It's just Dracula's castle now

It's been a while since we did a round-up of our city's most "iconic" doomed redevelopment projects.  In what's now a twenty year race to see who gets "back into commerce" only one of these has made it all the way there... for better or worse. The Trade Mart building is now the Four Seasons hotel.  Boysie Bollinger will sell you his penthouse there for $19.5 million if you are interested.  As for our other favs, well let's take a look.

Plaza Tower: Please enjoy this recent NOLA.com slideshow on the history of the tower. Last month, the city put out an RFP on possible demolition.  That didn't make Joe Jaeger, the building's current owner, very happy. Both Jager and the city have made vague references to possible sale in the works.  But nobody knows who the buyer might be.

Six Flags: As of this past October, Troy Henry has a lease on the property and, apparently, the green light to begin demolition.  He does not, however, have any partners lined up to operate any of the attractions and amenities his pitches for the property have promised.  Nor does he have any financing outside of the potential public subsidy should anything materialize.

Municipal Auditorium: Thankfully this will not become the next City Hall. What it will become remains anyone's guess. There is finally a plan in place to spend the $37 million in FEMA funding to "stabilize" the structure. The years of arguing over what to do with the building almost allowed that to expire. But, even now, there's still no agreed upon vision for the building. An RFP could come soon though.

Charity Hospital: There is news today! Not very encouraging news, of course.  Remember that years-long and very pained public process of getting various entities private and public (LSU, Tulane, the state and city governments, a developer partnership called "1532 Partners") to agree on a development plan? Well that's all scrapped. Instead they're doing this new thing. 

The Domain Companies, a New York firm known in New Orleans for developing the South Market district on Loyola Avenue, has finalized a deal to take over redevelopment of the old Charity Hospital, a project that is more than three years behind schedule and has at least doubled in cost.

What will they build now?  Unclear. But as a placeholder, please enjoy a bunch of gobbledygook.

Domain CEO Matt Schwartz said he isn’t ready to unveil updated plans for the building, but he said the project’s most important component — Tulane’s presence as anchor tenant — will remain the same. Other elements, such as the specific number and configuration of apartments, labs and offices, will be adjusted to make the project more financially feasible.

“Some of it will have to be retooled to make sure the different components are speaking to each other,” Schwartz said in an interview Tuesday. “We are looking at rightsizing the different components for viability, finance ability and making sure we’re targeting the right market and right demographics for what will work.”

The project was originally estimated to cost $250 million, and was later revised to $300 million. After the pandemic, interest rate increases and inflation drove up construction costs. Sources familiar with the project said it could cost as much as $600 million now.

Thumbing back through our notes we are reminded that in 2019 the LSU board gave its final approval to the plan while meeting in Shreveport in order to get as far away as possible from any objections from the New Orleans public. Even at that moment, the emphasis was already moving away from "innovation hubs" and affordable housing and toward condos and STRs. 

Plans for the project also include renting about 150 residential units to Sonder, a short-term rental company that already has significant operations in New Orleans. That would be about 50% more units than would be allowed for the property under short-term rental rules the City Council passed earlier this year, which bar renting more than 25% of the units in commercial buildings to tourists.

And, now, what with all the "right sizing" and "market targeting" Domain is going to do, who knows what they'll end up with. 

But what about the monorail?

This week, Troy Henry and the city's economic development team he has been negotiating with over the Six Flags site showed up at a convention of water park operators to do a little carnival barking. 

The yearslong effort to redevelop the former Six Flags amusement park in New Orleans East took a major step forward Wednesday as the 227-acre property was formally turned over to Bayou Phoenix, the local group selected to tackle the ambitious project.

At a ceremony held during the annual meeting of the World Waterpark Association at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, Troy Henry, who leads the Bayou Phoenix consortium, signed the lease to cheers from residents and applause from public officials.

Henry's one dollar per year lease now gives him permission to demolish what remains of the flooded and shuttered park. Beyond that, though, nothing is guaranteed. In fact, Henry even says here that the master plan he's been waving around in order to drum up public support and secure his bid for the project will probably be altered once the demolitions are done. 

Now that the document is finalized and Bayou Phoenix has control of the property, Henry said his group can begin the difficult task of figuring out how to turn their vision into reality.

“We just got the keys, so now we have to assess the property because we need to understand if the master plan we have designed can physically be located in the way we have laid it out,” Henry said.

While today’s ceremony was a significant milestone, many questions about the project remain.

