What's in it for her?

Does anyone else find it strange that the mayor of a city purporting to face a budget crisis would go so far out of her way to sabotage a solid source of future revenue already blessed by a court ruling and careful negotiations with high profile concerned parties? It seems strange to me. But here we are. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell on Monday vetoed $20 million New Orleans had promised for renovations to Charity Hospital, deepening a feud over the city's right to proceeds from a donated swath of oil-rich Louisiana coastline.

The city's $20 million pledge to Tulane University, which plans to turn the long-vacant Depression-era hospital into a new research center, emerged from negotiations over who should receive proceeds from the 38,000-acre plot around Port Fourchon, which is owned by the Wisner Trust. Tulane is one of several legacy recipients of money generated by that land.

Up until this point, the mayor's (illegal, according to the judge) extension of the Wisner Trust granted her wide discretion over the funds to distribute as personal political patronage, even if it deprived the city of a larger pot of revenue overall.  While that's not an ideal situation, it's not hard to understand her motivation to maintain control over the money. But Cantrell won't be the mayor much longer so it's not clear why it matters to her that the office she is vacating maintain control over the smaller pot of money going forward.  

What piece of this story are we missing?  

 

Gangster state

David Dayen writes here that the tariffs are really sanctions, in once sense against the entire rest of the world, but most critically against every business and ngo in the country. And, in that way also, they are a demand for ransom. 

I’ve really only seen Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) understand this, that this is just a loyalty test for virtually every business in the nation, a universal attempt to gather protection money. It’s no different than using the leverage of government funding to force universities and law firms into submission. These economic sanctions force businesses to supplicate. “One by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief,” Murphy writes. That’s correct, and it could come in the form of campaign support, corporate governance changes, or just raw cash. Anything is possible.

So this policy is an open invitation for corruption, yes. Where you sit in relationship to Trump, what donations you gave and what endorsements you’ve made, will dictate your level of success. America is now a country where proximity to the king matters above any other business strategy. As Tim Wu writes, companies so dependent on government treatment don’t innovate because they don’t have to. Their government relations departments rise well beyond their research and development departments. And as there are only so many favors to dish out, they trend the country toward oligarchy.

Not too different from the crude demand for patronage you find in any given local municipal budget dispute, really.

Similarly, the tariff gambit can be seen as a version of what Republicans have been doing in red states (and repeatedly in Louisiana) where they try to raise sales taxes in order to "pay for" big cuts to (or outright elimination of) progressive income taxes.  And, you know, sometimes, if the person running that scam is particularly clumsy about it, they might fail... at first.  

But the beauty of being the party that holds all the power is you can always try again. 

Louisiana legislators might put portions of a constitutional amendment overhauling state budget and tax policies back on the ballot, even after voters overwhelmingly rejected the wide-ranging proposal in Saturday’s election. 

On Monday, Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro, said she was already working on drafts of new constitutional amendments that would make some of the same budget and tax changes in the failed Amendment 2 from Saturday. 

“I think you will definitely see some of this reborn in the session,” Emerson said in an interview, later adding, “I think it is just how we package it, and how many instruments we have with it.”

And if you follow the Trump plan for this, you try again while applying pressure. 

Gov. Jeff Landry has enacted a hiring freeze for the executive branch of state government in an effort to save $20 million ahead of a projected state budget shortfall. 

The governor signed an executive order Wednesday that pauses hiring for state government departments and agencies under the governor’s control. The order does not apply to Louisiana’s judicial or legislative branches, according to Landry’s press secretary Elizabeth Crochet.

“To ensure the long-term fiscal health of Louisiana and protect essential services for our most vulnerable citizens, we must take decisive action now to address revenue shortfalls,” Landry said in a written statement. “By implementing a temporary hiring freeze, we will reign in spending, saving an annualized $20 million. This is a necessary step to give the Legislature more options, to prevent deeper cuts to health care and education, and to safeguard the future of our state.”

Somebody should really do something

Does Troy Carter know what that is?  Doesn't seem like it. 

Attendees told Carter that they felt helpless, confused and worried about the federal government’s actions. In response, Carter told the concerned residents to take to social media and to call elected officials in Louisiana and other states to express their dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders in Congress.

One attendee, Andrew Cosgrove, asked Carter how to increase political engagement among residents. Carter’s response — encouraging voting and organizing among church groups and on social media — did little to satisfy Cosgrove or other attendees who spoke with Verite News.  

“It seemed like he had no plan and no answers,” Cosgrove told Verite News after the town hall. “He’s saying, ‘Make sure you vote next time,’ but he’s talking to a room of folks who voted and then took time out of their night to go to a town hall meeting, so that didn’t make any sense to me.”

You see, Troy is simply the elected representative to the US Congress.  He's not really there to do anything difficult.  It falls to you, then, to exercise your much greater power to... vote sometimes and also do posts.  Whatever you do, don't yell at him about it.  Remember, he just wants all this stuff off of his desk. 

This might be interesting if it wasn't so predictable. I think I'm just getting old now but I do get tired of watching a cycle stuck on repeat. I used to wonder if the latest turn of the ratchet would be the one the finally breaks it. But I don't know if I still think that can ever really happen. The Democrats, in the main, seem ready to make their same familiar move: not so much opposing the radical right as figuring out how to benefit from its ascendance.

Here is a recent interview with Minnesota Governor (and 2024 VP candidate) Tim Walz where he looks forward to Trump's unilateral and illegal shuttering of federal agencies as a new "opportunity."

How much can Democrats can rebuild, of what Trump is un-building right now? We’ve seen cases where employees are laid off, a court orders them back, but they’re still laid off. Do Democrats run in 2028 on re-establishing it?

I use the analogy of the car running out of gas. Car runs out of gas, you go get a can, you pour some in, you start it up, and it’s all fine. This is the car running out of oil, and it’s broken. And what I’m saying is, he is breaking it. This is a little bit in the Ezra Klein space: Democrats need to acknowledge that not all these agencies work perfectly. All of us who teach would agree to that. You know, we say how important the Department of Education is, how it does incredible work, but we would all argue there’s ways they could be better.

I think we need to start messaging right now. We need to put our experts on this. How will we build back next time? I think it’s an opportunity. I think it’s an opportunity to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place, functioning better, without all the barnacles. So, Trump might be doing us a favor. He stripped it down, he blew the motor up. We’re going to put a new motor in it and take off. And I think that’s how we have to start thinking about it.

He's just articulating the thing we've known for a while. Democrats actually agree with Republican austerity policy. They, too, want to dismantle what's left of the welfare state. But they don't want to be the party seen as responsible for that happening. And, of course, they want to make sure they're in position to grab whatever coins they can that spill from the smashed pinata. 

None of this is new. It's just worse now than ever because, well, that's what happens when rot runs unchecked for so long. What is DOGE, after all, besides just the latest and most extreme form of neoliberalism. 

