A bigger haul

Torres is poised to take over the Richards' contract now. After that, he's bidding on Algiers as well. 

Contract negotiations will follow Tuesday’s selection. If they are successful, IV Waste will take over from Richard's in the new area on April 1.

At that point, Torres would control nearly three quarters of the city's 153,000 curbside waste and recycling pickups outside of the French Quarter and parts of the Central Business District — and that might not be all. On Wednesday, the same committee is scheduled to select a new hauler for Algiers, with more than 18,000 service locations.

IV Waste is also vying for that contract.

These are some of the biggest, most lucrative contracts the city lets to anyone and now Sidney is closer to collecting them all. So that's what he's won.  What do we get out of the deal?

The administration also allowed the contractors to cut service frequency in half, to once-per-week, to avoid disruptions in the future. The service cut is now permanent, since going back to twice-weekly pickups would further balloon what the city must pay.

Cantrell last year hinted that an increase in $24 monthly sanitation fees on water bills may eventually become necessary, despite the service cuts, since the fees don’t cover the costs. She has more recently dropped those hints, however, as outcry grows over rising taxes, insurance and other costs of living.

Over the long haul, what happens is you pay more and get less while one trash hauler hauls away more and more of the loot. 

Out with a bang after all

Well this is like the third or fourth reversal of plans now. But somehow this just feels more like the way we do our business anyway.

NEW ORLEANS — The city is speeding up the Hard Rock collapse demolition timeline. Officials will now use a controlled implosion to bring down the building and destroy three buildings surrounding the collapse site to do so.

Engineers are shooting for the implosion to take place in mid-March. Debris cleanup will take another two-to-three months.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced the new plan Friday afternoon after meeting with the building’s owners and insurers.

“We are going to revert back to implosion of the site as being necessary to insure public safety as well as being aligned with a timeline that is more suitable for the city of New Orleans,” Cantrell said.

Cantrell also announced her support for destroying three buildings that surround the collapse site to make that happen.

The most likely explanation for the change is this is the fastest and most emphatic way to ensure the whole block gets demolished. Which, in turn, is the best way to ensure the owners of those properties (i.e. the villains responsible for the hotel collapse in the first place) can sell the land for the highest possible profit.

In other words, it's Cantrell looking out for her wealthy allies again.  But, hey, more explosions!

That Tricentennial was a long time ago now

I'm so old I remember when Mitch was going to cut the ribbon on a new airport to celebrate. He's moved on to his new career of not running for President now. And the airport is, well, there are problems.

KENNER, La. — Kenner's top building official says he warned contractors about the potential for plumbing problems when construction began on the new, billion-dollar terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.

An email exchange from 2016 shows that the contractor asked to cut back on plumbing hangers to keep costs down. A city inspector would later blame the plumbing problems on a shortage of those same hangers.

Typically when you build anything on top of the South Louisiana Jello soil, you've got to take certain precautions in order to compensate for the inevitable subsidence that is going to occur.  One can easily imagine that this is particularly true when you are building something the size of airport terminal.  Anyway, it's common enough knowledge among the layfolk.  There's no way an engineering firm would just ignore a problem like that out of ignorance. They could only do that as a deliberate cost-cutting measure.  

The audit was based largely on an interview with Mohamad and an email exchange between the contractor, a joint venture called Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro, and 2016 Kenner Code Enforcement Director Stephen Petit.

“Kenner officials insisted subsidence would in fact occur with the soil beneath the terminals, but were told the cost to support the pipelines every two feet would be cost prohibitive, and the national minimum standard of five feet per hanger should be upheld,” writes Adam Campo, Director of Risk, Insurance, Audit and Compliance for the City of Kenner, in his report.

Engineers put a shorter length of pipe in between hangers when they are trying to add extra support.

“It was costing too much to put them at two-foot centers. It was costing a lot of manpower to have those hangers tied into the slab as well,” Mohamad said.

