The Winter Council

The lame duck City Council is decamping to a broom closet in an abandoned bunker somewhere across the river for a few months.  This will not be a vacation. As it turns out there are still a few items on certain outgoing councilmembers' "bucket lists" that will still need attending to.  If you are a member of the public interested in providing your input on any of these items, getting yourself over  to the hidey hole where your representatives are conducting their ostensibly public proceedings is only your first obstacle.  Five of the seven councilpersons are leaving office in May so, even if you can get your pleadings through to them, it's doubtful they're going to pay much attention. So good luck.

Here are a few items that might make their way onto the agenda. The first of these probably will have to wait until after the turnover... but, also, it might not.

• A consultant recently completed a survey of city employee wages and benefits. Their recommendations are intended to look encouraging at first glance. See, they want to give everybody a raise.
  

  New Orleans city government should raise its employees' pay by 10 percent, provide for annual merit raises and allow new hires to be offered more than the minimum salary for their positions, according to a report by a consulting firm hired by the city.
  
  The report, completed last month, argues that increases in the cost of living in New Orleans and the availability of higher wages in the private sector have made city jobs less appealing and harder to fill.
  
  The last widespread boosts in salaries for city employees came in 2008, meaning most have seen at best minor raises over the past decade, according to the report.

  And there's plenty of justification for doing just that. The report cites the rising costs of housing in New Orleans as well as a 500 percent increase in health care costs for city workers over the past decade.  Of course, that's a strange thing for the consultants to bring up. A ten percent raise doesn't begin to address that problem. And they aren't arguing for more generous health benefits. In fact, they're recommending sick leave be slashed.
  

  That policy gives workers 13 days of sick leave a year during their first five years and provides those with more than six years of service 15 days of sick leave annually and those with 16 or more years of service 20 days of sick leave each year. The report recommends all those figures be capped at 12 days of sick leave per year, to meet the regional average.

  This sort of bait-and-switch strategy is used against low wage workers all the time. Offer something small but attractive up front, take something important away on the back end.  It's the same logic behind the recently passed Republican tax cut plan which all but guarantees devastating cuts to Medicaid and Social Security. We've also seen it here.
  
  
  
  
  
  In this case, what City Council is most likely to use the report for is as an argument for cutting retirement benefits.  That's what it says way down at the bottom of that Advocate article.
  

  The report also recommends changes that would make city workers' retirement system less generous, noting that other governments in the area require workers to contribute more to their own pensions. The changes recommended are similar to those the city put in place for new hires starting next year.

  Slashing pensions has been Stacy Head's highest priority in her final year on the council.  Her false claim that the retirement system is in fiscal peril echo decades-long Republican lies in agitation against Social Security. Last spring she even attempted to jump the gun on the wage survey and pass the cuts before even seeing its recommendation. Last month they finally passed a scaled back version of the cuts that only affect more recent hires.  But this is still a swipe at the retirement security of a slightly younger cohort of workers.  Head hopes "the next council" will take it further. But there's no guarantee she won't try sooner given that it's harder for people go yell at her now.
  
  
  
  
• Nadine Ramsey is trying to do a favor for a former staff member's father. 



Metairie gastroenterologist Tamer Acikalin wants a zoning change for a Frenchmen Street residential property he owns that he says could one day become an urgent care clinic. The pillared apartment house with a second-floor front porch is two blocks from Washington Square in the Marigny and just down the street from some of the city's best-known live music venues.

Under the proposed zoning change, a medical clinic is just one of 21 commercial uses that would be expanded from its current zoning designation, which only allows day care facilities and small, owner-occupied bed and breakfasts as a commercial use. One of the possible new uses is likely to rile neighbors: Short-term rentals would be allowed year-round, not subject to the 90-day cap that the New Orleans City Council adopted when new regulations took effect April 1, 2017.

We're actually seeing a rash of these "spot-zoning" requests aimed at proliferating short term rentals, lately. One thing they all have in common is a vague plan for some sort of small business on a property that is clearly meant to be used as an Airbnb hotel. Many of them have specific instances of political favoritism in common too. This is one of many but it is in the news because of how obvious it is.


Acikalin is father of Aylin Acikalin Maklansky, Councilwoman Ramsey's legislative director who recently returned to her job after an unsuccessful run for the council seat Guidry is leaving. Acikalin said his daughter has no financial interest in the property. Campaign finance records show Tamer Acikalin contributed $5,810 to Ramsey's election efforts between 2015 and 2017.