One important reason for the trend toward privatization is the long-standing, bipartisan belief in Washington that private-sector contractors are inherently more efficient than government employees. The Reagan administration embraced contracting with open arms, despite early warning signs, and eventually initiated a formal commission on privatization. This was followed up by the “National Partnership for Reinventing Government,” through which President Bill Clinton promised that he would “make our Government work better” with the help of the business world. This private-sector fetish remains strong within the Trump administration, which has encouraged government workers “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

Despite how widespread this perception of contractor efficiency is among policymakers, there has never been much strong evidence for it. In 1994, a Defense Department inspector general report noted that “Federal agencies often contract for services at a cost that is 25 percent to 40 percent greater than if Federal employees had been used to perform the services.” A 2011 report by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight found that private contractors are often greatly overpaid in comparison to government workers. And in the situations where waste and abuse is identified in government programs, for-profit contractors are often the culprits.

We've been on this long path to destruction for a generation or so.  Politicians at every level of government and in both parties have specialized in smash and grab for longer than most of us have been eligible to vote for or against any of them.  Why are things so shitty? Because the entire era in which we've been alive has been about making things shittier and shittier for the sake of concentrating wealth in fewer hands. The thing that has been happening is still happening. It's happening in your city on a routine basis. 

Under the auspices of his charitable group, the Wisdom Foundation, and a newly created for-profit company called Civilized.ai, Wisdom and his team had been working for months with the city to integrate “newer technologies” with the city’s infrastructure. To do that, he planned to work with the city’s existing database of 311 requests. 

In late 2023, he rolled out FixNOLA, a website that catalogues and gamifies the city’s 311 data regarding road and drainage issues, creating a leaderboard to keep track of top “fixers,” a mix of contractors and volunteers who provide photographs and updates to existing 311 requests. Then, in February of this year, Wisdom launched ChatNOLA, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that can help log 311 requests as well as provide updates on already submitted requests while communicating in a human-like manner.

Behind the scenes, Wisdom and his nonprofit have rankled some city staffers, who noted that Wisdom is doing this work without a formal agreement with the city government. They are also concerned about whether Wisdom’s team is getting access to the personal information, such as phone numbers and home addresses, that residents enter into the city’s 311 system when they make a complaint. 

Five city employees familiar with 311 systems and protocols told Verite News that they are concerned that Wisdom, who has no background in public service administration, is creating a parallel 311 system when the city is in the process of implementing an already purchased new system for processing 311 data. (The employees declined to be identified publicly for fear of retaliation.)

The city already publishes 311 complaints on a public-facing database. But it scrubs the data of personal information, such as the complainants’ names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

Neither the Wisdom Foundation nor Civilized.ai has any contract or agreement with the city outlining the terms of this work or setting limits on how it can use the personal data it collects.

You can see the continuance of this in evidence as the field of candidates for this year's municipal elections begins to take shape.  A group of donors, politicos, and other local heavy hitters is hoping to influence the campaign by publishing its own Project 2025 document of sorts.

The recommendations from the City Services Coalition, which was formed in 2024 by real estate developer Pres Kabacoff, attorney David Marcello and others, focus on streamlining the structure and management of city government.

They include a proposed overhaul of the Sewerage & Water Board, empowering the mayor’s top deputy to manage day-to-day city operations, reforming the civil service system and clarifying the role of the city attorney.

The effort comes seven months before voters head to the polls to decide who will represent them on the City Council and who will succeed Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who is term-limited and unable to seek re-election. 

The coalition, which released the 216-page policy manual during a news conference Monday afternoon, has already met with announced and prospective mayoral candidates, including Helena Moreno, Arthur Hunter and Oliver Thomas.

Basically what's going on among the local politicians, donors and consulting pros is they're all trying to maximize their potential for getting a piece of whatever new patronage conduits are created after the next round of privatization.  With all the vandalism going on at the national and state levels, locally we have opportunists not pushing back against any of that but rather positioning themselves to catch as much as they can of the money that gets shaken loose. Somebody should really do something about all of this, you say?  Well, that's what your favs are doing. The same thing they always do. 

The "children and families" mayor

It says something that, in a moment of crisis like this one, when people are trying to figure out if they have to march or if they have to strike, and their elected representatives are clumsily grasping at ways to respond to an apparent coup, LaToya Cantrell's instinct in a moment like this is... to cut funding to public schools.

On Monday morning, a crowd of 30 officials – including state legislators, City Councilmembers, Orleans Parish School Board members, District Attorney Jason Williams, and school leaders  –  condemned Mayor LaToya Cantrell for trying to torpedo a $20 million settlement with the school district, which is trying to plug a deficit of at least $36 million, maybe significantly more.

The settlement would have resolved a six-year-old lawsuit by OPSB, which had discovered that the city was skimming a portion off of the top of its OPSB tax payments.

Cantrell cannot now take the position that “the city cannot afford to stop stealing money from schoolchildren,” said OPSB member Carlos Zervigon, noting that the city has skimmed at least $100 million due to the district. “We need the mayor to get out of the way.”

We all thought the mayor had gotten out of the way.  A few months ago, she and members of her administration all got up and played hero. Their settlement announcement came to the rescue of a school district budget crisis precipitated by a still unexplained "accounting error."  

It's hard to tell what's changed since then besides the federal government's payment systems having been taken over by an unpredictable corrupt junta. Everyone is at least a little bit worried about that situation.  But one can't help but wonder if the mayor has special insight into the Trump administration's M.O. It does take one to know one, after all. 

In any case, it is remarkable to consider that a mayor who came into office branding herself around concern for "children and families" will be remembered for her efforts at de-funding public schools and libraries.

The incredible shrinking administration

The New Orleans Saints opened training camp last week.  And the question on everyone's mind is, who is paying for Mayor Cantrell's tickets?

At the National Urban League press conference, Cantrell was all smiles despite the legal troubles surrounding her. Once she was on stage, she stayed on the theme, pointing to the political moment the nation is in and the challenges that may arise.

Cantrell is also facing a federal investigation into her dealings with Randy Ferrell.

WWL Louisiana reporter Alyssa Curtis tried to ask Cantrell about the investigation as she hurried away.

"Mayor Cantrell, did you attend the 2019 NFC championship, and who paid for the ticket?" Curtis asked. 

Cantrell's team responded, "We’re not going to do that. I told you all that this morning. We’re going to keep moving." 

All credit to Alyssa Curtis, of course, for at least trying. But I do have to say that this is very similar to the question I said I wanted to ask the mayor at the budget townhall last Monday.  It turns out they cancelled that anyway. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell's office has cancelled a town hall meeting scheduled for Monday night, citing the death over the weekend of longtime political consultant Bill Rouselle.

The meeting, where city officials were set to brief residents on the city's plans for its 2025 budget and take input on how tax dollars should be spent, was scheduled to take place at the University of New Orleans. The city cancelled the event late Sunday "due to the integral role" Rouselle's firm, Bright Moments, played in planning the budget presentation, a city spokesperson said.