HGBM’s construction manager did not return email seeking comment and a representative for Square Button Consulting, the plumbing subcontractor listed on inspection records, said they simply installed the hangers and pipes to HGBM and the architect’s specs.

Not to get too deep in the muck here (the pipes are doing that well enough on their own) but it's worth remembering that Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro became the contractor after a series of  acrimonious disputes, stops, starts, court challenges, etc. involving allegations of racial discrimination, conflicts of interest, and political side deals among other complaints.  Eventually they hammered something out where everyone could get paid whatever it was they thought they were owed.  Although it now looks like they also took a few shortcuts to get there.

There's no way for us to say what Square Button's role in the shortcutting might have been. But it is interesting to see their name come up given that the firm's specialty wasn't exactly plumbing so much as it was political networking.

Square, however, is not a plumber. He was Mayor Mitch Landrieu's chief information officer until 2014. He holds an MBA from Wharton, an Ivy League business school often regarded as the best in the country. He engineered wireless networks for companies like Verizon and was a corporate consultant for Boston-based Bain & Co.

Square Button Consulting became licensed to work as a plumbing and mechanical contractor in April 2015, just as construction companies began jockeying for a piece of the new Armstrong Airport terminal.

Square's company is getting into plumbing because he was handpicked by the 70-year-old New Orleans firm Gallo Mechanical for a subcontract on the airport project. Gallo describes the deal as a mentorship arrangement that's a win from many sides: Part of the airport's DBE goal is fulfilled, Square gets a mentorship that will show him how to succeed in building trades, and the community, hopefully, gets an African-American-owned business equipped to thrive in a competitive marketplace.

Impersonating an... officer?

Is that what you'd call this?  What is going on here?

The officers noticed two surveillance cameras mounted to a public light pole on the block. They looked very much like hundreds of crime cameras that have been installed across New Orleans since 2017. Those are owned and controlled by the city, all transmitting video to the Real-Time Crime Monitoring Center on North Rampart Street.

In addition to being attached to city-controlled property, the cameras on the Lakeview light pole bore the New Orleans Police Department’s logo.

The problem: They weren’t city-owned cameras. The officers didn’t know who owned them.

“The camera mounted at 6119 Vicksburg is not a City-owned camera, is not integrated to the Real-Time Crime Center, and is unauthorized to be on the light pole,” said Laura Mellem, the public engagement manager at the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, which oversees the city’s surveillance system.

Nor was it owned by the Lakeview Crime Prevention District, a security district that maintains cameras in the neighborhood, LCPD President Brian Anderson told The Lens in an interview.

“That is without a doubt not one of ours,” Anderson said.

The victim of the alleged car burglary told the police that the cameras belonged to Jeff Burkhardt, according to the police report.

Burkhardt, whose wife owns a house on the block, is the vice president and chief operations officer for Active Solutions, LLC, a crime camera supplier and installation contractor for the city. The camera on the block bears a resemblance to Active Solutions’ Neighborhood WatchCam model. The Neighborhood WatchCam draws its power from streetlights, according to the company’s website.

Burkhardt tells The Lens he doesn't know nothing about no cameras. Also he tells them they are "fake news."  But, see, the thing is he's got it pointed at his ex-wife's house. And he has NOPD logos on it. And he is the contractor who makes and installs these things.  And this is all very normal.

Beat the clock doctrine

The first two decades of the 21st Century may be the golden age of Disaster Capitalism. Naomi Klein's coinage "Shock Doctrine" has become popular almost to the point of cliche as a means of describing the political opportunism that follows and feeds off of crisis events. Wars, terror attacks, natural or man-made disasters furnish the means of subverting laws and systems that would ordinarily slow or prevent ethical abuses ranging from petty graft on up to civil and human rights violations. As Ray Nagin once said, "There is big money in disasters. Huge money."