Over the next 12 months, the developers plan to assess the site and clear it out, demolishing the rusting old amusement rides and removing junk from the property. The Bayou Phoenix master plan will also likely change during that process as the partners get a better understanding of the land and determine what is feasible.

In other words, yes, we have been plying you with bullshit for years now. But trust us.  

A few months ago, WWLTV helped spread some of that bullshit by running a little feature about Tyler Perry's music partner. Apparently Henry had trotted him out to say vague things about how he could do Hollywood things of some sort on whatever the Six Flags site becomes. 

His next venture takes him from Hollywood back to his hometown of New Orleans as he tries to help revive the Six Flags site.

“I walked in there and immediately went into reimagining what the space could potentially be, including equity and inclusion. Being able to have representation for the unrepresented."

The former church organist from Hahnville has big plans for Six Flags and his own career. They include technology centers on the abandoned site and partnering with industries that can help teach the courses and plant the seeds in the next generation.

But at this week's signing ceremony, we learn that Henry doesn't actually have any partners lined up to operate any of the "attractions" he has promised. And, of course, it follows that there's no financing lined up for anything. 

The developers have had initial discussions with several operators, including nationally known brands that are interested in taking on various pieces of the project, Henry said. Because Bayou Phoenix did not have a signed lease agreement until Tuesday, however, it has not engaged in serious talks or, even, secured letters of intent with any specific partners.

For those same reasons, the group has not secured any financing commitments yet. The price tag for the project has previously been mentioned as ranging from $500 million to nearly $1 billion, though Henry said Tuesday that it will likely be closer to $500 million. 

It's well known that Henry and his friends in media and entertainment pull this sort of stuff all the time. It's also fairly well understood that this circle of friends extends into politics. 

 

Equity Media bought WBOK making Troy Henry, who also runs Bayou Phoenix, Councilmember Thomas’ boss. Seems like Troy is gonna have to give out some raises if Oliver secures the bag 💰 pic.twitter.com/knYh56H8fT

— Down For Whatever (@dadioonthepatio) May 12, 2023

Which, in turn, is one reason Troy's project, which may not have any solid partnership commitments or private financing, does have access to $100 million in public subsidies. 

Of that, an estimated 20%, or $100 million, is expected to come from city, state and federal funds, including the possible creation of a special taxing district and “other creative, innovative government programs,” Henry said.

Anyway as of right now, Troy has a one year lease. Let's check back next Halloween to see how many of these deadlines need to be extended.

Its first deadline is 12 months from the date of the lease signing, October 25, by which time it must have a sublease in place with an operator for at least one component of the project. That portion of the project must be completed in early 2027, according to the lease.

The developers will be considered in default if they do not hit the milestones, though the lease contains clauses that allow for extensions.

"Along with"

 Seems like "along with" might be a bit of a stretch in this passage. 

A development agreement for the former Six Flags amusement park has been finalized, nearly a year after Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration chose Bayou Phoenix to take on the project.

The agreement will eventually allow the group led by businessman Troy Henry to access the site and begin pre-construction work. Details of the agreement were not immediately available, but Bayou Phoenix has proposed to build a warehouse on the 227-acre site, along with a water park, hotel, ball fields and other amenities.

If I had to guess at what's going to happen, at the very least I would assume the warehouse project is, "prior to" any remaining development which could be pending for a very long time.  

This doesn't yet say what, exactly has been agreed to.  Back in November, it was clear that Henry was seeking private control over a public asset beyond which was either legally or morally appropriate.  We'll see what he got soon, I guess. 

Update: Case in point, re: public investment going toward private profit.  Apparently the city is chucking in another 1 million dollars toward Henry's warehouse. 

Troy Henry's goal is full privatization

From the outside, this looks a lot like Henry's group is negotiating in bad faith with the explicit goal of getting complete control of the Jazzland property and avoid any accountability for their use of infrastructure created through a massive amount of public investment. 

Businessman Troy Henry, the public face of Bayou Phoenix, has claimed that NORA is demanding unreasonable approval power over tenants, contractors and other aspects of his future plans for the site. Henry, who reiterated those claims in a public meeting on Thursday, said Bayou Phoenix will never agree to those demands.

“No deal is better than a bad deal. And having one hand on the steering wheel trying to drive with somebody else having another is a bad deal, and a disaster waiting to happen,” Henry said at a meeting of the Industrial Development Board.

