Speaking of asking the council for stuff

Tomorrow, they're set to vote on the jail expansion. (Yes, it's already been rejected by CPC but City Council always has the last word on these things so tomorrow is the day.) Also please see the below post and everything we've noted about short term rentals since the city began dealing with them to get an idea as to why we don't trust these people to do the right thing ever.

And then go see them tomorrow if you can.  Here's a Twitter thread from the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition explaining what to expect if you are going.

Budget Day

The Mayor's 2016 budget proposal just dropped this morning.  You can find it here.  It looks like they worked really hard on their booklet and Powerpoint so take your time and look through them.  Mitch is presenting to City Council now. We'll spend the next month watching various departments run up before the council and beg for extra money.  The final budget is expected to be approved on November 19.

Here are a few quick observations just from glossing over the budget proposals and the early reporting.

• Police are clearly a big priority.

  New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu on Thursday (Oct. 15) presented a 2016 budget that calls for a $10.5 million increase in spending for the New Orleans Police Department.
  
  The mayor said the increased budget, along with previously approved pay raises totaling 15 percent, will help the department meet its goal of increasing department staffing levels and reducing violence in a crime-weary city.

  
  
  This is the sixth consecutive year that Mayor Landrieu has increased NOPD's budget.  Nearly one quarter of all general fund expenditures in 2016 will go to the police department alone. And, yet, you can rest assured critics will continue to wail that the mayor is "not focused on crime" because bike lanes or monuments or.. whatever.



• The budget includes about $60 million for Sheriff Gusman's operation.
  

  A big part of Mayor Mitch Landrieu's 2016 spending plan will hinge on the costs Sheriff Marlin Gusman estimates to incur to run the city's newly opened jail well into the future.
  
  Under pressure from a federal order to bring the jail up to constitutional standards, Landrieu has proposed spending $60 million on its operations next year, a sum that more than doubles the $28.6 million his administration had initially put aside for 2015.
  
  "Now $60 million ... ought to give him the best jail in America," Landrieu said Wednesday during a meeting with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune's editorial board. "And there is no statistic you can show me that doesn't reflect that that is as much money and more per capita than most cities this size are getting and that ought to be something that resolves that particular issue."

  Yeah, well, Gusman isn't likely to see it that way. In fact, he's asking for more than that just to build a "Phase III" addition to the prison.  
  

  Gusman asked the city for $84.9 million this summer to build the third building, the so-called "Phase III," but rescinded his request a few days later. Landrieu pegged the overall cost of building the jail, which FEMA financed with disaster aid grants, at $250 million -- a portion of which, he said Wednesday, could be better spent elsewhere.
  
  Landrieu also said Phase III will cost as much as $40 million a year to operate on top of what the city is already paying to the sheriff, although that figure is very much a rough estimate.
  
  "If we have to build another building for mental health reasons, there's no reason for that building to be anything but small," Landrieu said. "But there is no reason to build another $80 million facility that houses 300 to 400 people."

  So this isn't over yet. Gusman and Landrieu will continue to negotiate with and sue one another for the forseeable future.
 


• Also emphasized during the mayor's budget presentation was the work the city did to improve its credit rating.  Thanks, in part, to its decision to put $36 million from its share of the BP settlement into its reserve fund, the city now has just over the $60 million in reserve the finance people recommend.  The reason all of this matters is Mitch wants to ask voters to approve a new $100 million bond issue to pay for infrastructure improvements.
  

  It's hard to say whether the city would be able to issue the full $100 million during the remainder of Landrieu's term without raising taxes, Gernhauser said. Interest rates could go up. Assessments could underperform. "It's hard to predict more than a year out how much room you're going to have," he said.
  
  In any case, $100 million will only begin to address the city's pitted and sagging street grid.
  
  Landrieu said he estimates it would take $9.9 billion to fix everything.

  Which is why no matter what he does year over year to #FixMyStreets, the folks at the community meetings will still complain that the mayor is "not focused on potholes" because bike lanes or monuments or whatever.



• Another thing they mentioned the bond issue might pay for is this $36 million backlog of unpaid judgments against the city.  That doesn't even include the firefighters, though. They are their own special problem.  This morning the mayor issued the latest in a long series of dueling ultimatums from various parties to this dispute in recent years.
  

  “If we do not get to a result today I’m going to turn my attention to other matters and leave this issue to the courts,” Landrieu said. The unrelated suits against the city involve a dispute over back pay that dates back decades as well as a Landrieu administration decision not to fund the firefighters pension fund until it fixed issues that nearly bankrupted it. The administration has tied those two issues together, saying it will not agree to a deal to pay the $142 million in back pay and interest in the first suit until firefighters agree to make changes to their pension system.
  