This is nothing new, of course. Emergencies have always presented these kinds of opportunities. But the reason Klein's description is particularly relevant now is it suggests a stage of capitalism where the "big money" seems to be made during the course of destructive rather than creative events.  We aren't bending the rules and passing out money under the table to build bridges and roads or put a man on the moon. Instead we are spending it on "recovery" from the disasters we have brought on ourselves or "resilience" against the disasters we will bring on ourselves in the future.  The very term "resilience" implies fatalalism.  These are pessimistic, cynical times. We expect bad things to happen. Our leaders aren't planning to overcome or prevent the bad things. They are scheming to help themselves and their peers profit from the bad things as they happen.

Mitch Landrieu talks about resilience all the time.  So much so, in fact, that he stretches the term beyond meaning altogether. Now we can have a resilient affordable housing plan, a resilient COSTCO, a resilient bike share gimmick, a resilient Four Seasons Hotel, and so on.

Naturally, we also have a resilient French Quarter "security" plan.  For some reason, this involves street and sewer line repairs.  Probably we shouldn't complain too loudly about that.  Essentially what's happened is the mayor has talked the convention center into paying for millions of dollars worth of necessary infrastructure work. He shouldn't have to jam that into a wholly unnecessary surveillance and policing project in order to get access to this money. But it's one way to take advantage of the "shock" of a perceived crime wave in order to get around structural budgetary obstacles.

Of course, it also helps get around a few other inconveniences like the public bidding process, for example.

Rather than put the centerpiece of Landrieu’s $40 million citywide public safety plan out to bid as a capital project -- as is typically done for work of this size -- the city used an existing pavement maintenance contract to get the project started more quickly.

The three-year specialty pavement maintenance contract was put out to bid in December and the city selected Hard Rock Construction’s low bid of $3.9 million on Feb. 2. That was a little more than a week after Landrieu unveiled a public safety plan that included sprucing up Bourbon Street, fixing its long-standing drainage issues and converting it to a pedestrian mall.

But Hard Rock’s vice president, Jan Langford, said her company had no idea when it was selected that its pavement maintenance deal would be used to perform the far more involved Bourbon Street work.

It's pretty nice when you can just rush through all these details. That way nobody has time to worry about little stuff like  which Landrieu cousin might be coming out ahead.

Adding to the political intrigue with this project, Landrieu’s critics took to Facebook in recent days to complain that his cousin Renee Landrieu’s company, Landrieu Concrete and Cement Industries, had trucks on the job.

Maybe that's unfair. There are so many Landrieus running around out there that odds are anybody you encounter in the course of your daily business has about a 1 in 4 chance of being one.  So let's not judge. Instead, like David Hammer does in this story, we'll be sure to mention the fact but distance ourselves by sourcing it to "Facebook critics."  We also enjoyed the way Hammer explains that Hard Rock contributed $2,000 to Mitch AND $2,000 to Nagin during the 2006 mayoral election suggesting to us that as long as you bribe both sides there's probably nothing unethical going on.

But let's not get too bogged down in all that. Instead, the key bit from that story comes where Hammer asks Public Works Director Mark Jernigan what explains the irregular process.  The answer is, we're in a hurry.

Asked why such a complex and critical project would not be bid out separately as a capital project, Jernigan said there wasn’t enough time to go through such a long contract-procurement process.

He said the project needs to be finished by the end of the year. Asked what the rush was, he said it was important “to minimize the construction impacts and also to make sure it's integrated with the citywide public safety program.”

Asked if it had to be done by the end of the year to avoid construction during the city’s 300th anniversary celebrations in 2018, he repeated that it was important to finish the work as soon as possible.

And there we see the standard Landrieu move come back into play.  You don't need an actual disaster in order to play disaster capitalism. It turns out you can create an emergency situation simply by imposing a deadline.  Not every ticking clock needs to be attached to a bomb.  All that's necessary is to get people to buy into the premise.