The city will announce a new date for the town hall "in the near future," the spokesperson said.

No doubt, the passing of a monumental figure like Rouselle is worthy of remembrance. But it's difficult to understand why a basic public information function, like these budget sessions, would be so reliant on one private PR contractor. Or if we take that much for granted, does the unfortunate passing of the firm's founder leave its staff incapable of going ahead with what surely had to have been a fully prepared presentation by that time?  Or was Bright Moments always just Rouselle?  This really raises more questions than it answers. So why did they cancel the townhall? As that WWL story suggests, it probably has more to do with not wanting to face difficult questions from reporters and the public about various overlapping controversies surrounding the mayor right now.  

I have to say I'm at least a little sympathetic with the mayor about some of that. The celebrity gossip nature of the way local TV has handled the Vappie affair should be beneath all of us. And the way the media has made a hero out of this politically connected wealthy socialite who involved herself in it is regrettable as well. At the same time, though, the mayor's did react to her with the familiar clumsy and bullying abuse of power that has become one of the hallmarks of her time in office.

Remember, also, that if we look past the soap opera stuff, some of the allegations are actually serious. They just haven't been named in any indictment... yet.  But this story strongly suggests that the mayor moved to fire a city permits official in order to protect a crooked contractor. Yes, the one who gave her the football tickets. Even though he doesn't know how to spell her name. 

In a recording that WWL obtained of a meeting held Aug. 19, 2019, Chan complained to Cantrell that Cecil was “charging me with things” and creating a “hostile work environment.” Cantrell responded by praising Chan and asking, “Do you believe that we have what we need internally to fill leadership gaps should they become open? So, like running OneStop, that sort of thing?”

In an interview in March of this year, Cantrell denied having discussed Cecil with anyone else before firing her. She also denied that Cecil’s firing was a “favor” to anyone.

But Farrell claimed at least some credit. Last September, the TV station reported, Farrell wrote in an email to current Safety and Permits Director Tammie Jackson that “I had asked Mrs. Lotoya (sic) Cantrel (sic) to Look into Jennifer Cecil's Toxic environment at Safety and Permits and she chose to remove her.”

Adding to the intrigue is the appearance, once again, of controversial businessman Fouad Zeton who has shown up as a comic relief character in several Cantrell episodes. 

Farrell may have been introduced to Cantrell by Fouad Zeton, a friend and business partner of his who boasted of relationships to many politicians, including Cantrell. One of Zeton’s businesses was raided by the FBI in 2021; in addition to a series of paintings, the government seized his phone, which contained communications with Cantrell and others.

Zeton has pleaded guilty to falsely reporting a dozen or so paintings as stolen and then inflating their value – with the help of a New Orleans cop – in order to land a big insurance settlement. He is set to be sentenced Sept. 19.

Adding to the irony in this case is the fact that the tickets Farrell allegedly got for Cantrell were to the Saints-Rams NFC Championship game now infamous for its "no-call" pass interference ending which should remind us all that there really is no justice anywhere.  After all, the Supreme Court tells us that municipal bribery is basically legal now anyway. So maybe none of this matters. Still it sure would have been fun to go to the budget meeting and ask the mayor how many football tickets it would cost a person to be named the next Night Mayor.  But now we don't get to ask about that. Or about anything. Which is not good because, as it limps into the final year of its term, the Cantrell Administration looks to be falling apart. 

Take STR enforcement, for example. On second thought, maybe that's a bad example since there hasn't been a time when STR enforcement was actually functional. In any case, the regime such as it is, appears to be in complete disarray now.  The process for handling cases is toothless. The department doesn't want to assign lawyers to attend hearings. Oh and also the whole Zoning Department just up and quit for some reason. 

At the same time, Morrell told Mulligan in his July 17 letter that he was concerned Mulligan was now pushing hearings at a pace the understaffed STR office can’t handle.

Mulligan mentioned in his letter that the Zoning Division, which is supposed to be conducting STR hearings, hasn’t been able to have any “because its entire staff left earlier this year.” Mulligan doesn’t explain why the entire staff left.

As a result, Code Enforcement has been handling them in the meantime, while the Cantrell administration works to create a new office that handles hearings across nine city departments.

As of May 31, there were only 14 employees in the STR office, despite the office having a budget for 26 positions. According to Morrell, the 14 employees are now supposed to handle 40 hearings in two weeks.

Compare that with the 50 hearings per month previous memos estimated a staff of 23 employees could handle, and staffers now have more than twice that workload.

“When understaffed officers are forced to rush adjudications, mistakes are inevitable,” Morrell wrote. “There is a difference between quality and quantity of enforcement.”

Driving staff to quit en masse and overworking those who remain while refusing to fill the open positions sounds bad. But consider, also, that this phenomenon is hardly isolated to a single department. In June, we read about the similar (arguably far worse) situation at Public Works; the department responsible (for now, anyway) for keeping your streets un-flooded by clogged catch basins. You may think that's pretty essential work. The city, though, has purposefully made it less and less a priority.

It’s work that requires manpower, usually three to four to a crew. Two operate the equipment and at least one person for the manual labor that Casby was doing on a recent afternoon.

The problem for New Orleans is: There’s not many employees like Casby left.

An Algiers native, Casby, 58, joined the public works department in the late 1980s, when its maintenance yard on Norman C. Francis Parkway — then named for Confederate president Jefferson Davis — had more than 400 employees like him.

Today there are fewer than 30.

The city used to have its own rock crusher that ground asphalt that an army of frontline workers used to patch roadways. Now the city is down to just one pothole crew.

Because of the lack of staff, the city can only operate three of its four vacuum trucks full-time. In a good month, the in-house crews can only clear around two-thirds of the amount of catch basins needed to meet a benchmark previously set by the city.

“They just started cutting back,” Casby said about the late 1990s, when the city began outsourcing a lot of its work. “And everyone started moving out.”

Every story about the city's failing infrastructure can trace back to the 80s and 90s advent of austerity, privatization and outsourcing. This is not merely a New Orleans issue. Rather it is a long running policy regime that has emaciated public services in cities across the country. The turn against support for urban governance began with neoliberal technocrats in the 1970s and was put into practice by reactionary conservatives in the 1980s who passed billions of dollars worth of cuts in federal aid to cities. During the 1990s, cynical Democrats regained and held onto political power by fully adopting the reactionary rhetoric and consultant-driven policy grifts around notions of "reinventing government." 

It's worse now.  Over time, what might have once been dismissed as disingenuous Clintonite triangulation, metastasized into basic conventional wisdom. Anyone who had ambitions to become anyone in politics, especially at the local level in cities, had to learn to parrot tropes like "run government like a business," which was what our CEO Mayor Ray Nagin promised to do, or "do more with less," which became a frequent mantra during the Mitch Landrieu years. But those were just the poseurs.  

