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. 

"This city doesn't want you"

NOLA.com debriefs with Bunny Charbonnet on his sister's ill fated campaign for mayor.  There's a lot of interesting stuff in there. For instance, he talks about trying to talk her out of running at the beginning. The way he describes that is he says he told her, "This city doesn't want you."  It's not exactly clear what he means there but I think maybe this part later on serves as a pretty good elaboration.

What did this election teach you about how the fabric of the city has changed?

I think there's a confluence of people who have moved here from elsewhere, who believe they understand this city because they've gone to six restaurants and 12 festivals. But they don't understand the genesis of those festivals. New Orleanians understand the very core. They understand why Louis Armstrong sang Mack The Knife when no one would pick up the song. He understood the violence. He understood we are a packing town.

And that's OK. Because we need these new people here. But we need them to get to know us better. And I find that I learned -- I was indifferent to Uptown New Orleans, to the whole Mardi Gras culture and the business community. Not that I disliked them, I just had an indifference. I never understood them because I never tried. But I learned more about them than I cared to know (in this election). There is an interest in winning unlike no other area of town. They just play by a different set of rules and more resources.

Yes, I've got a lot more to say about this. It's been a busy holiday week. But think about this for now. Which city didn't want Desi?

Election Day

Get on out there and capture the magic. Here are some tips for those placing wagers on things.

Cantrell 62% Charbonnet 38%  Spread could actually go higher so watch for that

Banks 50% plus just a little itty bit over Bloom The Cantrell wave in the turnout would ordinarily favor Bloom but a lot of people also seem to hate him so.. it will be close

Gray 54% Nguyen 46% Tthis is just based on the primary numbers plus some educated guesses but if it goes differently don't come yell at me

Schroder 60% Edwards 40% The Democrats could have gotten their shit together and actually try to elect a Treasurer. They didn't.


More to say later in the day.  Have fun. 

Going monorail

Desi vs LaToya is running out of steam. We're already familiar enough with the depressing or disingenuous answers each will recite given a topic by now. I suppose if we get a chance to see the video of this latest forum, there will be some vague novelty we can pick out. But going by Gambit's description, the candidates stayed on script.

Well, okay there was one thing.  Apparently there is some law of nature which states that any time two or more talking heads discuss economic development in New Orleans East, at least one of them is eventually going to talk about something in the monorail category.

Other ideas from the candidates included light rail transit and development at the Grand Theater site in New Orleans East (Cantrell); and a $15 wage for City Hall employees and funding for the Orleans Public Defender's office to work on expungements (Charbonnet). An audience of more than 200 people clapped enthusiastically and gave out the occasional whoop of support.

Like I said, I'm probably going to have to watch this. What did she mean? Does the train go to the Grand Theater site? From where? Maybe it could just take visitors on a ride around the property to offer views of the murals which, admittedly, are pretty nice.  Maybe this could work.

It's a different story when you aren't just polling high school students

The mayor's race is over.

Questions surrounding LaToya Cantrell's use of a taxpayer-financed credit card have done nothing to diminish her commanding lead in the New Orleans mayor's race, according to the first poll to be publicly disclosed since the Oct. 14 primary.

Instead, the survey by the education advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform found Cantrell's nine-point advantage that night over former city judge Desiree Charbonnet has doubled despite the whiff of scandal.

Cantrell, a sitting city councilwoman, was 18 points ahead, 44 percent to Charbonnet's 26 percent, when the polling concluded Nov. 2. The survey began Oct. 24 with plans to target 600 likely voters, but the research firm LJR Custom Strategies added another 400 after news broke about Cantrell's spending.

The only caveat here is "Democrats for Education Reform" is a national anti-union group with a clear interest in promoting Cantrell. Still I'd be surprised if this isn't close to the actual spread in the runoff.

Congratulations, Mayor Charbonnet

As far as I know these are the first poll numbers since the primary and they are overwhelming.

Apparently the teenage demographic is breaking for Desiree Charbonnet in this year's mayoral contest.

At least that was the case in a mock vote Friday after a debate moderated by students from local high schools. The youngsters — casting their votes by cellphone, of course — went for Charbonnet over LaToya Cantrell by 82 to 41, though most of those present did not vote at all.

"Most of those present did not vote," is an easy frame for a cheap shot. Let's see if anyone takes it.  

The head of the Lower 9th Ward Voters Coalition, the Rev. Willie Calhoun Jr., said the organization put on Friday's event to get kids involved with the political process and encourage students from different schools to work together toward a common goal.

He lamented that the mock vote results were indicative of a larger problem, however.

"We had about 600 kids there, and only 100 voted," Calhoun said.

Well, no, the only problem this indicates is a lot of high school kids had to sit through a bullshit assembly which, being normal kids, they resented.  Okay so maybe it is a metaphor for this race after all.

Anyway, congrats to Desi. Way to go out and capture a big chunk of the ineligible vote.

Above their pay grade

On NOLA.com, Bob Marshall laments that, at a recent forum on coastal and environmental issues, the mayoral candidates appeared to lack a basic grasp of "existential threat" of climate change to the city of New Orleans, let alone any sort of plan to deal with it. But see if you can spot the problem here.

But when it came to addressing climate change they left the audience troubled. Almost every question on warming and rising seas led to another discourse on improving drainage or higher levees -- even improving the work force to do that work. The candidates apparently didn't get what that educated audience already knew:  Without addressing the causes of warming, none of those other issues can be solved.

The concept isn't complicated.

Better drainage and S&WB management? We can have an all-star cast operating the best combination of pumps and green infrastructure in the world, but the continued warming of the oceans and atmosphere will mean more of those 10-inches-in-a-few-hours rainfalls that will overwhelm that system and flood homes.