Call it Beat The Clock Doctrine. It's been the primary motivator of Mitch's agenda throughout his term in office.  It was absolutely imperative that we finish the Loyola streetcar in time for the Superbowl.  It was crtical that we open the St. Roch Market in time for the tenth Katrinaversary. It's important that we finish Bourbon Street before the Tricentennial. No time to consider the long term consequences, of course. Does that streetcar to nowhere improve public transit or just move tourists around slowly?  Will the festival marketplace  be an affordable food source or a luxury entertainment? Will Bourbon Street be a public place or Disneyfied pedestrian mall? Que sera with all that. The important thing is that we get it all done right now.

Sounds familiar

The lead contractor on the Iberville redevelopment has been accused of ignoring or subverting DBE requirements.

Not one but two companies that were supposed to be big beneficiaries of rules aimed at making sure companies owned by minorities and women got some of the work on the massive redevelopment of the former Iberville public housing complex in fact passed on most of the money they received to subcontractors that don’t qualify as either minority- or woman-owned, newly released documents show.

It was revealed last month that the Housing Authority of New Orleans was scrutinizing the work of one of those companies, Nolmar, which accounted for the biggest chunk of supposed spending on minority-owned subcontractors by Woodward Design+Build, the lead contractor on the Iberville project. HANO says that 90 percent of the money that Woodward paid to Nolmar ended up with white-owned subcontractors.

New records obtained by The New Orleans Advocate show that some of the money passed through by Nolmar actually went to subsidiaries of Woodward.

The Advocate spent a lot of time and a lot of column space flushing out the details here.  Strange that they wouldn't mention the similar dust-up involving Woodward which delayed the airport project last year. 

Turns out there's a lot of money to be made in tax farming

Who knew?

In total, Archon’s billings from June 2014 through January — eight months — came to about $3.15 million.

By comparison, the city paid the previous contractor, Strategic Alliance Partners, about $3.3 million for the same service over a period of 19 months.

Over that time, SAP charged an average of $175,000 to collect $1.8 million each month, The Lens determined. On a monthly basis, Archon’s total charges, including the additional, unexplained items, are more than double SAP’s charges: about $394,000 per month.

While Archon’s base fee works out to 7 percent of its total tax collections, the figure shoots up to 25 percent when everything charged by the company each month is included. The city’s contract with SAP, which Quatrevaux said was a bad deal, called for fees of 9.5 percent.

In his 2013 report, Quatrevaux concluded that the work for which the city paid SAP $3.3 million was worth less than $300,000.

SAP was closely connected to Archon. SAP used Archon as a subcontractor, and Archon’s CEO was a founder of SAP.

Don't like the collections contract? Fine we'll just draw up a more expensive one with pretty much the same company. At least, that's what that looks like.  It's hard to get a grip on any of this. Especially when the city doesn't provide records when the reporters ask for them.

It’s unclear precisely what services are covered by the fees on Archon’s invoices. The firm has a separate contract with the city to conduct a large auction of delinquent properties that the city has been unable to offload at tax sales. But the fees do not appear to be related to the auction. The auction process began in March, and the invoices for tax-collection records the city provided to The Lens run only through February.

Each invoice is just a few lines long and lists three charges, including a “collection fee.” The two other charges are labeled “tax code 51”and “tax code 66.” Those two charges make up more than two-thirds of Archon’s billings.

City officials did not respond to a request to explain those charges.

Archon is required to submit detailed monthly activity reports to the city. The Lens requested them on May 20; the city has not provided them.

And the judge says they don't really have to. 

There's money in it

Sometimes consultants make their money just selling some line of bullshit about how to water down your asphalt or whatever.  Other times they get paid to direct your deliberate human misery program.

The CIA contractors who helped develop and operate the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that the agency used on terror suspects, including waterboarding, were paid more than $80 million, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA's interrogation program released Tuesday.

The contract was for more than $180 million, but the contractors had only received $81 million when their contract was terminated in 2009.