Recall that, during the campaign, both Ramsey and Maklansky were beneficiaries of pro-Airbnb lobbying groups so this is a pretty easy gotcha story.  Expect more of them to come, though.



• Most urgent on the Winter Council agenda is the surveillance ordinance. 



The plan, proposed in January as part of Mayor Mitch Landrieu's $40 million public safety initiative, includes the adoption of a city ordinance that would require bars and restaurants across the city to install cameras on the outside of their buildings pointing into public areas. The ordinance, if approved by the New Orleans City Council, would also require those establishments to store the surveillance footage on a cloud-based government server to which law enforcement would have access.

"This ordinance would put the city's surveillance apparatus on steroids, subjecting New Orleanians to near-constant monitoring of their daily lives and stifling our vibrant public space - without meaningfully reducing crime," ACLU Louisiana interim executive director Jane Johnson said.

In addition to ACLU, the camera scheme has been criticized by the Orleans Independent Police Monitor citing “potential for mismanagement, poor information security, public record law compliance challenges and user abuse,”  and by the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans who released a review this week. MaCCNO's report concludes that the ordinance would constitute an unprecedented expansion of government surveillance powers that exists in no other U.S. city. The proposal has not been criticized by Councilmember (and incoming mayor) Cantrell, however. Her stated position is that the cameras are "a step in the right direction at the right time."

There is a vote scheduled for the coming Thursday over in the bunker.  If you have a hard time getting there, though, there is also a committee hearing set for this Wednesday at the very convenient for everyone time, I am sure, of 2 PM. They'll be on the 21st floor of an office tower at 1340 Poydras St.  Good luck figuring out how to get in there.  Maybe someone will think to install some cameras.

Everybody got jokes

Funny headlines this week.   Everyone is just a little too clever.

Here's an Advocate profile of still new-ish coroner Jeffrey Rouse. The agency he's taking over is "decomposing."



This is from The Lens on Monday.  It's about a Civil Service Commission meeting that involved the firefighters. Here's what they're doing.



And then there's this headline that appeared only in the print edition of the Sunday Times-Picayune. It concerns David Vitter. And... well..

Disruption

Mayor Landrieu is really "the Uber of" disrupting Civil Service protections with overpaid political appointees.

Michael Glasser, head of the Police Association of New Orleans, said the emails only confirm what he and his union suspected from the start: The creation of the job is the latest in a long line of attempts by the mayor to assert more control over the department.

The deputy chief of staff job was "clearly implemented by the mayor, and it will be the mayor's pick that fills it," he said. Given the department's decreased size since Landrieu took office -- it has shrunk by a third, according to Glasser -- the addition of another management position only makes sense when viewed as "a hand up the back of the department ... a continuation of the puppet show," Glasser said.

Meanwhile State Senator JP Morrell introduced a bill to the legislature yesterday to consider creating a new elected head of a merged NOPD and the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Department.  Not sure how that would affect the Civil Service framework but it's reasonable to suppose it would limit the Mayor's influence over the department either way.

Because they said so

Another judge just goes along to get along with Mitch.

A judge sided Friday with Mayor Mitch Landrieu in his fight with city employees about the overhaul of municipal personnel rules, finding that city employees failed to prove they were entitled to sue.

Friday’s ruling against the Concerned Classified City Employees, an organization made up of active and retired city workers, is the Landrieu administration’s second major courtroom victory over employees seeking to overturn the new rules. Judge Robin Giarrusso’s ruling leaves intact Landrieu’s Great Place to Work Initiative, which was passed by the city’s Civil Service Commission in August.

In December, Civil District Court Judge Ethel Julien found that a lawsuit filed by the Fraternal Order of Police to block key parts of the initiative was premature.

Giarrusso did not explain her legal reasoning for the ruling, which was preceded by brief arguments from the plaintiffs’ attorney Arthur Smith, as well as lawyer Gilbert Buras for the commission and Greg Feeney for the city.

Above it all... but not really

The Advocate is so goddamned haughty and phony about certain things. Doesn't do political endorsements. But it has no qualms about throwing out the occasional "Voice Of God" opinion when it suits. (It suits when they are covering for political friends.)

Can't wait to see the hemming and hawing if and when their boss King Georges ever jumps back in the game.

