his superiors and who admits that, as a newcomer to the city, he will have to undergo a "learning curve" with regard to the local political landscape. But they say having a "fresh start" is important to them so I guess this will do that.

“I think given where we are coming from, we need a fresh start,” said Elizabeth Livingston de Calderon. The office has “an opportunity for changeover, and I would like to see that happen for us here.”

Harper acknowledged that he faces a “learning curve,” being an outsider in an often insular city, but he pledged to work with members of the community to produce results.

“My prime directive is, I can’t do this alone,” he said. “It’s to identify problems and fix them. It’s to restore, and to earn the trust and respect of this community, and make a difference.”

LOL "prime directive." Ok, nerd. Also looking to "restore and earn trust" is the Ethics Review Board itself. They can't wait to get a fresh start with the new guy seeing as how the old one was really starting to nag some of them.

Separately Wednesday, the Ethics Review Board took pains to cast itself as above reproach, in light of claims from Quatrevaux this past week that Miller, a lawyer who is the board’s chairman, had improperly represented the Sewerage & Water Board, an agency the IG’s office oversees, while serving on the ethics panel. Miller was critical of a report Quatrevaux released this year strongly attacking the S&WB.

Miller chairs a board that oversees the IG who oversees a different public board who happens to be his client. There's a hell of an ethicsy problem for our new guy to chew on.  I hope that leaning curve isn't too much for him.

Paranoia

Who watches the watchers of the watchers and why?

Adding to the palace intrigue already engulfing his office, retiring New Orleans Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux on Monday fired a top deputy who authored a report that said the office was plagued with the same kind of corruption it was created to root out.

Quatrevaux called the report by Howard Schwartz biased and aimed at impugning a potential rival of Schwartz's. The IG terminated Schwartz, the assistant IG for investigations, just days before he was due to take over the office on an interim basis.

However, Schwartz's firing won't change that, according to Ethics Review Board Chairman Allen Miller, who earlier this month tapped Schwartz to replace Quatrevaux temporarily when the inspector general retires on Thursday.

Schwartz is also a candidate to succeed Quatrevaux permanently, a decision that will be made by the Ethics Review Board, which oversees the inspector general's work.

Or to put it another way, anybody who tells your they're just here to get the politics out of politics is probably also politically motivated. Why do we even have an IG's office other than for the purpose of keeping up appearances?

Worst ever

I like to take a lot of what comes out of the New Orleans Inspector General's office with a grain of salt. After all, it's as much a political instrument as any of the public bodies it reports on.  That doesn't necessarily mean what it produces is worthless. Only that a lot of it isn't always what it might seem.  Anyway, the language Quatreveaux uses here is certainly attention grabbing.

New Orleans Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux ratcheted up his criticism of the Sewerage & Water Board on Friday, calling it "the worst government entity I have encountered in 40 years as a government manager."

Quatrevaux previously had issued numerous reports critical of the board's business practices and has called for it to be folded into city government rather than remaining a quasi-independent agency.

I mentioned  Quatrevaux's S&WB concerns last week here. There are many. You can read his summarizing letter to the mayor here.

Meanwhile, David Hammer has started looking into some long-running issues with the state of those infamous power turbines.

On Aug. 16, WWL-TV asked Landrieu, who is also  the president of the Sewerage & Water Board, why the Turbine No. 4 repairs have taken so long.

“That particular (turbine) had to be completely refurbished, not just fixed. And it was in the process of getting fixed,” he said. “It was supposed to be finished in December. So, one of the things we did was ask them to work really hard and move it up to six weeks. It’s not like you can just snap your fingers and move it up three years.”

But the project was never supposed to take more than a year in the first place.

So what I've been given to understand about how this stuff works is when the contractor makes a decision to "refurbish" rather than "replace" a specific part, that changes and extends the contract. This turbine is a very old piece of equipment with lots of specialized and/or obsolete components so there are plenty of opportunities to make that sort of decision. Sooner or later we're talking about a lot more money and time than was probably necessary in the first place. So long as it gets spread around to right people and nobody gets hurt, it's all "honest graft."  Unfortunately, as it turns out, it's kind of important that this particular piece of equipment gets fixed on time and correctly so......

This is why I was always wondered if we should even have an IG's office

Eventually it just ends up eating itself.

A top official at the city agency tasked with ferreting out corruption in local government in New Orleans is herself facing allegations of misconduct, leveled in a scathing internal report.