In one regard, he's right. No deal really is better than a bad deal. It's just that the deal he is angling for is one in which he fully privatizes a public project and collects the profit with no accountability or oversight. That deal would be the bad deal. 

The current plan the Henry is bucking against would have the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) take over nominal ownership of the property from the Industrial Development Board (IDB) and act as a landlord leasing it to Henry's development company.

NORA’s executive director, Brenda Breaux, said at a city budget hearing on Thursday that Bayou Phoenix is asking for a lease that's below the fair-market rate. She said NORA can live with that, but “there has to be an exchange for what the public benefits are, to protect the public’s interest.”

“It's not that (NORA) is intending to approve every tenant or whomever goes on that site, but there are some safeguards that the general public, the 390,000 citizens of New Orleans, would like to see,” Breaux said.

But now it looks like Henry prefers to own the land outright. His strategy for getting it in that case would be to clam up these negotiations and deal directly with the IDB who may be more willing (maybe a little desperate, even, at this point) to sell. 

With prospects for a master lease looking dim, exasperated IDB members on Thursday refused to consider extending an agreement with City Hall that gives the administration the right to lead redevelopment efforts. The agreement expires at the end of November, after which the IDB would seemingly be able to do as it pleases.

That's not an ideal outcome.  We talked about this in greater detail last month on the CBC podcast. You can find that in this post. The land now formerly known as Six Flags/Jazzland was purchased and developed through a large public investment of federal and state dollars. The public, through its elected representatives, should maintain control of its destiny and it should be used for the maximum benefit of the public. IDB can't just dump it to Troy Henry so he can turn a profit doing whatever the heck he wants.  The city's economic development director Jeff Schwartz agrees. 

“If that site is not redeveloped through a solicitation process, whether the existing one or a future one, there’s no guarantee that someone who buys the property on the private market has to do anything with it,” Schwartz said. “They could sit on it for another 10 years. They could turn it into a gas station.”

If that is allowed to happen simply because IDB is tired of dealing with this, it would be a monumental betrayal of the public trust.

The people's park vs Troy Henry

The Six Flags saga is once again in the news. You might say, it's been something of a roller coaster ride.

One year after Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced Bayou Phoenix had won the right redevelop the former Six Flags amusement park site in New Orleans East, lease negotiations to give the group control over the site appear to be on shaky ground.

Actually the ground at the Six Flags site is the least shaky element in all of this.  At least that's one thing we learned watching the 2021 documentary Closed For Storm for the latest episode of CBC last week.  At least one person interviewed in the film says the park's foundation is structurally sound on strong piers and can be built on again.  (Of course this person may have been Tonya Pope so... grain of salt. But it seems correct.)

On the podcast, we specifically talked about why the park is of public interest and why the many attempts at redevelopment have necessarily been part of a public process. Not only does it affect the people who live in the surrounding area, not only does it matter to the well being of the city in general, but also because the initial investment... the one that built the strong foundation on those study piers... was massive amounts of public money.

We also talked about Troy Henry's background as a corporate leech and privatizing ideologue. And well, danged if that isn't the issue now.

Henry said he is still moving forward with pre-development work on the assumption that the project will move forward, but he would not say whether he believes NORA would eventually soften its stance.

"We are hoping they come back with something a little more amenable," Henry said. "But look, there are some fundamental things that we will not waver on. And if we can't control our own project, it's not our project."

But it isn't his project. This is a property and a facility that spiritually belongs to the people and in financial terms was literally built by the people. The people and their elected representatives should retain control over its destiny and benefit from its use.  Troy doesn't get to bully us into granting him the right to private profits from public investment without oversight. But that's what he's about now. It's what he's always been about.

Well it has been a roller coaster ride

The city's agreement with Troy Henry's development company to turn Six Flags into.. well... first into some warehouses and then maybe some other things later is, get this, behind schedule.

City officials said Tuesday that talks with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, which redevelops derelict properties, to take ownership have taken longer than expected. The Industrial Development Board has owned and maintained the site since 2009, but wants to dispose of it to save on maintenance costs exceeding $200,000 annually.

Seems like a straightforward sort of transfer between these governmental (or quasi-governmental) bodies.  But nothing is ever straightforward around here. What is going on?  Well, you know, real estate stuff, apparently. 

In a brief interview, Schwartz said agreements between the administration and the two development agencies are in final drafts, and said discussions are over “typical real estate terms.” He declined to go into detail.