Better levees? Engineers admit even the state-of-the art, $14.5 billion system now in place probably will be overtopped by the storm surge from current Category 3 storms. And as sea level rises due to warming in the future, that same Cat 3 storm will have much higher storm surge, pouring even more water over those levees and posing a real threat to that improved drainage system.

Supporting the state's coastal master plan? Absolutely. But the 2017 plan admits that without reducing the current rate of emissions sea level rise is likely to consume another 2,800 square miles of a coast by 2065 -- even if all those projects are completed. That greatly increases the threat of storm surge against the levees and the drainage system -- and possibly makes some of the current marsh creation projects obsolete.

Consider, though, that better drainage, levees, and "supporting" the coastal master plan are much closer to the actual job of being Mayor of New Orleans than is solving the global crisis of climate change. We're talking about stuff that happens way way way above the mayor's pay grade.

Marshall goes on to cite Mitch Landrieu's "Climate Action Strategy" as an example of what he'd like to see and hear from the candidates. But, frankly, that document is nothing more than a pamphlet meant to bolster Mitch's personal brand as much as anything else.  The next mayor can and probably will sign off on it. And that's fine. Anything to contribute in some small way to "the discourse." But it's also pretty much the extent of her power to do anything. Her role in this, like the the mayor of any one town will be little different from your household recycling bin's role in cleaning up the Pacific Garbage Patch.  It's symbolic, at best, and infinitesimally small.

On a more depressing note, this also indicates why we're never going to avoid this hazard. The politics of climate change are incongruous with anything that would suffice as a "solution." The problem is enormous. Its remedy requires global agreement. By comparison our political jurisdictions are tiny and represent opposing interests who are irreconcilable. 

The disaster is bigger than we are. It is already here. All we can do politically is fight over who bears the worst of its burdens. Who will pay the higher costs of  drainage, protection, insurance, and ultimately relocation? Whose losses will be remunerated? Whose operations will be subsidized? If you want to ask the next mayor what her plan is for climate change, ask her about it in that context.

Monday Night Debate Ball: Expense account edition

So I'd like to move on to Part 2 of the "How to lose an election" series I'm writing about this very bad mayoral race.  But it turns out that first we're going to have to spend a moment being bogged down in this credit card story.  I had specifically determined not to worry about the petty back and forth of an election whose outcome was determined months ago. In fact, the first thing I'd like to say about this late expenses controversy is that it probably won't have much bearing one anyone's decision to vote for either candidate. Still, it's not exactly nothing.

State law prohibits using public money for personal or campaign expenses. And while Cantrell paid back the money, Charbonnet's camp argued that amounted to a tacit admission the law had been broken or ignored.

Cantrell reimbursed the city on 11 different dates starting on October 2013. In five cases, she made the reimbursements from a personal account. Six were reimbursed by her campaign account, according to the Charbonnet camp's analysis.

Cantrell's campaign said Wednesday that the reimbursements show Cantrell's commitment to ensuring that no personal expenses were made on a card paid for with public money. And it denied that the timing of a July check reimbursing $4,433 worth of expenses, covering almost the entirety of Cantrell's time in office, had anything to do with her campaign for mayor.

That's all very much worth asking about. Fronting public money for campaign expenses seems like it violates at least the spirit of ethics laws even if the campaign fund pays the money back.  Throw in the bit about "personal expenses" eventually paid for by campaign donors using the public money as a conduit and then you're raising serious issues.

There is also this nugget that might mean a lot or a little. But it's in there so it bears mentioning. 

When taken together, the expense records, the lien the IRS placed on Cantrell and her husband’s home in 2014 for unpaid income taxes and their bank’s foreclosure on their home in 2013 suggest the councilwoman can’t be entrusted with the city’s purse strings, said Stuart, the Charbonnet spokesman.

“The simple truth is if she can’t manage her own finances, she can’t be trusted with a billion-dollar budget,” he said.

Cantrell's campaign has said the unpaid taxes occurred because of a dispute over how much she and her husband owed the IRS, and then that debt wasn't paid because of an error by First NBC Bank.

The Advocate has done a good job of pulling on the FNBC thread. I've tried to keep track of their reporting here.  Long story short, though, it's about some very important people making questionable use of federal grant money to leverage financing for their preferred projects.  Maybe LaToya just happened to have a home loan from them by coincidence.

Anyway, there's something to this even if it doesn't rise to the level of a major scandal. (It might! But also it probably will go away after the election regardless.) It's already being "both sidesed" because that's easy enough to do. Either way it's not something that should have any effect on the outcome. (I say "should" for a reason. But I'm getting to that.)

If nothing else it makes social media feeds amusing when a bunch of people who once upon a time howled about Ray Nagin's credit card expenses suddenly have nothing to say about this. These little hypocrisies permeate our politics. Petty corruption is only bad when it makes somebody else's friends rich.  I'll link back to a favorite example of mine for now because I plan on talking more about it in future posts.  The point is, for LaToya supporters, the narrative has already been set.  They're the "good guys" and the other side is a "corrupt machine."  No amount of evidence muddying those waters was ever going to change their votes.

So even going in this direction is a highly questionable move for the Charbonnet people.  But they've already spent the year running a lazy campaign about nothing so it shouldn't surprise anyone that this is all they know to do at this point.  I would have considered arguments about the value in going after undecided or less committed Cantrell voters but that was before the D.A. showed up. 

NEW ORLEANS - A criminal complaint has been filed against mayoral candidate LaToya Cantrell for her extensive use of a city credit card, and District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office forwarded the complaint Thursday to Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry.

Cannizzaro is a vocal supporter of Cantrell’s opponent in this month’s mayoral election, Desiree Charbonnet.

Surely no one will think that suspicious.  I know it's Halloween and all but maybe we could be a little less mustache twirly in our melodramatic villainy.  It's tempting to think Cannizzaro is deliberately trying to undermine the whole line of attack here. Whether he means to or not, he's likely forfeited whatever slight difference the credit card news would have made for Charbonnet.  People hate Cannizzaro. He's guaranteed to ruin any message just by associating himself with it.