  Representatives of the firefighters union and the administration have been in mediation for months trying to reach an agreement. While most of those negotiations have occurred behind closed doors, two settlement proposals offered by the city were made public, and both were rejected by the firefighters as either being too stingy or stretching out payments for up to 30 years.
  
  The mayor had been holding out hopes that a settlement could be reached in time to include it in the city’s budget as late as Wednesday, but no deal materialized.

  As of this posting, they still haven't announced any sort of deal.



• Finally, the mayor stuck this little bit on the last page of the Powerpoint today.
  

  To pull in more revenue next year, Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration on Thursday (Oct. 15) proposed to increase parking meter rates on New Orleans' streets.
  
  The plan, quietly tucked alongside the administration's budget proposal for 2016, would see hourly prices rise from $1.50 to $3 in the French Quarter and to $2 everywhere else. It would also extend metered hours from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday.
  
  Vehicles presently can park for free after 6 p.m. Sunday parking on city streets would continue to be free.
  
  The administration estimated the increase would add to the city's revenue stream $2.4 million collected from meters and another $1.9 million in tickets meted out to parking violators.
  
  The city's revenue estimating conference projected last month that the city should collect about $4.8 million in parking meter fees this year.

  You can see here in the budget that they've already plugged the estimated revenue bump into the 2016 general fund.
  
  
  
  If you work in the evening shift in the Quarter, this means a huge chunk out of your take-home pay. In the absence of anything resembling efficient and affordable public transit, this amounts to a $2 - $3 per hour tax hike on the wages of city service industry employees. For others headed downtown during the evenings, it's an incentive to become better acquainted with the joys of Uber price surges.
  
  Tonight the Saints are playing the Falcons in a Thursday night primetime game at the Superdome. Imagine the ticketing bonanza in such an event this time next year under the proposed new rules.  By mid-year 2015, the city had already issued 163,000 parking tickets. A night like tonight might bump that number up by 10-15% at once.

All this and more will make for good fun at the City Council's department by department budget hearings. (Oct 26 - Nov 11 on the calendar.) Anyone can attend these. You're on your own for parking, though.

Keep building more jail

I know this point tends to get lost in the fun of Mitch's and Gusman's long public feud over consent decree reforms but, despite what the Advocate implies in this report, it was never clear that Mitch was ever opposed to building Gusman a new jail.

“At this point, with construction well underway, it is a more cost effective use of taxpayer money to build a new building with mental and medical health beds than to retrofit the facility currently under construction by the sheriff,” the mayor’s spokeswoman, Garnesha Crawford, wrote in a prepared statement in response to a request for an interview.

Crawford blamed the mess all on Gusman: “It is a shame that the sheriff did not follow the law and failed to honor his commitment to construct a facility that could house all types of prisoners.”

The sheriff has nearly $50 million in unspent FEMA funding, which Crawford said would be used to construction the third building, which she promised would include “no more than 250 mental health, medical and substance abuse beds.”

Maybe it is "a shame" that they just have to go ahead and do this now.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that isn't what they wanted to do in the first place.

Opponents of the expansion aren't just agitating against a bigger jail.  They're trying to overturn a whole set of "perverse incentives" which reward the sheriff's office for keeping more people locked up.

The institution of OPP is also exceptional in that it is a county jail and a state prison combined into one entity. About 2,700 people in the jail are mostly pre-trial detainees - the majority being held for drug possession, traffic violations, public drunkenness, or other nonviolent offenses - and are legally innocent. An additional eight hundred people are state prisoners who have been convicted in court, who may spend years or even decades at OPP.

Almost 60,000 people passed through OPP in the last twelve months, a staggering figure for a city of this size. The average length of stay was 20 days. The largest portion of pre-trial prisoners in the jail are there for nonviolent, municipal offenses that even under conservative standards should not warrant jail time, including 20,000 arrests this year for traffic violations. "New Orleans is basically the incarceration capital of the world," says Kaplan. "You're hard-pressed to find a resident of New Orleans - especially in poor communities - that hasn't had their lives disrupted in some way by this institution."

An article by journalist Ethan Brown in one of the city's weekly papers noted, "thanks to the profound misallocation of law enforcement resources in New Orleans, you're more likely to end up in Orleans Parish Prison for a traffic offense than for armed robbery or murder." Ultimately, this struggle over the size of the jail is also about the city's incarceration priorities. If the city builds a larger jail, it will have to keep filling it with tens of thousands of people. If a smaller facility is built, it will change who is arrested in the city, and how long they spend behind bars.

At various turns, both the Mayor and the Sheriff have offered sympathetic lip service to this concern but have made no progress toward doing anything about it.  

See this exchange between CM Susan Guidry and city budget director Cary Grant in 2011.

“I’m surprised that the administration has had a year to do this and we still don’t have a fixed budget,” (Councilwoman Susan) Guidry said. “This is a perverse incentive to keep people in jail. It’s wrong, it’s not a healthy thing to do and we have had a whole year since the last budget. I don’t want another year to go by without us dealing with this.”