The document accuses Assistant Inspector General Nadiene Van Dyke of steering contracts to friends, altering the findings of reports to fit “her personal agendas,” suggesting that receipts be falsified and running off employees who raised questions about her behavior.

The allegations against Van Dyke, who heads the agency’s Inspections and Evaluations Division, echo the kinds of charges the Office of Inspector General regularly levels against other city agencies.

At the end of the day, the office that is supposed to ferret out all the political corruption, is itself just another political office used for political.. and sometimes corrupt political.. purposes. 

Much of the report focuses on Van Dyke’s relationship with Paula Pendarvis, a media consultant hired by the office who is a personal friend of Van Dyke’s. The contracts given to Pendarvis in recent years add up to about $178,400 since 2014, some of which the report argues amount to duplicative services. Contractors working for Pendarvis received another $100,000.

Tim Meche, an attorney for Pendarvis, said his client had not seen the report and denied that she had ever been paid twice for the same work and said there was no case in which she was paid for work she didn't do.

According to the report, Van Dyke set up some of those contracts as cooperative endeavor agreements rather than putting them out to bid so that the contracts could be given to Pendarvis. The report says Van Dyke told an OIG employee who has since left the office, “Paula’s my good friend, we go out to dinner all the time, she does great work, and I’m going to give her a contract.”

And maybe that's kind of petty but that's also kind of the point. At its best, the IG's office discourages ethically questionable favoritism that sometimes may or may not lead to inefficient service delivery in government. In this case, though, we find it's actually participating in that.

At its worst, it inhibits oversight of police abuse.

The internal report also includes allegations from several current and former employees that Van Dyke treated minorities in the office in a demeaning manner. And it recounts clashes — some with racial overtones — between Van Dyke and Independent Police Monitor Susan Hutson, suggesting those conflicts planted the seeds for the feud that ultimately led to the splitting of the two offices.

So we have to ask, again, what is this office for, exactly?

Rigging the election guide: Part One

Y'all, I've got soooo much to say about the Senate race that I sincerely hope I get to before tomorrow. But this is Revenge On 2016 Week and, well, I have been watching a lot of sports and drinking a lot of beer and stuff.  Yesterday, I watched the Saints get back to .500 over at Varg's gallery.  After that we hit the GBV show at Republic.



Because we were mushed so close to the stage, a person we made friends with snagged the setlist.



So there's a lot going on.  All I can do is promise to try.

But there's more than just that Senate race on your ballot. And, even if you live in Jefferson Parish, it turns out you have to wait in line to vote just like everybody else. So it's a good idea to go in prepared. I expect everyone knows what they're going to do about the Presidential race by now. Besides we already know that Trump has a lock on Louisiana and that Clinton has a lock on the election overall so I won't bother with that.

Instead, let's take this time to look at some of the down-ballot questions. In Orleans Parish, this means a charter change affecting the Inspector General's office. And statewide, there is a slate of six constitutional amendments to consider.  Stuff like this is often the least sexy and most time consuming part of the ballot if you haven't been following along.  Luckily there's a wealth of information out there to help you study up real quicklike.  Here are some essential links.

The non-partisan Public Affairs Research Council puts out an excellent guide to the constitutional amendments including detailed arguments for or against each of them.

The Louisiana League of Women Voters guide also provides its own analysis of all the ballot items as well as candidates' answers to a questionnaire.  Not all of the candidates send in responses, unfortunately. But it's still a good look the candidates and issues.

Here is NOLA.com's hub for everything it has run on the candidates and issues this year.

And here is The Advocate's version.

And, of course, not to be missed is Anitgravity's  "NEW ORLEANS HARM REDUCTION NETWORK PRESENTS: ANTI-OPPRESSION/ ANTI-BS VOTING GUIDE" which is certainly a mouthful to say but absolutely essential reading. If you do not like B.S., oppression, or harm, (and who does?) this is the guide for you.

Anyway so here's what you're voting on.

The charter change divorces the Independent Police Monitor from the Inspector General's office. This is a settlement between IPM Susan Hutson and the IG Ed Quatreveaux worked out primarily by City Councilman Jared Brossett last year after Quatreveaux tried to have her fired. The disputes are over budgetary and bureaucratic territory mostly. But there is also, at least, the appearance that Quatreveaux placed his thumb on the scale on behalf of NOPD a few times and thus directly interfered with the IPM's mission.