Not that he cares.  Most people probably aren't going to believe this but I think it's likely the D.A. is acting on his own accord in this matter. It obviously hurts the campaign so badly it's difficult to imagine they would have asked him to do this. Meanwhile Leon is happy to jump at any opportunity to promote himself. He's possibly up for consideration as the next U.S. Attorney. It probably won't hurt his chances with the decision-makers there to show that he can harass a potential New Orleans mayor over petty bullshit.  Or maybe he really is just this dumb.  In any case, he's definitely very ethical. At least that's what he paid this ethics lawyer to tell everybody.   

On Monday, Cannizzaro's office released a letter by R. Gray Sexton, the former longtime general counsel of the Louisiana Ethics Board, offering a full-throated defense of Cannizzaro's action.

The DA acknowledged after releasing the opinion that Sexton billed him about $1,000 for offering his view. A spokesman said Cannizzaro planned on paying Sexton personally, not with public money.

Anyway, like I've been saying, the result of the election is already determined. I'll get back on track trying to explain all of that later. Unfortunately, we still have to go through the motions of silly season.  Last night's debate was dominated by this silly slap fight. The candidates had to talk about the credit card stuff in response to the very first question and came back to it several times throughout the night. It's hard to say who looked worse.

Assume for a second that there are voters who honestly care about the credit card business as though it were a serious election determining matter.  I don't think there are many but if there are, LaToya probably didn't convince them of much. First she insisted that nothing she spent any money on violated any rules and instead, "advanced the City of New Orleans."  So Dennis Woltering went into the specifics of some of those expenditures reported on here by David Hammer to which she only repeated herself. Also I think she said "best practices" a few times.  It's really difficult to convey just how much condescension drips from LaToya's voice when she talks about this stuff and how grating that is. It's a good thing for her there aren't many undecided voters who are persuadable based on this issue. 

Next, LaToya asserted that Desiree "manipulated the documents" without explaining how the facts are any different due to that "manipulation."  Remarkably, this was enough to put Charbonnet on the defensive but only because Desi allowed it to. During one particularly stupid bit Desiree exclaimed,  "I DID NOT TOUCH YOUR DOCUMENTS"  before offering, "the campaign did all that." This will surely reassure voters who may have had concerns about Desi's independence.



The good news is none of this was any less depressing than the rest of the debate which saw the candidates climb over each other to show who would do the most to "incentivize business" through tax giveaways and various offers to "cut red tape."  Go back and watch if you want to have a big laugh about all that.  My favorite part was either Charbonnet saying, "President Trump has made infrastructure a priority," or LaToya talking about how she wants to ensure we aren't "being punitive toward the landlord community."  Sheesh!

But, look. The thing to get here is the election is not about the awful candidates or the things they say or the dumb ginned up controversies of the final weeks. The candidates are bad people. But candidates are always bad people. What voters actually have to do is look past the bad candidates and chose which set of elites is going to have the inside track on profiting from key policy decisions over the next 8 years. A lot of that will not affect you very much even as it makes certain individuals richer.

But some of it will affect you. The set of these corrupt elites backing one candidate may be somewhat more enthusiastic about privatization and "running government like a business" than the other set. One set of corrupt elites is slightly more friendly to Airbnb. One candidate's set of corrupt elite backers is decidedly more hostile to the rights of workers to organize. Maybe that stuff is important to you. Maybe it isn't. Vote for whichever you think best fits your preferences. But that's how the election will eventually touch most of us. 

Maybe some future election will be different. Maybe some day we'll find better people to be candidates. And in that future, if you want to win that election, I will tell you how for one million dollars. But for now, this is what we have to deal with. 

Wednesday Night Debate Ball

Here's a nonsensical tweet thread about was being said last night at a mayoral debate hosted by the Urban Conservancy and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.  Tweet threads are dumb and hard to follow, though, so here is a video of the whole debate.



At this point in the race, the two candidates have memorized their scripts pretty well.  So you aren't likely to get any major revelations out of an event like this. (Gambit warned everybody about this back in July.) This debate, focused on flood control and environmental issues, was an almost absurd manifestation of that phenomenon where both candidates just said the same rote cliches they've learned to apply to these questions over and over by this point in the race.

The first exchange was almost exactly this.

LaToya: "Build effectively, leverage resources, implement plan, partner with organizations, think regionally"

Desi: "Think differently, new ideas, teach these new ideas in schools"

LaToya: "Resiliency plan, Urban water plan" "Get things done"

It went on like that for most of the night. One thing I noticed, and this was very subtle, was LaToya made a deliberate effort to always throw something in about how any action she might take will "encourage development."

This was most stark when the candidates were questioned about the effect of commercial and industrial water usage on subsidence. Desi talked about imposing fees or doing some other kind of non-specific punitive enforcement. LaToya, instead, stressed "incentives" for developers adding that "Developers are seeing an added burden" from standards embedded in the CZO.


LaToya was also less aggressive with regard to joining the multi-parish lawsuit against the oil and gas industry. Back in July the mayor and council deferred taking any action on that just yet.  The next mayor could have different ideas. LaToya didn't sound very enthusiastic, though. Instead she repeated a lot of the rhetoric Garret Graves used when he was Bobby Jindal's coastal czar about preferring to working with the industry toward voluntary efforts at coastal mitigation.  Desiree took a more direct course. "The lawyer in me says sue," she said in what was the most firm sounding commitment from either candidate to anything all night.

There were a few other interesting exchanges but mostly it was just a recitation of familiar phrases. Watch the video and see what else you can pick out. LaToya does say "skin in the game" for the millionth time this year so be ready to do your shot. 