The current generation of politicians and administrators, like our Gen-X Mayor Cantrell, grew up as true believers in this stuff. The ideology was baked into the firmament of their careers before they even arrived.  It's the world they were trained for. No one in city administration actually believes in hiring people to do jobs. They're just looking to become conduits for outsourcing public funds to "private partners." And so it was inevitable that the Cantrell administration, from the first day it took office, could only have been ideologically opposed to governing. No one in charge there believes in the basic function of hiring staff to provide services to citizens. They don't think that is something a city should do.

There are real consequences for that. The understaffed and overwhelmed zoning and public works departments are just two examples of what happens when those who are charged with conducting the people's business do not take that task seriously. Even the things that they clearly want to do, such as, collect money from motorists via robotic cameras, can't get done in time to comply with new laws.  Last month, a key rental assistance program ran out of money because the administration didn't bother to request a renewal from the feds. 

Nor did they bother to answer reporters' questions about why. 

Monet Brignac-Sullivan, a spokesperson for council member JP Morrell, said the Cantrell administration didn't inform the council about the depleted funds or request more money in its mid-year budget adjustment.

"The Council is ready and willing to help solve problems when program administrators alert us there is one," wrote Brignac-Sullivan. "To date, there has been no communication from the program."

The Cantrell administration did not respond to a request for comment on why no additional funding was requested.

Nobody seems to be answering the phone at all over there anymore. According to this Axios story, that's a deliberate choice. We just hope the last whole department to resign remembers to turn out the lights before they go.

Some of these are so easy, it's stupid

All one has to do is refer to any point in the past when Mayor Cantrell's administration acted to expand the intrusive police surveillance apparatus deployed against New Orleans residents during her term in office.

At the request of Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the New Orleans City Council introduced an ordinance on Thursday to severely roll back local restrictions on law enforcement surveillance that were put in place only 14 months ago.

The proposed ordinance, if passed, would largely reverse the council’s blanket bans on the use facial recognition and characteristic tracking software, which is similar to facial recognition but for identifying race, gender, outfits, vehicles, walking gait and other attributes. One provision also appears to walk back the city’s ban on predictive policing and cell-site simulators — which intercept and spy on cell phone calls — to locate people suspected of certain serious crimes. 

That provision could, for the first time, give the city explicit permission to use a whole host of surveillance technology in certain circumstances, including voice recognition, x-ray vans, “through the wall radar,” social media monitoring software, “tools used to gain unauthorized access to a computer,” and more.

And then follow that up with her reaction to having those kinds of tools turned back on her.  

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell filed for a temporary protective order Friday against a woman she says has stalked her for two years by taking photos and videos of her, according to Orleans Parish Civil District Court records. 

Cantrell accuses the woman, Anne Breaud, of "aggressively" taking photos and videos of her on multiple occasions, including on April 7 as she dined on a restaurant balcony.

Breaud's actions over the last two years, she wrote, "have placed me and my family in greater risk of being harmed, jeopardizing my safety especially at places I frequent."

Breaud declined to comment Friday night, and the mayor's office could not be immediately reached.

Okay maybe it's not that easy.  It is stupid but some things need clarification. The photographs she's referring to in the second story connect to a tabloid saga regarding the mayor's personal life that I don't have any interest in discussing.  The local TV stations have enjoyed it very much because it is salacious in nature which gets a lot of attention while also having zero relevant news or political content which means they don't have to think too hard about anything while presenting it. 

If the reporters did want to talk about this with any sort of seriousness, these stories would focus less on the sensationalist aspects and more on the implications of who gets to point cameras at who and to what purpose. Because as it stands currently, the cops and the mayors have so many cameras poking into our daily lives that there's scarcely a step one takes without feeling like some sort of suspect. And yet the moment we might ask the slightest question about the work our public officials are doing, or the moment we point a camera at the police, well now there's the line that can't be crossed.

Someone should stop the crime that is in progress

 I'd call the police but it looks like they are in on it.

The NOPD has lobbied for new space for years, and Kirkpatrick has made it a top priority since taking over the department in October. Initial lease terms were agreed to in January, but some council members said they had been blindsided when it was unveiled to them in March.

Now a revised lease, up for council consideration in a special meeting on Wednesday, would add significantly more space at a higher cost per square foot. The latest draft adds a third floor to the space at 1615 Poydras Street and increases the total square footage from about 45,000 to 69,000.

The lease rate increases from an average of $170 to $180 per square foot over a decade.

If the New Orleans Police Department occupies the space at 1615 Poydras for all 10 years, the city will pay a total of $12.4 million, an increase from $7.7 million under the initial deal for the smaller space earlier this year. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration did not immediately respond to questions on Tuesday as to why it wants to add more space and agreed to pay a higher rate.

Good luck getting an answer out of them. Maybe it will be on the next podcast. Otherwise maybe FOIA some emails. You know, while that is still legal. 

Anyway... previously on Flip This Office Tower we learned the city had been in talks over this lease for at least six months before Frank Stewart sold the building.  Not sure where this sudden escalator clause came in.  We keep hearing that downtown office space is a soft market. What happened?

Speaking of Draculas...

The other day I saw this sign on the Napoleon Ave neutral ground advertising an upcoming production of the New Orleans Ballet. For a second, though, I thought Dracula (who we have already established lives at Charity Hospital) was running for office.

I am pretty sure the Charity Dracula Castle is in Alonzo Knox's house district. In which case, I'm not sure this wouldn't be an improvement. 

Anyway, there's something about people in the local political scene who just keep coming back from the dead. Take Charles Rice for example. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell wants the City Council to approve a contract with the firm of former Entergy New Orleans (ENO) CEO Charles Rice, who in 2018 stepped down after it was discovered the company had used paid actors to appear at city council hearings in support of a proposed new power plant.

According to a draft of the contract, the administration wants to hire the Rice Group LLC to help in ongoing litigation between the city and the Municipal Police Employees Retirement System, which handles the NOPD’s pension.

Of course, Rice didn't actually step all the way down from Entergy after the "actors" scandal. Remember, the paid actors gambit basically worked.  The plant the actors were hired to advocate for got built. The fact that the ploy got exposed resulted in a moment of bad press and nominal fine but that's all well worth it. And Rice was happy to take the fall anyway. No big loss to him.  He just got kicked down from CEO to legal consultant. Also his wife continued to work for and with the company. (She also continues to serve on public boards.)  Like Dracula, people operating at this level of privilege basically go on forever. They really aren't allowed to fail the way most of us mere mortals might be. I mean the Rices were doing kickbacks to their brothers-in-law over public contracts way back before a lot of you kids were even born. These are ancient powers we are dealing with here.  