Guidry’s criticism prompted Landrieu’s budget director, Cary Grant, to say that a fixed payment system for Gusman is still “a goal of the Landrieu administration.”

So, Guidry asked him, how many people did he have working on the issue today?

“Today we probably have fewer people working on that than we should,” Grant admitted.

In April of this year, we find little to have changed.

Now that the Justice Department is insisting that the city share responsibility with the sheriff for the unconstitutional conditions there, Mayor Landrieu would like us to believe that his hands have been tied since he has no control over Gusman or OPP. But the Landrieu administration has dragged its feet on changing the funding of the jail from a per diem structure that incentivizes filling beds at the jail to one that would increase transparency and accountability. When Laura Coon of the Department of Justice asked Kopplin if the city had done anything to increase the city's oversight over the jail, for example, ordering a forensic audit,  Kopplin admitted that although this was something within the city's power, they hadn't ever looked into it.

Not that they haven't been busy.

Three years ago, the mayor convened a "working group" to consider the jail expansion. The group met in secret until forced to do otherwise. Then, after some "lashing out" on the part of the public, the Mayor went ahead and approved the expansion saying only that they would determine the number of beds later.

A few months later that number was set at 1,438  by the city council and the mayor.  And now they've decided to scrap that plan.  So we're back to where we were.  The per-diem is still in place and Gusman will get a bigger jail to feed with it.

Finally, here's a new Al Jazeera report on the horrid conditions that exist at OPP.  It should be clear that the system needs a major overhaul.  But if the city continues to resist the federal consent decree  or keeps dragging its feed with per diem reform, it isn't clear that this new building will bring anything other than just more of the same.

Orleans Parish Prison - America Tonight - Al Jazeera America from Anon Videos on Vimeo.

Market saturation

Maybe on the way to this week's Saints game we'll have a chance to check out some of the "delighters" on display at the new Hyatt.

First, there's the addition of nearly 1,200 rooms to the city's inventory of hotel rooms. There is also the development of a downtown sports district, including Champions Square, which the Hyatt will anchor.

And, finally, the property brings with it new entries into the sparse selection of food options in that area of downtown.

Several restaurants, a convenience store and a coffee shop will also create new employment opportunities.

"We have a few delighters we're ready to unveil," said Michael Smith, the property's general manager. "We're ready. This is a totally new hotel."

Although I have to say I was less than delighted to learn that they had done away with what I was sure was a plan to re-brand the property as the "Yat Hotel" which would have had some kitsch value at least.



Anyway, since the city now has 1,200 new beds on the market, it's strange to see one of our most successful hospitality magnates buck the proverbial trend and push for even more expansion.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman is delaying a criminal-justice reform measure that would let New Orleans make a final decision on the total number of beds in his jail, the councilwoman most involved in pushing for that measure said this afternoon.

Of course, these niche business models are difficult to comprehend at first. It may be that the sweet money is in the "extended stay" market right now.

The final number is important because it represents a cap on how much money Gusman can make from housing city prisoners. That’s because the city pays the sheriff $22 a day for each prisoner. Fewer prisoners held for a shorter amount of time results in less money for Gusman’s office.

Critics, including the Inspector General’s Office, say that this payment system gives Gusman a perverse incentive to incarcerate more people and for longer, and Guidry has been among those who have called for an overhaul in the system. Pressed on the issue by a reform advocate about why this system hasn’t been changed this year as she’d hoped, Guidry responded simply: “Unfortunately that didn’t happen.”

The City Council enacted reforms in December aimed at reducing the number of people jailed for minor offenses, giving police the option of issuing them a ticket instead.

Gusman has started keeping inmates longer, according to a report given to the committee Wednesday by Austin. Guidry said she needed to understand why before the group decides on a final jail size.

Funny thing about public corruption

In municipal cases like, the Meffert-St. Pierre-Nagin business for example, it really doesn't do us a lot of good to see the criminals prosecuted once they've left office. I mean, it does allow us to say "I told you so" and shake our fingers and stuff but at the end of the day those guys go to jail, our lives aren't any better because of it, and the next group of corrupt bastards is well into the next corrupt scheme. Putting these people in jail only make a difference if they stop the damage from being done while it's happening which never happens. It can get very frustrating after a while.

I am open to arguments based on maintaining rule of law and shining a light on the nefarious workings of government for the benefit of the citizenry and so forth but we live in a world where that cow is clearly well out of the barn anyway.

I think we're getting the big jail

Mayor Landrieu is still pretty powerful right now. And it doesn't look like he's going to shoot Gusman down on this.

Collections racket

Much of your local criminal justice system amounts to a crude, cruel and inefficient collections racket.