How to lose an election Part 1: Crime and cynicism

The mayor's race is over.  LaToya Cantrell's campaign worked harder and smarter than Desiree Charbonnet's in the primary such that the situation for the latter is pretty much unrecoverable.  In the next few weeks, we'll have to watch a runoff campaign unfold knowing its conclusion is already a fait-accompli.  So rather than fixating on the surely irrelevant daily back and forth, I'd like to post a few observations about how we got to this point and what it says about city politics right now.   I've got a lot to say about that so I think it would be best to break it out into a series of posts.  Later, I'll talk about the candidates' differing strategies for voter turnout, how they handled key policy questions like flood control and economic development, and how each candidate embodies the persistent racial and class divide that defines New Orleans politics.  But to start things off we may as well look at what every candidate and pundit tells us over and over is supposed to be the "number one issue" on voters' minds always and forever.  Of course we are talking here about Confederate monuments public masturbation  crime.

The first thing we need to be clear about here is both of the remaining mayoral candidacies are deeply cynical operations. But it's the Desi campaign that has the added distinction of also being lazy. Charbonnet's advisors started with a basic idea about how to win a generic New Orleans mayoral election but never bothered to think about how the particulars of this election fit into that template. Nor did they do any of the groundwork necessary to connect their campaign to any actual human voters. This showed on primary night. Not only did Desiree finish second, she ceded key sections of her presumed base districts in the process to a harder working (though, of course, equally cynical) opponent.

After the WDSU debate, I said Desi's campaign style was reminiscent of  Hillary Clinton's.  I believe her campaign's strategy is flawed in similar ways to Hillary's as well. Desi's advisors are playing a detached, elitist brand of politics that considers voters as manipulable market segments instead of people with actual concerns and interests. The campaign has no message or purpose. It only has calculated pitches to specific demographics.  It's an incoherent approach that separates the question of how to get voters to your side from an honest consideration of why they should be there.  In 2016, Hillary took struggling working class voters for granted in pursuit of white suburban Republicans who were never going to vote for her in the first place.  Similarly, Desiree is chasing after a block of voters who are actively campaigning against her while ignoring others she may have had a better chance of persuading. 

This morning we read that her campaign is doubling down on this losing strategy.

Charbonnet argues that she can make headway in winning Bagneris backers and other voters by highlighting her plans to fight crime. In an interview last week, she said the primary campaign taught her that public safety remains the No. 1 issue for voters.

“I’m going to continue to let citizens know that if they are concerned about crime, I am the candidate,” she said.

They have no idea what they're doing.  Polling says voters consistently rank crime among their chief concerns.  But not all "crime" voters are alike. If your plan is to move voters who are "concerned about crime," you had better first understand which segment of those voters are yours to move and why.  The Desiree campaign is treating all "crime" voters as though they are Bagneris voters.

But the "Bagneris vote" is an explicitly anti-Charbonnet vote. There is no possible way to reach it.  The fact that the campaign still thinks it's as simple a matter as talking about "crime" tells you everything you need to know about how little effort they've put into this.  Their biggest miscalculation by far was the assumption that Leon Cannizzaro's endorsement would prove to be some kind of asset.





Instead it is a millstone around Desiree's neck as Cannizzaro's outrageous abuses continue to draw the ire of criminal justice reformers who, only a year ago, were pointing to Charbonnet as an example of someone who took their cause seriously. She's lost those votes now.  And, while, it's probably fair to say the "Bagneris backers" really do want to see NOPD go out and crack skulls with Leon's blessing, they still wouldn't come out for Charbonnet if she announced this program from the base of a restored Liberty Place Monument.

More to the point, there are significant numbers of  "crime" voters who are appalled by Cannizzaro's retrograde tactics. There are an even larger number of voters whose neighborhoods and families are directly harmed by them. These voters also say they are "concerned about crime" when polled. We're all concerned about crime.  We have vastly different ideas about what policies address these concerns. By and large, Desi's approach has been to pander to the hard-liners while expecting her base to understand that it's just politics.  That's not gonna fly.  

Meanwhile, the Cantrell campaign developed a more sophisticated (if still cynical) way to play all sides of the crime issue.  The slogan LaToya borrowed from this early 2000s Los Angeles anti-gang campaign "Nothing Stops A Bullet Like a Job," positions her to the left of Cannizzaro but not too much so. It tells some voters that the candidate feels their pain by superficially acknowledging the relationship between crime and poverty. Meanwhile it subtly speaks to conservative Bagneris voters too by suggesting Cantrell will make those people get a job.

Cantrell took this message out on a "listening tour" of neighborhoods and various civic organizations several months prior to the primary where she managed to make inroads with voters in precincts Charbonnet's spreadsheets determined would be hers by default. Charbonnet didn't talk to anybody about anything until well after qualifying day.

It's strange that this issue should have opened such a wide gap between the two candidates. There is little substantive difference in how we should expect either to approach it as mayor. The Cannizzaro endorsement, like the similarly disappointing Charbonnet "crime plan," is all about campaign positioning.  It's right and good that criminal justice reformers criticize her for running on those planks. But they could just as soon lean on Cantrell for her platform which is scarcely any sort of improvement. Or they could interrogate Cantrell's support of tactical gear for police or surveillance cameras in the French Quarter. Or they could talk about her father-in-law's role in the exploitative cash bail system they've pegged some of Charbonnet's supporters for. Charbonnet has been slammed (again, rightly) for a nonsensical ad in which she proposes to make some sort of Uber but for police app.  But in perhaps the most shameful moment of the campaign to date, Cantrell praised Sidney Torres's app to Sidney Torres when asked by Sidney Torres to talk about Sidney Torres's app at Sidney Torres's sham forum. 