The Boil Order Decade

It felt like we measured out the 2010s in the time spent between the several boil orders.  So much so, that by the end of the decade, it stopped feeling like anything out of the ordinary. And, of course, in the 20s, the global pandemic made our little home grown perpetual public health crisis seem practically pedestrian by comparison. It's just expected now the every so often, the water pressure will drop and people will have to take precautions.  That's resilience!  We even figured out a way to limit the boil orders to specific neighborhoods now so they seem like even less of a big deal. That's innovation!  As we all know, resilience and innovation are synonymous with the global brand of New Orleans. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration has fumbled a $141 million grant for green infrastructure projects, according to a report from a federal watchdog, with poor planning, misallocation of funds and a lack of workers undercutting the city's efforts to keep stormwater at bay.

In one case, a grant-funded program to add porous pavement and other upgrades to New Orleans homes — which the city has previously touted as a success — was so poorly handled that it actually made some properties more vulnerable to flooding, according to an audit released this week by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General.

The audit, conducted over nine months ending in July 2023, said construction had not started on any of the eight grant-funded infrastructure projects comprising the “Gentilly Resilience District,” which is supposed to hold stormwater in redesigned green spaces that would otherwise flow directly to the often-overwhelmed city drainage system.

 Okay well nevermind that right now. It's a global brand, trust me.

Following her participation in an international climate change conference in Dubai last December, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced she had signed a major new deal with a private company to significantly reduce the city’s carbon emissions and boost its drinking water and energy efficiencies.

The announcement was a public relations win for Cantrell after more than a year of being criticized for maintaining a busy travel schedule without any major results to show for them.

The Dec. 8 press release outlined the ambitious project the city would undertake with Zoetic Inc., an Ohio-based HV/AC coolant manufacturer. Described in the release as “a leading U.S.-based climate impact company with a portfolio of carbon reduction solutions,” Zoetic would be tasked with “increasing sustainability, including significant carbon reduction and water and energy resiliency.”

But more than three months later, the only thing Cantrell has to show for the trip remains the press release. In fact, internal administration documents indicate that after an initial flurry of behind-the-scenes activity, the project has completely halted.

Those documents also show Cantrell appears to have made the deal unilaterally within hours of meeting Zoetic’s founder. According to these records, Cantrell never consulted staff experts back in New Orleans before signing it, and the press release caught even her top climate-related aides off guard.

With city staffers scrambling to figure out what the agreement actually meant for the city, several people involved raised questions about the Zoetic deal, including one city employee who called the company “sketchy.”

Alright well put a pin in that one too. The point is, we're resilient now.  The streets flood every time it rains for a few hours and the water gets all amoebaed up every time a main breaks and we are not fazed one bit by it.  

That doesn't mean we can't be a little curious, though. I mean, maybe once or twice over the course of the Boil Order Decade, you may have wondered where does all the clean water our bills say we've been paying for go anyway? Well, now we know. 

NEW ORLEANS — The office of the Inspector General released a report outlining failures within the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans.

The report says that infrastructure weaknesses, plus metering and billing errors created significant water loss.

According to the report, "SWBNO water losses were found to be consistently above the highest range of industry averages of 45.5 percent, with a ten-year average of non-revenue water of approximately 73 percent between 2008 and 2017. OIG evaluators found the SWBNO continued to experience similar rates in 2021 and 2022, with 75 percent water loss in 2021 and 64 percent water loss in 2022."

The OIG says the water board did not follow industry standards, resulting in a combined loss of over $19 million over two years.

They've been pouring it straight into the ground.  Now, from what we understand, several of the stalled "Resilience District" projects had to do with creating stormwater retention facilities. This, we were told, had a dual benefit. They would supposedly lessen the stress on the drainage system by lowering the volume of water that had to be pumped out immediately. They also were supposed to be good for maintaining the soils beneath the city famously vulnerable to subsidence caused by over-efficient drainage.  But here we see that, even though, the retention projects weren't being build, S&WB was more than making up for it by dumping the water back into the soil anyway.  Score another one for innovation.

Loot and privatize

The Landry "task force" sounds like they want the state to take over the SWB and then turn it over to a private operator. Sort of the same process that moved us from public schools, to RSD, and then to the charterization mess we have now.

The proposed recovery district, to be controlled by a board composed of a majority of state appointees, would govern the agency for two years, according to the panel's recommendations. It could then cede control of the utility, renamed the “New Orleans Sewerage, Water and Drainage Board” to the City Council or the Public Service Commission. A third option would be to constitute the utility into a new municipal corporation modeled after one in Louisville, Kentucky. 

In the meantime, there's plenty opportunity for a state appointed water czar to loot as much as possible.  I wonder who will be our Paul Vallas of water? 

Also of note, this week we had expected to see SWB's own "State of the Utility" report the mayor had decided to take on as a counterpoint to the task force.  Guess she flaked on that.

From today's S&WB board meeting: "State of Utility" from @SWBNewOrleans, suggested by Mayor Cantrell as a rebuttal to Governor's task force on S&WB reform, pushed back to middle of the year.

— Matt McBride (@Matthew67052126) March 27, 2024

Rats gotta eat

First of all we'd like to thank NOPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick for choosing to drop this Weed Rats meme on us just after Mardi Gras.  It means that everyone who might have had to scramble for ideas a few weeks ago will now have a full year to really sit with the image and decide whether or not it is truly the costume for them. 

Heavy mold and deteriorating elevators, HVAC units and plumbing are some of the issues that have been plaguing New Orleans Police Department headquarters.

But those aren't the only problems at aging police facilities around the criminal justice complex near Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street. Don't forget the vermin, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee on Monday.

"The rats are eating our marijuana," Kirkpatrick said. "They're all high."

The great thing about the weed rats is everybody immediately loves them. But also nobody actually believes they are a thing. I mean, sure, there are rats at police headquarters. That's easy enough to believe. But, if anything is being stolen from the evidence room there, it's far more likely the culprits are in uniform.*  Even more dubious is Kirkpatrick's claim that the rats are "high." Rats can and do get high. We learn that from this study where rats were observed with increased appetite and laziness after exposure to cannabis vapor.  The key bit, however, is the vapor. Could the rats get high from just eating the raw plants?  I don't think it works like that. 

Anyway, why is this colorful fantasy being brought to our attention now?  Well, you see, NOPD wants a new headquarters. Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  They aren't necessarily asking for a new building. We just know they want to move out of the one they have. 

A plan to relocate New Orleans Police Department headquarters into two floors of a downtown office tower is a large piece of a wider vision to leave behind the city’s crumbling justice complex in Mid-City, said chief administrative officer Gilbert Montaño on Wednesday.

About 400 police department staffers are slated to relocate with the pending move to the 17th and 18th floors of 1615 Poydras Street, called the DXC building, he said. The draft 10-year lease, which awaits City Council approval, calls for a May 1 move-in date.

The plan is to abandon the current HQ located in the (geographic) center of the city with its proximity to the criminal courthouse and central lockup and move, instead, into an office tower downtown with limited public access and practically no parking. Oh and also now the city doesn't control the building and is paying rent to a private landlord for at least 10 years. This is short sighted, minor league city type stuff. The police aren't even "allowed" to do police business in the police office. 