No idea why they can't tell us more.  But just know that it's all very normal.

NORA Executive Director Brenda Breaux agreed the negotiations are over routine matters, but declined to provide details. 

 “These are normal agreements that require us to sit down and work with one another, and I’m expecting to be able to work through this,” Breaux said, adding that lease negotiations with Bayou Phoenix cannot proceed until the ownership agreement is complete.

Although maybe "normal" isn't the most reassuring state of affairs at this point. 

Which warehouse has the prettiest decorations?

The committee charged with selecting a redevelopment plan for the Six Flags site is meeting today.  We already know that the preferred use is going involve some sort of warehousing/logistics staging facility.  The group everyone expects to win, Kiernan West, specializes in that sort of thing nationally and seems to be the most well situated (although the financial details aren't yet known to the public.) 

Because this is a city-owned property, though, and especially because it was once an amusement park, the bidders have all been obligated to dress up their proposals with different grab bags full of public-facing amusements of varying worth and which may or may not ever become real. Us real Six Flags heads have been through enough of these exercises to have seen all kinds by now.   No monorail this time, as far as we can tell. But at least one of the proposals has put the zipline idea back in.  You love to see that. 

Developers Wendell Armant, Gerald Billes and Shelly Wills have partnered with lender BlueBell International, design firm Gould Evans and others to build an array of homes and condos, a grocery store, a day care, and a hotel at the site. 

Retail stores, a film studio, an amphitheater and a campground would help round out the $1.85 billion picture, as would a waterpark, wave pool, skate park and zip-line attraction.

But if we were giving odds, we'd probably put that one as the longest shot.  Of course, Kiernan West is the favorite. But the dark horse underdog is something, amusingly called "Bayou Phoenix"  which has to be be considered somewhat of a contender simply because it is Troy Henry. That "private police force" idea seems rather inspired. 

Renaming the entire area Bayou Phoenix "would allow the area to shake the stigma associated with the former Jazzland/Six Flags name," developers said in a city presentation.

A private police force would also provide security on site to protect the massive investment, freeing up the New Orleans Police Department to work solely to manage the crime in the rest of the sprawling 7th District, Henry said.

But, most probably, they will give the deal to Kiernan West. They did, after all, go to the trouble of hiring some NFL players to do the promotional nonsense side of the project.  

In the first round of evaluations in March, a plan from Kiernan West LLC of Colorado and S.H.I.E.L.D 1., a foundation launched by former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, Saints linebacker Demario Davis and Buffalo Bills cornerback Joshua Norman, scored highest. That project, if chosen Tuesday, would bring an urban farm and a series of educational centers to the site, along with a transportation and logistics center.

What we haven't yet learned, though, is how much will the public pay to subsidize whatever project is chosen. Will the city retain ownership of the land?  Will there be "tax incentives" given away to the developers?  Each proposal includes widely varying estimates of the number "direct" and "indirect" jobs it will create. But we won't get clarity on what that means until we know more about what actually is getting built.

We have to assume in the meantime that the main piece of this will be the warehouse. And aside from worrying about what pretty little schemes go up around the warehouse, we should probably ask how the pay and working conditions will be there.  Is the city adding any stipulations as to how workers are treated on the site? That sounds like something that could be added to a lease agreement.  Will it, though? Probably not. But worth asking about.

Update:  Turns out they couldn't settle on one today. Narrowed down to Kiernan West and Phoenix.  Typically this suggests a play is in the works to maybe cut Henry in on the deal even if it does go to Kiernan West. But who knows.  

Upperdate:  Starting to think maybe Henry's group has a better than even chance now.  Transdev is there, after all.  Also, look what they're bringing. 

The Bayou Phoenix proposal, created by Henry Consulting, TKTMJ Inc and master developer Hillwood of Dallas, scored 417 of 500. That plan would see a logistics hub, a water park, a 200-room hotel and a travel center.

It would also partner with Transdev, a French transit conglomerate that once managed New Orleans' mass transit system, to build light rail transit between Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner and the Six Flags property.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have found our monorail. 

Ah they brought in a ringer

For those who were curious about what sort of gimmick could possibly breathe new life into the many-failures-over Six Flags redevelopment saga, well, here you go. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration announced that a partnership that included Brees was among the three finalists chosen to redevelop the derelict Six Flags site in New Orleans East, advancing a highly-anticipated effort to breathe life into the 227-acre park that has been abandoned for almost 16 years. 