Frankly, both of these campaigns are nothing short of shameful in their approach to an issue most voters put at or near the top of their priorities list. At a time when more progressive movements are making surprising gains in local races across the country by taking serious stands against abusive and racist police tactics, the top candidates for mayor in New Orleans offer only smarmy platitudes and insincere triangulation. Voters deserved a thorough public debate about our dysfunctional, dangerous, and corrupt criminal justice system.  Instead we've had to settle for a dismal contest of cynical tactics.  And in that contest, Cantrell's more competently deployed smarm has been enough to weather Charbonnet's ham fisted flailing.

We're no nearer to solving this problem. But we are nearer to electing a mayor with no clearer mandate to right the ship than the previous one had. And, really, isn't that what it's all about? It's been an inspiring year. This is only the first of post of this series and already I want to drown in a flooded street.

Next we'll continue to draw inspiration by looking at how the infamous "natives vs transplants" dynamic has managed to distract from more serious and relevant issues to practically everyone's detriment... except LaToya's.

In the Bags for LaToya

This is kind of funny in a few ways. Bagneris could have gone the other way with this endorsement but it wouldn't have been worth anything.  The voters who pulled his lever in the primary were going to LaToya anyway. They were, first and foremost, an anti-Charbonnet vote and weren't really his to deliver.  Here, on The Lens's map,we find the bulk of the Bagneris vote. (Shaded blue) It is situated in Lakeview and in the deepest, whitest, wealthiest Uptown precincts around Audubon Place and the Garden District.

Those are the voters and donors who locked in on Bagneris early when he went to Frank Stewart's house got all "both sidesey" about the monuments. Remember that?

Recall also that the anti-Desi "Not For Sale NOLA" PAC  was funded by a cohort of reactionary "business leaders" dead set against what upper class white people in this town snidely refer to as a "machine."  The Not For Sale group also donated heavily to Bagneris.

So really what we're looking at here are a block of white conservative voters with sympathies for old confederates who were looking at buying a primary candidate and will now buy a different one in the runoff. They are, themselves "not for sale" by anybody to anybody and they will be the first to tell you that.  The Advocate decided to accompany the story about this transaction with a photo that featured a "Black Lives Matter" banner in the background.  Somebody over there has a keen sense of irony.

Will the new hotels be unionized?

I wonder which "vast new hotel development nearby" the Unite Here organizers were talking about here.

Lila Zucker, a bartender at Loews New Orleans Hotel, said her chronic health issues would prevent her from working without the $10 a month health insurance she's able to purchase through the hotel's union contract. Odell Brown, who works as a banquet steward at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, called for workers to receive a larger piece of the company's more than $10 billion in annual revenue. Gabby Bolden, a banquet server at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, mentioned rumors of a vast new hotel in development nearby.

"It is our business to make sure that [any new hotel] jobs are union jobs with decent wages and benefits," she said. "We all deserve a fair wage."

It says, "rumors" so I thought first of the so-called Trade District development expansion of the upriver Convention Center property. On our NOligarchs map (which needs some updating, btw) we were calling this area "Jaegertown" because Joe Jaeger and Darryl Berger appeared to have an inside track as developers there.   But just this month, we read that project has been "mothballed" for the time being. So what's the big thing in the works now?

There's Four Seasons moving into WTC (eventually) but that's much more than a "rumor" at this point. Heck, its projected revenue is already part of mayoral candidate Desiree Charbonnet's budget plans.  Speaking of which, I guess neither candidate made it out to the Unite Here rally. That's kind of a shame given that organizing hospitality is going to have to be a top priority for anyone committed to battling economic inequality in New Orleans under the next administration. (We're still not sure LaToya Cantrell even believes inequality is a problem.)  There were a couple of council candidates out there, though.

Bolden also urged elected officials to support local organizing efforts, but two City Council candidates who attended the rally already had pledged their support. James Gray, the incumbent District E councilman currently in a  Nov. 18 runoff election against opponent Cyndi Nguyen, donned a red UNITE HERE shirt and vowed to assist to the union in contract negotiations if he is re-elected.

Jay Banks, who faces Seth Bloom in a runoff for the District B City Council seat, also spoke, saying he would be "a friend" to unions if elected. "Making sure that families can work and afford to live is crucial to the survival of this city," he said.

Banks has also served on the Convention Center board so it's significant that he's aware of the need for stronger unions in hospitality.  Bloom is the only candidate on the citywide slate I've seen actually oppose a $15 minimum wage. So that's a pretty stark contrast. 

Primary post-mortems

Posting here has been kind of slow because I'm writing up a bunch of stuff about the primary results. The short version is the mayor's race is over and the reason for that is the Charbonnet campaign blew it big time on many fronts. What I'm writing are a series of posts that examine several of those fronts in detail.

To understand why it's over, one need only  take a look at The Lens's precinct maps. Specifically, look at all of these Cantrell precincts (in green) in the Lower Ninth and in East New Orleans that Charbonnet needed to carry in order to have any shot in the runoff.

I'm going to write more about why it went this way later. But just know, for now, Charbonnet isn't going to dig out of that hole.  Cantrell is looking at something like 60% of the vote in the runoff now.

There's a lot more to say about all of this. In the meantime here is a starter question to think about.  This week, Cantrell's backers (and some ostensibly neutral observers) are heralding her "progressive" and even "populist" campaign.  Why is it none among them seems to have noticed this one quote from election night picked up on only (as far as I can tell) by me and conservative TP columnist Tim Morris? 

Cantrell, meanwhile, will be trying to assure her doubters that she is not the radical community organizer of their nightmares and that her experience representing City Council District B has prepared her to become mayor.

"I'm not talking now about taking from the rich and giving to the poor and all that kind of crap," Cantrell said in a telling moment of her victory speech. "What I'm talking about is creating balance so everyone feels like they're winners. We all can win. It is not a zero sum game as we have been made to believe. We will not be pitting neighborhoods against one another, we will be building up neighborhoods."

I'll come back to that as well as ton of other stuff later. But I'd love to hear Cantrell voters, in particular, describe what they think it means.