Lahasky said the lease will not allow NOPD to conduct interrogations or make arrests within the office building.

“Our agreement with NOPD is that the offices will be utilized as administrative offices, and that certain uses such as interrogations and lineups and things that outsiders perceive as maybe not the kind of uses you’d like to see in an office building” won't be allowed, he said. “Those particular uses are to be held off-site.”

Nothing about this makes any sense in terms of public service.  It does make sense if you come at it from the point of view that the city government exists solely to facilitate real estate deals that benefit the succession plans of fading oligarchs like Frank Stewart.  Which is precisely the sort of thing you might think if you are Gilbert Montaño. 

Negotiations began in earnest about six months ago, Montaño said, when the building was still owned by businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart. The Monroe businessmen who bought it at the end of last year, brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, also own Orleans Tower, the former Amoco Building a few blocks away. The city leases space in that building for the Department of Safety and Permits, Civil District Court clerk and Civil Service Commission, among others. 

Frank Stewart, for those who need a refresher, is a billionaire investor whose fortune derives from his family's funeral home business.  The "philanthropist" descriptor he gets in articles like the one above is an inevitable result of owning lots of things (downtown office towers, for example) and making use of as many tax write-offs as possible.  In recent years, his "charity" work garnering the most attention was his leadership of the Monumental Task Force's attempts to maintain the city's Confederate statues. In 2017, he took out a full page ad in the newspaper denouncing Mitch Landrieu's efforts to have them removed.  Mitch was on his way out of office and working on his national profile at the time.  Because of this, he could afford to ignore Stewart's provincial concerns.  The same could not be said for Stewart's ambitious local ally in the monumental "lost cause," Councilwoman and soon to be Mayor LaToya Cantrell.

On Dec. 17, 2015, the day the City Council voted to remove the monuments, Cantrell, then a council member, gave a speech that must have been music to the ears of the pro-monument crowd, chastising then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu for bringing the issue to light. Amazingly, within the same hour she joined the majority of the council in voting for removal.

In early 2018, within a few months of being elected mayor, Cantrell empowered a secretive working group of Confederate monument supporters to decide the future location of the warehoused monuments. One of her spokesmen stated, “She believes that the future of the former monuments belongs in the hands of those who care about them.”

It’s highly likely that the only reason the mayor didn’t go through with the group’s relocation plan, moving them to another prominent location, was the exposure she received in an article by Kevin Litten published in The Times-Picayune. The article exposed Cantrell’s willingness to placate the side of the argument endorsed by some of the most moneyed and powerful people in the city — the side she voted against as a City Council member.

None of that was surprising. Both mayors (and a number of other state and local politicians) have done plenty of favors for Stewart over the years. In 2017, the same year the monuments controversy came to a head, they all helped swing the deal that gave Stewart's building its "DXC" moniker. That $120 million deal committed the city and the state to a package of subsidies and incentives including an agreement to rebate the payroll of software company DXC in exchange for its promise to occupy ten floors of Stewart's tower. The company and the politicians promised as many as 2,000 new "tech" jobs.

Of course, there were those of us who, just days after the announcement, observed that DXC appeared to be taking advantage of the state's generous corporate welfare offerings in order to facilitate its own global downsizing and outsourcing scheme to cut jobs and wages. But nobody ever listens to those of us who say such things. Anyway as time went on, it became clear that DXC was never committed to hiring locally. Over the following years, they would repeatedly miss the goals set forth in the original agreement. As of 2022, they had nearly scuttled the entire thing and were looking to sub-lease much of their office space in the tower.

In the meantime, The Cantrell Administration has spent plenty of time and energy trying to figure out ways to plug the hole in Stewart's revenue stream.  At one point they even considered moving City Hall into the building.  Which brings us up to last year when we find an aging Stewart trying to liquidate his asset portfolio in a slow market for downtown office space. At the time of the sale, the building was roughly 50 percent vacant. But its buyers, Eddie and Joseph Hakim were strangely bullish on its prospects. Likely the, by then, well underway negotiations over a guaranteed NOPD tenant had something to do with that.

All of this is typical New Orleans cronyism. But it also reflects the conservative ideology at the heart of the Cantrell administration. Gilbert Montano said recently that "the future" of city government should rely more on regressive user fee-based budgeting rather than a reliable tax base for dependable services. Under that kind of regime, there can be no real investment in social or physical infrastructure. City services will exist under continual threat of cuts. City departments won't own their own buildings.  Not even the police.  The only dependable revenue streams created go the other direction. Out of the public coffers and into the hands of corporate landlords.

For his part, (potential mayoral candidate) Oliver Thomas wants to put a pause on the NOPD lease because he doesn't feel adequately communicated toward.

“Not only was there a lack of communication about this viable move, but it seems like there was not a lot of thought put into multiple locations that would provide the best access to the men and women that utilize the headquarters, as well as the citizens to whom access is extremely important,” Councilmember Thomas said in his letter to Montano and Chief Kirkpatrick.

Thomas wants to “take a step back” to review other possible locations for the new NOPD headquarters.

He says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that is more “community-oriented” with easier parking and that could become a more permanent spot that would add “value to the community.” He also says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that would add overall access to residents in the city.

The kids are already joking that maybe Thomas will suggest putting the new HQ at the Six Flags site his friend Troy Henry is supposed to be redeveloping. But it occurs to us that this would put us a step closer to the New Orleans Cop City we've already speculated that Mayor OT might build one day. So maybe it's not that funny. In any case, it wouldn't represent a change in governing philosophy so much as a slight adjustment in the direction of the spoils.  It's never really a question of whether the rats are going to get a piece of the stash so much as it is which rats in particular.

 *That link references an evidence room scandal from 15 years ago.  When I started writing this post, I hadn't yet seen the latest one out just today.  Interesting that after the weed rats got their fifteen minutes of fame, NOPD has moved right along to blaming the conveniently deceased for what is clearly a systemic issue.

CEO

Last summer a judge ruled against the city council in a lawsuit against the mayor's office in pursuit of greater oversight of how the city disperses funds derived from the Wisner Trust.  The already complex matter of the trust has only become more convoluted in recent years after Mayor Cantrell took the controversial step of negotiating a deal with the Wisner heirs and other parties to the, technically, expired trust.

It had been thought that when the original trust expired, its assets would transfer permanently to the city. But the mayor's deal effectively establishes a new, apparently perpetual, arrangement that maintains the terms of the original trust, keeping the Wisner heirs, LSU, Tulane, and the Salvation Army as co-beneficiaries. This sounds like a bad deal for the city. But because it allows the mayor maximum discretion to distribute the city's cut with minimal oversight from the council or the public, it is a very good deal for the mayor. And, really, that's all that matters, isn't it? 

Anyway, here is how that money gets used now. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration improperly paid a city contractor tasked with cleaning up blighted lots and then tried to rush through a renewal of the contract, according to a report by the New Orleans Office of Inspector General that alleged the payments made by City Hall may have violated the state constitution.