Kevin Wildes is the shadow government

The Lens has more (a lot more) this afternoon on what emails reveal about the relationship between Loyola University President Kevin Wildes and Mayor Landrieu's administration while Wildes served on the city Civil Service Commission.

It's clear from these emails that Wildes joined the commission specifically in order to help Mitch dismantle the Civil Service system which exists to protect city employees from politically motivated interference.

As head of the independent, apolitical Civil Service Commission, Wilde’s primary responsibility was to protect about 3,700 rank-and-file city workers from political meddling. At the least, it should have an arm’s-length relationship with the administration. At its most extreme, some believe the commission should have an adversarial stance toward the city’s political leadership, serving as a shield against favoritism and political shenanigans affecting the workforce.

But the emails from Wildes’ tenure show his relationship with the Landrieu administration to be cozy, deferential and even reliant. This relationship perverted the intent of the commission in some cases, turning it into a panel that at times did the mayor’s bidding.

A few weeks ago, a judge threw out legal challenges to the mayor's "reform" on the maddening grounds that no one had been hurt by it... yet.

Orleans Parish Civil District Court Judge Ethel Julien on Wednesday stymied an effort by three of the city’s largest employee associations seeking to block key provisions of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Great Place to Work Initiative from taking effect. Julien, who denied a temporary injunction against the city, said that the lawsuit was premature because no city employees had yet been harmed by Landrieu’s overhaul to city personnel rules.

But what these communications demonstrate is that the mayor's office is already interfering with the process by which  personnel management policy is developed by the commission.  This, in itself, seems to fly in the face of constitutional intent. 

The commission, which was created by the state constitution, is meant to ensure that city employees are treated fairly and hired and promoted based on achievement. A 1983 state Supreme Court opinion was clear on the intent of the commission, saying those rewriting the new 1974 state constitution clearly believed it should be “safeguarded and removed as far as humanly possible from any form of political influence or any suspicion of political influence or control.”   

According to these emails, however, the mayor's staff intended to reduce the commission's role as a firewall against political mischief to that of an ineffectual "consultant." 

Late in 2011, Kopplin suggested Wildes meet Norton, the administration’s point person on Civil Service changes, and the two began corresponding regularly. Over the next year and right up until the passage of the Great Place to Work Initiative, they worked closely together. The emails suggest they repeatedly violated state sunshine laws.

Norton jumped right in to suggest the administration’s plan, showing Wildes exactly what policy changes the administration had in mind, including giving hiring, promotion and salary-setting authority to department directors — which would essentially “turn civil service into a consultancy.”

It is perverse for the court to demand the disruption or ruination of some hapless employee's life before action can be taken to uphold their constitutional protections. Especially when the intent of the "reform" so blatantly spelled out like this.

Meanwhile entirely by coincidence Loyola University (Wildes' day job, remember) has declined to renew the lease on the space The Lens has been occupying on its campus for the past two years.  So now we know Wildes understands how an administrator utilizes the tool of politically motivated interference.  Maybe he's just demonstrating the value of his gift to the city.

Shadow government

For whatever reason, this city allows the local university presidents to sit on unelected boards and make all sorts of far ranging policy decisions largely outside of the public eye.  Under the current administration, Loyola President Kevin Wildes has been an especially enthusiastic Shadow Governor.

Today he resigned from the Civil Service commission. It's entirely clear why. Although, in light of the fact that all legal objection to the mayor's obliteration of the Civil Service system as we once knew it has ended, Wildes might feel like he's accomplished his mission.

As chairman of the Civil Service Commission, email messages show, Wildes discussed Landrieu's overhaul proposal at length with various city officials, including Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin and Alexandra Norton, the architect of Landrieu's Civil Service agenda.

When asked about the messages, Wildes was not shy about his support for overhauling the city's employment system. He said he saw himself as a reformer from the beginning.

The emails between him and and Landrieu's deputies suggest the administration did too.

In a 2013 exchange with Kopplin, Wildes forwarded an article lauding the election of Pope Francis, who, like Wildes, is a Jesuit priest.

"Perfect. Still got the wrong guy," Kopplin joked, implying Wildes would have been a better choice.
"But then who would take care of Civil Service for you," Wildes replied.

"Good point," Kopplin said. "That may be tougher than reforming the Vatican."

Let's replace all the levees with cat litter

No reason not to. Nobody's drowned in a flood because cat litter failed to protect them yet, right?