Congratulations Mayor Cantrell

More on this later because today is a Saints game and I gotta go to the Dome. But just for handicappers out there check out Grace this morning.

There was some expectation that Charbonnet, whose family has deep roots downtown, would dominate those precincts, and that Cantrell would perform best Uptown, where she represents City Council District B. Cantrell did indeed own the precincts above Canal Street, with the exception of some largely white areas that Bagneris won. But she also showed surprising strength in what was supposed to be Charbonnet's home base, where she won a quite a few precincts outright. That's got to be a concern to the Charbonnet camp.

Grace goes on to say a few things there I think are either misleading or flat out wrong but, like I said, we'll come back to that. The above paragraph is the story.  This thing is over. You might as well stop the fight here.

Real quick cheat code to the mayor's race

In one corner, you have the following.

Sidney Torres
Frank Stewart
Anne Milling
Neil  Abramson
Leslie Jacobs
Boysie Bollinger
Lane Grigsby
Jay Lapeyre


In the other corner, you have what the wealthy white plutocrats listed above and their allies in local media  refer to as a "corrupt machine" because that is how you dogwhistle in New Orleans politics.  Like we've been saying all along, this is 2002 all over again. I think the result is likely to be similar as well.

Meanwhile, here's the show we recorded this week. It expands on the above points. Sorry it's so long but there was a special guest and a lot of stuff to talk about.  We cover the election in the first hour (just after the hurricane talk) and included in that coverage is a minor scandal we're pretty sure is an exclusive.




We'll write more before the polls close tomorrow. Here are a few items we've posted previously that might be worth review.

In August we looked at the controversies over Bagneris's and Charbonnet's respective donors and what that means in the bigger picture. 

Last week we took notes on the WDSU debate and hashed out the four "major" candidates' positions and strategy.

Also here is the AntiGravity No Nonsense Guide which I always find helpful.

Oh and last week's podcast had some stuff on Torres's involvement.

The problematic sandwich shop

Y'all have probably eaten at Melba's at least once by now. It's very good. They do po-boys and plates and stuff. The gumbo is really good. The ordering system is a bit of an adventure but once you figure it out it's fine. There should probably be more places like it. But there's a lot that goes into getting even something seemingly so modest off the ground quickly.  Melba's has been open for only a couple of years but has gotten a lot of attention. This can only happen for a family business if it starts with a fair amount of financial and political capital already in the bank which these guys certainly had in spades as this 2015 profile explains.

Melba’s is the latest venture for Scott Wolfe Sr., the grocer who made Wagner’s Meat into a household name in New Orleans, even for those who never shopped at his stores, thanks to its potentially blush-inducing slogan: “You Can’t Beat Wagner’s Meat.”

Wolfe and his family also created the Chicken Box (slogans: “Tastes Like Mama’s” or, at some locations, “Tastes Like Ya Mama’s”), a related chain of takeout joints that had a short but colorful run in the years before Hurricane Katrina. This was the company that once offered to put on weddings for couples who bought its 1,000-piece chicken package to cater their receptions.

After shifting to real estate development in the years after the storm, Wolfe quietly returned to the retail game in 2012. That’s when he first opened Melba’s, turning a vacant drycleaners on Elysian Fields Avenue into a 24-hour combination po-boy shop, daiquiri shop and washateria.

More recently, the menu has expanded with a steam table selection of New Orleans comfort food, boiled seafood and, as he’s resurrected the Chicken Box brand, fried chicken (the 1,000-piece package is available, though the wedding offer is not). More is on the way, including urban gardens Wolfe plans to develop on adjacent lots, an outdoor event venue and some 500 birdhouses he wants to distribute around the city bearing a Melba’s sales pitch.

The high profile cuts both ways, though.  The Wolfes found this out after a TV crew showed up at Melba's to get some man-on-the-street takes from customers about the Great NFL Kneeling Controversy of 2017.

What brought the crisis to Melba’s, however, was a comment from the manager on duty at the time. Mike Wolfe told WWL-TV that he didn’t want to show the Saints game if players protested in that way.

The restaurant’s Facebook page lit up with angry comments, accusations of hypocrisy from a white-owned business based in a largely black neighborhood and calls to boycott Melba’s.

But Scott Wolfe, the owner of Melba’s, said his brother's comments amount to an employee of the company expressing a view that doesn't represent the business and is at odds with its character.

“What he said was not the opinion of Melba’s, it wasn’t my opinion, and it’s not how we operate here," said Wolfe. "I know it's confused a lot of people, but the people who know us know that's not what we're about."

"It wasn't my opinion." Okay sure, we'll just have to take his word for that.  Still, as long as the business isn't deliberately involving itself in the stupid boycott movement, they at least deserve credit for that.   It's pretty nice for them that they have the kind of pull that gets the Advocate to help them with their PR response, though.

I had to go to the other news"paper" to find this story.

The owner of 821 Gov. Nicholls St. is now challenging the city's enforcement of a ban on short-term rentals in the French Quarter in a lawsuit on the argument that what's being purchased is catering services -- not a short-term rental -- because the free night's stay is merely an optional bonus.

Despite the lawsuit, a city administrative hearing officer Wednesday (July 12) fined property owner 821 Gov Nicholls LLC $3,000 for six violations of the city's short-term rental ordinance. Officials showed a VRBO.com listing for "Melba's Mansion" during the hearing.

Scott Wolfe owns Melba's Po-Boys on Elysian Fields Avenue through the company K-Ville Market LLC. Wolfe said the Governor Nicholls property is owned by his family through 821 Gov Nicholls LLC.

The "Po-Boy party" farce isn't just some uh.. lone.. Wolfe.. action.  It's actually the beginning of a larger, concerted effort by the Short Term Rental lobby to further confound efforts to regulate their activities. 