In other words, Obama cost these guys $100 million with his godforsaken job killing torture moratorium. 

Oh well, easy come, easy go, right?  Okay, admittedly, it didn't go so easy for everyone. Certainly not for the detainees, anyway.

Coercive interrogation methods included waterboarding, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, nudity, slaps, slamming detainees against a wall. At least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, including the threat of raping a detainee's mother. And it gets worse.

"At least five CIA detainees were subjected to 'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity," the report reads, documenting in gruesome detail one such example involving detainee Majid Khan.

It's still going pretty easy for the people who implemented these inspired recommendations. They're all happily yaking away on TV right now, probably.  That's pretty bad; sociopathic, whatever.  But what really worries me are the guys who were paid slightly less than half of the $180 million they expected for, "Hey let's shove some hummus up their butts!"  Because odds are they're actually still seething about not getting it all.

Business is good

The business is blowing up people and stuff.

Stock prices for Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman set all-time record highs last week as it became increasingly clear that President Obama was committed to a massive, sustained air war in Iraq and Syria.

There's also the business of "training moderate rebels" whatever a moderate rebel might be.  We do know the moderate rebels will be trained and armed in one of the world's most repressive and extremist countries. 

U.S. officials said a critical component of the plan to train and equip the Syrian insurgents, who have received only modest American backing so far and have failed to coalesce into a potent fighting force, was the Saudis' willingness to allow use of their territory for the U.S. training effort.

"Now what we have is a commitment from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia ... to be a full partner with us in that effort, including by hosting that training program," a senior U.S. official told reporters in a conference call.

The Saudi decision came to light after Obama spoke by phone earlier in the day with Saudi King Abdullah.

It's important to keep in mind that we're training and arming these people, in part, because we like to be able to say we're not putting very many "boots on the ground."  This is good for morale because we aren't putting as many of our soldiers in harm's way.

But it's also good for business because of who we send instead of soldiers.

Analysts say hiring contractors is a way to avoid deploying such forces.

David Johnson, a former Army lieutenant colonel who is executive director of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, said contractors aren’t considered “boots on the ground” in conflict zones.

“The government always seeks to minimize boots on the ground to reduce domestic political risk,” he said in an email. “The American people and media do not consider a paid contractor to represent them in the same way that they do a soldier.”

Using contractors, who, most studies show, are cheaper than soldiers, trims the official presence and still accomplishes the logistical and security objectives, he said.

Defense contractors have plenty of experience in Iraq. During the U.S. occupation, thousands of armed security contractors and support personnel worked alongside foreign and Iraqi troops to help stabilize the country.

Experience.

That is good for business even if it means your business does only one thing.

Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won’t create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won’t restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won’t dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won’t pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won’t end the Syrian civil war.  It won’t bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won’t persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won’t end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All the military power in the world won’t solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary — mostly because he and his advisers don’t know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration’s default option.

Because it isn't necessary to "solve those problems" so much as it is to just make sure you get to stay in business.

Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy—and not just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing US counterterror operations in the "surge" years of the occupation. In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS's fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington's weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.

When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single US military intervention has had anything like its intended effect. Each one has, in time, proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits—and ISIS knows it.

Probably, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Blackwater and Northrop Grumman know it as well.  They've been in this business a long time. And it's still quite good to them.  

Revisions to the do-over

The revised rosters of competing airport patronage arrangements are available now.

Of the two, the proposal by NOLA Airport Builders has the most changes from the plans put forward in the previous round, including a shake-up in the leadership of the joint venture, which went by the name Parsons-Odebrecht in the first round. Those two companies, one based in California and the other in Brazil, brought in Royal Engineers, one of the state’s largest minority-owned engineering firms, as a full partner after the first round of the process and severed ties with the local company Woodward Design+Build.