After a selection committee scored six proposals based on developers' qualifications, financial resources and other factors, the highest scoring contender was a partnership between Kiernan West LLC of Colorado and S.H.I.E.L.D., a foundation launched by Brees, Saints linebacker Demario Davis and Buffalo Bills cornerback Joshua Norman.

That group wants to turn the park into multiple facilities, including an agriculture innovation center that helps young people learn about urban farming.

The actual developer is Kiernan-West which is a corporate real estate firm that has dotted the US map with logistics centers so we can logically conclude that is at least one of the "multiple facilities" in the proposal, if not the main one.  The rest of it is just branding.  And by that we mean they just grabbed a bunch of progressive-sounding twee business buzzwords and mashed them all into one thing for the professional athletes to pitch.

The nonprofit portion, managed by the SHIELD group, would include a facility for urban farming and aquaponics; a “discovery lab” that would provide science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics programming for New Orleans students; a natural healing center, and a food cultural center that would serve as a lecture hall for culinary arts education. The site would also feature a restaurant. 

Future development phases could include a ghost kitchen that would deliver meals to people in need, and a food truck park.

There are so many half-baked ideas going on there it literally reads as though it were being made up as it was dictated. Either that or they were just trying to make sure they hit whatever sweet spot the consultant's report laid out for them. 

A firm the city hired to study the best use for the park said in 2019 that it would work best as a transportation and distribution hub, though that team ended up recommending an “education destination” that could focus on themes such as resiliency and climate change, after talking with residents.

I'm glad they clarified which consultant's report we're working from here because there have been several.  This is the 2019 report by  TIP Strategies and Perkins & Will.  The purpose of glossy papers like this is always to give the developers a paint-by-number scheme for making their project appear to fit the needs of whatever community they are taking advantage of.   I'm disappointed to see that Brees's group did not throw a zipline in with their proposal as the consultants suggested.  But we got the healing center and that always seems to be the key. 

Anyway, between the pro athletes involvement and the jamming in of all the shiny objects, this seems like the proposal that is going to be selected.  And Brees sure does know how to spit out the jargon. 

“I am excited about the ability to present this transformational proposal to the city,” Brees said in a statement about the plan. “It is a vision that we have been working on for more than a year, actively looking for the right site and the right public/private Partnership to launch our non-profit concept. I believe this is it.”

If this means he and this giant real estate firm he's shilling for are going to get their hands on one cent of the city's stimulus allocation for any of this, then it's all the same to us if the whole site just sinks back into the swamp. 

On the other hand,  we do see Troy Henry involved with one of the competing groups so maybe let's wait and see. They're expecting to decide within in the next two or three months.

Spears radio

Good news! WBOK will remain under local ownership.

New Orleans native Wendell Pierce, best known for roles in HBO's "The Wire" and "Treme," and several local businessmen confirmed Thursday that they are buying WBOK, Louisiana's only African American-focused talk radio station.

Not so good news.  It now involves these guys. 

Pierce is joining with Cleveland Spears, owner of a public relations company, business consultant Troy Henry and Jeff Thomas, owner of multimedia platform "Think504," to form Equity Media, which is expected to close the deal to buy WBOK in the next few months.

Really looking forward to the official radio station of Fest Festival.  Maybe we'll get a special commentary or two from Henry about privatizing S&WB or something.

What happens in the "longer term"

BGR doesn't really say. They do know, that in the meantime they aren't interested in returning S&WB to anything resembling direct city council control. They'd rather preserve the current mix of mayoral cronies, and people approved (for some never explained reason) by university presidents. "In the longer term," they want to do something else.

"In the longer term, stronger City Council oversight and regulation may not be sufficient to address the multitude of organizational and technical problems plaguing the S&WB," the report states. "However, it is a better interim approach than changing the board's composition until policymakers can determine the best long-term solutions to the S&WB's problems."

What happens in the longer term? Dunno. I guess that will be up to Troy Henry. 

What did the mayor know and when did he know it?

Well, if he read the reports...

A consultant found 17 Sewerage & Water Board pumps and two power turbines out of service last May, months before heavy rains in July and August caused widespread flooding in New Orleans. Outlined in a draft report presented Wednesday (March 14), the inspectors' findings reinforce the notion that agency officials had recourse to be aware of startling problems facing the utility's drainage system prior to the summer floods.