The gist of this is the IPM can likely operate more freely without Quatreveaux  involving himself. Besides, everyone involved wants this split to happen and there's no compelling reason to vote against it.

As to the constitutional amendments, those are actually easy this time.  Just go ahead and vote against all of them.  You can follow the links above if you want a more in-depth argument, but here's one or two lines on each.

C.A. 1 adds mandatory educational or experiential requirements for parish Registrars of Voters. Its effect, especially in rural parishes, could complicate the process of hiring competent people to fill these offices.  It's also just plain not necessary.

C.A. 2 allows college and universities boards to hike tuition at their discretion without legislative oversight which they quite clearly will do. It will make higher education less affordable and less equitably accessible.  Naturally a whole mess of wealthy conservative donors and PACs are all for it. 

About $100,000 of the pro-tuition change PAC's contributions came from the Louisiana Flagship Coalition, a nonprofit set up in 2010 to support LSU and push for Louisiana's most prominent university to have autonomy from the state Legislature.

The flagship coalition is run by Reilly and Grigsby and has Flores and Bollinger on the board. Roy O. Martin -- a current member of the state Board of Regents -- is also involved with the group, according to the organization's tax forms filed in 2014.

Flores, head of Freeport-McMoRan, Inc.'s oil and gas division, also put up $100,000 of his personal money to push Amendment 2 on the Louisiana ballot, even though he lives in Texas. Reilly donated $67,550 worth of free advertising on digital billboards his company owns throughout the state. Bollinger Shipyards contributed an additional $5,000.

Other notable contributions included $5,000 from the University of New Orleans Foundation and $10,000 from Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane's, according to campaign finance forms filed with the Louisiana Ethics Administration.

Three of the four men leading this effort are also some of the largest contributors to conservative causes and Republican candidates in Louisiana.

C.A. 3 is the result of a compromise stumbled into during the legislative session. What was originally an effort to raise revenue by eliminating the federal deduction on state corporate taxes was knocked back to a theoretically "revenue neutral" measure that exchanges that deduction for a flatter set of corporate tax brackets.  Actually this is hard to pin down but proponents still insist this is a net gain fiscally.  I am skeptical.  I do think doing away with the deduction is a good idea.  I'd prefer not to couple that with a corporate tax break, though.

C.A. 4 is kind of a "Blue Lives Matter" but for property taxes bill.  It offers a tax exemption for spouses of police or fire or military service personnel killed in the line of duty. It sounds nice and patriotic as well as charitable but it's a strange and improper use of tax policy.  Here, also, is a bit from the Antigravity commentary on this amendment with which I concur.

Where are the bills that protect, honor, and advantage the protesters who were attacked by police and National Guard in Baton Rouge this summer? Where’s the ad valorem property tax exemption for the family of Alton Sterling (may he rest in peace)? We need better ways to support our heroes.

C.A. 5 is compelling in principle.  It proposed to create a "revenue stabilization trust fund" which would mitigate the fluctuating revenue effects of Louisiana's fossil fuels based "boom and bust" cycle. We've actually written about this quite a bit.  But I'm not convinced this plan actually accomplishes what is says it does.

C.A. 6 is problematic because it would undo the specific will of the voters in myriad circumstances under which they have approved dedicated funds for various purposes. It also encourages legislators to act lazily and irresponsibly during the budget process which is something they need little more of.

In Orleans, there are also a handful of neighborhood improvement and/or security district parcel fees. Those are always bad news. If you see one on your ballot, vote against it.

So there's your cheat sheet to the boring stuff. Yes on the charter change. No on everything else. That should rig things up nicely.

Now.. about that Senate race....

Later tonight. I'll try.

I hate hate hate The Lens's comment gateway

I don't want to "sign in" just to leave a damn comment so I'll just post my question here. It's less likely to be answered but maybe somebody can help me with this.

The Lens story is about a development in the slow boiling turf battle between the city Inspector General's Office and the Independent Police Monitor.  You should go read through that and  some of the background it links to if you're not familiar. This is going to be a bigger political issue than it seems right now.

Anyway, here's my question regarding this specific article.

In what regard is this disqualifying factor for picking a professional services vendor,

Wisdom also said her office objected to Hutson’s preferred vendor, the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, because Hutson had been consulting with the group about how such a review should be conducted.

 Different from this qualification for the one the IG chose? 

She added that PARC is the best qualified contractor for the job because of its knowledge of the city — in 2007, the City Council hired the group to help draft the ordinance establishing the Office of the Independent Police Monitor.