The Woodward tie became controversial in the last round when a lawsuit called attention to racially insensitive behavior on the part of some of the company's supervisors.  One interesting way the NOLA Airport Builders group is attempting to compensate for that now is by paying off some influential people hiring a consultant.

In addition to those changes, NOLA Airport Builders announced Wednesday that the Urban League of Greater New Orleans would be working with it to improve outreach to so-called “disadvantaged businesses,” firms that are owned by women or minorities.

Erika McConduit-Diggs, president and CEO of the organization, said this will build on work the Urban League already is doing and on previous successful efforts to improve participation by disadvantaged businesses in other projects.

“We want to be able to commit ourselves to make a difference and help make those opportunities available,” she said.

The Urban League is listed as a contractor on the project and is being paid for its services, but McConduit-Diggs would not say how much the nonprofit will receive.

The Parsons-Odebrect/NOLA Airport Builders group was also criticized for Parsons' ties to former Deputy Mayor and now Sewerage and Water Board President Cedric Grant. They appear to have compensated for that unseemliness by taking the word Parsons out of their group's name.

Not exactly a do-over after all

Figured there had to be some sort of re-shuffle in the works.  Otherwise, what would have been the point?

A shake-up in the organization of one of the ventures vying to build Louis Armstrong International Airport’s new terminal has bumped one of the state’s largest minority-owned engineering firms up to a full partner in the project, while dropping a firm that had been a source of controversy.

When the team that had been organized as Parsons Odebrecht submits a proposal for the $546.5 million terminal next month, it will do so as NOLA Airport Builders, a new joint venture that now includes a seat for Royal Engineers and Consultants at the head of the table and leaves out Woodward Design+Build.

That reorganization seems aimed at shoring up the company’s weak points even as it doubles down on the themes that received a positive reception the first time it faced off against Hunt Gibbs Boh Metro, a competing joint venture that includes several local firms.

"Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no job is too big, no fee is too big! "

After years of squabbling with the two largest garbage contractors over the number of addresses each should be compensated for servicing, the city has finally agreed to just accept their numbers. The ingenious reasoning is, well maybe they'll grow into it.

The administration is betting the city’s population will continue to grow while the cost of trash pickup — still more than the mayor would like — will remain almost flat, representing a relatively stable figure in a budget that has otherwise been under assault from ballooning and sometimes unpredictable expenses.

The garbage contracts are among the city’s biggest, taking up about 5 percent of the annual operating budget.

“As long as New Orleans continues to be the fastest growing city in America, which it has been for the past few years, and we fix those house counts, this is a very favorable agreement,” Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin said in presenting the details Tuesday to the City Council’s Sanitation Committee.

Maybe that will work out for them eventually.  It might be interesting to note, though, that despite the growing population, usage of another major city service has only just exceeded half its pre-Katrina numbers.

Public transportation in New Orleans has steadily expanded since Hurricane Katrina decimated the network in 2005. While the number of riders every year is nowhere near the 34 million who took a bus or streetcar trip in 2004, the system could provide as many as 18 million rides by year's end, said Stefan Marks, Veolia's director of planning and scheduling for the RTA. The RTA has logged 13.9 million riders through September, a 12-percent jump over the 12.5 million passengers that used the RTA during the first nine months of 2012.

 Naturally they're asking for a fare increase.

But back to the disposal companies.  What might account for the supposed padding in their contracts are the unique challenges  New Orleans presents. Recall, for example, the ugliness that erupted when Veronica White's sanitation department introduced suburban style trash bins to the narrow French Quarter streets.

The anger over the issue clashes with general delight with the performance of the Quarter's new trash collection service. But many French Quarter residents say the free 32-gallon, wheeled, lidded "carts" -- although just a third the size of those the city is requiring in most other neighborhoods -- are too big to store on their small lots or in narrow side alleys.

The commission fears that bins left on sidewalks for many hours after garbage trucks have passed will be eyesores and will hinder pedestrian traffic.