Maybe they didn't put it in bold face on the front page or something.  Or maybe he wasn't at the meeting that day.   There's a bill in the legislature that is supposed to address that problem. 

If passed, the bill would return a City Council member to the board, require either New Orleans' mayor or the city's chief administrative officer to attend board meetings and tighten rules on quarterly reports submitted by the utility to the council. Its author, state Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, says it's high time for more accountability over Sewerage & Water Board's top ranks after flooding last summer revealed severe deficiencies in the utility's power and drainage systems.

Ok but you do have to wonder how they enforce that. Maybe it involves the threat of house arrest. 

Also it's worth pointing out that this is a partial walk back of the very S&WB reforms Morrell and the New Orleans delegation pushed through only a few years ago at the Mayor's urging. Last year, those reforms were called into question in The Lens by Jacques Morial which prompted a response from Morrell defending them.

So this new bill indicates J.P. agrees something needs to change, at least.  It doesn't go far enough unless it takes the damn university presidents out of the selection process. To this day, I still have no idea why these professional fundraisers get a say in so many local governance issues.  In any case, there's more than one S&WB issue that needs to be addressed.

The utility has previously said the drainage system is short more than $50 million in projected brick-and-mortar costs, while an estimated $80 million in emergency work is rapidly drawing down cash reserves. Black & Veatch's report accounts for a roughly $82 million shortfall by 2021. To help mend the gap, the utility's board of directors last month began the process to secure a bond sale to finance $27 million for drainage improvements.

Not sure what sort of reform the next mayor might put forward to deal with that.  Maybe we should ask the co-chair of her transition's infrastructure committee. 

Troy Henry and Bruce Thompson co-chair an infrastructure committee made up of four subcommittees: a subsurface committee looking at Sewerage & Water Board systems, a surface committee looking at roads and bridge, and committees looking at transportation and the implementation of a citywide water management plan.

Certainly Troy has all sorts of interesting ideas. 

Nevertheless, Troy Henry, the southern regional manager of United Water, is convinced that private water providers can do a better job than public utilities. He readily admits that his company and Atlanta city managers have had problems “dealing with the complexities of the system” in Atlanta and says the company is spending “multiple millions of dollars [to] win back the citizens’ and mayor’s confidence.” A biomedical and electrical engineer and former manager at IBM, Henry argues that private companies can do for water delivery what Big Blue did for computing — revolutionize technology and attract “the best and the brightest and most talented people.”

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?

Uberize

It's fair to say every candidate for mayor has been unseemly in their fetishizing of both the tech driven "sharing economy" and of local law enforcement.  But only Frank Scurlock managed to distill the essence of this in a single word and act.

New Orleans mayoral candidate Frank Scurlock is facing a misdemeanor count of lewd conduct in Santa Monica, California, where he is accused of masturbating in an Uber vehicle in February.

Scurlock, whose splashy campaign ads have pledged to “Uberize” the New Orleans Police Department, was allegedly caught masturbating by a driver taking him to a hotel in West Hollywood on Feb. 10, Santa Monica Chief Deputy City Attorney Terry White said.

If you had been wondering what a candidate might mean when he says he wants to "Uberize NOPD," well, now you know it is even worse than you thought.  What's worse than even that, though, is it's not just Scurlock who wants to go around Uberizing over cops.

Desiree Charbonnet is doing it too.  This absurdly stupid ad even mimics Scurlock's cops-but-with-an-app-or-something premise. Her website puts it in even more alarming terms. There we find proposals to defund consent decree compliance monitoring as well as the Neighborhood Housing Improvement Fund in order to pay for more police. It also doesn't help that her plan has the support of New Orleans's proto-facist District Attorney as well as some of its notoriously corrupt bail bondsmen.

The Cantrell campaign took a few minutes away from promoting prison labor to try and make some hay out of that last point recently. We're still trying to figure out how they ever thought they had any room to talk, though. Anyway, Cantrell is as Uber-enthused over tougher policing as any of these candidates.  Maybe not as intense as her Uberizing over Airbnb but it's close.

Troy Henry is also doing it. At the most recent forum, he indicated his vision for NOPD would involve creating a "strike force" that goes after "bad dudes." He and Charbonnet also criticized consent decree restrictions on paid details. Charbonnet even said that NOPD officers are "demoralized" by the fact that Saints game detail gigs go to Jefferson Parish law enforcement.  We agree. It was extremely demoralizing when a Jefferson Parish Levee Authority officer told us to stop banging on the wall during the Saints-Patriots game last weekend. The way that game was going, we'd have much preferred to have NOPD just come by and shoot us.