The report, issued Thursday by Inspector General Ed Michel and based on interviews with city employees involved in the contracting process, also includes allegations that one employee was forced to resign after trying to slow down the contract renewal.

While it is not clear if the agreement with the Center for Employment Opportunities was eventually renewed, the OIG found that the administration violated its own contract — and possibly the state constitution, which prohibits anything that could be considered giving public money without a public purpose — by paying the group $500,000 without verifying that work it was hired for had been performed.

It feels like a story as old as time in New Orleans.  You've got a seemingly good cause. (We're cleaning up blight! We're helping incarcerated people transition back to work!) But look further and there is no documentation any of that work is done or information about how they go about it. It's a bit reminiscent of the NOAH home remediation scam back during the Nagin Administration. This isn't likely to draw as much attention, though. We're in a different era now. The volume of graft that goes on has magnified several times over and the capacity of the press to keep up is so greatly diminished that it all seems to wash over us like water from a busted main. If a scandal doesn't involve some salacious bit about the mayor's rumored paramour, it barely even registers.

But, alright, fine. Just for laughs, please tell us more about this Center for Employment Opportunities. 

The Center for Employment opportunities, known as CEO, is a New York-based nonprofit that employs recently incarcerated people and aims to help them get back on their feet.

In December, 2021, CEO signed a $1 million contract with the city to clean up abandoned lots, to be paid using money from the Wisner Trust fund. In addition to providing cleanup services to the city, the contract also required CEO to provide support services for the recently incarcerated people it employed. As part of the contract, CEO was to document the work it did and the services it provided to its workers.

But city employees said that documentation for some of that work was never requested nor submitted, according to interview summaries attached to the OIG report. CEO was also told it didn't have to submit invoices, despite contractual provisions requiring them, employees told OIG investigators.

If nothing else, the name of the organization has to be a red flag, right?  Why does the leadership of a supposedly charitable non-profit want its acronym to evoke in our minds the image of ruthless business moguls?  It's amateurish and insulting on its face. 

Or maybe it's just showing off. After all, there's nothing to stop any of this. Not, really. An Inspector General's report can sound like a dressing down, but the accountability is rarely likely to go beyond that. Especially when patronage scams like this are the bread and butter of city politics. And, frankly, that is the reason City Council keeps fighting with the mayor over the Wisner money. They don't necessarily want this sort of thing to stop. It's just that the way the mayor has structured the terms of the trust has frozen them out of the action. For now, anyway.

3-D Spidermans

Amusing bit from this past weekend's T-P politics round up.  The issue at hand here is the ongoing legal dispute between the mayor and the city council over who gets to pass around Wisner trust money to whose patrons. The council's position is that the mayor is "wrongfully handing over city money to private parties." And that is, of course, true. But the only reason the councilmembers are so hot to challenge her on this is because, in their estimation, wrongfully handing over city money to private parties is supposed to be their job. 

Really, both sides are kind of right. Ordinarily they all work together to figure out all the spoils. But lately nobody at City Hall is getting along with anyone else. When that happens the little understandings that normally obtain start to break down and the system can no longer function. For instance...

Below the surface, the case involves a more fundamental question: Can the council sue the mayor, as an independent component of city government?

No, it cannot, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled in June, a decision that is now before the Louisiana Supreme Court. Before that is settled, however, the council is trying a new tactic, one that will test its power in a different way.

The council on Thursday voted to order the City Attorney’s Office to make the city a plaintiff in the lawsuit, even though city lawyers have already made arguments on Cantrell’s behalf. The strategy is to pre-empt any dismissal based on the council’s lack of authority to independently sue the mayor. And the result, if it works, will be a spectacle: a mayoral administration suing a mayor. Might New Orleanians have the privilege of witnessing one city lawyer arguing against another in open court? Seems highly unlikely, but one can dream.

The headline for this column makes reference to the Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman meme but doesn't explain the joke in the text of the article. On the one hand, it's refreshing to see the T-P assume even a minimal degree of sophistication in its readers. On the other hand, maybe some clarification is in order. We're pretty sure they mean the two Spidermen here are the hypothetical dueling city lawyers. But they could also be every councilmember and the mayor pointing at each other in every direction as well. Maybe it's all of that.

Still pretty far from getting it right

This could be the week we get a ruling on the latest legal challenge to the latest attempt by City Council to rein in the plague of short term rentals on our city where nobody actually lives. We keep saying the only remedy for this is a full ban on these in our neighborhoods. When we say that we mean a full ban on the residentially zoned AND commercially zoned parts of the neighborhoods.  Which means we've got a long way to go with all of this. But it does like we're about to get one step closer. 

In September, U.S. District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle suspended the city’s regulatory system governing STRs. As a result, there are essentially no rules governing the industry while the city awaits Lemelle’s decision on a suit filed by the industry in May. Although the judge hasn't explicitly said which way he's leaning, his suspension of the rules, apparent skepticism of the compromise and a lack of movement on the issue since then has opponents of the industry increasingly convinced he'll strike them down. Lemelle is expected to make a decision during a Nov. 2 hearing.

I don't care for the way John Stanton frames things in that article. In lines like this one, he buys into a bullshit myth that the app-i-fied STR business is merely a noble purpose corrupted. 

What originally started as a gig economy style way to temporarily rent out a spare bedroom has turned into a multi-billion-dollar, global industry dominated by large corporations.

He also goes heavy into flourishes about the aesthetic consequences of STRs, "predatory packs of bachelor and bachelorette parties," and so on. And while that's unpleasant, it's just a symptom of the more fundamental illness. A community is being destroyed for the benefit of capital. 

This "gig economy" Stanton seems neutral about is just a new name for an old process. STRs, rideshares, delivery apps, all of these arbitrage businesses that turn workers into independent contractors or demand that people commodify their private living space just to get by, all of this is just the same logical progression of unfettered capitalism we've always seen. The alienated subjects of this regime have always been vulnerable to more intrusive and efficient extraction of value from their time, their bodies, their privacy. The "innovative technology" here is really just a means of circumventing existing rules protecting us from these intrusions.  This is why we've always needed to band together and work out ways to protect ourselves. That's democracy.  And so we need new rules to keep the beast in check.  Hopefully we can still get there.

Or maybe we won't.  Democracy is hard to accomplish but easy to subvert.  It often comes down to identifying the most venal or willfully ignorant political power brokers and buying them off; sometimes with bribes, but also with bullshit if they're stupid enough. 

The one major exception is sales tax collections, which have been below projections in the second half of this year. Cantrell’s budget anticipates a slight decrease in sales tax collections, about $3 million, next year from what was budgeted this year. During her speech, Cantrell appeared to blame the shortfall, in part, on the council’s attempts to rein in short-term rentals, on which the city collects taxes. Cantrell has repeatedly expressed frustration with recent council-backed restrictions on the industry, saying in September that she felt the city’s original short-term rental law — passed in 2016 and criticized as being too lax — “got it right.”