Eric Bay, the director of the pro-short-term rentals group the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity, appeared in an adjudication hearing with attorney Eric Torres to answer an enforcement action against a French Quarter short-term rental. Short-term rentals are illegal in most of the French Quarter under an ordinance that the City Council that took effect on April 1.

Bay does not own the short-term rental that was cited for operating illegally, and he insisted he does not represent the owner. But his appearance before the city's adjudication panel over a clearly illegal short-term rental raises fresh questions about how committed the organization is to complying with the city's short-term rental law.

Bay and his group practically wrote the ordinance.  It was their side who showed up in force at City Council to lobby for its passage.  But now they sense a political opportunity to press even further in the direction of full legalization. In order to do this they're pouring money into the municipal elections.  Gambit reported last month on some of the campaigns who have received money from Bay's group, Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity. ANP emails to members explicitly state that candidates, "have pledged to work with us" presumably in their efforts to expand STRs during the next term.

The council candidates named in that article have had to publicly backtrack and even return donations in order to keep up appearances. Gambit doesn't say anything about the mayoral candidates [THIS IS INCORRECT SEE * BELOW]

Cantrell also got $1,100 from the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity, a local group of short-term rental property owners, and $2,500 from the Committee to Expand the Middle Class, Airbnb’s political action committee. Shachat said Cantrell has not given any assurances on what her policy on short-term rentals would be if she’s elected, other than to say that it would be “open, fair and transparent.”

As we've noted previously, Cantrell has demonstrated through her words and actions that she doesn't believe Airbnb is really all that much of a problem.  Wonder how she came to that conclusion. In any case, despite their reporting on the council races,  Gambit must not think STRs are all that much of a problem either. They've endorsed Cantrell for mayor, after all. Maybe they thought she was just talking about po-boys or something. Either way it's good to have friends in the media, whatever it is you might be trying to sell.


* This blog is a piece of trash sometimes.  Here is what Gambit actually wrote in that article.

ANP’s other campaign donations include:

- $1,000 to Ramsey on May 11 and $250 in June 2016.

- $100 to District B councilmember and mayoral candidate LaToya Cantrell on Feb. 2 and $1,000 on May 24.

- $500 to At-Large Councilmember Jason Williams in June 2016 and $250 in November 2016.

Bay also made donations to Cantrell ($250 on Feb. 2) and District A candidate Joe Giarrusso ($250 on Sept. 2). Giarrusso contacted Gambit after this story initially ran to point out he returned Bay's contribution the same day it was made

Here's a little behind the scenes look at how this crap blog gets made sometimes. I read that Gambit article weeks ago and bookmarked it in here.  Later, I noticed Melba's was in the news vis a vis the Trump bullshit, remembered Wolfe and them were running the po-boy airbnbs, and thought I could put all of that together.

So I put all the bookmarks in a post and saved it for a while. Over the following days and weeks I came back here and wrote a few lines at a time about what I thought I remembered this  post was supposed to be about.  Usually I write while two or more people are talking to me and/or the TV is on. I'm actually typing this correction right now while listening to a mayoral debate.  I have severe Trump brain. It's a wonder any of these sentences ever come to a complete.......

Anyway, by the time I "finished" this post I had forgotten enough of the Gambit story that I ended up misrepresenting it (and snarkily so, even.)  Sorry about that.  I still think they shouldn't have endorsed a candidate in this terrible race, although that is a separate matter from what they published in the Airbnb story.

Tuesday Night Debateball

The exciting action from the "John Georges Auditorium" on the campus of  Dillard University is available from WDSU here.  Now that the candidates are on TV all the time, we're well past the point where any of them is going to say or do anything substantive.  Not that we've been in much danger of that happening at all this year. But last night was almost entirely on-script and therefore devoid of meaning. The very first question specifically asked them to say what about their approach to crime would distinguish them from their opponents. When they all answered by repeating one another's platforms and the cliches that describe them, it was clear we weren't going to learn anything from this one.

But I took notes so let's run through those real quick. 

It is with a heavy heart and with great trepidation that I introduce this strained metaphor but it must be said.  Desiree Charbonnet is the Hillary Clinton of this election. She is well funded, well connected, some would say well groomed and prepared for the office, and is running the most bland,  playing-not-to-lose campaign of everybody.  While it's fair to say all of the candidates are playing a cynical triangulation game, Desiree's version of that seems the most pure. As we've written previously, her ads and website are calculated to target specific slivers of voters with an almost paint-by-demographic obviousness.

Last night she continued in this vein, robotically non-answering whenever possible. I think her opening statement was, "Greetings, Earthlings.."   The most interesting thing she said had to do with Sewerage & Water Board which she has decided she does not want to fold into a city department. The reason for this is the independent board has bonding authority and, if it can borrow, that means Desi can pledge not to raise fees and taxes to support its operations.  No, this probably isn't feasible. But it's a creative way to finesse a difficult campaign issue and that's really all we're here to do, right?

If Desi's technocratic reserve calls to mind Hillary Clinton, then LaToya's full on smarm can be said to evoke Bill.  On the campaign trail thus far she has frequently draped her rhetoric in a kind of false empathy designed to comfort audiences but not necessarily commit to anything.  She tells personal stories about crime in her neighborhood, or the time she rode a bus past a housing project, or the fact that she, too, once lived in an apartment. I've watched her talk to hospitality workers about how she understands their experience having once worked in a hotel herself. They seemed to eat it up despite the fact she promises nothing in the way of supporting their efforts to organize today. There's very little that comes out of this candidate's mouth that anyone should take at face value.  Even her signature line, "nothing stops a bullet like a job" is cribbed from an L.A. gang intervention program.