And, of course, Michael Bagneris is Uberizing over the police as well. His website features a plan to hire 300 more cops by recruting heavily among military vets, install more surveillance cameras, and create a not-at-all scary sounding "Crime Analytics Department" to  "proactively identify violent criminals."

Yesterday Scurlock said he was going to "evaluate" the status of his campaign after having grossed everybody out this week.  If he drops out, he won't be missed. But we do have to thank him for leaving us this word with which to describe how grossed out we are by the rest of the field as well.

Why is Troy Henry running?

I can't figure it out.  He's not polling well. He decided late to get in and was never going to crack the top two. As it turns out he doesn't look like a threat to get into to the top three.  But he's pulling some support from somebody. I can't figure out the angle.

All about Mitch

The juicy rumor this morning is that Mitch Landrieu's PAC interviewed LaToya and Desiree last night with an eye, one supposes, toward deciding which to endorse, or at least support in some way since an explicit endorsement might not be not be the most welcome gift to any candidate.

Anyway, as Grace kind of points out here, it looks like Mitch has already partly decided on the basis of what's best for Mitch.  In this case, that would be snubbing his opponents in the previous two elections.

The letter Alford quoted omitted Michael Bagneris, the former Civil District Court judge who ran a harshly critical challenge against the mayor when he won reelection in 2014, as well as businessman Troy Henry, who ran against him in 2010.

Oh yeah I totally could have won....

LOL Walt Leger.

But Tuesday, a day before qualifying starts, Leger emailed supporters to say he would not be running.

"The decision was not an easy one, mostly because it presented such an amazing opportunity to serve this great city, but also because I am certain a path to victory was clear," Leger said. "However, my public service has never been about titles or jumping to the next best thing. Rather, I remain focused on working hard, studying issues, and relentlessly pursuing policy initiatives in a professional, reasonable and bipartisan manner."

It was clear that I would have whipped everybody. But that just didn't seem very nice so, enjoy being mayor, then, whoever.  Ok, Walt. Anyway, we knew Walt was out the same week Desiree got in. But it's been fun.

Meanwhile... is that Troy Henry's music? 

Troy Henry, the business consultant who in the 2010 New Orleans mayor’s race finished a distant second to Mayor Mitch Landrieu, said Tuesday that he is pondering jumping into this year’s mayoral fray.

His consideration of a second run is fueled by a desire to solve city ills such as violent crime, unequal opportunities for residents and gentrification, he said in a prepared statement.

“We can't continue going from one administration to the next with the same problems that continue to plague every Mayor and Council,” Henry said. “Something different has to happen to benefit the citizens not just in talk or political rhetoric, but in REALITY!”

Hey look it's a business guy who makes loud, self-aggrandizing statements in all caps with exclamation points.  That' new.

You may also remember Mr. Henry from such political follies as:

Going to the mat in favor of corporal punishment at St. Aug.


Having also been employed by a company attempting to privatize water systems in New Orleans and in Atlanta... but also lying about his specific role with that company.  

Having been at Enron during an interesting time.

After a dozen years with IBM, Henry was recruited to help launch an energy-services branch at Enron. He moved his family back to New Orleans while he commuted to Houston.

As vice president for North American operations, Henry recalled putting in long hours to take "a business that was floundering and give it some direction." But in mid-2001, Henry said he was startled to see an earnings report that appeared inflated.

Henry said he was told by superiors that Enron simply was engaging in aggressive bookkeeping with its accounting firm's blessing. He left the company on Sept. 7, 2001, just as revelations began to emerge of a massive accounting fraud that led to Enron's collapse in one of the largest corporate scandals in U.S. history.

Having had his 2010 campaign basically ended by one rebuke from Sybil Morial.  

So, yeah, he should be fun to have around this fall. Anyone with a chip on his shoulder this big fits right in with the current zeitgeist.

He might also appeal to voters who are fed up with the current slate of long-time politicians and want an outsider to shake things up -- a profile Henry appeared to be cultivating in his statement Tuesday.

“I have been successful without the politics, despite being unfavorably treated by the current administration and the power structure of the city,” he said.

Slight detail that had escaped me

It's former mayoral candidate Troy Henry who wants to beat St. Aug students with wooden paddles.