Mayor Ray Nagin has promised "Disney-like" cleanliness in the French Quarter and Central Business District, with twice-daily trash collection and continuous sidewalk cleaning, as a way to promote tourism and economic development.

Leaders of the two principal organizations of Quarter residents recently took their complaints about the bins to the mayor, but Nagin and Sanitation Director Veronica White remained adamant.

A frustrated Ralph Lupin, the Vieux Carre Commission's tough-talking chairman, told the commission Tuesday, "I don't understand Ms. White's obstinance other than that she's a bitch."

Then there was the time when the Nagin administration spent half a million dollars on "bomb-proof" trash cans and then decided they didn't want them after all. 

New Orleanians, it appears, will never get to find out whether the "bombproof" trash cans the city bought for $750 a pop three years ago were worthy of the title.

That's because all 600, purchased for a steep $450,000, have been junked.

Now Mayor Ray Nagin's administration, which staunchly defended the original trash can purchase, has begun replacing them with a different model. Unlike the old ones, the new ones do not feature advertisements -- nor do they claim to frustrate terrorists.

In a recent interview, Nagin said he was never a fan of the squatty cans, bought with a no-bid contract at the direction of former Chief Administrative Officer Charles Rice. Rice left city government in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina.

"Those little munchkin trash cans? We got rid of those," Nagin said, referring to the trash can deal as "a Charles Rice special."

The mayor's chief beef, apparently, was that the receptacles, known as "Jazzy Cans," were too small.

"I said to Charles, 'Where'd you find these trash cans?'" Nagin recounted. "They're about this tall," he added, holding his hand at the level of a table top. "I had to bend over to put stuff in 'em."

Nagin's backaches likely would have been in vain anyway. Earlier this year the city experienced a brief period of hysteria over the frequent appearance of various "suspicious packages" none of which ever was actually placed inside a trash receptacle where the supposed "bomb-proofing" might have provided some benefit. 

But it's not only bombs that require careful attention. There's also the matter of spectral decontamination which, can be a tricky issue on some lawns.





This morning, in the first day of budget hearings, the City Council considered a proposal to shut off residents' water service should they become delinquent in paying the sanitation fee attached to their bill.  Stacy Head seems like she wants to punt the decision on this enforcement policy back to the Mayor.

CM Head: "Neither the city charter nor state law ... require any ordinance passage" to do water shutoffs for failure to pay trash bills.
— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) October 23, 2013

CM Head: "It could be done merely through a CEA ... and we would only have to approve the CEA." #nolabudget
— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) October 23, 2013

Kopplin says the city attorney and the SWB don't agree. They recommend an ordinance. #nolabudget
— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) October 23, 2013

Head: "This is a difficult policy decision an I'm sure you'd love to pass that hot potato to us, but the charter is clear." #NolaBudget
— Charles Maldonado (@CMaldonadoLens) October 23, 2013

Some may wonder why the sanitation fee appears on the city water bills in the first place.  But, as we demonstrated the other day, some of these specialized pick-up jobs have been known to emerge from the sewers anyway.




The city estimates that it can raise an extra $1.6 million in trash fees simply by adding the water shutoff threat.  That seems unlikely to me.  But if it turns out they can't wring out that last bit, and they absolutely need help fulfilling these sanitation service obligations, they can always go out and find a new contractor. 

Seen this somewhere before

Isn't this precisely the sort of thing that got the last administration's technology department in trouble?

Still, the foundation’s work goes on largely outside the usual scope of accountability, even though documents abundantly demonstrate a working relationship between the foundation and city officials in the Office of Information Technology and Innovation.

The official line from City Hall is that the foundation isn’t working for the city.

“The New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation is not signing a contract or doing business on behalf of the city,” said Landrieu spokesman Berni, speaking on the proposed Sierra contract before it was scuttled.
But employees of the city of New Orleans were directly involved in the Sierra Systems proposal, according to emails obtained by The Lens. At least one thought Sierra was the wrong choice.