In her opening statement last night, Cantrell told us she is running in order to "spread the love" whatever that might mean. At the times when one could pull policy positions out of her syrupy ooze, they invariably derived from a dismal neoliberal playbook. On crime, she talked up her record of pushing for more surveillance cameras. On flood control she lamented that only property owners were shouldering the tax burden saying that, I guess, poorer residents need to have more "skin in the game." On affordable housing, she talked about soft second mortgages, "incentives" for landlords, and some bootstrappy sounding ways to encourage homeownership. When it comes to rising rents, LaToya's solution seems to be we should have fewer renters. Which is weird given that she also boasted of her efforts to secure PILOT tax giveaways to the developers of the South Market District apartments. Wasn't the idea there to bring more rental units onto the market?  Maybe not, actually.

Wisznia could be just one of many developers who — intentionally or not — have run afoul of HUD requirements, she continued.

Many of the city’s prominent developments are HUD-insured properties, such as the South Market District’s Paramount Residences and the Woodward Loft Apartments in the Warehouse District.

A search of the city's database found at least one unit at Woodward to be operating as a commercial short-term rental.

It's worth noting also that every candidate ducked a question about Airbnb. Each of them said some version of LaToya's meaningless call for "balance."  Also, to be fair, LaToya isn't the only candidate promising tax giveaways to developers and corporations in hope that the benefits will "trickle down."  Charbonnet presented a hypothetical pitch to Amazon where she said she would help them apply for new market tax credits. I think I actually shot myself in the brain at this point so excuse me if I'm missing some things.

I believe I heard Michael Bagneris say he was going to compile facts and clean things up several times.  Like all the candidates, Bagneris loves police and thinks we need more of them.  Like all of them he ducked the question about the monuments. They all basically said it was time to move on and have less "divisiveness." Like the other candidates, his housing answer centered on blight remediation and boot-strap type talk. Like all the candidates he agreed to give Payton and Brees one more season with the Saints. (Yes, this was a question.) He repeated the "nuts and bolts" manufacturing pitch he launched his campaign with. So, Bagneris was his typical boring self, right?  Not exactly.

For one thing, he was the only candidate to deliver anything like a direct attack on anyone.

In the most heated exchange of the evening, Bagneris took a shot at one of Henry's big talking points, that he is best positioned to reform the Sewerage & Water Board because he once served as a top official at a wastewater management company called United Water. Bagneris pointed to the brief period when the company ran Atlanta's water system, calling it a time of "customer complaints," "broken pipes" and "excessive chlorine in the water."

"So that’s experience we can do without,” Bagneris said.

It might have been better if Bagneris had skipped the customer complaints and asked what, exactly, it is Henry did at United Water.  To hear him tell it, he was the "President" of the company.  It's been a few years since the last time anyone called him out for this particular lie.  Maybe in his mind there's a statue of limitations. In any case, Henry is more or less a flim flam artist. His function at United Water, whatever his title, was the privatization of water systems. The last time New Orleans was pushing in that direction under Ray Nagin, Henry was involved. Prior to that he was on the executive team at infamous energy deregulation profiteer Enron. Last month, Henry's name came up in a story about how a venture run by him and actor Wendell Pierce to build houses in Pontchartrain Park had defaulted on federal CDBG grants financed through..... wait for it..... yep, FNBC.

In previous mayoral forums, where the candidates were asked directly if they would consider privatizing Sewerage and Water Board, Henry has answered, "possibly."

Toward the end of this debate, Bagneris also dropped this little gem on us. 

Bagneris would raise eyebrows a second time before Tuesday night's debate ended, during a "lightning round" closing out the event. In response to a question about whether the city is in a “mental health crisis,” he replied, “Some of it is represented here.”  

He didn't specify who he meant. Given his earlier attack on Henry we can reasonably assume that was his target. Although, in this field who could blame us if we asked for a more specific answer?

What is happening

Here's the other QOTD

A request to demolish two vacant homes in the St. Roch neighborhood turned into complaints about abuses of the city's short-term rental ordinance at a New Orleans City Council meeting Thursday.

Councilwoman Stacy Head, who supported the short-term rental ordinance when it passed last year, questioned whether the new rules are working or whether the city is allowing property owners to break them.

“I feel like I’ve been duped by this whole short-term rental bull,” Head said.

Stacy Head, welcome to #TheResistance, I guess. We kind of noticed something like this a few weeks ago when LaToya Cantrell took a more pro-STR than Stacy's at this council meeting.  But, well, only one of those two is currently running a campaign that has taken a fair amount of Airbnb money.  Guess which one. 

Just another one of those sure-hope-the-pumps-are-on days

Plan your commute accordingly

If you still have power amidst today's regular rain conditions, which you may not,  you might pass the time by watching a few of the recent mayoral forums. Here are two that focused on S&WB issues specifically. The first was hosted by the Urban Conservancy on September 14. Please enjoy Matt Hill talking about paving roads with Styrofoam peanuts or something and Johnese Smith talking about Captain Kirk. It's all very inspiring.



This link should get you to the September 20 forum hosted by The Advocate.  In that one, LaToya says "Skin in the game" approximately five hundred times, Troy Henry talks about getting an NOPD "strike force" to go after "bad dudes" and Desiree says "we are fee-ed out" to a question about stormwater fees.

Meanwhile, what pumping capacity are we currently working with? It's anybody's guess today.

Early voting week

If you're an early voter and looking for a place to go and the Governor's purple bus hasn't come to get you yet, this Advocate article explains where the polling locations are.

If you're looking for some guidance, I always recommend Arielle Schecter et al for that.  As usual, I don't agree with every endorsement on there but the reasoning is solid.  Don't put too much stock in the campaign rhetoric and mailers and stuff that gets said at the forums. Look instead at who the candidates are, where they come from, who supports them, and most importantly, what their actual records tell us about what we can expect from them.

Finally, there's some pretty good talk about the mayoral race in the latest one of these. That is until the audio craps out a bit.  You'd think after two years someone would get the hang of producing better quality sound and all but you would be wrong abut that.