Sybil's Smackdown

Sybil Morial may have just delivered a game-changing blow to Troy Henry in the mayor's race. I'm a little pre-occupied with football this week so just go check out Adrastos' take. I pretty much agree with everything there.

"I have the money and I have the ability"

Awesome

Someone should have asked him if that's like knowing "what to do and how to do it", though. Would have been worth the price of admission.

Update: Buried beneath Georges' histrionics is the fact that the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee endorsed Troy Henry. I've been saying the Henry has potential since the second Ed Murray dropped out. He may be on the move now. Look, even Clancy Dubos appears to be coming around to the idea.

Where the mayoral race is right now

I think Troy Henry has an opportunity to make a run at it but he also appears to be well on his way toward blowing that opportunity. I don't think it's a bad idea for him to complain about the way the local media covers the horse race angle first and actual issues and platforms something like... well never, really. E has a really good summary of the week's events up right now where he addresses Henry's argument this way.

I agree that the media tends to fixate on the theatrics of the election - the horse race itself - and not on positions and values of candidates relative to the problems the city faces. I agree that this hurts African American candidates and the African American population, but it also hurts everyone in this city. The public should know who their choices are and what differentiates them from one another. Mitch Landrieu should be forced to really prove he knows "what to do and how to do it" by being asked to provide some basic detail about what it is he's going to do and how it is he plans to do it.

But in the end, it's kind of hard not to say 'tough sh-t.' That is how the media works.

My big complaint about this year's election coverage is that it really has been inside baseball all-around. I see reporters and commentators working harder at establishing their bona-fides than they are at educating and engaging the public. Maybe it is hard not to say "tough shit", but in some cases I really have to wonder. At the end of Henry's press conference Wednesday, there was this remarkable exchange between Henry and one of the reporters in attendance (I'm sorry I have no idea who she was. I blame Kevin Allman's shoddy iphone work.)

Henry: What I'm here telling you is that it's important that we have a fair election, that everybody understands that every candidate here has the opportunity to succeed or not succeed

Reporter: But, Troy, isn't that your responsibility to convey that message regardless of what anyone says I mean it's just part of the game.

Now we know that Henry was pulling a disingenuous stunt by staging this press conference in the first place, but the answer to the very serious question of whether or not the press is carrying out its responsibility to the public record in the course of a major city-wide election cannot possibly be, "it's just part of the game." When this is the sort of the thing our reporters willingly own up to, one wonders if possibly the Mayor had a point when he threatened to take local news directors into the parking lot so he could cold-cock them. But, you know, Tough shit, I guess.

Anyway, back to Henry. It's also not a bad idea for him to attempt to play the victim a bit while making his argument. It's obviously his strategy here to rally some sort of racial-indignation vote out of what's left in play at this point. The prevailing argument right now is that this is a desperate tactic by a Henry campaign running low on funds and in the polls. But there's still an opportunity there, especially if my horribly flawed model of ignoring all current polling data and just counting 2006 primary votes is anywhere close to reliable. In the past week I have been admonished by more serious and professional observers for even entertaining this flawed methodology but, like I keep reminding everyone, I am neither professional nor serious. I'm just some dude who likes to guess so I can get away with being this stupid.

According to the flawed counting method, there are (or were) potentially close to 30,000 votes out there that might have moved to a candidate like Henry given the right sort of prompting. I believe Henry is trying to move those votes now. What I am less and less convinced of, however, is that he actually can move them. One problem is that he's not nearly as glib or, well, as charming as Nagin has always been while playing victim. I'm also not sure what to do with the fact that Nagin is now openly trying to help him out a bit. On the one hand, Henry could use some help from a master like Nagin. On the other hand, how much "help" is Ray Nagin at this stage of his political career?

Another problem Henry has is that he's got one month to make a leap from the back of the pack and into the runoff. There are examples of relatively unknown candidates catching late lightning in a bottle and pulling something like this off. Two that come to mind are Buddy Roemer's 1987 Gubernatorial run and Ray Nagin's 2002 race for Mayor. The trouble there is that in each of those cases, the candidates ran to the front of the pack by becoming last-minute media darlings. In each case (especially in Nagin's case) the media consolidated around the candidate and practically foisted him upon the electorate in the closing weeks of the campaign. Given Troy Henry's poor performance at charming the kids Wednesday afternoon, it's difficult to foresee something like that happening for him this time around. Tough shit, I guess. It's just part of the game.