Orleans Parish Civil District Court Judge Ethel Julien on Wednesday stymied an effort by three of the city’s largest employee associations seeking to block key provisions of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Great Place to Work Initiative from taking effect. Julien, who denied a temporary injunction against the city, said that the lawsuit was premature because no city employees had yet been harmed by Landrieu’s overhaul to city personnel rules.

Who found the money?

Starting to think someone at City Hall has turned over a couch cushion with some unexpected change they aren't quite ready to talk about yet.

Later in the meeting, the commission approved a 20 percent pay raise for police officers, based on a recommendation from the Civil Service Department staff. Under the proposal, officers would receive a 10 percent bump next year, to be followed by 5 percent increases in years two and three.

Landrieu’s 2015 budget proposal, however, only accounts for a 5 percent increase, and Landrieu has not committed to continued raises in 2016 and 2017. Funding for the raises will ultimately have to be allocated by the City Council.

The commission approved the proposal above objections from a top Landrieu aide. Alexandra Norton, the city’s director of organizational effectiveness and the chief architect of the Great Place to Work Initiative, said she would support a resolution to the City Council supporting police pay raises.

City Council will vote on the budget this week. 

Uh oh

Kind of a relaxed attitude toward hiring procedures for the people who are supposed to be in charge of the hiring procedures.

The chairwoman of the New Orleans Civil Service Commission has overstayed her term by more than three months, The Lens has learned, calling into question key votes in which she  participated.

The term of Michelle Craig expired in early August, weeks before she voted in favor or Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Great Place to Work Initiative — a sprawling and controversial package of changes to rules on how city employees are hired, promoted and evaluated. Although that vote still appears to be valid, Craig’s status raises concerns about related actions taken by the commission, including the hiring of an outside attorney using public money to fight a lawsuit against the Great Place to Work Initiative.

Well that's a predicament.  Surely, nothing a few more closed door executive session meetings won't fix, though.

Seems legit

Civil Service Commission had a meeting.  Nobody knows what happened at it, though. 

The agenda for the meeting said only that the board would meet in private to discuss that lawsuit, an exception allowed by the state’s Open Meetings Law. But when the public portion of the meeting reconvened, members added the two changes to the agenda without explanation. Such late additions are allowed under state sunshine laws, but public bodies are expected to explain why late additions were necessary and unanticipated.

Typically, the commission takes comments for 30 days before making changes to the city’s hiring policies. On Monday, the process took less than 30 minutes.

Commissioners declined to respond to repeated requests from members of the public, made during the public-comment portion of the meeting before the vote.

The speed with which the vote was taken raises questions as to whether commissioners or employees in Mitch Landrieu’s administration were privy to the changes. Cherrell Simms, a lawyer in the City Attorney’s Office, signaled that the administration approved of the rule changes, even though she and other members of the public had only a few minutes to read them before the vote.

How many commissioners?

In a new twist in the mayor's scheme to gut city civil service protections, a group of city employees is suing.   Their argument is kind of unusual.

Concerned Classified City Employees, a group that has for years opposed Landrieu’s proposal to change how employees are hired, promoted and evaluated, says that the city’s charter calls for the Civil Service Commission to have seven members, not the five it has. The Commission’s three-to-one vote in favor of Landrieu’s plan was therefore not a legal majority, the suit alleges.

The group’s argument stems from inconsistent language on the Civil Service Commission in the city charter and the Louisiana State Constitution.

The charter does, in fact, mandate a seven-member commission, with nominees selected by local universities and city employees and appointed by a City Council vote. However, that was trumped by a section of the 1974 state constitution — clearly designed to apply only to New Orleans when it was written – that calls for a five-member Commission.

The problem, however, is the language in the constitution applies to “each city having a population exceeding four hundred thousand” or in smaller cities provided a local option election has been held. Without an election, the constitution says, municipalities with populations between 10,000 and 400,000 can opt create their own civil service systems through state statute or local law.

The city’s official 2010 Census population was about 344,000, down from 484,000 in 2000. And New Orleans residents have not voted on the issue since the city’s population went below the 400,000 mark post-Katrina.

That's a tricky argument to make. Especially so since the city's population is estimated to have risen past 400,000 again.  [CORRECTION: No it hasn't!  I could have sworn it had but the latest estimate says 378,715]

On the other hand, I could argue that the entire commission is illegitimate since the employees are represented by a token minority and since this is yet another of several commissions in the city where university presidents are given undue deference.

University administrators are some of the worst people on the planet. I'll never understand why we give them so much power over our civic institutions.