In an email to Weaver, city employee Lamar Gardere said he “was swayed by Geocent’s specific knowledge of ITI and NOPD environment and the feeling that we may be able to negotiate a lower price based on previously delivered exploratory work.”

Gardere’s opinion did not sway the rest of the selection committee, which included other city IT workers and members of the foundation’s tech team.

In another email from late summer, a city information-technology contractor, Bill Garbee, warned other employees involved in the bid evaluation to “keep these documents confidential and do NOT distribute the documents to anyone else as the evaluation is ongoing and no decision on award has been made.”

Typically, decisions about the public’s right to check out bids under review by the city of New Orleans emanate from the City Attorney’s office, and not from the email account of a contract worker.

And, of course the larger issue is a private foundation has purview over loads of sensitive data with regard to any individual's interfacing with the criminal justice system. Another triumph for "public-private partnerships" no doubt. 

Bucking the trend

RSD services contractor Aramark is already reaping the "trend bucking" economic benefits of Hurricane Isaac.

Aramark was paid even though schools were closed. Instead of paying workers for their scheduled shifts that were canceled due to forces beyond their control, the company pocketed tens of thousands of dollars, while their workers, who already toe the poverty line, were put into precarious situations because of the loss of income.

Designed to fail

I've never read or heard about a house moving project like this one where anyone was satisfied with the results.

In a blow to housing preservation efforts, the nonprofit owners of a home that was moved from the new Veteran’s Affairs Hospital site to Treme recently asked for permission to demolish the historic house. The city spent $35,000 to move the house and donated it to Providence Community Housing. After The Lens and our reporting partners at FOX8 began asking questions about the demolition request, Providence officials backtracked and said they now are working to form a new partnership to save the house.

The house moving scheme, initiated as a means of placating preservationist protest over the clearing of the hospital site, was never going to satisfy anybody. Except the contractors, of course.  Not that that should surprise anybody.  In fact, it's likely that way by design as anyone who did the math at the time, like Tim here, could have pointed out.

Simple math tells me this program will fail.

$4.2 million divided by 73 houses is just $57,500 each.

No way you can prep the house, move it, build a foundation, and repair the house for that amount of money. And the cost land at the new location? What other funding or potential funding is provided to get all this done? If all they have is the $4.2 million.

Whaaaaah

City contractors don't want anyone telling them they have to comply with basic labor laws.

Update: The following council members are not serious about protecting workers' rights in New Orleans

Opposed were Jackie Clarkson, Stacy Head and Kristin Gisleson Palmer.

Incompetent corruption

I half expected Kevin Houser to be in this story.

A City Hall technology contractor bought suite tickets for Mayor Ray Nagin and his wife to attend the New Orleans Saints' first NFC Championship Game appearance in 2007, but the tickets turned out to be invalid, the company's executive testified today in a corruption trial.

Keep recycling weird

Because making it easy and convenient with a clear picture of what the sanitation fees pay for would only confuse people.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration did not answer a host of question on the matter, including why this expense was not disclosed sooner or a ballpark expectation for the cost. Late Monday, the administration said it will tap the city’s capital budget to pay for the carts.

In an unexpected development, the service will be offered only upon request of residents, so not everyone would automatically be issued a recycling can, though every customer saw their trash fee doubled this year. Interested residents can now sign up to get a cart here.

The bid specifications seek carts similar to the regular trash containers used by the city’s three trash companies, rather than the small, open bins familiar to residents before Hurricane Katrina. The recycling carts will be 64 gallons, whereas the most common trash cart is 96 gallons.

Budget fixed

Cost of sanitation contracts goes down.

Sanitation fees paid by residents go up.

The last Mayor made a big deal out of the fact that he was a CPA but I think this one means more business. And not in a good way.

Fire sale

Still time to shovel all the money out the door