High court costs and fines imposed by judges too often hamper the ability of indigent defendants to get back on the right track after they plead guilty or are convicted, according to two national studies released today, both of which decry the practice of jailing people solely for failing to pay fees.

Both studies, one by the American Civil Liberties Union and another by the Brennan Center for Justice, examined New Orleans in their critiques of these practices in 16 states across the country. The ACLU questioned whether judges are ignoring U.S. Supreme Court decisions that require judges to determine if there is a legitimate reason why a defendant can't pay before putting the person in jail.

In many states -- Louisiana being a prime example -- the court systems themselves and key offices within it, such as public defenders, receive substantial portions of their financing from fines and fees imposed on people who are convicted.

One would think the fact that the city has resorted to abusing its law enforcement powers for the purpose of shaking down residents would at least be perversely logical, but, on further examination, even that excuse doesn't make any sense.

In two New Orleans criminal court cases cited by the ACLU, men were sent to the Orleans Parish jail after failing to pay fines or fees of less than $500 that were imposed after guilty pleas to marijuana possession and minor theft. The months the men subsequently spent in jail cost the city, in each case, more than $3,000, the group calculated.

But hey no reason to abandon the philosophy. As long as somebody is collecting from somebody, the brutal system works just fine for the collector. Take Sheriff Gusman, for example. He seems to have the play down pat.

Sheriff Marlin Gusman is threatening to take the city to court unless it pays him 28 percent more money than last year to house New Orleans inmates.

The move likely heralds yet another round of legal wrangling between the city and the sheriff’s office over funding for the jail, which has been ongoing since the late 1960s — prompting criminal justice reform advocates to suggest changing the way the city pays for its jail services.

The city now pays Gusman $22.39 per inmate per day. That’s less than the state and federal prison systems pay him, with daily rates of $26.39 and $43 respectively.

....

At the root of the ongoing dispute is that no other major city in the country pays its sheriffs for jail space with a per diem system.

New Orleans’ daily rate originates from a lawsuit filed by the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1969, on behalf of all prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison, asking that the city pay the Sheriff’s Office sufficient money to maintain constitutional conditions.

An order establishing the daily rate was added in 1989 and has been amended several times since then, most recently in 2003, to the current rate of $22.39 per day.

The ACLU withdrew its name from the lawsuit last year on the grounds that its original intent — to improve jail conditions — had ultimately been turned on its head by the per diem system.

“The only incentive a per diem system provides is to have more people in jail,” said Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York. “Because the more inmates you have, the more money you have.”

More people in jail, the more money Gusman's department can demand from the city to house them, the bigger the drag on the already suffering municipal budget.

New Orleans city departments are gradually bringing their spending under control, but they still are on track to overspend their 2010 personnel budgets by $6.5 million, not counting an extra $4.1 million that City Hall is likely to end up having to pay Sheriff Marlin Gusman to house and feed prisoners in the city's jails.

...

However, the picture had worsened as regards Gusman's operation. On May 31, it appeared that the city would be billed $3.3 million more for the year than the $20.5 million it had budgeted. As of Aug. 31, the shortfall had grown by $800,000 as the average daily number of inmates rose. Under a federal court decree, the city must pay Gusman a set amount of money per day for each city prisoner in the jail system.

Earlier this year Mayor Mitch Landrieu referred to the city budget as a "moral document"

The budget is the single most important city document affecting the lives of citizens. We should look at the budget as a moral document – because it says everything about who we are and what we value.

One would think that a (at least) $4.1 million hole in Landrieu's moral document would cause him to keep a closer eye on the cruel prison-collections system behind it. One would hope, anyway.

Landrieu: Sheriff building 400 temporary jail beds "doesn't bother me"

New Orleans is slated to eventually get a brand new jail, but on Wednesday Mayor Mitch Landrieu said he had no idea the Orleans Parish Sheriff is moving forward with the construction of a new temporary jail complex in the meantime. Landrieu, however, says there was no reason for him to know about it and adds the project is fine by him.

“It doesn’t bother me that he’s building it,” said Landrieu.” “The sheriff needs a space to put the individuals the judges put in jail or the police officers arrest.”

...

Landrieu disagrees and seemed confused as to why the issue is even making headlines.

“The sheriff is charged with making sure that the individuals in his care and control are housed appropriately and it's been part of discussions with FEMA,” said Landrieu. “The sheriff is an independently elected individual. He’s responsible for that task, so it's really not something out of the ordinary. I was curious as to why the story even got airtime to be honest with you."

The mayor's detached "curiosity" regarding a system of dual extortion against the poorest citizens and the city treasury displays a curious "moral" judgment indeed.

How many Joe Caos does it take to pay for one temporary jail?

According to Cao's billboard it would take 11 Caos to pay for one.

"Temporary here becomes permanent"

Sherriff Gusman is circumventing the permitting process and beginning construction on a "temporary" facility on the site of his controversial proposed mega-jail.