So sue us

On Monday, the city Civil Service Commission went ahead and approved Mayor Landrieu's so-called reform initiative despite the opposition of the police and firefighters unions, the Civil Service staff, and the lone member of the commission elected by city employees. 

Clark said he couldn’t “in good conscience” vote in favor of the proposal because the commission did not have enough time to review the administration’s latest changes. He also was perturbed that the administration didn’t provide the commission with a marked-up copy of the new rules so that members could easily identify the latest additions and omissions.

“How can you vote on something that you just received?” Clark asked. “We are the Civil Service Commission. We have the power of legislation. We can write the rules in two ways. We can W-R-I-T-E them or we can R-I-G-H-T them.”

Throughout the process questions were raised about the constitutionality of the rule changes. The commissioners decided to risk an expensive court battle anyway in the hope that at least some of what they threw against the wall would stick.

As the meeting begins, employee groups, including the police associations and Randolph Scott, come out in opposition to changing the Rule of Three. There are still some questions as to the constitutionality of the change, because the current rule closely mirrors the Louisiana State Constitution. The comments are brief, and shortly after that, Cohn moves to approve the proposal as offered. He moves to make any provision found to be unconstitutional severable from the remainder.

Monday evening the Fraternal Order of Police had apparently already filed for an injunction.  The Lens released a copy of their lawsuit here.  I imagine there will be more about this in the coming days. 

The mayor will appear at the District B Community Budget Meeting Tuesday night at Touro Synagogue (4238 St. Charles Avenue) Maybe he'll address the issue there.

Gutting Civil Service

The Lens will live blog today's vote on Mitch's "reform" initiative.

The mayor’s plan also would remove the current employee rating system, replacing it with a so-called “performance evaluations system” administered by Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin. Under the current proposal, direct supervisors will do these evaluations, and someone above them will review them for fairness and compliance with the rules.

Landrieu has said that his changes will not affect employees’ disciplinary protections. But that was not clear under the first two versions of his proposal, which said employees could not appeal poor performance evaluations. In the current system, employees can appeal their service rating.

However, in the new proposal up for vote on Monday, evaluations would be subject to review by an appointed panel, the Civil Service Department and ultimately, the Civil Service Commission.

Maybe people will think that's good enough.  But moving the evaluation process from Civil Service over to the CAO's office means politicizing the entire system.  This should have been obvious to everyone from the start.

Small number

Can't imagine why that would be the case.

The Service Employees International Union, whose members include a small number of city employees, also says it supports the (Civil Service reform) proposal

If you insist on functioning as a management tool rather than representing your members' interests, don't expect to retain many members. On the other hand, if the only reason you keep a toe in the door at City Hall is to network with the political players there, then, yeah, great job. You're making lots of friends. 

"Powerless vestige"

The Lens will live-blog today's meeting of the Civil Service Commission as they take up the mayor's proposed "reform" to the city's personnel management system.

The proposals would give departmental managers — political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the mayor — greater discretion in hiring decisions by reducing the importance of examination scores and eliminating the requirement that laid-off employees be considered first.

Landrieu’s proposals would eliminate the employee evaluation system, replacing it with a “performance management system.” Unlike the current job ratings, those measurements could not be appealed.

Yesterday PANO President Mike Glasser spoke about the proposed changes with the press.

Glasser said PANO agrees with only one aspect of the initiative, which would raise the minimum wage for city employees to $10.10. He said any effort to weaken the civil service system would eliminate the commission's merit-based purpose.

"It was designed to eliminate nepotism, it was designed to eliminate patronage, favoritism, bias by setting firm, plausible attainable goals and minimum criteria," said Glasser.

Glasser said the Civil Service Commission will become a "powerless vestige" if the city's plan is passed.

Letters, Landrieus, Spoils

The Louisiana Civil Service League writes in opposition to Mitch's attempt to politicize city employment.

(LCSL Executive Vice President Daniel Sullivan) Sullivan has challenged 13 of the 32 proposed rule changes. Many of those he identified as problematic have to do with giving managers more flexibility to execute human resource decisions without first seeking the approval of the Civil Service Commission. In several sections of his letter to Wildes, Sullivan said the various rule changes threaten to take away the commission’s authority.

Sullivan also called a proposed revision that would reduce the priority given to laid-off civil service employees when new jobs become available a “serious and blatant attempt to return to the spoils system.”