From the looks of things we're still years away from getting it right. Maybe by that time there will still be some city left to save. But it's slipping away fast. 

What happened?

We did it! We're back, everybody. 

Revenue projections

The Cantrell administration expects general fund revenue of more than $762 million, driven by sales taxes, property taxes, licensing and permitting fees, and more. The remainder of the operating budget is funded via revenues earmarked for specific purposes like federal and state grants and specific districts' property tax funds. Those revenue projections suggest that the majority of the city's revenue streams will return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Montaño.

A whole year ahead of time, according to 2021 Monatno, anyway. 

New Orleans is set to receive $388 million from this year’s coronavirus stimulus package, and while council members are calling to spend at least some of that money, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration is urging a slower approach.

Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño on Monday resisted calls from the council to hold mid-year budget hearings on the funds and urged that the vast majority of the money be held back, with the first major round of spending not coming until next year. And even then, Montaño urged council members to take the long view and parcel out spending through 2025, when some projections say New Orleans will finally emerge from its pandemic-induced deficits.

At the time, Montaño and Cantrell were resisting calls to spend the federal relief money on housing and other support for service industry workers facing evictions. In other words they were being asked to use the funds to help poor people affected by the pandemic; the purpose they were actually intended for.  Instead, Montaño wanted to squirrel as much of it away to address his 5 year "projected" deficits.  

But, here we are. Not even 5 years down the road and the deficits seem to be over.  Maybe it's finally time to make good on the original promise of the American Rescue Plan? 

Or maybe not. As these counter-programmers to today's hearing pointed out, we're mostly spending it on cop stuff.

At a press conference outside City Hall before the mayor's budget presentation, advocates with the Big Easy Budget Coalition issued their demands once again.

"The American Rescue Plan dollars really offered New Orleans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move in a different direction and recover from the pandemic and recover from years of inequity," said Sarah Omojola, director of Vera Louisiana, a local initiative of the Vera Institute of Justice. "Instead the ARPA dollars— the American Rescue Plan dollars— were used to plug budget holes and invest in policing."

It flows downhill

This new S&WB substation has gone on quite a journey. First, Entergy was going to pay for it outright. We thought that sounded suspicious. And lo and behold, it was. After that fell through, the plan was to pay for it out of the city's American Rescue Plan allocation.  But that also sounded suspicious to us because it was already clear the mayor wanted to spend that money on cops and discretionary nonsense. Those suspicions also turned out to be well founded and now here we are back where we always thought we would be.  

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and the City Council responded in unison last July when Assessor Errol Williams announced that citywide property assessments had jumped by more than 20%.

They said City Hall would not “roll forward” property tax rates under its control, meaning property owners would not face additional liability for a little more than half of all citywide millages.

But the Sewerage & Water Board’s executive director, Ghassan Korban, has different ideas than his elected overseers when it comes to the utility’s tax rates. At the board’s Sept. 20 meeting, he said that he will argue for a roll forward, as the S&WB is in full tree-shaking mode to pay for a critical drainage power upgrade and a citywide meter replacement project.

Eventually the burden finds its way downstream to where the least important people are. And that's who has to bear it.

Very accurate leaning. The most accurate leaning. More and more people are saying this

 It turns out we've got plenty time left. 

A new forecast for saltwater intrusion moving up the Mississippi River has surprisingly bought lots more time for the New Orleans area — and raised the possibility that most of the city and Jefferson Parish could be spared from the threat altogether.

The change in forecast had to do with factors related to the river’s flow, work by the Army Corps of Engineers to elevate a sill and the Mississippi’s depth at the salt water’s current location.

The cone of uncertainty for the arrival of this wedge must be pretty wide. Who even knows the correct speed of salt anyway?  Anyway, the wedge isn't coming as quickly as they thought.  There's a bunch of reasons listed for that in this article. The river didn't lose as much flow as they thought it would. The salt is also sinking into a "pocket" in the riverbed near Belle Chase. Possibly a tandem float ran into a tree. I don't know. 

But it does change the plans a bit. Maybe by a $250 million bit, in fact. 

On top of that, based on modelling through November, the Corps now thinks the leading toe of the salt water — at the bottom of the river — could stop somewhere between river mile 112-113, or in the River Ridge-Kenner area.

If that does occur, the toe will not have reached far enough to cause salinity on the surface of the river at the locations of the West Jefferson plant in Marrero, New Orleans’ Carrollton plant for its east bank and the East Jefferson plant.

As a result, chloride levels in drinking water would be expected to remain below the 250 parts per million threshold for those plants. Surface water tends not to exceed that standard until the toe advances 15 to 25 miles upriver from it, given the wedge shape of the intrusion.

New Orleans may be able to avoid having to build an emergency pipeline to dilute the salt water at an estimated cost of between $150 million and $250 million. The Corps cautions, however, that forecasts could very well change. It now plans to update its forecasts for the public every Thursday.

That's quite a difference from just a few days ago when it looked like the pipeline wouldn't even make it on time. A similar effort in Jefferson Parish appeared to be moving faster which led everyone to begin making the usual jokes/trolls about comparative governmental efficiency.  Little did they know Orleans was "leading the way," the entire time. 

When it comes to where Orleans parish stands currently in its effort to mitigate the saltwater intrusion, when compared to neighboring parishes, Cantrell says the parish is ‘leading the way’.

“I'm saying don't believe the hype. The city of New Orleans, Sewerage and Water Board, we're leading in this capacity, or we're getting the responses that were due,” she said.

“Again, at the federal level. I've been always leaning in, always attached to the briefings, always advocating picking up the phone and calling myself so no asks have been done by anybody else. First, but me. But of course, echo, you continue to ask. And you continue to serve, circle the wagons to demonstrate why the solution is a collaborative one, that there's buy-in across the board, that we can actually get it done, that we have the talent to get it done. And we need the resources the federal government is listening, and the state is listening.”

Always leaning in, yes. That's what you have to do when you serve, circle the wagons.  But then we found out it is just as important to lean in with accuracy. 

"So, make no mistake about it, the city of New Orleans is not behind anybody, or anyone. The city of New Orleans is leading in this capacity. You know, regardless of what you hear," she said.

But not long after she said that, Jefferson Parish began construction on their West Bank pipeline. Meanwhile, Orleans is still nailing down contractors. Usually, the city's procurement process can take months. When asked if they were expediting the process, she said the city is moving ahead.

"So again, working aggressively every day. The contract and procurement process has started, in short order will be completed, because the time is now. We all understand that. And everyone is lean, leaning in with urgency, but also wanting to lean in with accuracy," Mayor Cantrell said.

On second thought, maybe the thing that's actually holding the wedge back is the great wall of sound that happens whenever the mayor speaks.  Whatever it is, it's working. Keep doing that.