Meanwhile the Legislature is considering a bill that would allow Governor Jindal to politicize the levee board nominating process. The Lens will live blog a Senate committee hearing concerning this bill sometime today.

The bill would give the governor greater control over who is chosen to serve on the board. The proposal faces the strong opposition of Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, which led the drive in 2006 to create the Flood Protection Authority. Also opposed are John Barry, who was formerly the authority’s vice president, and the trial attorneys who have filed suit against 97 oil and gas companies on behalf of the authority.

Senator Mary Landrieu hasn't spoken directly about this bill but is now publicly opposing the SLFPA-E's lawsuit which spurred its creation.  Here is a letter to The Advocate by Richard Boyd  commenting on Senator Landrieu's position.

Landrieu has always been friendly with oil and gas industry interests in the state and they have been kind to her campaigns in the past.

But the truth is that a massive negotiated or court-ordered settlement in the lawsuit filed against 97 oil and gas companies by the Louisiana Flood Protection Agency — East could pump millions into workable projects to repair drilling environmental damage and start saving the state’s vanishing coastline.

To avoid angering those oil and gas interests, Landrieu wants more federal revenue sharing money.
But Landrieu in her same appearance in her own words amplified the problem with her approach when she said the fight in Washington for more revenue sharing for Louisiana “is what I have been leading for 20 years.” And she has scored some gains but that money comes back in palsy dribbles and drabs compared with the revenue the federal government grabs from Louisiana oil and gas production.

Landrieu's new campaign ad highlights her record as fierce friend of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana. 

BP Day (the fourth anniversary of the Macondo Gulf Of Mexico oil gusher) is Sunday.  Yesterday BP announced that they are ceasing "active clean up" operations on the Louisiana coast.  Maybe they can get Mary to hold the Mission Accomplished banner for them.

Letters

This is a letter printed in the New Orleans Advocate yesterday from Nick Felton  Walter Powers.  Mr. Felton and Mr. Powers represent the New Orleans Firefighters Association and the Fraternal Order of Police respectively.

On April 3, Mayor (Mitch) Landrieu announced his “reforms” to the civil service system in New Orleans. These “reforms” include the ability to hire and promote who they want. The mayor claims these “reforms” do not impede the civil service director’s ability to set minimum hiring standards, while at the same time, inserting a provision that would require approval of the appointing authority (read: appointee of the mayor) before those minimum hiring standards are put in place. The “reforms” also include raising the minimum wage of about 200 city employees, which was apparently enough to fool some folks into supporting the measure.

The Louisiana Supreme Court said, “In the science of government, experience is always the best teacher. The political drug store is full of panaceas, each with its trade-mark of some school of therapeutics blown in a bottle. In politics there is so often invoked the destructive concept of a practice that to the victor belongs the spoils. It is the “spoil system” that civil service desires to eradicate. If this Court knows what everybody knows, then it has knowledge that political opponents of one administration may be the governing body of the next, and the cranks of the old may become the philosophers of the new; but the value of civil service reform is wholly dependent on whether the law and the evidence, without exception, are fairly and justly applied by the Commissioners, and in the Courts with an even hand freely and fearlessly enforced.” Boucher v. Division of Employment Security, 226 La. 227, 75 So.2d 343 (1954).

The mayor’s plan indicates that test scores for hiring and promotions should not be determining factors, then states that they should be able to eliminate entire pools of certified candidates if those persons are in the bottom half of the test scores. The mayor’s plan repeatedly points to “falsely objective rankings” without providing any support for that contention. Just because you say it over and over doesn’t make it true.

It is not too surprising that some New Orleans city employees are dissatisfied with the Civil Service Department. It is difficult to perform when your department’s budget has been slashed repeatedly and your workforce has been diminished to a shadow of its former strength. There were also comments made by Rabbi Cohn regarding the slow pace of civil service proceedings. To that, we would simply say that Rabbi Cohn’s short tenure on the Civil Service Commission has been hindered recently by counterproductive actions taken by the current administration and its appointees designed only to impede progress.

We will not try to convince anyone that civil service could not be made more efficient or that things couldn’t be done better. We will tell you that these improvements can be made without impacting the foundation of the civil service system that the people of Louisiana felt was so important that civil service was included in the Louisiana Constitution.

The New Orleans Police Department and the New Orleans Fire Department account for nearly half of all classified civil service employees in the city of New Orleans. We stand united in opposition to this “reform.”

Among the most crucial "reforms" Landrieu proposes is removing a significant portion of the employee performance review and  disciplinary process from the purview of the Civil Service Department and placing it in the hands of the Mayor's Chief Administrative Officer.  This alone is cause for concern that the city workforce is being politicized.

But the "reform" further places employees at the subjective mercy of the CAO by altering the process by which their performance is scored and diminishing their standing to appeal capricious disciplinary actions.  

The plan would eliminate service ratings, which now range from “Outstanding” to “Unsatisfactory,” replacing them with a goal-based “performance management system.” Again, Kopplin’s office would be in charge of that system.

In eliminating the ratings, the plan also eliminates an employee’s ability to appeal a poor rating.

That would be unnecessary, according to the proposal, because “written performance feedback under the performance management system is not an adverse action to punish an employee.”

However, it goes on, “once poor work performance has been established” — it doesn’t say how that would be done — that can spur supervisor monitoring and a report to the city’s personnel director. If the personnel director decides that the employee’s work hasn’t improved, then the employee could be disciplined — which he could appeal.

In effect, the new system would push back the point at which an employee can protest a supervisor’s poor view of his work.

Ultimately what this is about is power in the workplace and, by extension, in the city's labor market overall. "Business leaders" around town make it a priority for this reason in particular.

Gregory Rusovich, CEO of Transoceanic Trading and Development Company, rattled off a list of governmental reforms that he said the city has benefited from since the storms — the transformation of the New Orleans Recreation Department into a public-private partnership, the increased transparency in the city contracting processes, the creation of the New Orleans Business Alliance, the proposed civil-service reforms and even the way the city banded together to save the Hornets (now the Pelicans).

Unfortunately, as Felton and Powers state, the Police and Fire are isolated in their opposition to Mayor's scheme. The minimum wage provision they refer to (which is, of course, a nice thing but clearly also a distraction) was apparently enough to bring SEIU on board. I'm less sure about what Civil Service's reason for signing on is but in any case both groups have badly failed to stand up for the people they purport to serve.

Mostly it's about being able to bully people

Had a brief Twitter conversation about this yesterday.  In my working life I've had to deal with all sorts of personalities. I've worked with and for some great people. And I've worked with and for some terrible people.  I've supervised good employees and troublesome employees.

I've always considered it a given that people are going to have their quirks and their strengths and their weaknesses. And since we're not robots, those qualities are not going to be constants.  The secret to working with people, though, is tolerating the fact that they are people and figuring out how you're all going to get something done in spite of whatever is bugging you.

You do this best by being flexible and being respectful.  Most importantly you do this by resisting the bullies and the hypercompetitive Type-As and the atmosphere of suspicion and intimidation they tend to foster.  Simply put, in a majority of workplaces, unless an employee is behaving criminally or dangerously, there's no reason to fire or threaten to fire them.  Firing people is a serious and traumatizing action from which most people do not easily recover.

But the bullies do tend to run things and that's how you get stuff like this.

According to Landrieu, the plan would not touch employee protections in disciplinary matters. However, one provision appears to do just that.

The plan would eliminate service ratings, which now range from “Outstanding” to “Unsatisfactory,” replacing them with a goal-based “performance management system.” Again, Kopplin’s office would be in charge of that system.

In eliminating the ratings, the plan also eliminates an employee’s ability to appeal a poor rating.

That would be unnecessary, according to the proposal, because “written performance feedback under the performance management system is not an adverse action to punish an employee.”

However, it goes on, “once poor work performance has been established” — it doesn’t say how that would be done — that can spur supervisor monitoring and a report to the city’s personnel director. If the personnel director decides that the employee’s work hasn’t improved, then the employee could be disciplined — which he could appeal.

In effect, the new system would push back the point at which an employee can protest a supervisor’s poor view of his work.

Efficiency experts

Serpas' hiring and promotion procedures have been ignoring standard Civil Service practices. 

Superintendent Ronal Serpas and the Landrieu Administration did not recommend $147,000 the Civil Service Department requested for sergeant exams in this year's budget. That budget item has gone unfunded for the last several years. During budget talks in November, personnel administrator Lisa Hudson told City Council that the department has not performed promotional exams for sergeants since 2007. As a result, sergeant and captain registers have expired and the NOPD has made at-will appointments, FOP attorney Donovan Livaccari said today.

NOPD, as we all know, is a very efficient city agency.